5 Things I Learned Today — World Information Architecture (IA) Day Vancouver 2018
Hey everyone, my name is Bella and I’m a User Experience (UX) Designer living in Vancouver, BC.

Recently, I’ve found myself attending more and more events organized by the local Tech and Design community. I love meeting and learning from new people, and it’s always a special treat to get that ‘AHA’ moment when someone asks a thought-provoking question or shares advice that resonates with me so much.
So far, I’ve just been scribbling what I’ve learned into the same notebook, hoping that future-me knows how to decipher those nuggets of wisdom AKA mess of random notes. Since I’ve been meaning to write more anyway, I thought it might be useful to document what I learn from each event I choose to attend. That way:
- I’ll be forced to write out my thoughts and learnings in coherent form
- I’ll think more critically about the content I’m consuming, and form my own unique, informed opinion on different topics
- I can document my learning journey and how it informs/affects my career as a UX Designer
I also feel like I want to give back to the design community, and while I’m not at a point in my career yet where I can impart decades-worth of wisdom, there is probably someone out there who is interested in my fresh perspective.
That’s the why, now let’s get to the what!
First, a bit of introduction: World Information Architecture (IA) Day Vancouver 2018 was organized by members of Meetup group Information Architecture and Content Strategy Vancouver, and this year’s theme was ‘IA for Good.’ I decided to attend because I wanted to know more specific examples of how good UX and IA make a difference within products and organizations.
The event was hosted at one of Vancouver Film School’s (VFS) buildings downtown. I thought the agenda was pretty packed considering it was a half-day conference, but it all flowed really well.
So, without further ado:
What were some key takeaways for me from World Information Architecture (IA) Day Vancouver 2018?

1. Information Architecture is so intrinsically linked with User Experience Design, that some designers aren’t even conscious that they’re working on IA.
The day started with InWithForward presenting ‘Kudoz,’ which won the ‘UX for good’ award at Last Year’s Vancouver User Experience Awards.
I’m quite familiar with Kudoz but still love hearing their story every single time. Their researchers lived in a social housing complex in Burnaby for three months to study social isolation in adults. Through that ethnographic research they discovered isolation wasn’t necessarily the problem, it was stagnation. People were feeling stuck in their current environments, and weren’t learning because they weren’t being exposed to anything new. This was especially evident amongst people with cognitive disabilities. From there, Kudoz came up with their learning platform to facilitate new experiences for these individuals. I love the metaphor they used — turning social service ‘safety nets’ into ‘trampolines’ to catapult people forward.

However, I think there’s still some confusion on what IA encompasses and how it fits into UX, as when it came to speaking about IA the presenters for Kudoz took more of a learning standpoint and said they hadn’t fully considered how IA played into their work.
The Information Architecture Institute defines IA as:
Information architecture is about helping people understand their surroundings and find what they’re looking for, in the real world as well as online.
Definitely, Kudoz has put thought into how they present their information, to kudoers and hosts alike. I’ve just signed up to be a host and their on-boarding process alone (which involved meeting up with one of their operations staff who answered all my questions and helped me fill out my experience page) showed very deliberate decisions on what information I needed to know, and what would be most important to show about my hosted experience.
This makes me think: is IA something experience designers automatically consider without even realizing it, and does being more conscious of your IA decisions change how designers tackle problems?
2. Information architecture is about helping people understand their surroundings and find what they’re looking for, in the real world as well as online.
IA Institute’s definition really puts into perspective how broadly applicable IA is. As I type, I’m sitting at the Burnaby Public Library (BPL), thinking about the way libraries have chosen to organize their content both on-site and online. Borrowing a book in both contexts is radically different (in my experience), and I wonder whether those who designed the BPL website tried to mirror the experiences (the online ‘explore’ feature definitely instills some excitement in me similar to actually browsing through shelves of books).
What about exploring malls, museums, or even entire cities? Information Architecture is everywhere — and yes, that sounds like a completely nerdy quote, but it’s true!

3. Access to accurate, relevant information is powerful. The way information is organized shapes how people act and learn.
This was the key point I took from the Lightning Talk with Barbara Richards, who is an IA and UX consultant with Habanero. Barbara spoke about her passion for purposeful work, which she pursed by working in experience design for international research and development organizations worldwide. She spoke about how IA can help individuals and organizations reach their goals.
This really got me thinking about my previous work experiences with service delivery, both as a public servant and a front-line worker. As you may or may not know, I worked in the Federal Government for a few years, and part of my role included speaking directly with Indigenous clients who were moving their claims forward towards a hearing. Now, our unit within Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) was particularly good with using more layman’s terms when we sent out letters to claimants, and yet there were times when even I (who had been working there for years) got really confused with the language and jargon we used in letter templates to match the overall tone we were meant to project. I compensated for these letters by being very clear and thorough with my clients over the phone, but I’m certain that having the written information be clearer and catered to their specific demographic (most hadn’t had the opportunity for higher education, and they had all experienced significant trauma) would have improved their user experience in a process that surely was confusing and intimidating to partake in. Enabling easier access to important information could improve people’s lives, especially marginalized communities.
I asked Theresa Putkey, an Information Architect and one of the panelists, about her experiences with advocating for use of IA, as she has worked for a number of crown corporations. She boiled it all down to: it’s human nature to resist change, government organization or not. Regardless of who you’re working for, you need to show the value of good information architecture and content strategy through the work you do, and that will convince them.
Andrew Fung, our keynote speaker and an Experience Designer at Domain7, said something similar: sell the value of good IA for users and the organization, by speaking their language — numbers and predicted outcome. For example, saying that “if you were to change how you present X information, my predictions show Y would improve by 20%.” I thought that was a pretty good tip — it made me realize that even if you don’t have the real data yet, that doesn’t stop you from doing your research and showing pretty hard-hitting predictions to your client.
4. It’s important to consider ethics when you work on user experience, content strategy, and information architecture (or anything, really.)
At one point during the panel discussion, panelists were asked about ethical considerations in content strategy and information architecture. Of course dark patterns were mentioned (dark patterns are carefully crafted interfaces that trick people into doing things they don’t want — first thing that comes to my mind is budget airlines and their tendency to pre-check all sorts of extra insurance options in the chance that you won’t notice and end up paying extra).
Sheila Mackenzie (NIIU) touched on this a bit during her talk as well, talking about ethics in experience design (e.g., for Virtual Reality experiences, you would need to think about how the design could trigger motion sickness, trigger PTSD, could lead to decrease in empathy for users, etc.).
As a designer, it’s easy to get excited about all the emerging technology and ways we can apply them to improve existing processes. But I agree that ethical considerations need to be front and centre. We discussed how social media platforms like Facebook have impacted the spread of false information. While their product designers would have had no way of predicting the magnitude of their influence, I think it’s still their responsibility to be mindful of how their product could be used for unethical purposes, and what could be done to combat that.
They also spoke about some people’s personal preferences in only working for companies whose values match theirs. I agree somewhat — I would never work for an organization producing a product that I’m wholly against. Obviously, I would be a horrible experience designer there if I didn’t even agree with the product’s existence, and it would make user interviews quite interesting to say the least. But I think in every workplace there will be practices inconsistent with your values (e.g., advocating for less waste but working somewhere that hasn’t quite mastered this). I think that as long as the organization is open to making positive changes, then you can be the person who starts that.
5. We need to be mindful of the content we are taking in
Andrew Fung gave a really well-articulated keynote titled “Organizing our minds for truth.” Nowadays, information about everything is so readily accessible through the internet, but how do we decipher truth from convincing-sounding-lies? And how can we, as individuals, shift away from the good-vs-bad mindset towards a more holistic understanding of complex world issues?
A hot topic right now is gun control in the US. I have a lot of personal opinions about this, but I agree that it’s always a good idea to understand ‘the other side.’ By being familiar with key arguments on both sides of the issue, you can form an informed opinion based on your knowledge and experiences, as opposed to choosing a side based on what arguments you’ve seen on Twitter (whose algorithm is skewed anyway, to show you information that reinforces your biases).
Andrew suggested tools like Quora and Kialo to broaden your knowledge, which are not perfect but at least encourage more critical thinking than tools like Twitter. And reading. I love that he suggested reading. I used to read so much before university, but university sucked the fun out of reading and I took a long hiatus from it. I have recently restarted, and it’s doing wonders for my brain and attention span. He mentioned that reading helps encourage unfolding of information in a narrative manner, which helps our brain make logical connections as opposed to the snap conclusions we often come to from the influx of information online (At least, that’s how I understood what he said).
He encouraged us to 1.) think critically of the information we’re absorbing, 2.) safeguard our time and attention, choosing only what is important and relevant, and 3.) to Study-Understand-Respond to information, as opposed to Skimming-Judging-Reacting.

Overall, an interesting day with great speakers, engaging facilitators, and pretty decent coffee ;) Thanks so much to all the volunteers who made this event possible! Who knew information architecture and content strategy could be so fun?
If you’d like to continue the conversation, leave a comment below or send me an email at bellamargolles@gmail.com

