Workshops

Today’s big, exciting announcement is …

I’ll be speaking at this year’s User Interface 13 Conference, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’m teaching a full day workshop called Information Architecture Essentials: Best Practices for Organizing Your Site’s Content. I’ll also be doing a 90-minute presentation, but haven’t yet figured out what it will be.

I’m excited about this for two reasons. I look at this conference every year and want to go every time - it has a consistently strong line-up of both topics and speakers. And I get to present my favourite workshop - one that I have done enough that I know people *always* enjoy and learn from.

More details to come, and a discount code for you to use!

I’m very excited to announce that I’m teaching a new workshop with Russ Weakley. It’s called “Website user experience & CSS workshop: Designing for usability, building for the future“. It will be run in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, in late March and April.
I’m teaching the day on user experience, and Russ is teaching on CSS, which is lucky for you as I’m pretty good at ux and Russ is awesomely good at teaching CSS.

I’m really looking forward to it - I’ve wanted to go to one of Russ’ tutorials for a couple of years. And I love teaching user experience design for the web - I’ve spent a lot of time doing it, and a lot of time thinking about what I’ve learned and how to best share it.

I hope to see you, or your colleagues, there. Please pass details on to anyone you think may benefit.

Workshop description

A hands-on workshop with user experience expert, Donna Maurer, and CSS
expert, Russ Weakley.

Over two full days you will build detailed websites layouts from the ground up - starting with page layout, navigation and form design; and ending with clean markup and elegant styling using XHTML/CSS.

Day 1: Planning and designing the user experience - Donna Maurer

On day one you will plan and design a website - focusing on the user experience: designing the navigation, page layout and forms.

You will:

• learn techniques to understand your users, and prepare user scenarios
• understand your content with content analysis methods
• create an effective and usable site structure (information architecture)
• design a range of navigation methods
• create page layouts for content, home, index and special pages
• design simple forms

For each step, Donna will outline the fundamentals and show examples from small and large website projects. But most of the time will be hands-on -you work on your own project, ask questions and discuss with the group.

Day 2: Building beautiful sites using CSS - Russ Weakley

On day two you will build your website from the ground up - starting with structural markup, adding accessible markup and then styling your layout using CSS.

You will learn:

• how to create well structured, accessible markup
• the basics of CSS including rule sets, selectors, shorthand rules, inheritance and the cascade.
• how to structure efficient CSS files
• how to create a full CSS layout from a flat graphic mockup
• how to deal with browser issues including specific browsers such as IE5,IE6 and IE7.
• how to create a resolution dependent layout
• how to create CSS for printing and hand held devices

Dates

Canberra - Monday 31 March and Tuesday 1 April

Melbourne - Thursday 3 April and Friday 4 April

Sydney - Monday 28 April and Tuesday 29 April

Brisbane - Thursday 1 May and Friday 2 May

Register

More information and registration here: http://maxdesign.com.au/workshop2008/

I’m currently writing a workshop for a client, and soon hope to start work on a new workshop series for my own business (lots of modules on all types of design-related topics - will tell more as I go).

I’ve been writing and teaching workshops for a long time - I think I what works and I know what I like.

But rather than assume, I thought I’d ask you. What makes a killer workshop? How important is the balance between:

• Most time spent on solid theory
• Real-life stories and case studies
• Practical activities during the workshop
• Discussions with other people in the workshop
• Materials to follow-up with later
• Trust that the presenter has experienced what they are teaching
• Being inspired

Can you live without some of these things? Is it OK to have nothing to use later but leave feeling inspired? Is it better to pack in lots of theory but not get time for discussions and activities?

What’s your idea of a killer workshop? (and is anyone teaching them?)

I have been teaching for many years (like 22) and teach often (4 workshops in the last 4 weeks). And in all that time, I have never resolved one particular problem. One that I have found harder as I move into harder work.

People come to my workshops wanting answers. They would really like to turn up, spend a day playing and go away with answers. Really, most don’t want to go away with increased skills, heightened awareness or a reading list; they want answers. Not only that, and they don’t know it, but they want those answers deeply embedded in their brains so they don’t have to think too hard when the next problem arises.

And I understand this. My user-centred, empathetic brain cares deeply about the expectations of workhop participants. I pay attention to what they think, expect and want. I know that I would like to approach some fields and get the ‘main ideas’ from the field - things I can understand and use straight away.

But my ‘experience-in-the-field’ brain causes conflict. That part of my brain says that I’ve spent a long time learning, thinking and doing this stuff; and that I can’t distil it into a set of rules. It makes me think ‘Duh. If this were so easy I could tell you in a couple of hours, don’t you think someone would have by now’.

This is the spot where some gurus have made their names - in context-free rules and answers. In providing the simplistic answers that some people want.

This is my teaching challenge. Providing the answers I’m confident about, letting people know I can’t provide an answer on the spot and raising awareness that much work needs thought. It is an incredibly hard balance, lifting people from ‘give me answers’ to ‘help me think’ in a short time.

I sort of think I’m making it. I’d guess 10-20% of people who attend my workshops start thinking (depends on the situtation - IA Summit the % is very high, in-house workshop is low). All my mentoring clients do. But I still feel bad for not meeting the needs of the rest.

I’m teaching a full-day information architecture workshop in Wellington, New Zealand, organised by my friends at Optimal Usability. I’m really looking forward to it and hope to talk to some of you there.

More details here: Information Architecture - Theory and Practice

We have finalised our workshop schedule for the next 6 months, and boy am I going to be doing a lot of talking:

Australia

In a number of places:

• Usability testing fundamentals

And while I’m on the topic of work, there are still a few spaces left on our Introductory IA workshops in Canberra and Sydney in October. This is a great workshop (if I do say so myself) - a nice balance with some theory, lots of hands on exercises and a good set of supporting notes and resources that you can return to later.

We have also just announced the next date for our ‘Latest Thinking in Usability and IA’ seminar, this time in Brisbane on 18 November. The seminar covers faceted browsing, shape of information, personas and my card-based classfication evaluation.

At work, we’ve just announced a new workshop - one that is very special to me. Introductory Information Architecture. It will be intially running in Canberra and Sydney, Australia in October this year.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to teach core information architecture skills in a short time (it is a one-day workshop) and in a way that involves practical work to maximise learning and retention. I think the workshop will do this pretty well…

I spent today teaching 20 potential usability testers all about testing, and working through their first-ever test. This was cool from 2 perspectives:

• I love teaching things that I’m passionate about
• I love seeing the first time that people watch someone else work. The paradigm shift that often occurs is amazing