IA SUMMIT
The IA community is made up of the a diversely experienced list of speakers and workshop leaders. The lineup is shaping up to be stellar.
Donna's a freelance information architect, interaction designer and writer. That's a fancy way of saying she plans how to present the things you see on your computer screen, so that they're easy to understand, engaging and compelling. Things like the navigation, forms, categories and words on intranets, websites, web applications and business systems.
Most of the projects Donna works on are large, messy monsters, like government websites and intranets, internal business applications and web applications. But she still gets to work on something small and cool too. So she's completely aware of the challenges of long-term, ongoing projects and short-burst, agile projects. She's also an old hand at sketching screens, drawing wireframes and building prototypes.
But whatever sort of job Donna's working on, there's one common requirement. She has to comprehensively understand the needs of the people who will use it. Only then can she make the system as usable as possible. Luckily, she's also quite fond of people, so doing user research and running usability tests is a pleasure, not a pain.
Not surprisingly, given Donna's obsession with usability and fondness of people, she's also quite the teacher. She's a very experienced speaker and regularly holds workshops and speaks at local and international conferences, on the topics of information architecture, interaction design, the web, writing and more. She even runs a user experience conference (UX Australia).
Donna's been doing this since 2002. She's worked on the boards of the Information Architecture Institute (international), Web Industry Professionals Association (WIPA) and has judged many web awards. She's also written three books – on card sorting, web writing and now information architecture.
