Noreen Whysel
COO at Decision FishNoreen is a Brooklyn based researcher, information architect and teacher. She is COO of Decision Fish LLC and an Adjunct Lecturer at CUNY New York City College of Technology’s BFA program. She has facilitated workshops on mentoring, accessibility, search and technology standards. Her recent research includes the effect of climate change on healthcare access by vulnerable populations, accessible science gateways and digital privacy and safety.
She is a research consultant at Internet Safety Labs (ISL) where she is working on digital safety specifications and serves on several standards working groups focusing on usability and accessibility at ISL, W3C, UXPA and Kantara Institute. She is co-founder of the Information Architecture Gateway, providing IA and SEO services to the science gateways community.
How do people locate and discover information online? Well, they type keywords into a search engine and then select items from the search results, right? This is the current mental model of how search/retrieval works for most users. But it’s not the only way people search, nor is it necessarily the most effective for the information seeker.
In this workshop, you will learn about ”Sense-making,” a search behavior that information architects, user experience (UX) and usability pros should not ignore. You will learn how individuals (and groups) plan and carry out search activities. How a searcher’s goals affect their sense-making tasks. And how accessible design and information architectures improve search performance. At the end, you you will understand how to optimize the user experience of your products and search engine results pages, so people get the information they need with less frustration.
Topics covered:
- Approaches to sense-making & information seeking behavior
- Searcher goals that affect sense-making tasks
- How accessible design and information architecture improve search performance
- Where & how to implement search-related sense-making in user personas/profiles & customer journeys
- How to optimize individual search listings for findability & sense-making
- Search strategies for apps, video, voice and ChatGPT
Exercises:
- Individual and group search exercise
- Analyze a selected web page for accessible design and search optimization
- Incorporate search behavior characteristics into personas and JTBD
- App, video and voice search optimization
- Discussion of new and emerging forms of search experiences
Attendees will learn:
- How to identify search behaviors and incorporate them in personas and JTBD tasks
- How to architect & optimize different types of search experiences
- How accessible design can improve search experiences for everyone
- How search strategy differs for websites, apps, voice, video and emerging experiences
Any requirements for attending: None
You’ve been there before. You thought you could trust someone with a secret. You thought it would be safe, but now somehow everyone seems to know. Or maybe they didn’t share it, but the way they used it felt manipulative. Doesn’t feel fair. But now that it’s out there, do you even have control anymore?
Ok. Now imagine that person was your supermarket.Or your bank. Or your boss.
In this talk, Noreen Whysel will discuss a framework for evaluating the relationship that digital technologies have with consumers and the digital harms and dark patterns that, whether we know it or not, violate that relationship. You will come away with an understanding of how to determine that what you are creating is fair, secure and in the user’s control. And that your relationship will be sound, respectful and long lasting.