IA Summit 2009. Photo by Francesco Casale.

Those of you who don’t follow me on twitter (why not?) don’t know that I had a chance to attend the 3^rd Italian Information Architecture Summit (#iias09) in Forlì this weekend. I probably would have never even heard of the event if not Andrea and Simone who not only passed me the information but also turned out to be great companions for the trip. In this article I’ll share some thoughts on the summit and sum up my favourite presentations. I will then close with some brutal type crimes I witnessed during my stay in Forlì.

KillZone2.

The IIA Summit kicked off on Friday morning with quite a few interesting presentations. Reinoud Bosman showed us preview of the new Killzone 2 website which apart from being a marketing monster is an online community for players, data gathering center and data visualization masterpiece. What it does is basically collecting game progress data sent from thousands or even millions of playstation consoles around the world and outputting it as a highly advanced leaderboard with beautifully designed interface. Just to give you a general idea imagine playing a fps game and being able to check where have you been, who and how many times you’ve killed in the game on the game’s website. Killzone 2 does just that.

Connecting the Dots.

Gianluca Brugnoli in Connecting The Dots of User Experience — The Design of Interactive Systems talked about how content is getting independent from the media and what impact it has on user experience in general.

Connecting the dots by G. Brugnoli

For a positive and fulfilling user experience, the whole is more important than the parts. […] Results are not delivered by a single device. They are the arrival point of a fragmented and random interaction flow which goes through many devices and different situations. The architecture of the system becomes a key design challenge. Before focusing on the capabilities and on the features of a single device, the design should start from the organization of the system, and from the possible relationships and connections between the parts which can be activated by the user action. […] Users are always in the center: they are the protagonist which freely and actively connect the dots, selecting and putting together the different pieces of the system.

EuroIA Network Initiative.

Søren Muss talked about the European Information Architecture Community (http://euroianet.ning.com/). His talk was very inspiring and entertaining. So were his slides. I picked these two for your pleasure.

Søren Muss about European Information Architecture Community

Divided Europe. By Søren Muss.

Versatile interfaces.

One of my favourite presentations was the one by Luca Mascaro. He talked about adaptable interfaces, ones which adjust themselves to the user based on his interaction with the application/service. Microsoft has been doing it with Windows for a quite a while (remember XP’s taskbar or start menu?). Now imagine web applications’ interfaces doing similar stuff. Think about »Upload pictures« link getting bigger and bigger every time you visit your Flickr home page because all you do from there is just… uploading photos. Picture items disappearing from your favourite webapps’ menus just because you never click them.

Luca Mascaro about Versatile Interfaces.

Somehow I find it hard to imagine versatile web interfaces becoming a standard but it’ll definitely be something that’ll make your web app stand out from the crowd in years to come.

Closing words and words of gratitude.

There was a lot going on at the IA Summit. In fact I would have never published this article if I were to sum up every single presentation. I’m hoping Andrea will cover some of those I failed to dedicate a paragraph to: “Learning to Think with IA” by Renata Durighello (slideshare), “IA and Ecosystems” by Leonora Giovanazzi (slideshare) and “Commercial Ethnography” by James Kalbach (the author of “Designing Web Navigation”) to name a few.

The Third Italian IA Summit was an amazing event. Great lineup of speaker, wonderful people and no registration fee—how often do you see that happening? I can’t imagine the amount of work Alberto, Andrea and the rest of the IIAS2009 crew put into organizing the conference. Big thanks to all of them and I’ll be looking forward to the IIAS2010!

Type Crimes.

Apart from seeing Comic Sans used for slides in one of the presentations I witnessed a few other dreadful type crimes of which images I’m sharing below.

Warning: The following images contain graphic of objectionable content.

ANTICHITÀ

BANCA di FORLÌ

…FORLÌ

…d’uso…dell’Impresa in un giorno

Forlì, that was close!

Thanks for dedicating your time to read the article! Ciao ciao!