Virtual UX Conference: UX Basic Training and Information Architecture

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a virtual UX conference with Nielsen Norman Group, as part of their UX certification program. Nielsen Norman Group is a UX research and consulting firm. They are world leaders in research-based user experience.

The customer experience, or user experience (UX), is a competitive advantage when it comes to technology. It’s critical to focus on the user, to ensure that the product is useful and usable. The two courses I took were: UX Basic Training and Information Architecture. I was really impressed by the quality of instruction and there were conference attendees from all over the world. Additionally, there were breakout sessions, as well as opportunities for discussion and practical application. At the end of each course, I completed an exam. This conference was a wonderful learning opportunity!

The UX Basic Training course was a general overview, with guidelines grounded in the latest research, as well as methods and opportunities for practical application. Often when people hear the term “UX” they think of just the user interface design. But UX is more than just design; it’s a broad field encompassing research, analytics, psychology, usability testing, design thinking, content strategy, and feature prioritization. Good designs are based on a detailed understanding of your users, such as their needs, the tasks that they’re interested in carrying out, and the product or environment where they go to complete those tasks.

Information Architecture is the art and science of organizing, classifying, and labeling information on websites, apps, or intranets, so that people can easily find it. That means arranging the parts of something to make it more understandable as a whole. This includes:

• navigation

• search

• filtering

• related content

• sorting algorithms

• on-page layout

As a knowledge management specialist, my goal is to enhance employee information searches and findability in SharePoint, so both these courses gave me a lot of great insight. I’d highly recommend it and look forward to completing more Nielsen Norman Group UX courses!