Building a sense of place: Practical cross-channel design

Ever wondered why you can watch a movie and actually follow up without getting lost? After all, you just got lost for the 100th time in that parking lot.

Ever wondered how you can make any single piece of your strategy, online and offline, contribute to making your users and customers feel at home? Then this workshop is for you.

As the way we make sense of the world is largely dependent on the fact that we are embodied beings, with a physical body of a certain size, I will introduce you to the world of place-making in cross-channel user experience design and pervasive information architectures.

After a brief pep talk to introduce the basic concepts of cross-channel UX and pervasive IA, we will work in 30-60 minutes stints, in groups, using two hands-on related and fun design exercises to drive the ideas home.

Our rough schedule, content-wise:

  • Identify where current experiences going across channels fail
  • Make the point that ‘being there’ is a powerful way for us to make sense of our experiences, to understand, and that this is what translates to the idea of ‘place’.
  • Bring it home: what does this mean to UX / IA? How can I build a place with information? How can you successfully implement ‘place’ across different channels? What ‘tools’ are necessary?
  • Install place-making as the core heuristic approach that can lead to better cross-channel UX, and explain, through examples, how it can be deployed successfully
  • Recap and say our goodbyes.

No computers will be harmed in the course of the workshop: this is strictly a pen and paper learning activity.

Target audience

This workshop is for anyone involved with designing in more than one medium (web, mobile, kiosk, print).

Take-away material

You will receive a detailed description of the workshop, and cheatsheet deliverables (the cross-channel heuristic cheatsheet). The deck of slides will also be made available.