Books
Austin Govella writes about collaboration, design, and information architecture.
Work the Room, out now.
Want attendees to experience wonderful workshops and masterful meetings? In Work the Room, Austin shares his 15 years of experience facilitating design thinking, innovation, and strategy workshops. Learn more ›
Collaborative Product Design
Help any team build better a better experience
by Austin Govella, 2019
You can launch a new app or website in days by piecing together frameworks and hosting on AWS. Implementation is no longer the problem. But that speed to market just makes it tougher to confirm that your team is actually building the right product.
Ideal for agile teams and lean organizations, this guide includes 11 practical tools to help you collaborate on strategy, user research, and UX. Hundreds of real-world tips help you facilitate productive meetings and create good collaboration habits. Designers, developers, and product owners will learn how to build better products much faster than before.
Information Architecture
Blueprints for the web, 2nd ed.
by Christina Wodtke and Austin Govella, 2009
Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, Second Edition introduces the core concepts of information architecture: organizing web site content so that it can be found, designing website interaction so that it's pleasant to use, and creating an interface that is easy to understand. This book helps designers, project managers, programmers, and other information architecture practitioners avoid costly mistakes by teaching the skills of information architecture swiftly and clearly.
Articles
Collaborative Journey Maps
Boxes and Arrows, October 26, 2020 – When you map the user journey with your team, everyone understands what it says and why. When you collaborate with your team, the journey map transforms from the designer’s magic to the team’s mission, representing the journey you shepherd for your users.
In many organizations, the design team does some research and then retreats to their tower to conjure deep magics that turn note filled notebooks into a customer journey map. At least that’s what it looks like to their peers.
Journey diagrams capture tons of detailed info about users, processes, and systems. The best teams share the same understanding of the user’s journey. Instead of having your team wonder where you got this information or how you came to these conclusions, have them build the journey map with you (407kb PDF).
3 key SharePoint Syntex and Project Cortex insights
Avanade Insights, October 22, 2020 – Training custom machine learning algorithms is hard work. You need to understand and process a unique universe of content. And that requires data science skillsets and infrastructure, which was outside the reach of most organizations.
But the release of Microsoft SharePoint Syntex changes everything. Now, powerful, custom machine learning is accessible to every organization. SharePoint Syntex not only processes and understands enterprise content – it can transform that content into useful, contextualized knowledge (334kb PDF).
Designing the “right” thing for the “right” persona
Big Design Magazine, September 23, 2016 – I applied my first, ‘official’ personas back when I worked at the University of Houston. When I designed the Distance Education website, I focused on the New Student persona, and the student services office call volume fell by 10% despite a 20% increase in enrollment. When you prioritize the right user’s needs, you can see a massive affect on the success of your experience design (726kb PDF).
The language of interaction: Rich interfaces, networks, and design
ASIS&T Bulletin, August/September 2006 – Inside any organization, you've already evolved your own set of patterns and should have some way of collecting this knowledge. Knowledge management and sharing should focus not only on patterns, but also on methods for knowing when to use a particular pattern and when not to (192kb PDF).