Dan Zollman
Independent IA & UX Consultant at Dialogue for Design, LLC
Dan Zollman (Cambridge, MA) is an independent consultant specializing in strategy, information architecture (IA), and human-centered design for complex digital products & services.
With experience leading digital initiatives in government (Mass.gov), university IT (Tufts University), nonprofit organizations, finance (Vanguard), and digital agencies (Last Call Media), Dan enjoys working on challenging problems where UX intersects with questions of organizational strategy, structure, and process. His IA skills bring clarity to murky situations where teams are unsure how to proceed. Dan has "untangled the mess" for organizations who were struggling to manage sprawling bodies of content, complicated software workflows, and gnarly customer service issues.
Dan has a particular interest in responsible, ethical, and systemic approaches to human-centered design, most recently investigating the social and political implications of AI as a design tool. He has explored these topics through speaking, writing, and community organizing. He has organized the World IA Day Boston conference, co-organized the Academics and Practitioners Roundtable on Information Architecture, spoken at conferences including the IA Conference, UXPA Boston, Design4Drupal, and New England Drupal Camp, and wrote a chapter for the book Advances in Information Architecture.
Resisting AI: How AI impacts designers and developers, and the need for a collective response
The dominant narrative on AI is that it will inevitably transform our industry. The only response is to get on board before we get left behind. But the tech industry's push towards AI ignores the extensive harms of AI and automation, historically and in the present, and important stories of mass resistance by workers.
This session is about how AI impacts us as designers and developers. We'll have an open discussion about the concerns we share around AI, and I'll present several ways to think about AI in contrast to Silicon Valley narratives. Going beyond the well-known criticisms of LLMs such as misinformation, IP theft, and environmental costs, we'll talk about how AI specifically impacts creative professionals in terms of the quality of our creative products, our personal development, and our working conditions.
Drawing on recent books such as Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant and Resisting AI by Dan McQuillan, we'll also cover examples of popular resistance to workplace automation, including the often-misunderstood Luddites—serving as inspiration for us to work together, today, for a better future at work.
Designing Human-Centered Navigation: Information Architecture Principles for structuring a website
This session introduces approaches that will help you make confident decisions about website navigation. Beyond guessing, brainstorming, or even card sorting, we'll discuss how effective information architecture (IA) is guided by principles of human information-seeking behavior, and how it is grounded in core conceptual models for the business and its audiences.
Fundamentally, a website is built for users to navigate information—but designing navigation can be a mysterious part of the process. For important elements like menus and search, we may struggle to decide on a structure, or to give it due attention while busy with other aspects of the project. For the global navigation menu, menu items are sometimes chosen casually; sometimes through political compromise rather than thoughtful UX.
This session, presented by information architecture and UX strategy consultant Dan Zollman, introduces approaches that will help you make confident decisions about website navigation. Beyond guessing, brainstorming, or even card sorting, we'll discuss how effective information architecture (IA) is grounded in core conceptual models for the business and its audiences. We'll look at concept modeling as a tool that helps people in all disciplines make sense of complex and ambiguous structures, even beyond navigation-specific design issues. Along the way, we'll cover principles for making navigation systems user-friendly.
Highlights include:
- How humans navigate: information-seeking behaviors, and other basic cognitive principles, that impact how you'll organize content
- The difference between a website's conceptual structure, its sitemap, and its menu structure
- Using concept modeling as a first step to define website structure, as well as your content model in Drupal
- The four main goals that a site's main menu, specifically, should achieve
- Tips on arriving at the final labeling & classification for a navigation menu