Save Your Spot for World IA Day

Last month, UX Akron was honored at Greater Cleveland Partnership’s Annual Best of Tech Awards as a leading Tech Community Group / Ecosystem Amplifier.

Partnership representatives said, “We’re thrilled to recognize UX Akron as one of Greater Cleveland’s 2025 Best of Tech! You’re part of a remarkable group of 108 innovators helping shape the future of our region’s tech economy.“

Nearly 300 tech leaders from the Greater Cleveland area gathered at the Great Lakes Science Center for the ceremony.

Learn more about this year’s event, see photos and a list of all the honorees at Greater Cleveland Partnership’s website.

WOrld IA DAY in Akron is Friday March 7, 2025

Join us for WIAD25 for Friday, March 7th at the Blu-tique Hotel at 1 S. Main St. in downtown Akron, Ohio. Breakfast and lunch are included, as well as breaks and opportunities for networking with the local tech & design community.

We’re planning a full day of speakers and activities — check back here for the schedule of events. This year’s global theme is the Challenges of Change. Learn more about the global event at worliaday.org.

An accessible, covered parking deck is located next to the library at 40 S. High Street and has an access corridor along the west wall that leads directly out to Main St.

AGENDA

10:00 – 10:15 – Check in, Continental Breakfast

10:15 – 10:30 – Welcome, opening remarks

10:30 – 11:30 – UX at a Crossroads – Joshua Randall

11:30 – 12:00 – Co-Creation Workshops: What Role Do They Play in Effective Design? – Richard Douglass

12:00 – 12:15 – BREAK

12:15 – 12:45 – Protection by Design – Ben Woods

12:45 – 1:15 – AI or IA? – Marc Majers

1:15 – 1:45 – LUNCH

1:45 – 2:00 – GIVEAWAYS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

2:00 – 3:00 – Untangling Supply Chain Systems – Nick Dauchot

3:00 – 3:30 – Beyond Design: Positioning UX as a Business Solution in Times of Change – Alina Bengert-Lombardi

3:30 – 3:45 – BREAK

3:45 – 4:15 – Affecting Change in Your Organization: Five Methods I Use to Change the Minds of Business Leaders About Digital Accessibility – Stephen Morrisey

4:15 – 4:45 – The Only Constant Is Change: How to Thrive in an Ever-Evolving Product World – Kim Kastner

ABOUT THE PRESENTATIONS

Joshua Randall on “UX At A Crossroads”

User Experience stands at a crossroads: will we live up to our potential to design a better world? or will we be co-opted by “product management” or another business buzzword?

Looking backwards, this talk will show how UX has repeatedly failed to create a better world, drawing on industry data from Nielsen Norman Group, Baymard, MeasuringU, WebAIM, and others.

Looking forwards, this talk will argue that UX must resist hype, say no more often and collaborate less often (you read that right), and become a true profession — in order to be able to design a better world.

Richard Douglass on “Co-Creation Workshops: What Role Do They Play in Effective Design?”

Co-creation workshops are becoming more prevalent in the product lifecycle. Typically, they are employed early on in the discovery process. Attendees will learn more about Co-Creation workshops: what they are, who is involved, what outputs/deliverables to expect, and how they can best use them.

Ben Woods on “Protection by Design”

The world continues to change, and so do the demands of UX professionals. 20 years ago, we wanted to ‘make things easier’ for the user. Then in as a ‘product’ and ‘agile’ mindset took hold, we turned to the idea of ‘delighting the user’. Today, in the shadow of anxiety around Artificial Intelligence, abuses of personal data, and rising rivalries between corporations, criminal enterprises, and nation-states, we are called to new purpose – ‘protect the user’.

Marc Majers on “AI or IA?”

Discover how Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a big effect on information architecture (IA) by influencing how information is organized, accessed, and utilized. Learn how to use AI to improve the user experience and make content easier to find.

Nick Dauchot on “Untangling Supply Chain Systems”

Supply chains are complex systems that are constantly impacted by internal and external forces, and are, in effect, a complex information architecture beast to tame. This session will dive into the weeds about designing for supply chain, its people and metrics, with real world examples from designing for a company delivering medical around the world. Outcomes from this session will include an understanding of designing for supply chain control tower usability, lessons and risks associated with supply chain design in complex organizational structures, and the need for co-design in supply chain related projects.

Alina Bengert-Lombardi on “Beyond Design: Positioning UX as a Business Solution in Times of Change”

Change is inevitable—layoffs, mergers, and reorganizations are part of today’s business landscape. In this talk, I’ll share insights and practical guidelines on how to position UX as a business-critical function rather than a design luxury. By reframing UX in terms of business impact, you can strengthen its role during times of uncertainty and ensure it remains a key part of strategic decision-making.

Stephen Morrisey on “Affecting Change in Your Organization: Five methods I use to change the minds of business leaders About digital accessibility”

UX professionals strive to positively impact their organizations. Yet we must realize that our projects are just one of many priorities leadership must contend with. How can you best champion your cause?

Few undertakings are as difficult and frustrating as our desire to integrate accessibility into our digital products. In this talk I discuss five methods I have used to persuade organizations, along with my results and lessons learned.

Kim Kastner on “The Only Constant Is Change: How to Thrive in an Ever-Evolving Product World”

Product roles are never static. From shifting business priorities and changing stakeholder expectations to new methodologies, emerging technologies, and the unpredictability of the job market, nothing stays the same for long. This reality can feel exciting at times but overwhelming or even disheartening at others.

And change isn’t just happening in product roles—it’s happening in how we design experiences and solve problems. For designers, this means continually re-evaluating decisions, iterating on solutions, and balancing evolving user needs with shifting business priorities.

In this talk, we’ll explore how to embrace change as a competitive advantage and build the adaptability required to succeed in a product career.

Be a sponsor

World IA Day is an annual event under the World Information Architecture Association.

It’s a one-day global celebration with locations all over the world, and serves to:

• Build and connect a global community of IA advocates and practitioners
• Promote the role of IA in different fields
• Provide resources for learning and professional development
• Engage IA academics and professionals in research and development

Sponsorships are a great way to communicate your organization’s value and attract visibility to your brand, products, or services.

Interested in sponsoring WIAD 2024? Visit our Sponsors Page to explore opportunities, or use our Contact Us form to connect with UX Akron. We’re happy to reply promptly and answer any questions you might have.

BE A VOLUNTEER

Want to help out on the day of the event? Let us know you’d like to volunteer.

Let’s Stay in Touch

Stay up to date about upcoming events and what’s new in UX for Northeast Ohio by subscribing to our monthly newsletter.

It’s been a rough year for tech, so the genuinely positive energy in the room was actually a little jarring at first. More than 200 tech CEOs, tech professionals, and representatives of 28 tech-centric Partner organizations, like UX Akron, mixed and mingled around cocktail tables set up with pamphlets and trinkets and business cards. Everyone seemed to fall into engaging conversations quickly, and it was great to see just how many tech-focused organizations exist in our area, approaching development from various angles.

In the keynote, the Founder of Overdrive, Steve Potash, spoke about the 30-year transition from selling volumes of digitized legal publications on collections of CD-ROMs (the tedium of digital operation in this era was summarized by Potash as “By about the 25th disc, you’d think, do I really need the whole book?”) to developing Overdrive’s beloved flagship e-reading app Libby by way of getting a law degree, following the urging of his librarian wife Loree to branch out into e-books more generally, and partnering with Cleveland Public Library to develop the first iteration of the Overdrive app with librarians for their patrons.

Then came the awards themselves, which did a fantastic job of spotlighting a variety of avenues illuminated by technology and ingenuity in the Greater Cleveland area with categories that celebrated collaboration and creative approaches, as well as taking a moment to highlight the good work of each nominee. Awards were given to the CEOs of startups and the CIOs of more established companies, to Tech Teachers, AI Innovators, and Cybersecurity superstars, and to companies and organizations driving innovation in Cleveland’s manufacturing sector.

It was encouraging to hear about all this happening in Cleveland, and not just recently or in a buzzword-laden, hype-forward way. The role of place in how we capture and understand information often gets lost online. The internet as a medium supposedly transcends geography, and therefore development has proceeded from a point of conspicuous lack of interest in how life is lived IRL. This ethos means the internet doesn’t yet handle the nuance of IRL artifacts well (concepts like timezones, dialects, differences in conceptual understanding of a topic even when content is in the “same language,” the role a local economy plays in a user’s wellbeing and even participation in the great project of the internet, weather, etc. which shape our ways of consuming and understanding information.) This event showcased how natural a sense of community can be experienced in person, it was great to meet people really DOING things right here in Northeast Ohio, shake their hand, and hear them talk about their work and genuine interests.

In UX, we used to talk about people being “unicorns” if they could design and code. At this event, they talked about “unicorns” being tech companies that reached $1B in profits. There are 6 such companies in Cleveland. “What do you call a herd of unicorns?” Greater Cleveland Partnership’s CEO Baiju Shah asked the audience. “A blessing.”

Check out more photos from the event, and see a list of winners on Greater Cleveland Partnership’s website.

Interested in hearing about events coming up in Greater Akron and around Ohio? Subscribe to our newsletter!