Abby Covert: Democratizing Information Architecture – Episode 157

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As the digital practices have grown and evolved over the past few decades, the job title “information architect” has become less common. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the work isn’t being done, but IA is now often in the province of a designer, content strategist, or other practitioner.

Abby Covert sees this situation as both a sign of progress and as an opportunity to more deliberately democratize the craft of information architecture.

We talked about:

• her current work on democratizing information architecture
• her take on the relationship between information architecture and content strategy
• how the apparent current dearth of IA attention may actually be a sign of success
• how IA work is getting done, regardless of whether practitioners label their work as IA
• the importance of incentives and incentive structures
• the origins of her democratization work
• her shift from teaching corporations about information architecture to focusing on teaching individuals
• the hazards of bringing your IA ego into an organization
• when to step back from democratized practice and engage a true IA expert
• the crucial role of education in democratization
• opportunities as an IA to influence the incentives in an organization
• her stealth approach to teaching metadata

Abby’s bio

Abby Covert is an information architect, writer and community organizer with two decades of experience helping people make sense of messes. Abby has written two popular books, How to Make Sense of Any Mess and Stuck? Diagrams Help. She currently spends her time making things that help you to make the unclear, clear, many of which she makes available for free on her website www.abbycovert.com or at accessible price points in her popular Etsy shop AbbytheIA. In 2022 she started The Sensemakers Club where she brings together sensemakers from different walks of life to learn from one another. Abby currently lives and writes from Melbourne, Florida where her most important job title is ‘Mama’.

Connect with Abby online

• AbbyCovert.com
• The Practitioner’s Guide to How to Make Sense of Any Mess
• The Teacher’s Guide to How to Make Sense of Any Mess

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 157. The field of information architecture has seen a lot of change over the past 25 years. One aspect of this evolution has been a reduced prevalence of the role of “information architect.” IA work is still being done, but often by folks who don’t have the term in their job description. Abby Covert sees this situation as both a sign of progress and as an opportunity to more deliberately democratize the craft of information architecture.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 157 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am super delighted today to have with us Abby Covert. Abby is a well-known information architect, who focuses these days on writing and teaching. Welcome Abby. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you’re up to these days.

Abby:
Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me. Let’s see. These days, I’m really focusing on democratizing information architecture. I really want to bring the information architecture lessons I’ve learned over the last 20 years to as many people in as many industries as possible. So I’ve been focusing for the last few years on projects that really work on that.

Abby:
The first was I expanded my authorship into my second book, which is about diagramming. It’s called Stuck? Diagrams Help. And then around the same time, I also launched something called The Sensemakers Club, which is a place for people to learn how to make more sense. So I’m working on expanding that into a series of community events. We have some monthly things, some quarterly things. And then of course our annual celebration Makesensemess, which comes up every November. So yeah, I’m keeping myself busy in the indie content world over here, Larry.

Larry:
Nice. Yeah, no idle hands there, I can tell. Yeah, and I got to say we’re a thousand percent aligned on the democratization thing. Anybody who’s listened to this podcast knows that I’ve used that word in the intro to every episode, so I’m super excited to talk about that. But one thing I want to do first, because this is entitled Content Strategy Insights, is talk a little bit about your take on the relationship between information architecture and content strategy.

Abby:
I love that question. It’s also one of the most common questions I get. I would say my favorite quote about this is actually from Karen McGrane, who I know you’ve had on the pod. Karen years ago, and I have no idea the provenance, said something to the effect of, “Information architecture builds the car and content strategy makes sure you don’t run out of gas.”

Abby:
And I think that when I look at the projects that I’ve been on, whoever is doing the information architecture and the content strategy can change. They can have different roles than those two specialties, but ultimately you do need both of those parts. You need somebody who is figuring out how the pieces arrange themselves as a whole to make sense. And then you also need someone to figure out how that whole is going to evolve and be filled with content that makes sense over time.

Abby:
And the degree to which you need content strategy really comes down to cadence. Are you designing something that’s super evergreen and locked down, or are you designing something that changes all the time? If it’s the former, you can kind of take care of the content strategy part upfront. If it’s the latter, it requires an ongoing maintenance that you don’t see as much of a need for in terms of the information architecture part.

Larry:
Yeah, interesting. I love that take on that. Now, I had not heard that quote from Karen before. She’s kind of a quote machine, so I’m not surprised she said something that brilliant. Well, hey, I want to turn to quickly to democratization because that’s a topic near and dear to my heart. And we talked a month or two ago to prepare for this. And you said a few things in there.

Larry:
One of the things you said when we talked was that the current dearth of IA talent out there in the world, or of current apparent dearth of IA talent, might be a positive sign. It might be a sign of some kind of success. Tell me more about what you meant by that.

Abby:
I think that it really comes down to labels, which is funny for an information architect to say it comes down to labels, but I think that that’s really true. I think there’s a lot of people that end up in my inbox that tell me that they’ve been practicing information architecture for 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years, that did not know the word for it.

Abby:
Now, does that make them any less good at information architecture? I would argue no. But, it does limit their ability to connect with community to get better at it, and it does limit their ability to have the right words to break into that next level of it.

Abby:
So I see a lot of folks that get into the labeling part and they’re like, “Whoa, I have a label for this.” And then they want a job doing that by that label. And often I have to then burst the bubble that that’s actually probably not going to happen, that you’re going to do information architecture, but you’re going to do it in service of another role.

Abby:
So my most recent bout of that was moving into a role in product management. I had an IA job at Etsy that was going really well for a few years. But ultimately, because I was a person who was the only person with that title, it wasn’t something that was sustainable in a corporate environment. It just was always going to be a specialist contractor like thing floating through the orb. But taking on a role of product manager, I could do a lot of the things that as an information architect, I could talk about all day, but I couldn’t get them done.

Abby:
So I think there’s something that I really learned in that process of letting go of the label as a title and thinking about it as a practice. Which I think in the 15 years that I’ve been teaching information architecture, that’s been my focus of, “It doesn’t matter what your title is, everybody needs to make more sense.” And information architecture is something that existed far before we had words for it. So we all do it all day.

Larry:
The way you set that out is super interesting, because it almost sounds like it’s been elevated to this, you bring in the outside pro, the proper IA consultant. But at the same time, everybody’s expected to have some basic skills around it. Is that what it is? Because I hear a lot of consternation in the IA world, and a lot in the UX world, which I run in more, about the disappearance of the role. But it sounds like you’re saying that the activities are still there, they’re sort of hidden away. Or not hidden away, but just not articulated.

Abby:
I think that the activities are absolutely getting done. I mean, people are labeling things and they’re picking structures to put content into. That is absolutely happening all day, every day, in the majority of knowledge worker jobs, if not in the majority of tech and design jobs. So everyone is doing it all day.

Abby:
Now, when do you need a specialist, I think is the more interesting question. What is the point at which you need it? And to be honest with you, I think the point is fear. I think that there is a fear point. There is a risk assessment point where the fear is great enough that an organization feels the need to bring in an expert. Either that expert is in the scale of the problem, or that expert is in the tool of the problem or the medium of the problem. But whatever it is, there is a moment where the mess is too big. You’ve let it get too big. It’s just too big.

Abby:
And often, that’s where you see the need to invest in somebody from the outside. I’m constantly told by students now that when outsiders come in, companies listen. But when they say it, companies don’t listen.

Abby:
And I understand that. I understand exactly why that happens. They are resting on the laurels of you as a resource. They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll get to that.” Versus, “Oh no, this thing is broken right now. We need to fix it right now. Get the person that will fix this right now.” And those are different conversations fundamentally, and it’s all about incentive. They’re incentivized to change.

Abby:
One of the best examples I have of this from my consulting days was there was a startup that merged with two other startups, and they were going along on their merry way with their three-startup weird morph object-product that they had morphed into. It was not until they needed to translate that product outside of English that they realized that they had a problem.

Abby:
Because they had so many verb duplicates, noun duplicates, inconsistency everywhere. And it’s fine when you have 14 ways of saying something in English, until you have to find 14 ways to say that in Spanish. All of a sudden it breaks down.

Abby:
That’s incentive though. They had an incentive to go into a market that required them to translate. Their incentive was not to clean up the mess. It wasn’t just like, “Oh my God, that’s such a mess. We should clean it up.” Unfortunately, humans just don’t work that way. We don’t clean things just because we want to, but we dream about it.

Larry:
The way you say that, it makes me realize that the information about information architecture is dispersed well enough that it puts the fear of God in people when they get to a certain point, then they’re like, “Oh my God, we need help figuring out this mess.” So there’s some level of awareness about it.

Larry:
And also the way you described that relationship, because that’s a common thing in any kind of consulting is that a consultant can come in and say the same thing that the practitioners have been saying for five years, and the boss will finally start paying attention. Those are interesting dynamics. Have you-

Abby:
But it’s not just paying attention. I want to make sure that that’s really clear. It’s not just that they’re paying attention. It is that they are changing the incentive structure to make that thing matter now. The incentive structure did not make that thing matter before. Now it matters. It’s not that I matter more. It’s that thing that they brought me in to fix, that thing matters more. The problem matters more.

Abby:
And I think people miss that. I feel really bad when students bring this to me, because there’s a lot of shame with it that they’re not good enough, that they couldn’t make that sale. And that’s not the case most of the time. Most of the time, that sale was impossible until the moment where something was large enough that it needed to be fixed, and that’s an incentive change.

Larry:
Got it. So that gets into the… I think a lot of practitioners, not struggle, but deal with the ongoing issues of authority and permission, or being assigned responsibilities to do stuff. And it sounds like, well all these dynamics you’re talking about, and I want to quickly acknowledge too that you’ve done a ton of leadership work in the information architecture field. Organizing conferences. You’ve started World IA Day, you’ve done a ton in this world. Did you do any explicit kind of democratization work in any of those roles? Was there outreach?

Abby:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that the first democratization work that I did around IA was probably in preparation for Interaction 2012. I was invited as an information architect to speak at that conference, and they invited me under the proposal to talk about information architecture heuristics.

Abby:
And that was a big ask. I mean, to stand in front of a design group and talk about IA in 2012 took a lot of courage, I would say. And I feel like that was really the first time that I was saying out loud, “Look, all the things that we’re doing in information architecture are super useful. If you guys just drop all of the pseudo academic crap that’s around it, a lot of people could get a lot of use out of this thing.”

Abby:
And so that was kind of the first foray into that for me. And I would say that the reaction that I got from other people in the industry was the reason that I kept doing that, both information architects and non of just people saying, “Wow, I thought this was a lot more complicated.”

Abby:
And I think that words are tricky like that. Information architecture happens to have two beautifully complex words kind of married together. And when people hear them, the first reaction that I’ve always gotten 20 years of as an information architect, “Wow.” It’s always like a [inaudible], but they don’t necessarily know what that means.

Abby:
And so I think that that’s a really interesting part of it is for a job whose job it is to clarify terms and structures for terms, the term for us is incredibly fraught, and has been used at all sorts of levels, and is even argued whether or not it exists. So yeah, it depends on how philosophical you want to get, Larry.

Larry:
No, and the same thing with content strategy. I think the cruel irony of the word people being unable to correctly identify themselves and their roles, but it’s information-

Abby:
Go ahead. I was just going to say I feel like a lot of that comes down to how slow systems are to change. I remember when information architecture was… Or information architect rather, was the role. The role du jour, the hot role, the one that all the recruiters wanted to get your phone number for.

Abby:
When that was happening, there was a totally different structure that that role sat beneath, and it was something like business analyst, or web designer, or webmaster, you know what I mean? And it took some corporations a decade to get rid of those names for those things and adopt information architect.

Abby:
And you know what happened? In that decade, everybody decided to change it to UX, and now they’re still called information architects, and they’ve been lobbying with their management to get it changed for the last 10 years because it’s out of date. This happens in academics, this happens in corporate structures. This just happens.

Abby:
So I think that it’s interesting when a field is trying to establish itself at the same time as become an integral part of a capitalist machine. We have to define ourselves very quickly to show the value, but the ways that we’re defining ourselves are pigeonholing us into a particular system at a particular time. And ultimately, systems kick back. So we want to be the word, people that have great labels, and we’re the word people that have terrible labels, cobbler’s children and all that.

Larry:
And as you’re saying that, I’m picturing Stewart Brand’s pace layers, and all of a sudden wondering about… Especially the geological metaphor that he uses of the deeper you go, the slower things change. And I’m flipping it around now, not as a model for change, but how do ideas get in there that makes them hard to change subsequently? Do you think we could be better? Because that seems like an important democratization tool to have, to be able to hack that.

Abby:
I think that one of the things that I’ve shifted focus on is I no longer am interested in teaching corporations about information architecture. I am now interested in teaching individual people about information architecture.

Abby:
So I think that that’s how it ultimately gets done. I think that the goal from my standpoint is to have people feeling more confident, making information architecture decisions, while knowing that that is what they’re doing. And you don’t actually need to know the term information architecture to do that, and I’m fine with that. If all they ever figure out about practicing IA is that having clear labels is important so that people know how to use your thing, I am set, that’s great.

Abby:
But if they hit a place where they have a mess that’s big enough, I also want them to have a word that they can ask for from other people that they can search for on the Google, or the Chat GPT, or whatever the heck they’re going to use. I want them to have that vocabulary, because I know how much it hurts when people don’t have that vocabulary, that pain with no name, that I think everybody suffered from for a real long time in terms of information architecture. And some people still do.

Larry:
And that seems like… Back to the pace layer, is a fairly superficial level of democratization, just being able to articulate the right label to get the help you need in the moment. I’m just trying to picture how to go deeper. And you’ve obviously had some success at this, but how you establish in an individual or an institution, that awareness that I am just doing this thing. I’m labeling stuff, I’m organizing stuff, I’m sorting out messes. Some people call this information architecture, and I know to call it that when I need help. I guess, let me flip that around a little bit. What are people calling it as they do it now? Like you said UX a minute ago, is that the main label do you think, or are there others?

Abby:
It depends. There’s folks that are coming from the design and tech place, and they’re absolutely calling it UX, or they’re calling it content design, content strategy. I’ve heard product, product design. I’ve heard that as absolutely like a, “That’s just product design.” But I also heard that about interaction design 10, 15 years ago, so I’m kind of used to that one.

Abby:
The one that’s more interesting to me is the people that are coming from outside of design and tech that are doing this in service of small businesses or charitable causes, people that are ending up finding specifically my stuff. And I have to tell them that I didn’t invent this. I have to be very clear, “I didn’t information architecture, this is a larger thing,” because they only want the everyday approach. They just want to fix the thing that’s broken right now. And I think that that’s something we could learn for businesses too.

Abby:
Back to the incentive point, there’s no point in making a big, frilly, frothy presentation about all of the things that are wrong at your organization, if that’s not what was asked for. And we do that all the time in this industry and I think that the whole, “They should trust me because I’m an expert,” I think that that’s something that it took me years to understand the implications of ego, and that really, if we’re believing what we say about information architecture, about content strategy, about user experience, it is about a contextual set of decisions within a set of circumstances every single time.

Abby:
You can’t be an expert in that. You can be an expert in the process, you can be an expert in communicating the process. You can be an expert in making screens that stem from that process. But the idea that you would always know the answer and that your opinion is always gold, I think that’s a really dangerous thing that I see a lot in our industry.

Abby:
And I see democratization kind of be tarnished with the, “Well, but you need experts.” The best one, “You wouldn’t have surgery from a surgeon that didn’t go to medical school.” And I’m like, “We are not doing surgery most of the time.”

Abby:
So I’m cool with not being trained as a content strategist and doing content strategy. I’m cool with most of information architecture work being done by people that don’t even know the name of it. I’m totally cool with that.

Larry:
As you say that now, as a consumer of democratization now, I want a chart that shows, “Surgery, no. Information architecture, yes.” What else is on that?

Abby:
Well, here’s the thing though, and I want to be really clear. It’s not information architecture, full boat, all the time, don’t need an expert. I’ll give you a good example. Let’s say that we are designing an app that could kill us, an actual app that launches something, or calculates something, or communicates something of dire importance.

Abby:
In a situation like that, I would sure as heck hope that the project team that is in charge of that would understand the need for an increased level of expertise in all of those fields. All of the ones that we talk about democratizing. The content strategy, the information architecture, the research, all of it. I hope to goodness that they all have budget for, time for, and respect for, and thoughtfulness for those things.

Abby:
But that’s because they’re working on an app that could kill us. You know what I mean? When you’re working on an e-commerce website, is that an app that could kill us? No. There are parts though, that I really wish that there were more expertise introduced. Think about the ethical quandaries that algorithms have brought to the way that content is brought into information structures online. There’s so many things that are being done because people don’t even know that they’re making ethical considerations when they’re building their algorithms or making the proposal to the developer to do so.

Abby:
Those are the moments where I’m like, “Those are the companies that do need expertise.” A small e-commerce company with 20 products that has a graphic designer who they hire to do their brand and their website, they need an information architect. They need that graphic designer to know how to make a simple website that’s going to show 20 products that people are not going to be confused by, and hopefully they have some analytics so they know if it worked, and they can tweak it over time. That’s what they need.

Abby:
They don’t need to pay tens of thousands of dollars to go and have professional research done. There’s a point where that company might grow to a place where they might need to invest in those things. But I think that the spectrum of when we introduce these specialties and who can do them, it’s so variable. I feel like that’s why democratization is important. It’s because everybody needs to know about it, so they know how much of it they need and when they need an expert.

Larry:
Now I’m picturing, I want your next book now to be about democratization. Because the way you’re saying that, a couple of things you said, that kind of awareness of the thresholds around it, what any one trade or craft consists of, and then being able to identify…

Larry:
It’s kind of like, not the frog in the pot, but when you’re swimming in the water, you kind of have to step out, and look back in, and figure out why you knew what to do in the moment. And I love how meta a lot of this conversation is getting. I guess, can you go meta on that and talk about how to be aware, cultivating awareness of both your consumption and production of democratization, if that makes sense?

Abby:
Within information architecture or just in general?

Larry:
Within any craft, like information architecture or content strategy, any craft. Just being aware of… You are clear in your mind about what you do and what your colleagues do, and you want to advance democratization in some new population or something. How do you start that?

Abby:
It is about education, and that’s really why I’m in the place I’m in now with wanting to focus on that as my full-time gig. I feel like when I give students advice on how to manage change within their organizations, the part that slows them down is usually what they need, which is me saying, “You jumped right into the change, and you’re trying to change them with a set of tools and mediums that they don’t yet understand and that’s going to be a problem.” So you have to do a level of education and democratization of the knowledge of the skillset.

Abby:
And also, there’s an aspect of bringing people along in the work. I think with diagrams, I kind of have the perfect example, which is we have all been in a meeting where somebody pulls up a big old diagram that doesn’t make any sense, it’s at a type scale that no one could consume. And everybody knows that the reason that diagram is on screen is for the person who made it to be like, “Look at all the things I made.” It’s not about making a decision. It’s not about understanding something. It’s just about, “Wow, you made a thing.”

Abby:
If we look at the things that we make with our colleagues as the users in mind, then we can make those moments really meaningful. We can say, “Look at this big map I made. You don’t need to understand this whole thing, but here’s the next slide. Three things that I actually learned from making this map I want you to know about.”

Abby:
That’s a much more effective way than beating our deliverables over the heads of people outside of our functions all day long, and hoping that they’re going to read them, or let us walk them through it in a meeting, or comment on our Google Doc, or whatever it is.

Abby:
In reality, people want to know what you are incentivized by. They want to know if you understand what they’re incentivized by. And they want to make sure that those incentives are not at odds, and that both incentives are met by whatever is produced.

Abby:
If that’s not the case, there’s going to be a problem with the people part, and then the information architecture, it just doesn’t matter at that point. You’re not going to get anything changed.

Abby:
So education is the key. You need to tell people the words for the thing that they’re already doing. You need to make sure that the incentive structure of your organization or of the teams in your org are not so adverse to that skillset that it’s not useful, which you could see that a lot when you see organizations prioritizing conversion rate over everything, and that’s an excuse for unclear labels, or anti-patterns and things like that. Do you know what I mean?

Abby:
So I feel like there’s an education piece of, “This is a thing we all do. This is a thing that you already do. This is a thing we are doing together. This is a thing I have a little bit more of experience in. And then this is how this applies to the project.” But everybody wants to jump all the way to the project. They want to go, “Here’s the project. And through the project, I’m going to teach you about information architecture.”

Abby:
Doesn’t ever work because everybody’s suspicious of the thing the whole way through. They’re waiting for the big moment, they’re waiting for the, “Maybe this is the time they show us a website. Nope, just a spreadsheet. Maybe this is the time they show us a website. Nope, just a diagram. Maybe… Nope, just a PowerPoint.” Show them what it’s going to be and then take them through that.

Abby:
We go through this beautiful process of not knowing to knowing, and then we hide the whole thing from everybody. We’re like, “I know,” at the end, and it’s so much more valuable when they come with us.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s one of those things with design, is everybody goes, “Oh, that’s beautiful, I could have done that.” It’s like, actually there was a lot that happened there.

Abby:
Well, but that’s the thing. And then we expect everybody to be like, “Well actually, there was a lot that happened there.” No, they’re going to be like, “That’s so easy. I could have done that. I could have drawn that boxes and arrows map in two minutes in Visio,” or whatever they’re using. Yeah.

Larry:
I want to circle back. You mentioned a couple times incentives, and it sounds like, I’m inferring from what you’ve said, but the main role of the information architect is to understand the incentives in an organization and how it applies to the mess they’re trying to solve. But do you ever have influence over incentives? As an information architect, do you ever see opportunities to affect that?

Abby:
Yeah. Oh my gosh, all the time, because usually the incentives are not as… They have not been directly correlated or causally linked to what I’m being asked to change.

Abby:
In a lot of cases, you’ll see that the incentive structure of the design team is something akin to altruism for users, whereas they’re measuring it with MPS or something like that. But then you have product who’s measuring everything by conversion rate.

Abby:
If those two things are happening at the same time, I’m just here to tell you guys right now, if anybody’s watching this, that’s never going to work. You have to get those people to work together, otherwise it’s always going to feel like sandpaper. So yeah, I have impact on incentive structures when they are misaligned across an organization in a way that impacts the work that I do.

Larry:
And again, I know you’re not consulting anymore, but that seems like the kind of place a consultant often comes in and goes, “Wait a minute. They’re saying that over here and this over here.” How do you reconcile those? That’s sort of how it manifests?

Abby:
Yeah. And I think back to the, when do you know you need an expert? It’s about fear. If you’re brave enough, a lot of people can do that inside the organization too. It’s just about going slow enough and making the relationships, and waiting for the incentive shift in the winds to strike.

Abby:
I had a metadata wishlist at Etsy, and it was just about finding product managers that wanted to do stuff, and hacking away at it over time. But the idea that I would have a meeting and have them all come together and, “Here’s all the metadata changes.” I tried that. I’m not different than anybody else out there that’s tried that, and it didn’t work. Headline, it didn’t work. But the slower part does work, even if you’re in-house. But it’s so slow. It’s so slow that most of us, I don’t think could take it.

Larry:
I’m kind of a weird metadata-strategy evangelist, and that’s just going nowhere fast. You just have to do it. Like you just said, it’s got to be tied to something and-

Abby:
And you got to do the education. I did a little keynote at an orientation for a school I used to teach at in New York at SVA, last week or the week before. And I taught all the design students about metadata, without telling them that I was teaching them metadata. And then I had a big reveal like, “Baby’s first metadata schema,” because they totally made one, and they didn’t even know that they were making it.

Abby:
But if I have to crush the dreams of one more product designer about what they can’t do with data, I won’t be able to take it. So I have to start younger and in different genres of the work, to make sure that everybody is advocating for the metadata and not just us.

Larry:
Nice. Yeah. Hey Abby, I can’t believe it. We’re coming up close to time already.

Abby:
I could talk to you all day.

Larry:
I know, totally. Yeah, and I’ve successfully kept us out of rabbit holes. Someday, I’ll do a three-hour interview and just go down the hole. But before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything that you want to share with the folks or that’s come up in the conversation that you want to circle back to?

Abby:
I always take the opportunity to plug what I’m working on right now. I have a couple of really cool social activities that are attached to educational products that I’ve worked on. So I have The Practitioner’s Guide to How to Make Sense of Any Mess, which has a monthly office hours with me answering questions from students. We’re about eight months into that program, and it is legitimately the favorite hour of my month. It’s just so fun and nerdy. So if you’re looking for something like that, thesensemakersclub.com has access to that.

Abby:
I also just launched a product called How to Diagram, and it is the video e-course version of my book about diagrams. And that comes with access to a diagram critique bingo game that I will be hosting quarterly. So I think that one’s really fun.

Abby:
And then most recently, The Teacher’s Guide to How to Make Sense of Any Mess is also now live, and I’m starting a little support group for teachers. So teachers who make sense will be starting in September, and looking for invites from teachers from all over the place, and hopefully we’ll get some really good cross-learning.

Larry:
Nice. So are you getting classroom… Because that typically comes with adoption in courses. Is that where that teacher’s guide came from?

Abby:
The Teacher’s Guide is a ask that I’ve had for years about, ‘How do I get this content into the hands of my students without having to have them read the entire book?” It is not a book you would use to teach an information architecture course. It is a book that has useful content about information architecture, that lots of other courses could use.

Abby:
So The Teacher’s Guide was my attempt to make every single chapter a self-contained lesson that the teacher could assign as a reading for their students, but also gives them the background on what I’ve learned about teaching that particular content. And it comes with slides, and assignment ideas, and conversation prompts, and all sorts of neat stuff. Honestly, it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever made. I’m very proud of it-

Larry:
That sounds great. I’ll link to all of those in the show notes as well. Okay. One very last thing, Abby. What’s the best way for folks to stay in touch with you if they want to connect online?

Abby:
Yeah, definitely email. I take personal emails. I do answer all of them. I also have an office hours one-on-one pro bono. I give away a couple of half hours a month. So you can join the wait list for that if you want to nerd out over video chat.

Abby:
And then I have an email list. So I send out only one email per month, and it is always about what I’m interested in or what I’m up to. So I would love it if people join that. You can get pretty much everything about me at abbycovert.com or thesensemakersclub.com.

Larry:
Great. Well, thanks so much, Abby. This was super fun. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Abby:
This was very fun and very nerdy. Thank you, Larry.