Join me and prove it to yourself!
Thingology (LibraryThing's ideas blog):
Both LibraryThing and Amazon allow users to tag books. But with a tiny fraction of Amazon's traffic, LibraryThing appears to have accumulated *ten times* as many book tags as Amazon--13 million tags on LibraryThing to about 1.3 million on Amazon. (See below for the method I used to find this out.)Something is going on here--something with broad implications for tagging, classification and "Web 2.0" commerce. There are a couple of lessons, but the most important is this: Tagging works well when people tag "their" stuff, but it fails when they're asked to do it to "someone else's" stuff. You can't get your customers to organize your products, unless you give them a very good incentive. We all make our beds, but nobody volunteers to fluff pillows at the local Sheraton.
via Peter Morville
Check out the PARC Forum on September 18, 2008Residual Categories: Silence, Absence and Being an Other
Residual categories (for example, none of the above; not elsewhere categorized; not otherwise specified [NOS]; other) are ubiquitous in all working classification systems. Where and how they appear, and are used, changes historically and politically. Their presence also reflects the nature of technical descriptions of nature: something always escapes formal description. This has been noted by thinkers including Gödel, Wittgenstein, Gregory Bateson, and John Dewey.
First draft of a chapter for the second edition... love to get some help as I warm up.
Background: we're trying to tighten up the book so it reads more quickly and can be accessible to more people. In doing so, we tried to collapse two chapters into one. I'm wondering if the section "those people" shoudl just be axed. Yes, it's useful information but is it really relevant to information architecture in particular and is it really necessary in this era in which there are so many good books on user research?
Please forgive dreadful formating madness... I exported pretty directly from Word, and we all know how well that works. But I'd rather spend time writing than formatting.
They are discussing Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky in the inkwell:
I've actually come to regret the "organizing without organizations"
line a bit.The phrase comes from an observation in the book that we use
variations on the same word to describe the state of being arranged or
coordinated (organized), and as a label for well-structured groups
(organizations). As a result, when we see organization in the world, we
often assume that there is an organization at work. And the changes
I'm pointing to are all the ways that is becoming less true.To take a recent example, when the Western press covered the upset in
the Chinese blogosphere about the Olympic torch protests, they covered
it as if the synchronization of the bloggers concerns must have been
orchestrated by the Chinese government. What they seemed unable (or
unwilling) to investigate was whether that synchronization was organic
-- whether there was organization without there being *an* organization
responsible, even though assuming that the bloggers actually feel that
way, and are synchronizing with one another, is the more parsimonious
explanation.So the basic observation is that order can arise without there being a
group of people paid to put things in order, and we're seeing this in
things like Meetup groups, Flickr and delicious tags, where sharing
precedes community formation rather than following it, and so on.The one thing I've reconsidered (too late, alas) is the way that
'organizing without organizations' sounds like on of those "...and the
State will wither away and we'll all live in a post-hierarchical
paradise' arguments. I'm so far from believing that that I didn't even
see the resonance til I started fielding questions from people who had
read the title but not the book.
When I saw this slide on Josh Porter's terrific preso on Psychology Of Social Design the clouds parted and the angels sang.
There is a desired behavior that we need to create, we have no control over the person but, via interaction design, information architecture and interface design we control the environment.
Perfect, and succinct. I need to make a T-Shirt.
entire presentation:
Rosenfeld Media recently did an analysis of user experience mentions in prominent Business Magazines. What they discovered is quite fascinating.
- The Harvard Business Review dramatically differs from its peers in its information focus. Knowledge management (26.7%) and information management (61.7%) combined to account for 88.4% of its results, while the average for all of our business publications is 28.2% (8.5% + 19.7%). Of course, HBR is the most academic publication on our list. If this is the explanation, does that suggest that the research and academic side of the business community is more focused on information management issues? If so, why?
- The Economist is quite focused—at the expense of all other UX topics—on branding: 96.7% of its results, versus a 42.4% average among all analysts. Of all the terms on our list, branding has been in use perhaps the longest. Does The Economist see newer topics as flighty and not worth deeper coverage?
- Conversely, Business Week seems to have the most balanced coverage, with six terms accounting for at least 5% of the results each (branding, content management, industrial design, information management, knowledge management, and user experience).
Admittedly a difficult name to decipher, it is pronounced Wood-Key. Nonce, I'm impressed he came up with three alternatives to that choice.
I'm incredibly flattered I'm quoted, I realize I shouldn't be so arch. It's a bit weird to be interpreted. The "pants" entry was my last foray into people taking my words and viewing it as the impending death of IA; here I'm a sign that IA is bigger than design. I can't say I would make the analogy of IA is to design as architect is to construction worker; I'm in the camp of IA is to design as architect is to design. But then, I'm not sure I'd make that statement wearing a pig mask on Halloween either, so viva la difference!
I was just uploading some old slideshows to slideshare, and found this guy. IN 2004, I was invited to give some talks in scandanavia. Since talking about basic IA principals was starting to bore me, I thought I'd jazz it up by trying to guess where IA was going to go next. I just realized that I got 6 out of 7 dead on. Feeling kinda sassy right now.
(note, first half is about IA, takes awhile to get to the actual predictions.)
prelude GK Patterson offered to let me participate in "structured" conversation with Bob Goodman and Joshua Porter, both people I quite respect and I said yes. The I read Unidentical Twins. And then I decided to pass on the structured conversation. I can't be caught up in a long defining the damn thing conversation again. But now, some days later, I find myself haunted by what died in my outbox. On the off chance anyone finds it helpful, here is my response, which, after sending, decided to kill. unedited, half-baked, but hey, it's a blog. Enjoy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, if you thought I was angry before... I cannot tell you how badly this pains me, being included as an indicator of something wrong with IA. I had a point, and apparently I didn't make it at all, and here it is, if you want to know it:
Designers tie too much of their identity into their profession, and this makes it hard for them to progress in their careers. IA and Ixd is design. And as such, IA's and interaction designers get caught in the same trap. They say I *am* an IA rather than I practice IA, and it's more than linguistic shortcut, it's a statement of being.
This is particularly difficult if your name and reputation is intertwingled with that previous career. It's the equivalent of Todd English starting to love fixing old cars, repairing them and rebuilding their engines, and finally saying he has become a vehicular chef instead of admitting he'd become a mechanic. Nothing is wrong with cooking, but he had grown into a new shape. I have grown into a new shape.
As long as folks try to reshape their profession instead of relabeling themselves, they are going to feel constrained. And probably angry. My problem was I was trying to turn IA into a profession that included all the activities of entrepreneurship, instead of admitting I had changed careers. Once I realized I wasn't an IA anymore, life went on and I was much less angry that IA's didn't care about what I cared about. Of course they don't! Why should they?
So I suppose the question really is, what to think about IA. Honestly, I really do not understand why people attack it, and most of the attacks are bizarre and ill-informed. I just reread all the supporting material (including my own) and bah. I love you Josh, I love Shirky, but I don't see why you guys think IA is stagnant (more on that later.)
I had not read Unidenticle Twins, and now that I have, I deeply regret agreeing to respond to it. Too late now; I've lost the bulk of a Saturday morning writing this.
Response
I cannot believe an intelligent person has to cloak his ideas in inflammatory language. On top of it, GK, you have footnotes that go to nowhere! You make claims with no supporting material to prove your point! I'm upset and angry and disappointed and annoyed. And I haven't been an IA for years!
"This is a difficult story to tell in this format and one that is unlikely to appear on any of the Information Architecture-driven blogs."Why do you say that? It speaks of prejudice not fact. As far as I can tell, IA blogs have done a great job of citing forebearers and embraced controversy, from Adam's posting of Not IA to Erin's Malone's design history work. I'll cite mine, if you cite yours.
"While the Information Architecture community of today is notorious for having a short, inwardly focused, airbrushed historical memory, it is well known that contemporary Information Architecture practice and the Information Architecture community began years before the dot-com era arrived (as did the Experience Design community)."Again, offensive and inaccurate (not to mention self-contradicting). If you make claims like this, I really wish you would provide supporting information.
"Richard has written many books (70+), including the more widely known Information Architecture, published in 1996."The book is actually called "Information Architects." It's now worth 70 bucks and up used on amazon, which I think is kinda cool in a world where many formerly critical works are now available for pennies. I had it on my canon on my site since I first had a booklist, and sometimes commenters would suggest it was outdated. But RSW's work and book is still useful as well as beautiful and his mantra "make the complex clear" is as true for Information Architects now is it was then. And complexity has not lessened.
However, it is a book on information design, not on strategy as you suggest later.
"That other unidentical twin moved in a radically different direction embracing all and more of the original intention of Wurman's Information Architecture. Since those early days, that unidentical twin, Strategic Information Architecture, continuously transformed itself and spawned many diverse children: Innovation Architecture, Innovation Acceleration, Strategic Design, Transformation By Design, Strategic Sensemaking, etc."Perhaps as an insider, you knew of RSW's grand designs that would lead to such brilliant innovations as TED. The book doesn't make that case. It simply says that the world is complicated, and some people are gifted with skills to make it make sense, and thank goodness that's true.
"While absconding with Wurman's higher-order name but only a fraction of the original focus, content, intent and knowledge, Findability Information Architecture went on to create its own world that it conveniently, some would say presumptuously and inappropriately, depicted for many years as Information Architecture."So my argument would be that Lou and Peter, not sitting at the knee of RSW, went on to expand that early vision into the newly born internet space, and grew it with the tools they had at hand: LIS (library science.) What you and others forget is someone else was making loose and easy with the IA name: Clement Mok. Designing Business (sadly for him, fortunately for the rest of us, available for 13 cents on Amazon.) is a lost IA historical text. In it, IA is defined more or less as the process of making site maps from strategy, and remarkable numbers of IA's still work like this. Far more, sadly, than those who actually know how to make a taxonomy. But reading it, you can see what resulted of taking RSW's work and turning it into a discipline. These folks became content strategists and strategy folks. Some learned about metadata and deepened their IA knowledge, some focused on usability, and some became interaction designers. Around 2001, some became waiters. I got a job at Yahoo working on search.
You may complain that IA's are unaware of strategic work, but I would argue that many strategic IA's are woefully unaware of the body of knowledge that resides in the information retrieval community. I recall working with a former employee/disciple of RSW's who suggested we add search to a consumer photo site. "What would we search," I asked? "The photos." "There is nothing to search," I replied. "No, you just search, you know, dog, and the dog photos come up." "No, nothing comes up." The infrastructure of search-- that it works by searching for words and words do not magically attach themselves to images-- was beyond this person. This self-proclaimed "IA" did not know the materials s/he worked with, moreover s/he didn't think it mattered. S/he was "strategic."
Those of us who were part of the IA community since the beginning have heard these arguments before: they were called "Big IA" and "Little IA." Big was strategic, Little was executional, Big thought it could be a "conductor" on web teams, and pull the disciplines together to execute strategy. Little know a lot about how the information world actually works, and how you could search photos, how you could make it possible for people to find things they were looking for, use the data they collected, create the things they dreamed of. Little in its little ways helped users in myriad ways do the things they dreamed of, and little IA's, like the biblical meek, inherited the world. Big IA's discovered that between Product Managers and Design Managers, the job they wanted was already taken. The smart Big IA's traded in their job titles. The others whined they could do it better if someone would just listen to them.
This attitude of arrogance coupled with ignorance seems prevalent in some "Big IA" practitioners still swaggering around consulting rounds. They seem disinterested in giving up their wireframes-and-a-sitemap solution they've been hawking since '99. Bullshit artists, too lazy to learn retrieval techniques, too caught up in their identity to study Mintzberg and Drucker, they are noisily spoiling the landscape for the new generation of IA's. But don't be fooled by these blowhards! IA is alive and well and in the hands of folks too busy adapting and inventing to whine about who invented what.
Nform's Gene Smith, for example, just published a fantastic article on social software and is about to write what will be the definitive book on tagging. Thomas Vanderwal's work with Infocloud is getting a ton of attention at senior levels. Emanuele Quintarelli is finding ways to merge folksonomies with taxonomies into more useful retrieval tools. Stacy Surla is working IA in Second Life, and Bill DeRouchey in smart furniture. Moreover, Mags Hanley has made metadata sexy for executives everywhere, because it actually *does* help achieve strategic goals. IA dead? Dead like a caterpillar in a chrysalis, maybe. IA is incorporating, adapting, expanding but still staying with its core value proposition. What is that value? I'd state it is the same as Google's -- "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." And like Google, IA is adapting to new technologies and behaviors to be more relevant than ever.
"Some folks writing on this thread really need to go and do some reading work. Get out there and go to some non Findability Information Architecture conferences. Go and learn some history."Some folks writing about IA should go read some IA history, and understand the discipline before making calls based on occasional perusal of a blog. I've just come back from my sixth conference this year, and not one is as innovative, as strategic or as educational as the granddaddy of all "findability" Information Architecture conferences: The IA Summit.
Maybe you should go to the summit, and learn something about the creature you criticize. I've found your tone so incredibly offensive and dismissive, I can barely bring myself to say I agree with a single point you make. A few other disturbing moments:
"the iPod-driven huge wave of interest in "design thinking" that Findability Information Architecture leaders still seem to be struggling to react to, airbrush over, write themselves into and reorganize around."Are you speaking about Victor Lombardi's blog, an early and well known IA who is now on the Business Week's favorite list for his posts on Design Thinking? He's hardly struggling to react to anything; he's actively and successfully defining it.
"this became known notoriously as the "drunken sailors containment strategy," also lovingly referred to as the "blue collar containment strategy."What is this, where did it come from, can you please cite where you see IA's using this language or approach? You say it's a phrase from outside the IA community, but then manage to suggest IA's do it.
"Whether everyone likes it or not, the future of Strategic Design ... Information Architecture are all merging into the strategic space, evidently at different speeds."I imagine the folks who like it least are those senior business strategists who have been practicing for many years, and see a bunch of arrogant and undereducated folks telling them what to do when they should be listening and bringing their skills to the table. Hopefully enough of those from the design professions will go humbly and thoughtfully and merge their insights and approaches with business strategy that new ways of practicing will occur. Hopefully there won't be so much infighting those who hold the reins won't simply dismiss "those darn creatives" from the table entirely.
GK, I'd like to challenge you to rewrite your article with citations and without insulting generalizations. Then, you might actually change the IA profession rather than be dismissed as a resentful designer, which is what happened on private lists.
~~~~~
And in response to something Josh said
~~~
I think we agree that once something is big, it's more big than it is IA (and big D design is design, and Big IxD would be design and so on... ) Occasionally IA is engineering, but most of the time it's design. Where Josh and I part company is on "little"'s health and well being. "Little" means specialist IAs whose subset of the world's design problems has to do with making the world's information accessible and useful. Taxonomies and so on are merely tools, and as new tools come along --such as folksonomies-- the good IA's pick them up and incorporate them into their practices.
When cars showed up, most blacksmiths stuck to horseshoes. A few applied their wheel straightening abilities to horseless carriages as well as the horsed ones, then branched out to stickshift making. Eventually very few horse shoes were made. What we don't know is if taxonomies or horseshoes or wheels; i.e. will they make it into the next generation of usage or get hung on the wall for luck.
I'd say it'd be unwise to retire them too early. If you know something about search and retrieval, you know there are things you can do only if you have lots and lots of data. Too many folks plug in the Googlebox and are surprised it doesn't work as well as the website. Well, you can't use pagerank algorithms as effectively in a closed system like an intranet, because you just don't have as rich a set of data to base relevance on. Perhaps the rising popularity of "enterprise" IA reflects that fact. Tags, search, dynamic linking etc work better in a large data-set, large -index world while handcrafted "best bets" and navigation systems are required in a smaller and more closed systems.
To return to the blacksmith metaphor, we notice there are very few blacksmiths around today. Eventually wheelmaking was standardized to the degree it could be mass produced. I think it's premature to say that information architecture is sufficiently solved that craftsmen are not required. It's possible that day will come, but new techniques keep popping up, so I'll go with "not yet."
And finally, regarding the IA "land grab" - the WORLD is becoming information rich. Why would the people who know how to make information palatable to humans stay in the internet, when even the internet isn't staying in the internet. Is itunes a application or a browser? How about songbird? Your phone and other devices are hollow shells holding information, and every street corner holds a kiosk providing a portal to the information world.
I'm actually somewhat upset that interaction design is a has made a comeback, because I'd like to see interaction designers and information architects merge (and I really really don't care whose title is used.) Like peanut butter and chocolate, they are two great things that taste great together. Unlike peanut butter and chocolate, they are growing increasingly more bland without each other. Finding information is lovely, but cooler yet is storing, sharing and remixing. And I challenge you to find one application on your desktop that doesn't have an information component. You can no longer have one without the other.
In my fantasy world the IAI and IxDI merge. Sadly, I don't think most folks egos and sense of identity would allow it.
Squidoo : Introduction to Information Architecture good for those newbies looking for a place to start.
It's all good.
Informations-arkitektur - fra navigation til søgning
personally I have no idea what's going on....
I may be biased, as I am speaking, but I think this is quite an interesting line up, and registration is cheap right now!
~~~
The early registration deadline for the Information Architecture Institute's Leadership Seminar is January 28th. Sign up now to get a significant discount for this star-studded event.
The 1 ½ day Seminar “Advanced IA: Topics for 2005 and Beyond” will precede the 2005 Information Architecture Summit in Montreal, scheduled for March 3nd.
This highly interactive forum will connect leaders and provide an invaluable way to learn from others across a variety of disciplines. The sessions and speakers include:
Thanks for your patience. The slides are back up. This is the latest version, with a bunch of notes I hope will help, so you probably want to download them so you can see the notes field. Enjoy, and I'll try to write an article from it, as I think many of the ideas deserve contemplation.
A particularly good JOHO this month, especially for the category inclined.
"Aristotle's answer is that those aren't separate questions. If you're going to exist, you have to exist as something — a table, a human, a piping hot souvlaki. That turns philosophy back from a bad course that it had embarked on, and to which it would return as the influence of Aristotle wore off after the Middle Ages: Thinking that the meaning of things (the table as a table) is separable from their existence (the table as a thing). That path leads to the trivialization of meaning. But not for Aristotle. For him, if you want to know what makes Socrates real, you have to see how Socrates is a human...which means understanding him within a category (animals) with differentiated sub-categories (the rational animals as opposed to the non-rational ones). Thus, taxonomy and existence are fused: To be is to be in a taxonomy of meaning."
Every once in a while it's nice to know that one is not just making products easier to find, or adding business value, but perhaps even making the world saner and more palatable.
That's not even the bulk of it; most of the JOHO is about the three orders of order. It's a very IA issue.
Nate has posted our natek: Web Visions Presentation, which makes a simple proposal to make wireframes more meaningful by at the minimum making them compatible with modern coding, at a maximum replacing them with xhtml.
We're working on an article to flesh this out further... stay tuned.
Trolling about, trying to see if anyone is using the term "faceted narrowing" which has recently become hip at Yahoo, and tripped over A Faceted Approach to Building Ontologies which is a very strong explanation of facet design.
A recent article on document design in the WSJ shakily raised the question:
Is a poorly designed memo at fault for not warning the president the nature of the terrorist threat.
In many ways it's a retread of the butterfly ballot controversy, and the Challenger controversy, but I think it's a controversy worth raising again and again until careless attention to design stops killing people.
Here is the article (PDF) (html). Here is the redesign of the memo.
Here's what wasn't printed from my interview (lightly edited for coherence):
Q: I'd like to talk about the PDB and the redesign - especially what wasn't working in the original
A: I can't blame the president for having a hard time with the memo: it's a mess. Everything is wrong with it: bad writing, bad design and no sense of hierarchy. Presidents of large companies can only give a few minutes to most issues brought before them; it must be far worse for the president of the united states. Bush has to be able to judge in a few seconds how much of his precious time needs to be devoted to an issue in a memo: this one wasn't helping him.
People scan newspapers for a number of reasons: too much daily information, difficult reading conditions such as subways and buses, etc. Journalist like yourself write using the inverse pyramid. This allows the reader to immediately understand what the article will cover and if it is relevant to their lives. It's the same with writing for executives; they are so deluged with information they have to scan as a survival trait.
Imagine if that first sentence was "Data from reliable internal and external sources indicate Bin Ladin planning a large scale attack on an US target." from there you can move on to bullets
This way the president can glance over the memo to understand the threat and then dig in to richer information that can help him decide how to act.
Adding color and graphs would improve both scanability and impact. Imagine if every memo had bargraphs displaying a scale of how severe the threat was, how urgent the issue was and how trustworthy the data sources were. Bush could then compare that memo to those on corn production and diplomat dinner schedules and know where to place his attention.
In a strange way it's like designing a comparison shopping site like Yahoo! Shopping-- you know when users are searching for a camera, they want to be able to look over a number of stores who are selling the camera and quickly see if it is a brand they know, what is the user rating, how much is the price... the president may need to know how severe is the issue, how much time does he have to respond, how trustworthy is the information.
And he has less free time than an average shopper.
(I'm not a presidential adviser, so hard for me to say what he needs to know, but let's use those factors as strawmen)
Q: "what is information architecture?"
A: A profession devoted to making the complex clear, via information design and content organization. It requires an understanding of human nature when faced with mountains of data.
Some good definitions here
http://www.aifia.org/pg/about_aifia.php
1. The structural design of shared information environments.
2. The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets,
online communities and software to support usability and findability.
3. An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of
design and architecture to the digital landscape.
Q: What is the growth of the info architecture field since you've been involved
A: When I first started, there were very few IAs out there. But the growth of data has resulted in information overload, and trouble means opportunity. There are hundreds of dedicated practicing IA's, and thousands of people who make IA a part of their work. Data is useless, knowledge is invaluable, someone has got to make one into the other.
Q: Have you ever heard of/seen a company that tries to apply usability principles to internal communications.
Yahoo! does. During a major Yahoo! property redesign, every single day the product manager sent out html email updates. Each item was a bullet point, and each item was color coded green, yellow or red depending on how much danger it was of slipping.
The Senior VP could take a look and in a second he knew where he needed to spend his time straightening matters out, and where he could relax. It was a very successful project, and those simple daily memos made everything run a bit more smoothly. I bet Bush would have enjoyed a similar design. After all, shouldn't a red flag be red?
Q: Do you know what the readership is like for "Boxes and Arrows"? Any sense of how many readers you've got, and whether it's grown during the two years it's been around?
A: In our first year, we had 1001117 page reqs, in 03 we had 2337704, and this year's numbers suggest we'll grown by another half. (aka half again each year.) our mailing list went form 2000 in year one to 6000 to year 2.
Q: What are big topics in IA circles right now?
A: IA is going in two directions right now. Many folks who are "hands on" IA's are becoming master craftsmen of taxonomy design and navigation systems. Others are going in a slightly tangential direction-- working on complete user experience strategies that encompass multichannel design based on business priorities. Both are thrilling: the hands-on IA's are embracing things like topicmaps and emergent classification tools like Wikis, while the big-picture IA's are becoming involved in organizational innovation and user experience strategy. Overall its an exciting field, with a lot of innovation and experimentation.
Q: What's going to be the challenge for the next few years?
A: The challenge in the next few years is two-fold; one is how do we push forward to the next generation of knowledge management. By that I mean how do we harness the vast amount of information that is out there-- every day physicians prescribe the wrong medicines because as humans they can't keep up with the massive amount of new knowledge flooding the field... sometimes this limitation results in a less than effective treatment, sometimes it actually result in death.
The information space is growing so rapidly its becoming harder and yet more crucial we keep it human-manageable. I think this is one of the reasons we're seeing search get so much attention-- its one potential solution to the problem.
The second challenge is exactly what you spoke of earlier... how are we making sure what we've learned is getting out there. That's one of the reasons I founded Boxes and Arrows-- it's critical that as advances are made, they are shared. That way we are standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before us, instead of reinventing the wheel....
Also see: every breath death defying: IA in the WSJ
Correction on the WSJ article: I am no longer President of AIfIA, that role is now Peter Morville's. I was AIfIA's first year president.
After Karl Fast's terrific talk, i will never doubt the potential of visualization.
Today i tripped over Visualisation Patterns which might help make that potential realizable.
Just in time delivery comes to knowledge management is a tight little article that I have referenced many times to show why KM & IA are important. I had no idea the entire text was online. Worth a read.
"The ways of organizing information are finite. It can only be organized by location, alphabet, time, category, or hierarchy. "
thoughts on this thought? I was re-acquainted with ti recently, and category/hierarchy bothered me. i think i should prefer category/attributes....
"Two School of Information students have developed a digital library for the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture (AIfIA), a professional organization dedicated to furthering the information architecture profession. "
from AlterNet: Inside the Frame
"A frame is a conceptual structure of a certain form. Let me give you an example. Suppose I say the word "relief." The word "relief" has a conceptual frame associated with it. Here's the frame: In order to give someone relief, there has to be an affliction and an afflicted party somebody who's harmed by this affliction and a reliever, somebody who gives relief to the afflicted party or takes away the harm or pain. That reliever is a hero. And if someone tries to stop the person giving relief from doing so, they're a bad guy. They're a villain. They want to keep the affliction ongoing. So when you use only one word, "relief," all of that information is called up. That is a simple conceptual frame. "
-- George Lakoff
any one want to question the importance of selecting the right label now?
Reading The Oversimplification of Mark Hurst, I'm not sure Peter particularly disagreed with any of Mark's key points. And of course it's oversimplification, it's
a) a blog
b) a guru pronouncement
both notorious for going for the pithy over the compete.
Did mark actually cause any harm? I'd say unlikely, certainly not in that post. Navigation is important, but breadcrumbs in their traditional format rarely are seen or used. The recent study on how training user how to use breadcrumbs results in them using them begs the question: who has time to go to every user's house and teach them to use breadcrumbs?
(Okay, if you've got an intranet, this is a woohoo moment for you.)
C'mon now, breadcrumbs are one of the oldest web conventions (as seen in this 1996 Yahoo) so if people aren't using them now, what makes you think that that might change suddenly?
The breadcrumb is visually weaker than the rest of the page, and often easily overlooked. It also is often labeled "you are here" making it informational as opposed to a object for use. It also causes the user to do some mental gymnastics. The user must hold the site structure, however breifly, in their head to use the breadcrumb, which is probably more thinking than most users want to do mid-task.
The breadcrumb is indeed supplementary, and if real estate is precious, it probably can go, as long as it's key purpose-- widening a search among a large set of objects-- is preserved.
What about it's other theoretical purpose, going back? Trust me, users love their back button, and when in one site usability test session I tried to get them to use something other than the back button by saying "what if I took away your backbutton" they threatened to lynch me. Back is the one thing you can pretty much take off your table of worries, as long as you don't mess up the back button.
Alternatives to the breadcrumb include the BBCi solution of combining breadcrumbing into the navigation. "see all X" is another way to get users to widen their choices, and causes no mental strain. I'm sure there are many more.
Regarding goals-- peter is right about a multiplicity of goals on each page, and that is a conversation for another day. I do believe every page has a heirachy of goals, just as there is a hierachy of users and moreover each section of a page has its own goal-- this is the place for answers, this is the place to get more answers, if this answer didn't suit you, this is the place where you refine your search for answers.... I will have to save this for anotherr day.
it's about pushing the cognitive work off the user and onto the designer. we cannot rely on simple solutions.
Reading Good Experience - The Page Paradigm
"Users don't much care "where they are" in the website. So-called "breadcrumb links," which show the user the exact hierarchy of the website as they click further down, are a nice but mostly irrelevant technology. It's not that users don't understand the links; it's that they don't care.
Let me say it again, Max Bialystock-style:
USERS DON'T CARE WHERE THEY ARE IN THE WEBSITE. "
no, they really don't. They don't care at all. They care where they are going. They care to know if they are there yet. they care about where they wish to go next. where they are in the grand scheme of things is entirely a cause for concern of the people who know a bit too much. User researchers who ask in usability testing "do you know where you are" then report worriedly that the user doesn't are every bit as deluded as the design weenies who obsess over it. The user, meanwhile is unworried about where they are: they are sitting on a chair facing a computer, that offers a address bar to a search engine if at any point they can't think where to go next.
Breadcrumbs, if noticed, are mostly good for navigating to a wider selection of stuff. Knowing that, is the classic breadcrumb design really the most effective way to offer that functionality?
AIFIA | Workshop: IA Summit 2004
"What are the key concepts that underlie a successful content management effort? How can content management environments better serve the needs of their various audiences? What strategies and techniques can information architects use to effectively meet content management objectives?"
ARGH! AIfIA, take me awy! I must know all this and so much more!
past summits were so fun -- oh yeah, and informative -- I am getting very very excited about Austin...
"In the past I've wondered about how taxonomies become navigation and did the taxonomy dance to match the bottom-up to the top-down, and now I wonder if this whole way of thinking about information architecture is flawed. "
Which is why Indi Young's Information Architecture from Mental Models is such a useful technique. It at least helps one see the gap betweenuser design and design.
Though very little is discussed about task based classification vs. topic based classification, and how they might interrelate (though if you've seen something, please post a link.) A navigation system is so much more than the inverted L... related links, shortcuts, contextual linking. And yet the inverted L, or whatever form it might take (stacked X&Y is a common variation) is still the safty net, the freeway for when you want to zoom somewhere, the way to get home when you are lost.
just a thoughtwander, maybe I'll see if I can get somewhere coherent later with this...
but yes, victor, keep pondering.
While there were not a lot of surprises in this interview, if you have followed RSW at all, this sentence still resonated: "I am astonished that my doing what I want to do every day hasn't inspired more people to do the same. "
Why not? All indications are that if we follow our passion, we are more likely to be successful. The leaders are always those who follow their bliss. It's not a guarantee, but it does seem to be a prerequisite. And why not? We only get a handful of years on this earth, why waste them?
from ASTDLinking People, Learning & Performance
"Knowledge is messy. Because knowledge is connected to everything else, you can't isolate the knowledge aspect of anything neatly. In the knowledge universe, you can't pay attention to just one factor. "
sweet little article deunking most of the mistakes people make when they try to fix their KM problems...
TC 510 Course Website David Farkas has an amazing collection of web-based articles supplementing his course that would make fine reading over the holidays-- the breadth and diversity of the reading would help round out any IA or ID thinking.
From Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
"It used to be that Web sites offered one or two things. Now it's common to find sites with thousands or millions of items. Wonderful, but that means that item listings are often very long and hard to use.
One of the main usability guidelines for category pages is to let users winnow items according to attributes of interest. To "winnow" a list basically means to filter out elements that don't meet specified criteria, leaving a shorter list that's easier to manage and understand. "
Sounds like a job for faceted classification! Dooo do do!
From Good Information Architecture Increases Online Sales
"Information Architecture can be applied to resolve breakdowns in site design and navigation structure. The role of good Information Architecture is to make the Website work not in the technical sense, but from a functional, organized, conceptual perspective. "
I always thought Asilomar at 40 bucks was a fine deal-- cheaper than most magazine subscriptions. But this is not the case if you live in Chile or India, our membership has told us.
So I am very proud to say Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture has taken one more step to being a truly international organization. AIfIA Membership - pricing is now based on the world bank's country classification system.
Along with the translation project, AIfIA is taking steps to bring IA to the world-- and why not? the web is the world-wide web, neh?
You may think this is small potatoes, but I say if the devil is in the details, so are the angels.
Boxes and Arrows: The Devil's in the Wireframes came at the right time. I've been thinking about wireframes, and more and more I think they should not be used by people who work in0house, and perhaps not by consultants either. At all.
Sketches, paper prototypes, etc maybe.... but only maybe. Why would you design, but take away the tools that lend clarity to your message such as color and font? Why make the layout do all the work/ Why not leave layout to the one who will combine it with color, font and more: the visual/graphic/interface designer?
Is the wireframe an atrocity whose time has come to be booted out of the development cycle? I'm beginning to think yes.
from Setting the stage for success Information architecture earns performance kudos from customers
"Information architecture is the process of organizing and structuring information so that it is logical in design and presentation. It establishes categories and relationships among different pieces of information. It defines metadata schemes, navigation and search interfaces. Good architecture not only helps users find information, but also facilitates updating content by having clear rules for adding new information. And its effects show up on the bottom line with surprising speed when users can get what they need in just a few clicks. "
I'll be giving a talk at UIE 8 in Boston this October.
And I've been given a chance to offer you, my faithful readers, a discount. Read on!
* Conference attendees will receive a special discount rate if they sign up for the
conference using this promotion code CW01.
If you sign up using this promo code, CW01, you will receive $60 off each single
day registration; $300 discount for all four days.
(Note: This offer cannot be combined with any other promotions offered.)
So come, save, enjoy!
I'm excited about this talk. Tom Wailes, a coworker here at Yahoo! will be assisting me with the talk. He has a background on content management and anthropology and brings a rich body of experience to the talk. If you've read the book, Tom alone brightens the mix. Plus I plan to dive a bit deeper into a couple section.
Anyhow, hope to see you there!
I'm getting deja-blog, but I'm going for it anyhow:
An Atlas of Cyberspaces - Web Site Maps
anthony morales is completely right. Netflix put lipstick on a pig.
I still love it though. Oh, Netflix, darling, hire an IA!
BTW, the submit sidebar addresses another Netflix annoyance.. because of button gravity I'm constantly hitting the update awaiting releases when i mean to hit update queue. sigh. not fixed in le redesign, btw.
If I am proud of anything AIfIA has done this year, I think this is it (and I'm proud of many things we've done...). For mysterious reasons, EH has always gotten a lot of international visitors, and I know that IA is not USIA. And that folks in outer countries are going through the same issues, worries and problems that the US folks are. So to know someone out there is translating the articles that helped me struggle through the big IA questions brings me great joy.
It's a small collection right now, but if you are bilingual, take the time to translate an article that helped you make sense of it all... give back.
Speaking of teaching (see commenting son "fireside") I've agreed to do a one day tutorial at User Interface 8 East (seeUser Interface 7 West Conference for a flavor of the event).
What I'd like to know is, if you went to a one day seminar, what would you like to learn? What would you like to leave teknowing? And if you have read (or skimmed) my book, what from it would you like to to go over in depth, in a class situation?
I'm open to suggestions-- there is really so much I could talk about, I could do a semester... but I got to figure out how to cut it down to a day!
I just saw this mail, and having spent way too much time thinking about reccipes and since my husband is now caffeinated and barked at me to get going on our sunday advanture to Marin, I'm going to leave it with you dear readers for now:
"Hi Christina, I have an IA question I thought you, or you visitors might be able to help me with.
The background.
Last year I joined a small but very successful 3D software company and inherited responsibility for the website.
The site was a mess, the solution for everything was build another page and link it to as many related pages as possible. Side menus for product pages not only replicated the tab links on the top bar but also much of the content - albeit in completely different places.
To try and sort out the mess and make life easier (for myself more than anyone) I have centralized much of the content shared across different product pages and located them under the main tabs across the top of the site. For example there is now only one registration section accessible from the main tabs, in the past there were separate unrelated galleries for each product.
The question.
I've been told our website's is mainly for e-commerce sales, however based on the background below I'm unsure in a redesign if I should locate all menu options for a product such as register, download, buy etc
Only on a product page
Only on the top tab navigation bar
Or try and create a combination by having them in both places - although I suspect this is why things got out of hand last time (we don't have a content management system).
To add to the mix the company is moving from a boxed software sales model to a much more expensive server based model and management want the site to look more and more like an IBM or EDS style site.
I know you must be busy but any thoughts you have would be great. You are welcome to tell me to rack off if I asking to much.
Much respect,
David R."
AIFIA | Information Architecture Leadership Seminar "Slides!
Information Architecture Leadership Seminar
Afterword: This seminar was a real success, generating great discussion and sparking quite a bit of networking. Thanks to everyone who participated! Please see below (Additional Resources) for the presentations and related documents."
woo hoo!
IA Summit 2003 Pictures for fun or blackmail.
I feel like a little kid in december. Is it christmas yet?
Is it ASIS-T IA Summit 2003 yet?????????
ASIS-T IA Summit 2003 online registration is working. If you are like me and hate to lick a stamp (ew) this is your moment.
First five people who say "I signed up after seeing your post on EH" to me in Portland will get a shot of tequilla on my dime.
Love Amazon? Check out Rashmi's post to better understand your loved one...
'... it is incorrect to think that Recommender Systems cannot have an agenda, or less of an agenda than categorization. Recommender Systems are explicitly designed to encourage people to buy. ... Apart from other things, they also classify YOU. And they classify you without any knowledge or choice on your part. "
InformIT.com : Articles > Blueprints for the Web: Organization for the Masses an excerpt/article on card sorting. Registration is required, but free.
At Challis's urging, I've reread UX Roles & Titles: Trend or Profession. Other than pain at reading such a tiny font (god I'm old. old old old. I'm old.) which may have lead to free-floating crankiness, I've pulled out a bunch of goodness-- in particular I'd like to point to:
"Web Designer may seem like an overgeneralization to those of us practicing in this space. However the same may be said of those practicing as doctors, lawyers and engineers. Each works within a profession, yet has an area of specialization and may fill different roles at different times. One example is as follows:
Doctor (pediatrics, oncology, internal medicine, orthopedics)
...."
Which is a great model for us to consider. Many folks say this *or* that, IA or ED, design or graphic design, with out considering the range of special and general skills one may need to do one's job.
The professions are not only not diametrically opposed, but's not even hierarchal. Design professions are intertwined, and variable, depending on medium and nature of the work (like doctors--small company vs large, small town generalist, big city specialist).
As for being a trend, hey, if we keep at all this IA business, maybe we can work up to a full fledged profession. After all, dentists used to let blood, right?
OJR article: UnderstandingInformation Architecture
"he is an Information Architect, a member of a discipline that has a reputation for being a preserve of the hipper-than-thou." or nerdier than thou, depending on who you talk to.
Jesse just happens to be one of the hip ones.
Challis Hodge notes IA's popularity as an UX profession.
Mapping Websites is a dang inspiring book. I'm sad to hear it's gone out of print (a rumor-- is it wrong, I hope? Amazon says so...) Anyhow, you can get the section we probably care most for Web Site Planning Diagrams online.
All of the first edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web seems to be online on some guys site.
A side note: don't judge the polar bear on this edition (which is darn good, don't get me wrong) It's just that the second edition blows the doors off the first.
After reading Consumer WebWatch: How Consumers and Experts Rate Credibility on the Web, it seems if you you want to be trusted, get design and IA right.
The best part of the end of december is the prognostications. madonnalisa tries to predict the future of ia-- my favorite is
"5. Search engines no longer exists as we know them today...they rebrand their identities as "Find It" or "Knowledge Repository" engines. Yes I know this sounds outrageous but I have this feeling..'k?"
Strangely I found this as I began to work on a predictions article for B&A-- what are your predictions for 2003?
AIFIA | AIfIA Finishes its First Month with 200 Members, International Flavor
"Recent additions to AIfIA's leadership council are similarly global, hailing from Australia, Belgium, Chile, Denmark, and the US."
I'm psyched to be part of an organization that is working on kicking its USA-centric habit-- it's a big world out there...
from Metacrap
"A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. "
The reasons why decent metadata is near-impossible to come by are funny and true--- and point toward why the semantic web is going to be a hard row to hoe.
from the riveting Nathan Shedroff: the v-2 interview (part one of two) and by the way, ED is short for experience design. Cozy little acronym, ain't it?
"Nathan Shedroff: Well, all of those cultural, psychological, physiological, technical, etc. theories support ED just as well - if not better, in fact - than they do IA/ID. I don't understand the need to acknowledge them for one and not for another. This is like those IAs who spend so much time splitting all of the responsibilities of information creation into two sets, the set of things they consider nicer, cooler, or more sophisticated, and those they consider basic, dull, or beneath them. Then they label the first IA and walk off laughing with their noses held high and the other set ID.
AG: Sounds to me like when you talk about "noses held high," you have one or more bad experiences in mind. And I'm not denying that can be important, but aren't you then simply doing what you accused me of earlier: damning the entire field for the blunders of one or two pompous jerks? Why would I assert that IA is somehow free of such, when anybody who's read SIGIA knows perfectly well that we have our due ration of bozos?
NS: It's just that I see it way more than "one or two jerks." It's an overall feeling I sense, more often than not, in writings, speeches, and conversations. If it were only a few people I'd just write them off (like certain usability folk). But, in my experience, it's pervasive.
Maybe I'm just being too sensitive, but things feel a lot different from ten years ago, and not in a good way. Some of the best IAs/IDs I know never participate in the IA/ID community because of the pervasive attitudes and the lack of anything new or interesting going on. I think that the IA/ID community is, mostly, spinning its wheels in terms of growth and development. It isn't innovating and it is turning more people off than on. Again, my opinion."
Wow, it's been a long time since I've seen anyone bag that hard on IA-- I wonder who has been poisoning his soup. Last I saw Mr. Shedroff, he was cheerfully breaking bread with Lou Rosenfeld... I personally have many reservations about the nascent field of ED but I have yet to take a public stick to the entire group of people who are trying to build it (though Adam's fearlessness in asking the hard questions is rather enticing... come on in... the water's bracing!)
Another oddity in the interview is Nathan's mixing of Information Design and Information Architecture. I really wish Adam had asked Nathan for his definition of IA, just to set a common vocabulary. I'm not sure if Nathan has expanded his definition beyond his former mentor Wurman's or not...
Finally I just don't get these particular arguments. Why argue over the same bit of carpet, when there is a whole world to design? IA designs information spaces, ED designing experiences, IA designs for findability, understandability and usability, ED designs for a positive user experience, thus moving beyond information spaces and interactive to include passive and visceral designed environments.
For me, Ed is too big, too undefined to be juicy enough for me-- I like to stay more in the realm of the practical than the theoretical. I still do big IA, but it tends to be limited to information spaces-- interactive, digital, structural. When I hang with former Argonauts, I'm a generalist. When I chat with the ED crowd, I'm a specialist.
But for other designers, ED is the key and I like watching them go off on their philosophical tangents as they ponder the universe of designed experience like a sophomore art student on his third beer. There is joy there, and it's all good.
Ten taxonomy myths is such an pleasently written article, it brings taxonomies in reach.
"Myth #1: A taxonomy can only be expressed as a hierarchical list of topics.
The implication of our definition is that every company will use multiple, interacting organization schemes (taxonomies). Some will be very concrete and may even be "invisible" except to computer programs (e.g. product codes). Others will be abstract, designed primarily for use by human beings (e.g. a list of topics on a departmental Web site)."
This is an exellent observation. Often I've seen arguments over which classification scheme to use, as if there is one ideal that all users can understand and meets all needs. But often the better answer is use several schemes. A CD site can have music type, artist and chronological classification schemes all mixed and matched-- and often do. Why shouldn't other sites support different user needs and mental models with multiple interacting schemes?
Mark Bernstein thinks we are saying the web sucks. Er, well..
I love the web, and think it is wonderful. I can't imagine how I lived without it-- how did I figure out how to make tomato soup? Or figure out what the name of that guy In Green Mile and Charlie's Angel's was? Or keep track of my bank account? Or find new fiction?
But there are one heck of a lot of bad websites out there. When I was writing my book, I was looking for a good example of a ecommerce store that sold only music (I was looking for taxonomies of music). I went through a directory flipping through store after store, stunned at how ugly and unusable they were. I had gotten a bit complacent-- all the sites I use on a regular basis are great (IMBD), or pretty darn good (Wells Fargo Banking). But the grand mass of *professional* sites are lousy.
I'm not even including the sites built by hobbyists, families and diarists. These are small busines sites whose equivalent is a store in the mall, or on main street in a small town-- but they don't even meet that standard. You can't find anything on these sites, they are ugly as nobody's business and check out is often impossible to accomplish-- if you dare it after taking a look around. It's more like a old barn turned junk store you find on a lonely country road... you dig through spiderweb covered junk, and if you do find something that catches your eye, you pay in cash because the cross-eyed KKK-T-shirt wearing drooling kook at the register looks like he'd eat your credit card as likely as process it.
When you are a professional site, there is a baseline of quality you need to do business. While the web is delightful, I would say many denizens are far from reaching that baseline. This is a multipart problem, in which IA is not the solution, but a piece of the solution, which includes excellent design, copywriting, technology and more....
uxDesign says
"the "little ia theory" has gained so much traction over the past two years, any conversation of the "big ia" has lost it's validity backstage within the community. now ia has become a discrete entity, separated from interaction design, ui design and information design."
IA has moved from Wurman's original view of anyone who makes the complex clear to the structural designer's mlange of taking user research and turning it into organization and interaction systems (often also doing the research as well) to an information retrieval specialist.
So is big ia done? I hope not, I may have to turn in my aifia.org membership (and wouldn't that be awkward). I am now and have always been a big IA... strategy and interaction design and well as design of information retrieval systems have always been my bailiwick. When IA is limited to controlled vocabularies and labels, I'm done being an IA.
Personally, I think we've specialized too fast. Design in information spaces is very new-- we're still in the horseless carriage stage, as far as I can tell. it's one thing to identify key skills as JJG has done with his (in)famous elements, it's quite another to turn them into job descriptions. Conversely, if we generalize too broadly, we run the risk of being "master of none."
I guess I'm uncertain where these will lead. In the early stages of a new frontier, be it physical or technological it's hard to be certain what anything means. Let's wait and see...
from aperceptive
Okay, so I'm not so special. David Crow: Information Architecture Overload writes about the glut of IA/UX/UCD books hitting the shelves these days.
BTW, I guess this is as good a place as any to mention if you are an educator like David or a reviewer for a periodical, you can get a free evaluation copy of my book by sending your name, mailing address and phone number to me. christina at the domain you see in your browser (now that's low-tech spam evation!). Oh, and some sort of proof that you are a writer for a periodical or teacher.
We arent the first folks to realize that a lot of data doesnt mean a thing if you cant get the right data at the right time and know what it means. Watching From the Earth to the Moon last night on DVD, I was amazed at the sheer volume of raw data that had to be accessed and understood for each simple action taken by astronauts. A miscalculation in space is literally worth millions of dollars and maybe a human life.
The same is true for cyberspace. Data not found, data misread, data coming too late to the end user of a website means millions of dollars in lost profits or lost productivity. And if you think we have the luxury of not gambling with lives, well, this is the story they tell around Google. A man with severe heart burn searched on his symptoms. He realized it wasnt heart burnit was heart attack. He called 911 and his life was saved.
Finding is critical to our lives. Finding the right medicine on Drugstore.com, discovering a book revealing fast food malfeasance on Amazon.com, seeking the perfect interview shirt on gap.com there are so many little tasks we as website designers think are benign, but mean a lot to some human being using our design. And a failure on our part to connect humans to their needs can mean a failure in their lives.
Thats why I am proud (and more than a bit relived) to say Information Architecture has arrived. Information Architecture is a skillset concerned with organizing information so it can be found. First coined by Richard Saul Wurman in 1997, Information Architecture has become how we find our way in information spaces. It provides shelter like a house, movement like a bridge, access like a library. Its taken for granted like a road, but is just as annoying as five miles of potholes when its done wrong. Maybe in 1997 users surfed the web. Now its more likely they commute it, traveling from E! online to wellsfargo.com in their daily travels. And the route is determined by IA.
Whats led me to the conclusion IA has arrived? Articles on IA are seen in every publication that addresses the web, from engineering to design. A recent search turned up 188,000 results on Information Architecture. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web has gone to second edition, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web hit the best seller list on Amazon in its second week on the stands, and three more books on IA are scheduled to come out next year. Jobs for Information Architects are found on most job sites, but more importantly, information architecture is listed as a skill for designers and programmers alike. And finally, the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture launched Mondaythe first organization dedicated to promoting and advancing Information Architecture. These are heady times for information professionals.
But its not done yet. Are websites easy to use? Not all, not yet, not by a long shot. And look at software: the other day I flipped from menu to menu in a graphic program trying to find the tool to reset inches to pixels. Not to mention stores with bad organization, airports that get you lost, and one of these days well have to do something about they way that Dewey guy made the library so confusing.
Id like to ask all of you to consider what you need to help you tackle these challenges in the upcoming century. And go to the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture and let them know. In fact, if you can, join up and help build these things. Do you wish you had a mentor? Do you wish there was one place to look up well written case studies? Do you want to know how to be better make your case to business? Do you want to understand the pitfalls of faceted classification, and when to use it successfully? What will help you as you try to improve your products usability, findability and understandability? And then help share that wisdom with others.
There are people depending on us.
Boxes and Arrows: Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web
pretty cool!
Amazon.com: Books: Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web is finally available *and* the price is right. Back to 20 bucks.
and you can buy it with Jesse's!
see also the official site (kinda sparse still) Blueprints for the Web
if you know Seth, you know he is an IA to the bone. If you don't know him, reading Boxes and Arrows: Consolidated Assessment would tell you all you need to know
"Card sorting is so simple a 6 year old could do it. Actually, that's how old I was when I first started card sorting in the late 1970s. Not that I've been in the research field that long, card sorting just seemed a natural thing to do with my baseball card collection. On an almost weekly basis, I'd reorganize my cards. Usually I'd lay them out all over the floor and then get to work. Sometimes I'd sort by team (Go Orioles), or by position (all first basemen), or by year, or by card brand..."
Early explorations of faceted classification!
Read through The Best IA Tool You Never Heard Of and despite the joy i feel in my wee heart when I read this:
"Far from a trivial task. I'd argue information architecture (IA) is more important to the success of a site than design or programming. The two are (obviously!) vital. But if your customers can't find your products and information or can't access your services, you're better off not having a site in the first place."
(woo hoo!)
I still have no idea by the end of the article what IA task tinderbox would actually assist me in doing? Manage taxonomies to use in a CMS? Generate sitemaps? huh? All I've ever seen it used for is blogs, which is a fine use, and for personal note management.
Well, the book is off at the printers, and the Amazon.com buying info is finally correct.
It's a lot more pages than I thought it would be. Of course there are tons of screenshots, so maybe that isn't so shocking. It is due out October 16, just a week before my birthday, so that's a lovely present. And someone suggested reading Judy Blume instead of my book. (hi mike!)
Sorry if I'm am going on and on about this thing, but god, it's like having a baby. it's huge, time consuming and weirdly personal considering it's a "technical" book.
Well, it's almost done. Nothing left but live the screaming agony that it's print and I can't sneak in at 3 a.m. and change stuff....
from Boxes and Arrows: Understanding PowerPoint: Special Deliverable #5
"Inserting screenshots into Word is like popping pimples: it is messy and painful, and does not necessarily lead to satisfying results."
yuck. but hey, yeah, exactly. but yuck.
yes, I'm back.
from Boxes and Arrows: Building the Beast: Talking with Peter Morville
"B&A: So why a second edition?
Morville: Last April, after the agonizing process of closing Argus, I managed to escape into the wilderness of Yosemite National Park for a few days. I liked the romantic notion of figuring out what to do with the rest of my life while hiking alone in the Sierra Nevada mountains. So, armed with a bottle of water and some beef jerky, I headed for the snowy peaks in search of transcendental moments and healing visions.
When we wrote the first edition, we had relatively little experience. Most of our massive IA projects at Argus came afterwards.
Now, I'd like to tell you that when I arrived at the summit, a disembodied voice thundered "Thou Shalt Write the Second Edition" or that while walking through the valley, I glimpsed a polar bear flitting gracefully through the forest, but those things didn't actually happen.
However, I did come down from the mountain with a strong desire to write the second edition and a whole bunch of brilliant entrepreneurial ideas. I wrote them all down on a couple of airplane barf bags on the trip home. I've still got them. Really."
Very funny. Also don't miss Lou's interview from last week. It's a pleasure to compare their voices which blend so seemlessly in the book.
Peter Morville wrote a poetic forward for my book-- it's a pleasure to read. PDF of forward to Blueprints for the web.
Drop your 20 bucks here.
From a new Semantics column on Ambient Findability
"Having achieved this network nirvana, the question is inevitable: what's next? For an information architect with library roots, the answer is obvious: ambient findability.
I want to be able to find anything, anywhere, anytime."
Me too! I want to by lying in my hammock, gazing at the stars and be able to yell out, 'When were dogs first domesticated?" and have an answer.
Can you grab a minute and take this survey? Cheers!
IA Myths, Realities, and Promotions
Still a very busy little bee.. just got the first PDF's back from the publisher, and it's so exciting!
But Jeff can keep you entertained with The Age of Information Architecture
and David tackles the old chestnut Defining information architecture but from a non-IA perspective.
That'll keep you busy-- but if it doesn't, Dan graces us with another column on deliverabels in B&A and on top of it all Karl stops talking about writing and produces Recording Screen Activity During Usability Testing, which displays the rigorous thought we've all come to expect from him....
Whew! How can I write when there is all this good reading to be done??
Open Directory - Reference: Knowledge Management: Information Architecture the open directory decides what IA is really all about-- knowledge management. I don't think I'll argue.
Amazon.com: Books: Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web Since I'm biased, I'll let Don Norman do my talking for me. He recently wrote this blurb after reading a late draft:
"At last, a book about the technical topics of web architecture and usability that is fun to read, informative and authoritative. Wodtke's style is that of story telling which gives the book its friendly, easy to read manner, but the stories also make clear why the principles are so important. And don't let the word "Architecture" throw you. Yes, the book is about architecture, but it is a lot more. It is how to break through the creativity block, why paper and pencil can be superior to a computer, and even how to convince your fellow workers to give you an extra two weeks of time. Easy to read, good insights, practical advice: what else do you want?"
Don Norman,
Northwestern University and The Nielsen Norman Group
Author of "The Design of Everyday Things
You can also check out the book site and the book review.
IA spotted at Nasa: NASA WWW Best Practices, Chapter 1.1 - Structure and Site Organization.
Who desperately needs it, I might add.
In Boxes and Arrows: The Tool Makes the (Wo)Man, Erin explains why drooling over the right bit of software is a waste of our slobber.... okay, not *quite* in those words.
Good piece!
My finalized cover (pay no attention to the one on Amazon.) Just in time to ride the publicity from Mel Gibson's new movie, Signs!
Everyday it gets a bit more real.
Interesting classification scheme spotted at Safeway.
They've choosen meals as the main organizing principal, which leads to funny labels like "bake time." And would you look for "paper napkins" in the "lunch time" isle?
The shop.safeway.com site has a somewhat different classification scheme (unfortunately you will have to register to explore it. all you need for that is name, email and an appropriate zip. mine worked, 94306)
| Fresh Foods Bakery Deli Meat Produce Seafood Kitchen Cupboard Bake Time Beverage & Juices Breakfast Lunch & Dinner Snacks | Health & Beauty Baby Care Health Care Personal Care Household & Pet Home Care Magazines & Stationery Pet Care Alcohol & Tobacco Tobacco Products Wine & Spirits |
I wonder how they came to these different choices? (navigating the shop.safeway.com is a nightmare for very different reasons that I'm sure I'll write about later.)
I love fonts deeply. But like my wine experiences, I have no memory for names and thus I tend to a sensualist's pleasure rather than a collector's passion. (i can never exclaim, "oh rather! this is just like the 1981 copppola-bondoni -- insouciant, but structured." And perhaps that is for the best.)
Public Lettering tickles me right where I live. This collection of signage throughout London is a delight if you love fonts, architecture, photography, signage or travel. I've been wanting to do the same sort of thing for el camino avenue... the street is lined with amazing leftover fifties structures with classic signage. This inspires me to try to make it reality.
Lou recommends After the Dot-Bomb: Getting Web Information Retrieval Right This Time
"I explained to the broker that the idea of "push" technology was first called "selective dissemination of information," or SDI, and, to my knowledge, had first been proposed in 1961 - yes, 1961 - in an article in the journal American Documentation by an IBM computer scientist by the name of H.P. Luhn (1961). He worked out the idea in considerable detail; the only key difference was that the old mainframe computer would spit out informative postcards to be mailed to customers, rather than sending the information online - since there was no "online" to use in those days."
Which reminds me both that
innovation comes only from a deep understanding of the problem (otherwise you can fall into the trap of re-invention.)
and
those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I love:
Dan Brown. I mean, never mind the great deliverables articles that have been on B&A, his portfolio is just lovely and thoughtful.
My latestest entry in the favorite slim book category is Rapid Problem Solving With Post-It Notes. While it is aimed at business types solving business problems, its application to designing content architecture is readily apparent. It's very simple, can be read in about an hour, and is a wonderful way to expand your diagramic vocabulary.
In Dan's Brown's latest Special Deliverable, Where the Wireframes Are, he discussed one of my favorite sticking points: wireframes as turf war for design and IA (Hey, we tuff, we got a gang sign.)
He writes "we hired a new creative director, and together he and I formalized the user experience group in our office. As part of that process, and based on our own bad experiences, he told me that I needed to find a way to take design out of information architecture."
Anyhow, Nick asks about IA and design. This question comes up a lot. I thought that another one of my bad diagrams will help add clarity rather than muddy...
Important disclaimers: this diagram does not list everything either job does. It's all very random, as this diagram was done in all of 20 minutes. Anyone who wants to do a better more accurate one is invited to do so. Stuff on the ends is not in strict order, imagery selction is not more designy than type, metadata harvesting is not more IA than controlled vocab creation. Whew.
it's not as simple as IA is or is not design (graphic design I mean, IA is an act of design of course). The question is what is the relationship of IA and design.. and how can we make that relationship more productive.
Both IA's and graphic designers do stuff theat the other has very little interest in (inviduals excepted) and both do stuff that are natural outcropping of their work.. they just happen to be natural outcroppings of someone else's work as well. Dan's article showed there are ways to do your job, do it well and to its natural conclution and still not get in anyone's face.
Now that sounds familiar....
"Egreetings truly operated on "Internet time," and could implement suggestions very quickly. On the other hand, it was a challenge to keep up with them and to ask them to take time to wait for the results of our research and design efforts before jumping to a decision. "
from June/July 2002 Bulletin: Farnum. Sadly, I didn't get to work with Chris. My last act before I quit was to fight for Argus over a few other competing web design companies. We had a more than competent design team; I remember how hard it was to explain that a redesign of the look/feel would not fix what was broken, only a rearchitecture of the content would. But Egreetings folks are (were... snif!) smart smart smart and in the end they did the right thing.
Didn't stop American Greetings from gutting them after they bought the company, though.
btw, Chris is about to be a father. Go Chris! put more smart people in the world!!
mc.clintock documents everything in his house. just lovley.
Doing a Content Inventory (Or, A Mind-Numbingly Detailed Odyssey Through Your Web Site) is damn good. As was Janice's previous article on content inventories in web techniques. Painful, necessary, useful: that's the content inventory.
A few weeks back, I was lucky enough to have That Damn Canadian(tm) as a houseguest. Karl Fast recently finished his masters in library and information science and this fall he'll be starting his PhD (his research area will be information visualization). Dude!
As part of his masters he took a class on thesaurus construction using facet analysis in which he had to develop a small thesaurus. So while he was in Palo Alto I took the opportunity to pump him on facets, the hot IA topic these days. I make everyone sing for their supper.
While I stirred some risotto, we talked about why facets are harder than most folks think.
Since we were there in my kitchen, Karl used the example of cooking equipment. "That pot you're fussing over: what are its characteristics?"
"Well, it's a pan. flatbottom. non-stick. calphalon. metal handle."
"So you have type, material, shape, brand....those are potential facets. What about knives?"
"What have knives got to do with it?"
"Well, a knife isn't a pan so it might have different facets."
"Like sharpness or length."
"Yeah, those are potential facets for the knife that aren't facets for the pan. So some facets would be shared by most cooking items, like material and brand, and other facets would be unique to certain items, like sharpness was to the knife."
"I think I got it."
"Do you? All the knives in a kitchen store are sharp, but they all have different handles. It's an important distinguishing characteristic. So how do you distinguish between the blade of the knife and the handle?
"I don't know. Maybe material, but also color, edge and...hmmm. I don't know."
"Neither do I. It's starting to get fuzzy here isn't it? How *do* you describe the handle of a knife? I'm sure it can be done but it'll require some research and analysis. And we should remember that most cookware has handles but handles aren't always an important characteristic. It's probably important for describing a knife, but probably not important for a blender."
"Blenders! Shoot! What about strainers, toasters, lemon zesters...our classification needs to describe facets for those too, right?
"Yeah."
"This is getting a bit harder."
"It could be worse. What if we decided to tackle not just cookware, but the whole subject of cooking?"
"Well, we'd want to hit techniques, history, recipes.. um (looking around) interior design? Counters and shelving? And ingredients.. oh my god! ingredients. Canned, fresh, dried, fruits, vegetables.. vegetables! peas, beans, root veggies..."
"And what about something like the history of cooking? Famous chefs like Julia Child? Geographic differences? How do we handle that?"
"Got me."
"I don't know either. Not yet. But with enough time one could develop a faceted scheme to handle all of this. That would take a lot of work."
"I begin to see what you mean about facets. Not being simple." (I opened the fridge for a beer at this point. God, the fridge was full of facets also; a french husband means a shelf dedicated to cheese: there was french italian spanish, goat, sheep and cows milk, soft and hard, herbed and plain and what about the creme fraise! where the hell would that go?.... My revery was broken by Karl reaching past the cheese for an ice tea.)
"Most writers use simple examples to describe facets. Like the cheese there"
(simple?!?! I thought to myself)
"This is effective at introducing the concept but there is a dark side. Simple examples mislead readers into thinking facets are simple, or worse, that they understand facets. Life in facet-land *is* relatively simple when you're dealing with narrow subject areas or physical objects. Life is far more complicated when you expand your scope or when you start dealing with concepts (like history) instead of just physical characteristics. This is true of any sort of classification or indexing scheme, not just facets. And library and information scientists have done a lot of investigation into these things."
"So coming up with a faceted scheme to describing cooking in general would take years of work, but even doing facets for cookware would take months."
"Not necessarily. It depends on the scope of the project. The broader the subject area, the more work. It also depends on how exhaustive you want to be.
"Exhaustive?"
"Detailed. Cooking would take a lot of time, probably months depending on how many people are involved and how exhaustive you want to be. Cookware would be a lot easier, but not necessarily months.
So mind reeling, I put facets in the back of my head. Use cautiously. In limited way. Watch out for scope.
Some months later, I saw Adaptive Path's article on facets, and immediately forwarded it to Karl to tease him.
"After reading this article, I'm going to put in my book how easy and fun facets are, and how every one should do them."
"I see you have chosen the way of pain. (I just saw Lord of the Rings again--Christopher Lee is soooo evil)
Anyhow, this is not -- IMHO -- a particularly helpful article about facets."
"What's wrong with it? Is it the problem of scale we discussed?"
"It's a tease. It tells you what facets are, sort of, but not really. Check closely and you'll see there is only one paragraph that describes what facets are. One paragraph? Not enough.
It has other problems too:
1. It covers what facets are, not how to develop your own faceted classification scheme.
2. It doesn't tell you how (a) difficult and (b) time consuming it is to design a faceted thesaurus, which is to say how expensive
it is.
3. The terms "thesaurus" and "classification" are never used, but that's what you're building. No mentioned either of controlled vocabularies.
4. A faceted thesaurus is a dynamic thing and requires a lot of time and energy to *maintain*. This costs more money.
The best thing about the article is the discussion about the interface issues. It correctly points out that these issues are enormous and much harder than they first appear.
Jeff also makes the excellent point that browsers aren't well suited to an iterative query interface, which is the direction most faceted interfaces are headed. The idea is to use a point-n-click interface and make lots of little adjustments to your query until you've whittled the dataset down. Each iteration involves a request to the server and the relatively slow network response time makes this problematic (information visualization, my research area starting this fall, faces a similar problem)."
"So it's not inaccurate, it's sin is that of omission? Personally, I think any kind of thesaurus or even controlled vocabulary design is incredibly difficult and time consuming."
"There might be a few niggles, accuracy wise, but it seems basically correct."
"So what's the problem?"
"The article is too thin for my liking. In my view this is beyond omission. It's like saying that the engine in your car is simply a
metal container into which you inject gasoline vapor and then light it on fire. It's far more complicated than that and anyone trying to duplicate an engine with this information is going to fail miserably.
Now the article isn't going to cause anyone to set themselves on fire, and it's purpose is not to teach anyone how develop a faceted classification scheme. That should be clear to anyone who reads it. Nothing wrong with that.
My complaint is that there is a lot of talk about facets, but little of any substance. Most of it won't help you build your own faceted classification scheme. It amounts to saying the grass is greener on the other (faceted) side, but fails to give you a map explaining how to get there and what obstacles you'll face along the way. And the academic literature doesn't help much either. It's too dense and I can't recommend it to the practitioner (not the stuff I've seen)."
"So where's the article that will explain all of this in a language we can understand?"
"Well, I'd thought about writing it this summer but things have happened and I think I'm too busy (I'm going backpacking in the mountains for four weeks). More importantly, the answer is probably a series of articles. We need something to fill the gap between the enthusiastic but simplified articles we've been getting and the rigorous, dense explanations in the academic LIS literature."
"So, B&A is waiting, Karl...."
Or Amy! or anyone!
Make your own conclusions. But I didn't want to wait until an article was written to get the word out-- it's complex. So Karl agreed to let me put up our conversations.
Amy Warner's talk at the summit http://www.asis.org/Conferences/Summit2002/IA_Summit_031602.ppt made many wonderful points about when and why to choose what degree
of controlled vocabulary you want to use. (and faceted thesauri are the Cadillac's of controlled vocabularies. See slide 6.).
She also pointed out that often a company cannot technologically support a thesaurus, and designing one would be a waste of time and money (which Karl agrees with 100%). In fact, if you are excited by Jeff's article, definitely go through Amy's slides. It illustrates what it takes to make a thesaurus.
Personally while I fear faceted classification in all its majesty I think adding limited facets to your navigation is just fine. There is nothing bad about "shop by occasion, recipient, lifestyle and shops (brand)" as seen on www.redenvelope.com. It's important to be careful when you open that genie's bottle. Facets are like wishing: they may seem simple, but the consequences can be unpleasantly surprising.
BLAH. Now that is 99% bad.
Go to CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar and watch the first archived talk, Scott Klemmer's. Do not be fooled by the title, he demonstrated a new wall-sized GUI, a smart whiteboard. It blew me out of the water. The attention to understanding the nature of design that allowed this new tool to come into existence... well, that's the way it's supposed to be.
BTW, Terry's Winograd's seminars are open to the public. If you are ever in the area, it's well worth making an effort to attend.
More on Design Outpost project: the chi paper and the overview, with videos, etc.
Anyhow, it's not only a cool product, but a good talk as well for thinking about the nature fo the design process and how tools support modes of thinking. Oh, and it's in english, not academic jargon. At least I could follow it.
Excited!
and it's even free. Redo your IA blog in Polar Bear today...
strange systems: Using Wireframes is a terrific essay on wrieframes.
I'm bummed that I can't tell anything about this person... no name, no nothing except s/he is was an architect. Anyhow, cool stuff.
navigation is information architecture made visible.
p.s. this is my one thousandth entry, according to movable type.
All the fuss over findability resulting from Peter's article and the many insightful comments led me to think about this new concept until I saw this diagram in a dream. 
Structural Design Components
Unfortunately my skills fall mostly in two of the three circles, so this draft is pretty rough looking. This one is a bit fancier. I'll be browsing Information Graphics for inspiration later...
The key concepts should be apparent, though. An IA strives toward the goal of findability, an interaction designer toward the goal of usability and the information designer toward understandability.
Obviously there are overlapping points. I had originally thought to put something in them, but then realized many items could go there. Between IA and InD, browse structures, between IfD and IA you get navigation design, between InD and IfD you get interface (GUI) design and so on. Most websites (and most software) fall neatly in the middle.
This is definitely a draft, so I'd love to get feedback from folks. Cheers!
And number ten. Which means I'm the bookends of IA, I suppose.
It feels amazing to have Boxes and Arrows regonized so young. Though for the record, it could not have been done it without Erin Malone, George Olsen, David Bloxsom, MadonnaLisa Gonzalas Chan and the rest of the staff AND the unbelieveable authors who have generously written for neither money nor fame but just a hope to reach someone with a message. The article mistakenly says it was my effort, and that is far from the truth.
Anyhoo.
Greece is cold and rainy, but still cool. Settled on Paros. I hoped to be here yesterday, but Athens had a general strike. No taxis, no metro, no ferries no nothing. We arrived at the port via an overcrowded irregularly running bus exhausted thinking we had missed our boat only to discover no boats were running at all. We stayed in a rundown hotel that looked lieke it was decorated by frank sinatra and the rat pack. The room with bright tangerine, and had many many mirrors (we all know what that means, yes?) but Tracy and I slept peacably enough (except for a lonely midnight dog) and woke at daybreak to sucessfully leave on a ferry full of teens heading for san torini. I started reading the alexandria quartet with Justine. Lawerence Durell. I wonder if william Burroughs read Lawerence's work-- Burroughs could have been seeking Alexandria in his Interzone, I think. It's written like marmelade, but it's interesting and compelling and sometimes a sentence makes you stop short like a line of poetry-- sulking youth out seeking a fellow nakedness (warning, possible paraphrase, i'm working from my untrustworthy memory). Anyhow, a pleasurable change to read one who both has a level of craft and has something to write *about* I also read a New Yorker cover to cover on the ferry, and there was a terrific article on teachign art that suggested that art was no longer about the world, but about art history and thus decadent and irrelevent. The two books, Club Dumas and Justine suggest similar things about literature. But I digress (and at how many Euros a minute, I wonder).
more to come...
I found Lessons from the London Undeground in my inbox this a.m. and read it with some doubt: yet another metaphor for IA? When do IA's find time to do IA when they apparently spend so much of it explaining what it is.
Then I was sucked in. And utterly charmed and intrigued by the metaphor of the London Underground for the web.
If you've ever emerged from the underground (or the metro, or the subway) dazed and perplexed and disoriented, you know what I mean when I say that is much like coming up from a long stint of surfing to stagger to the kitchen for a soda (and accidently walk into the closet. or maybe that's just me). We learn a new set of navigation rules to the point of almost unlearning our native ones.
It's a whole different world underground, with all our usual wayfinding devices (sky, wind, square walls, windows) removed; to be replaced only by signs. Signs get to be very important.
It's an apt and intriguing metaphor, complete with solutions we have hardly begun to tap into.
Thought-provoking article. Check it out.
Finally got around to finishing Sorting Things Out (thanks Caltrain!) and I have mixed feelings. It is desperately boring for long stretches. And then it is seat-fixing in others. The chapter on apartheid alone deserves a double latte in borders to accompany a long peaceful read. The chapter on tuberculosis requires a double latte also-- to stay awake to read it. But overall I highly recommend it to anyone who classifies for a living. We easily forget that every act of sorting also reflects a value system that is then codified in our designs and propagated. It's a lot of responsibility.
See sample chapters
so you don't have to. Thank goodness Samantha Baily has the smart answers.
Boxes and Arrows: Unraveling the mysteries of metadata and taxonomies
Ever since I've been reading Sorting Things Out , I look at classification schemes differently.
When I saw this: Webmonkey | design I realized that it was as much a statement of how Webmonkey currently sees design as it is an organizational system.
Design is subdivided into "Site Building" "Graphics" and "Fonts"
Site building holds articles that range from usability to cheap web hosting.
hmmm.
Another christina sent me this article: Reduced to a look and a feel
"It alarms me when I hear that many interactive agencies make the distinction between a "designer" and an "information architect" (IA). Apparently the IA determines the structure, functionality and content of a site and then the designer applies the "look and feel". Needless to say, in the methodology mentioned above, the box entitled "information architecture stage" appears just before the "design stage" box."
Well, yes, that would annoy one.
Brad pointed me to Design Interact: Feature on "Herman Miller RED". On the second page, in big red letters
"To build a strong foundation, hire an information architect."
Yay!
It's nice to see nathan's sketches... it's nice to see an IA who isn't afraid to show the ugly side of his thinking that leads to beautiful results. Again, too often we open illustrator (or visio) before scratching out our thoughts with good old fashioned paper. I'm also cheered by his non-pretty wireframes that encourage notation.
good study; check it out.
Location, Path & Attribute Breadcrumbs was Keith Instone's poster at ASIS&T's IA summit. If you dont' mind holding yoru head sideways, it is a very interesting read.
I like breadcrumbs-- they are both a navigational widget and a way to broaden your search.
I learned a lot of things at the summit, from the esoteric to the remarkably practical. Running the gamut of this range was John's talk, Zen and the Art of Deliverables (pdf)
On the practical side, he said "To do a good site map, I need four days of hard thinking and a day to draw it out. I can't always convince the project manager to give me four days to think, but I can often convince people it takes five days to make a site map."
hmm....
My magic moment from the conference was when Matt Jones taught me the new "IA gang sign." Here he is joined by Brad " Yeah I live in Palo Alto and I'm really an interaction design wanna make something of it" Lauster and Izumi "yes, we do have IA in Japan it's spelled Ray-Zer-Fish., don't make me kick your ass."
Damn, you tough!
Anyhow, it involves spelling backwards, so I keep doing it wrong...
Peter Morville's new Social Network Analysis is a pretty sweet essay on the social network Peter used to learn about social networks. And check out those cool diagrams!
Meanwhile Jesse continues his recon. I'm even more uneasy about this entry, but I want to see how it all plays out before jumping to any conclutions about the essay. Facinating to watch it unroll.
The real mystery is how these people write a book and all these essays. And they've got spouses. It's all I can do to work, write the book and keep my husband feeling like a husband and not a couch-warmer dinner-maker.
Anyhow, my sentence of the week is "Design has consequences"
I can't think of a sentence that is more acknowledged as true and most often acted as if it were false in our industry.
Not at this moment, anyhow.
Several blogs pointed to The New Architecture of Informationwith the blurb "The first generation of Websites has been built with a radical misunderstanding and misrepresentation of users' expectations and practices." yet no one felt they should mention its actually "Les nouvelles architectures de l'information" and in French. The link the blogs give drop you right into the French paper with no sign of a link to the English translation, or to anything else, of that matter.
Go to text-e.org, and click "English", then follow the links to the paper from the front page. If you don't read French. I'm sure it's much sexier in French. But then, I'm biased.
I'm still sorting out how to handle the newsletter. But today's glean is below...
MORE...Better questions, not more answers
can I get "mentat" on my bizcard?
"In the minds of many outside our discipline, 'information architecture' has already become synonymous with 'usability'. It is easy to understand why practitioners in a discipline as new as ours might want to align themselves with an established one that already has made some progress in establishing its credibility. But by fusing information architecture with research, we risk corrupting our process and undermining the very credibility we seek. "
I do champion user-centered design, but I can't agree with Jesse more (beyond jumping up and down in my chair muttering yes, yes, as I was doing as I read part three).
Very few people understand the relationship of research and design-- Im just beginning to have clues to how it works, and they are more whiffs of clues... but it is not asking users "what should that be called " and then making the label that name.
Fieldwork, be it ethnography or contextual inquiry gives us insights into the nature of the user's problems and mental models that we *as designers* can then use to innovate. It gives us insights, helps generate ideas, not shut them down. Fieldwork helps the creative process, doesn't dampen it -- if it informs rather than proscribes.
Usability testing catches our internal prejudices we can't always transcend. User's give us a different point of view, but the pressure to design is always with us. And although we might think everybody knows what "home" means, good usability testing can prove or disprove that assumption.
But it's still just a sander we use to rub off the rough edges of a design... if the work is fundamentally flawed, usability testing can't fix it. Then it's literally back to the drawing board, where solutions are born.
The only thing that gives me pause in Jesse's article is the glimmer of the idea that an expert IA has no need for user research. That part worries.
Noel describe a different sort of set of tools for Information Architects in his post on Content Inventories.
If you are an Information Architect (or want to look just like one) this is probably the month to sign up for a free 30 day trial to Knowledge Management Magazine.
It's taxonomy, taxonomy, taxonomy!
Highlight: Former Argonaut Sam Bailey's smart article Do you need a taxonomy strategy?
kottke is trying to create a personal schema/taxonomy. I know there are heaps of IA's trolling this place, so hop over and give him some theories.
Great Infonomists
awards great thinking and innovation in the field of information science.
Information Design Using Card Sorting -- or IA using Card Sorting if you prefer-- this is a solid introduction to the very useful technique of card sorting.
thanks iawiki
Lately I've been thinking about card sorting in relationship to menu design for features. One can sort features (tool, what have you) into groups depending on user expertise, tasks, user types... and so on. I've done this in the past by making squiggly diagrams (probably in the affinity diagram family), and I did feature card sorting on the snapfish project long ago... has anyone else tried this? Succeses? Failures?
Flexible Search and Navigation using Faceted Metada is required reading. My gosh, it's swell. Completely thought through ideas, clearly explained, jargonless, insightful... okay, I dug it.
While visitng Peter Van Dijck's personal site I noticed a site map with humans interacting with it. I was enchanted and excited... what a wonderful way to connect personas with architecture (potentially) and thus humanize one's work. I'm only sorry the big version didn't have these people in it.
It also caused me to fantasize about a map this big, painted by a muralist. At CIQ, we're working on a project that will result in a map at least this big, but more because of site size rather than map size... (shudder).
Moving WebWord > Information Architecture for the Rest of Us is a nice article on wayfinding, but not on IA....
Finally 1.0 of Denim, the website sketching tool is available. Lots of sweet features, including a zoom tool to go from sitemap to wireframe.
Download it at Group for User Interface Research - Projects - DENIM and SILK - Download
Jesse takes on the big question: who are we as IA's. Are we the role, or the job? Are we our specialty, or all the fine stuff that goes into getting the job done.
Jesse and I have argued a lot on this topic-- he has always in the past championed the difference between information architecture (organization of information for retrieval) from information architects (who do that + interaction design, information design, and maybe some project management, code, business analysis and so on). I've always held that information architecture is architecture in the information space, and must embrace content architecture (a.k.a. little or narrow IA), interaction design and information/interface design, and the architects are those who practice and excel in those arts.
We do always agree that something must be done about the state of the web-- a lack of thoughtful premeditated architecture results in sites that are difficult to navigate, difficult to use, unprofitable, unrealized and generally stinky.
I look forward to part two....
Samantha points out Tour The Wall Street Journal Online where they list they ways their redesign has improved the site. The first point of bragging: "Better Organized"
i.e. new and improved IA.
"Web users don't always have the same needs. So we've reorganized our navigation in a way that works better online. We've moved some sections and pages, and given some of them new names that more directly describe the subjects they cover. "
So I started a conversation with the clever and oh-so helpful Mike Steckel from International SEMATECH about thesauri and their kinfolk. It seems he learned a ton from the argus seminar, and was kind enough to share some of that learning with me.
It proved to be trendously helpful. You wouldn't not believe how little about organization tools is in english for ordinary people. Kudos to Mike and the former argonauts!
I reproduce it below in hopes it helps some other poor lost fool
MORE...Doing a whole bunch o' reasearch on the librarian's art for le book, and was recommended WWW -- Wealth, Weariness or Waste
"This article offers some thoughts on the problems of access to information in a machine-sensible environment, and the potential of modern library techniques to help in solving them. It explains how authors and publishers can make information more accessible by providing indexing information that uses controlled vocabulary, terms from a thesaurus, or other linguistic assistance to searchers and readers."
I want more!
I want to better understand how all these organizational systems work, what their relationship to each other is, how they can can be combined to build dynamic architectures.
c'mon, marion, educate me!
I'm speaking here CHIFOO and I promise a good show. George and I have sworn a battle royal! even if we agree, we swear to disagree! If you are a Portlandian, and have some time the next day for coffee or lunch, I'd like to arrange some get together. i fly out around 3.
Also showing... User-Centered Design Strategies here in lovely SF.
January is yack month, when you add in Carbon IQ's discount usability workshops... perhaps 2002 wil be the year of the yac?
I'm thinking about the nature of standards a lot lately. So this is a full-on blather about them...
A couple weeks back, my biz partner, Gabe, was sitting at his desk, surrounded by books: Microsoft Windows User Experience , a similar guide to OS X (which I can't seem to locate on Amazon), the sun interface standards one, and Elements of Style.
Gabe said "They are all essentially the same book--- they all explain the standards, and how to adhere to them to be more effective."
Today, browsing Digital Web Archives, I came across The Destination Matters More Than the Journey, in which Dean Allen points out that Elements of Style -- not just Elements of Typographic Style -- is very useful to typographers. Which caused me to re-open Strunk & White's masterpiece.
The Elements of Style is still the best seven bucks you'll spend if you want to be better at pretty much any creative act. Not just writing (though it is the book to read if you want to be a better writer. And everyone needs to be a better writer.)
The book does more than give rules of proper English; it provides principles of the art/craft of writing. And these principles are so succinct, so well crafted in themselves, so universal that they apply beyond the art/craft of writing to the act of creativity, no matter what the medium.
There is a big difference between a rule -- say, "use blue underlined text for links" -- and a principle -- "group like items together to provide context and relevance." The rules are hard and fast and unquestionable-- you either live with them or break them. Principles are subtle, hard to learn and hard to unlearn. Rules lend an air of efficient professionalism to your work, a veneer of unassailable propriety. Principles improve your work immeasurably, and move the judgment of your work from "correct" or "incorrect" to "true, real, meaningful, dismaying, disturbing" ;i.e. following a principle can take your work away from being judged for its execution and get it judged for its intention.
Part of the power of the Strunk and White book is the relationship of the Strunk to the White. The first half is written by a English teacher, and has succinct excellent clear cut rules for writing proper English. The second half was written by his pupil, E.B. White, a writer of fiction, and pays attention to the more subtle act of creating compelling writing. Thus the first half is strict rules, the second principles.
From the first section "Place a comma before a conjunction introducing an independent clause" which is followed by an explanation and examples.
"Two-part sentences of which the second member is introduced by as (in the sense of 'because') for, or, nor, or while (in the sense of "and at the same time") likewise require a comma before the conjunction."
From the second section "Do not affect a breezy manner" Which is followed by
"The volume of writing is enormous, these days, and much of it has a sort of windiness about it, almost as though the author were in a state of euphoria. 'Spontaneous me.' sang Whitman, and, in his innocence, let loose the hordes of uninspired scribbers who would one day confuse spontaneity with genius."
The division is not always perfectly neat-- Struck gives fine principles such as "Omit needless words" and White lays down the rules-- "Do not dress words up by adding ly to them, as though putting a hat on a horse." But overall it is Strunk's job to make the rules, White's to teach you the principles.
Rereading Strunk & White reminds me that while learning the rules is useful, internalizing the principals is vital. Yesterday Gabe and I were talking again, this time about an interface for a project, a weblication. He was stuck with a problem of displaying hierarchal toolsets. He was digging through the Window's book for a standard to adopt, and was dissatisfied with all the current conventions. The solutions the book presented were ones we'd seen fail in user testing.
I suggested he figure out a way to visually associate each toolset with the item it was modifying. It seemed more sensible to me to simply stick to the more ancient standards of design principles, if recent software standards were lacking. We brainstormed back and forth, and came up with a satisfying design.
So standards, rules, principles... was our solution breaking conventions? true to principals? What are rules, if they don't make for better designs? useful? hindrances? Even as I write this I begin to think about the power of rules, and all the gradations between rule and principle... when is a rule a rule? a principal a principal? How do standards fit in? What about style?
It's a lot for a Sunday...
Abel Lenz Insists That Information Architecture Really Is A Creative Pursuit is the link du jour, pointed to by the many link harvesting blogs on UX that now exist (remember when it was just tomalak?).
Reading through his article, I had to question the examples Abel gives... does a hut need an architect? A track house? The Royal Tenebaums is an extremely basic site that has been slathered with a lush flash interface and mystery meat navigation on top of mystery meat navigation (which might be fine for a movie site, as an extension of the movie's entertainment. Though it leads me to question if it's right for this particular movie. but I digress)
It's the equivalent of the house up the hill from me-- a concrete bunker of a building, a squat square one story thing that has been painted mysteriously with zebra stripes and leopard spots.
There are houses that don't need architects-- there are sites that don't need them either. Or won't need them, once we have prefab plans to hand out: here is your basic store. Here is your basic movie site. Here is your basic band site.
Yahoo is already capitalizing in this by building a strip mall of its own, and quite successfully as Jakob notes.
So to address his key assertion "IA is a creative act," --well, yes it can be, but like design and real-word architecture it is the challenges and constraints that make it something great. A simple site, a problem that has been solved again and again-- can this be a creative act? Can something wonderful come from trailer-cast-director-story?
Then again, people keep reinventing the spoon and fork...
Lou has gone to movabletype, which means I can link to his latest impressive take on how to construct an infromation architecture, and you can comment on it. go now.
Digital Libraries: Metadata Resources made me feel-- well-- meta!
"Metadata is data about data. The term refers to any data used to aid the identification, description and location of networked electronic resources. Many different metadata formats exist, some quite simple in their description, others quite complex and rich. "
In Lou's latest progress report we find that many professional organizations would love to have the vibrant if contentious IA community join them. But, true to IA's multi-disciplinary (dilettante?) nature, IA's plot to create a Super-SIG, allows us to belong to all. What will happen next? Can IA every truly commit? Tune in next week...
I may have blogged this before, but since these days I've been researching methods of selling and quantifying IA, here it is again: Measuring Information Architecture Panel at CHI 2001
And I'd love it if anyone who has links on selling, justifying and quantifying IA (and usability, what the heck) please share!
Tess Lispi's portfolio is more than that: it is a guide to a methodology for a project done right.
Reading Louis Rosenfeld's Bloug
"Now there must be some sort of counter-counter-movement afoot: people who've experimented with classification schemes, and were disappointed to find that, yet again, there was no silver bullet to be found, just as with search engines."
Reality just keeps letting people down.
I read the original post that set Lou off, and they both have some merits. Doug is talking about bloggers using metadata, and I have to say, that's like writing the names of the people on in the photo on the back of your snapshots-- good idea observed in the exception rather than the practice.
Although making a shared vocabulary in the form of a catagory base might be interesting (in blog tools that use categories, such as MT), especially if this vocabulary was shared across some sort of site network.... with a thesuarus to catch stragglers?
Maybe a solution is a hybrid?
Is that a category I see before me?
"Your brain recognizes broad categories of objects - such as faces, houses, shoes and chairs - with a unique pattern of brain activity for each category, according to recent research by US scientists"
from IS 249 | Information Architecture | Summer 2001
"Information Architect: 1) The individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear, 2) A person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge, 3) The emerging 21st century professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding, and the science of the organization of information."
--Richard Saul Wurman
IAwiki: WireFrames has recently been vigorously and lovingly edited by Victor Lombardi, and show a sensible approach to the (necessary?) evil of wireframes.
Web classification is essential (Gerry McGovern) -- "Classification
(taxonomy, categorization) is to content as mapping is to geography.
It is an essential tool that allows the person visiting a website to
navigate it quickly and efficiently. Without professional classification
a website becomes a jumble yard of content that is confusing and time
wasting."
David Bloxsom's resume/portfolio site includes some very tasty case studies. FYI, He's also one of the B&A kids....
matt jones beautifully and brilliantly trots out once again our quest for identity. and it is good. (i'm probably going to hell for linking to a post that started out on my site, thus creating a black hole of cross links, but whatever...)
Designing for the Bottom Line (Web Techniques, Dec 2001)
"The easiest ROI arguments are those that come with dollar figures attached, often referred to as hard ROI. For example, when IBM carried out a wholesale redesign of the IBM.com site in 1999, online sales rose by 400 percent the following week. That's easy math."
In these increasingly troubled times, we are forced more than ever before to justify ourselves. it's time for us to learn from usability and figure out how to fight with numbers. After all, if usability says "sales improved 400% by fixing usability problems" the odds are good the information architecture was altered (as well as interface design, etc.) A little backtracking of cases in old copies of Interact, a thorough read of Cost Justifying Usability and we should be able to say, once the information architecture was restructured, customer service calls were reduced by 50%, resulting in a net savings or 40,000 in a two month period. or something like that.
"USABILITY IS THE PRIME consideration in the creation of a site's information architecture. Information architecture concerns itself not only with the structure of text but with text-related tools that contribute to a site's usability-- navigation, searching, and browsing systems, labeling and indexing systems, and the words writers use in their copy. "
In The Speed of Information Architecture, Peter Morville once again chastises us to slow down.
He then continues on to introduce different sort of classification techniques is lovely clear terms, weighing their effectivness, and then points out the "slow" methods are the effective ones.
Once again, the early bird gets the worm... but who wants to eat worms? Slow and steady wins the race.
Community Infrastructure for Information Architects is the birth of a crazy idea-- so crazy it just might work. So many professional organizations are irrelevent to our lives. Lou is one man I'd bet on to change that....
At George's repeated suggestion, I subscribed to Harvard Business Review. The latest issues seemed to be to be extremely useful to "innies" trying to effect organizational change. The first is Harnessing the Science of Persuasion (note, these article you have to pay for, either for download or by hiking into a magazine store. perhaps you can read it for free at borders.). The second is Radical Change, the Quiet Way.
Something we as IA's don't often do enough of-- considering politics and human behavior outside of our design techniques. But we should be very good at making change happen within organizations... after all, we are good at getting customers through check out, or to the article they were looking for. maybe it's time we pointed our brains at this problem with the same systematic analysis we give to an interface or taxonomy.
Finally an interesting note in the Radical Change article: it mentions strategic losing of your temper as a tool. This strikes me as something more easily played out as an innie, but nonetheless. I was watching Maltese Falcon again last night, and got to my favorite scene-- Bogart is verbally fencing with Sydney Greenstreet-- both want the other to reveal what he knows, both don't want to give up his own knowledge in exchange. The conversation runs along the lines of
"I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously, unless you keep in practice. Now, sir, we'll talk if you like. I'll tell you right out, I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk." -- Greenstreet as Gutman
In other words, the conversation goes round and round. Sound like you talking to your manager?
Finally Bogart leaps up furiously, throws his glass down shattering it and accuses Greenstreet of wasting his time. He grabs his coat and hat and storms out. In the hall we see him grinning broadly... it was all a sham. Though his hands are shaking with the stress of the gambit.
If done judiciously, a show of genuine emotion can be effective in cutting through cycles of pointless repetition. maybe it's a flare of temper, maybe it's just a heart-to-heart, where you tell your employer you are deeply frustrated. And maybe your hands will shake after, like Bogart's... but maybe, like Bogart, you can break the cycle of repetition and inertia.
Anyhow, good articles, check 'em out.
Tripped over this review of Information Architecture for the Web and this passage reverberated with me
"It is odd that Rosenfeld and Morville seize the title of architect, because the central claim of the architect's profession is the very breadth of concern that Information Architecture lacks. Architects have always competed with craftsmen, construction firms, and engineers; what architects offer is an original and coherent vision that inspires and entire Web site or building. Beyond the supervisory power of the job title, Rosenfeld and Morville aren't very interested in architecture. "
At the risk of opening up an old can of worms, I have to say that this small passage suggests to me that a slightly broader definition is truer than "Information architecture involves the design of organization and navigation systems to help people find and manage information more successfully."
What does it take to truly be an architect of information?
You've probably seen this: I saw it earlier, forgot about it, and have returned to print it out finally
Welcome to the Introductory Tutorial on Thesaurus Construction
The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine
Changes in Metatag Descriptions Over Time
Information Architecture and the Support of Brand Promise (pdf)
"Some believe information architects should only concerned with the structure of hard information. I disagree." Note: his graphics are misbehaving, but the ideas are all there
Paul sends me this lovely article: Article - Information Architecture with yet another variation in our defintition.
"Information Architecture (IA) is the science of designing the labelling, navigation, organization and search systems to help people find and manage information more successfully."
paula thorton followes the life of IA from beginning to present... you get to write the next chapter....
Bloug gets happy-- has the IA's day finally come?
WebWord Interview > The Face of Information Architecture is Webword's first interview with a woman this year... three guesses who it is! Anyhow, enjoy!
Richard Saul Wurman defines an Information Architect
"the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear. It's a person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge, and it's also the name of the emerging 21st century professional occupation which addresses the needs of an age, focused upon clarity, human understanding and the science of the organization of information."
As the New Yorker would say, Our correspondent in Japan writes:
"My job is predicated on the implicit assumption that information is stable, knowable, and not least, deployed in the service of a user. In Japan, as we shall see, this isn't always the case. I think the results are instructive, not only for IA's, but for anyone who moves information across cultural boundaries."
Metadata Harvesting and the Open Archives Initiative
'The Metadata Harvesting Protocola mechanism that enables data providers to expose their metadatais seeing very rapid deployment, and enables a fascinating array of new services and system architectures for a diverse set of communities. "
Terrific post by Peter on faceted classification. It's something we all do and take for granted, and peter has managed to write it up in an intelligent and accessible manner. go birthday boy!
if you like infographics, this is a nice simple one used to make a point about the futile nature of revenge.
Sometimes it's good to remember ordinary user questions. Nice and funny column.
Digital Web Magazine interviews Carbon IQ. It's a great issue, full of user experience goodies.
I always thougth Route by George Oppen was the ultimate IA poem, but Edward Houseman's writte a little gem.
Can Navigational Assistance Improve Search Experience?
"From the September issue of First Monday. Compares the search experience of three different interfaces, including one they've designed that looks fairly similar to the one at MSDN. They found out (big suprise) that theirs works best. Might be an example of where using frames is actually a good idea."
don't forget-- tonight!
IA: The State of the Profession
Andrew Dillon's got another great column on IA in the latest ASIS Bulletin, and I finally found it online... among other things he points out that the market downturn may result in job seekers having to *actually know something about IA* to get a job as an IA (woo hoo!). He also points out a bunch of universities are hopping on the IA bandwagon by putting out courses that are basically repackaged old courses "selling old wine in new bottles." He doesn't name names, but buyer beware...
But the part that gets me excited is the promise of the new summit:
"Furthermore, plans for holding an IA Summit in 2002 are underway, and I shall take this opportunity to let you know that I shall serve as chair of the program committee. If you have ideas for contributions and themes, feel free to contact me."
My request? Quit defining, start refining. I'd like to see an in-depth look at some of the points Lou raised in Bloug, as well as *heaps* of case studies on how IA's are solving problems and saving/making their companies gobs of dough.
I think we are officially in the summer doldrums. almost all my newsletters are pointing to Noel's write up of Tufte and
almost all the blogs are pointing this new york times article
and both are terrific, no doubt. But so many pointers suggests a certain hunger for new ideas.... perhaps all us linkers deep to take a deep breath and write up some of our ideas...
then we can all link to each other!
sigh.
Every IA and most designers should have this book, in my opinion. If you still don't have it and you live in the bay area, swing by Green Apple books-- they've got two copies used and thus quite a bit cheaper. However, you will have to look in the architecture section, up on the third floor. Apparently Green Apple does judge a book by its cover.
Lou kicked it all off with a post about the future
After looking at it with some trepidation for three days, realizing I would either have to write 6 emails to sigia about it or a giant post on eh. Having no restraint, I did both.
peter took up one of those mails, and turned it into a lovely well thought out insight on good-for-business/bad-for-ia
I'm working on part two, but it promises to be as long as part one, so don't hold your breath.
If you are san francisco next tuesday, come say hi
you should also check this out....
Outline and index
Illustrate and summarize
Organize your work!
thanks bill!
It's time to look at Lou's post, and if we are going to talk about future directions of IA, we need to finalize what IA is.
After doing my big survey on definitions, I started to formulate this model of information architecture that consist
of three parts
organization of information for easy retrieval.
to accomplish tasks, much more application oriented.
both organizing information for comprehension but also concerns itself with
gui design.
For information architecture for the web, this makes the greatest amount of sense. One can then organize information, design systems for retrieval and use, and create ways to access and comprehend. Almost all websites are combination of these elements, so I feel that with these three concentrations of skills, IA's are well equipped. I'm going to assume many IA's will be stronger in one concentration than another, much like a graphic designer might be a better illustrator, or a specialist in type. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a few IA's specialize in only one of the three, and come in at key junctions of a project to lend their skilled hand to crafting a small but vital part of the site. But I think all websites will need an IA that has some skills in all three. Or some human who plays that role.
Some of you may be asking where the user is in this model? Well I would say that user-centered is an approach, not a unique skill, and one can do user-centered IA, user-centered design, user-centered anything... one is a layer that fits over the other. Whether this requires two people (a usability specialist and an ia) or one (a user-centered ia) is up to the organization of the company. I personally prefer the first, for a number of reasons I've articulated in the past. And since this is an approach, that means there can be other approaches
So, to turn my attention to the Lou post, August 23, 2001: Future Directions for IA--
There is this French phrase my hubby uses all the time "et alors?". It means "and then?" When I read Lou's post, I thought "and then?" -- these were all things I thought IA's were doing already. Then I realized if we are, we aren't talking in public about it. We need to spend more time articulating problems we have solved and the methodology we used in hopes of growing our knowledge as a profession. Lou's post revealed to me that we spend too much time dealing with either the "big" questions of IA (what does it all mean? What is IA) or the "tiny" questions (what software do you use to make a sitemap) and we rarely talk about the meat and potatoes of our work. I think Lou's post illuminates some key areas that --if you are innovating-- are worth writing up some white papers, or speaking about at the next summit.
If one is practicing user-centered IA, and you are doing content architecture, you are very likely doing this. Who is the user, and what are their needs in retrieving the information on a given site is core to the work of any content-rich site's IA, be it IHT or epicurious. Carbon IQ is doing a lot of this for our clients, I'm going to guess we are not that unique.
There is a reason XML talks keep showing up at the IA summits.. Hopefully someone is making the connection right now.... Controlled vocabularies are key to search, especially search/browse cross use such as yahoo has been doing for years.
The nature of the web is almost all architectures are hybrid. Take egreetings: one had to design 1st and information retrieval system that allowed a user to successfully find a desirable card from one of multiple mental models of seeking (occasion, recipient, mood) then *send* it, track it, reply to it... from content architecture to interaction design with a fine veneer of information design on top we have a fine hybrid. I can point to everyone's favorite example Amazon, which mixes browse architecture, recommendation engines, search and susceptible moments... We're doing it.
(mini-topic drift: does Amazon have IA's? How much great IA is being done by non-IA's?)
Is Avi in the house? And does this belong to IA's in their information design role, or does this belong to designers?
And now we are back to what some folks call big IA....
I don't always agree with this idea that we need a CIA, but I do believe we need a CUXO-- we need one person who holds the vision and assures a consistent user experience across the company's properties in order to protect the brand.
A CIA (Chief Information Architect) might be necessary in a company that was highly information based, or catered to content seekers. Though personally I doubt it. However, a Chief User Experience Officer would be a welcome addition. The user experience is heavily influenced by information architecture, but it is made up of many elements including
A CUXO would be responsible for standardizing and assuring consistency of the brand throughout all these elements. Of course not all aspects of the brand can be controlled, but the bulk can be and those aspects that cannot be controlled can be influenced. A CUXO's team includes marketing, customer
service, design (graphic) and IA, product development and a CUXO must work closely with the CEO, CTO and the COO in their areas of overlap. Any company that has a user (or customer) should have a CUXO.
An IA only belongs to those companies whose products can be helped by the their unique skillsets: content architecture, interaction design and information design. The short list this would include would be
A long time ago Don Norman posted a long email to the CHI-WEB list explaining three different types of models. They make a good template for how an IA works in the organization as well.
Mental Model: How a user perceives how a system works. Here is where a usability expert can be of great use, determining the user's model of a given domain before anything is designed, then verifying they are able to deal with the item after it is created.
Design Model: "mental model held by the designer of the artifact" in other words, that held by the system architect who knows how the dang thing really works.
Conceptual model: "the conceptual model refers to a description of the workings of a device." This is the realm of the IA, who hides the messy complexity of the design model from the user, and makes it simple to comprehend and use the product.
The IA perches between the technologist and the user, helping makes the creations of one palatable to the other.
time to run to work. more later, most likely...
Lou Rosenfeld requests less adolescent pondering the meaning of our existance, and more planning (plotting?) for the future)
"Here are some areas that I think information architects can and should take on. Some are orphans that may have gone unnoticed and therefore unowned. Some are simply not well understood by most people working on web sites today, including most IAs. Each of these areas presents us with difficult and interesting challenges that will increasingly demand our attention over time. And they fit squarely within the scope of information architecture: "
he goes on to list and describe
which range from the granular to the super....
and what do you think (I'm still mulling)
Information in a Networked World:
Harnessing the Flow
ASIST Annual Meeting
November 3-8, 2001
Washignton, DC
Well, my mama used to say that every cloud has a silver lining, and one silver lining of this market downturn/softening/recession/whathaveyou is a lot of IA's have worked to explain just what they did and how they did it online as part of their resumes. An outstanding example is Cindy Alverez's work. Recruiters take note!
Remember when we couldn't find a deliverable example online?
Matt Jones writes
"check this out... my take on it, FWIW..."
it's worth quite a bit, actually....
Okay, I quit-- this blog has it all!
a few highlights
a look at webml, a website modeling language
"OVID (Objects, Views, and Interaction Design) is a formal methodology for designing the user experience based on the analysis of users' goals and tasks."
"Information design is the process of discovering an inherent structure from a data set with the goal of divining a desirable model from which the information within may be simply and logically revealed." (drool)
Guidelines For Improving Content Usability For The Web
While this whitepaper on taxonomies is mostly a marketing tool, it does show why taxonomies are important (thanks noel!)
If you are in the bay area, and you dig all that IA jazz, you probably want to check out the August Cocktail Hour
Ji Kim sends this
"Interesting article from informationweek
People are still trying to automate user interface though automation
When would they ever learn"
and the infamous vanderwal sends this article
Amazon Librarian Says Data Can Become Marketing Tool
outstanding article on refining personas.
Lou wonders what are the skills an IA must possess.
"Contributors were asked to comment on the differences between Information Design and Information Architecture."
The latest interview in ACIA with Seth Gordon is full of nuggets of knowledge.
On IA:
"As the web consulting industry started to take shape, firms tried to create proprietary approaches that would separate them from the competition by giving the perception of a more disciplined and scientific focus on the work. It seems that just about all of the approaches were similar except for a few nuances or catchy acronyms. I've been in Thailand for a few weeks, and there is a common expression that I think perfectly fits some of the formalized IA approaches. "Same, Same but different.""
On Usability:
"In a misguided effort to measure the effectiveness of an architecture, many researchers assess variables such as time on task (how long it takes a user to complete a given task) and error rate and recovery (the number of errors and how users recover). While these may be relevant in certain situations, like diffusing bombs or responding to 911 calls, I think they can be misleading when trying to measure the average user's experience on the Internet."
He goes on to recomend two other metrics that we've also been using at CIQ, frustration and misguided confidence (which he calls "Confidence of Accuracy"). Check it out!
Learning About and Keeping Up with Information Architecture
"This survey ran from June 1 through June 6, 2001, and was completed by 107 respondents...We asked:
"How do you keep up with the field? And what sources of information are most important? "
The latest ACIA interview, with Seth Gordon
old article from Victor Lombardi, from his razorfish days
"Pattern Languages for Interaction designs."
what Victor's up to today
"Hugh Dubberly describes this series of work as a step-by-step approach to introducing information architecture. More than a sequence of related assignments, this is a significant plan for an entire course where students come to understand a body of content in preparation for designing interactive systems. Dubberly has chosen the game of baseball and how to play it as the content. Specifically, he asks students to "describe how to play baseball to an adult speaker of English (someone over 12) who is unfamiliar with the game." "
Interesting discussion of IA vs. ID in Design Matters. Lou Rosenfeld,
Richard Saul Wurman start it off, followed by a bunch of second generation
IA's and old school ID's, including Andrew Dillon, Nathan Shedroff, Bob
Jacobson and myself.
download the PDF
George Olson throws his hat in the ring: he attempts to come to a definition
for "what we do." It's an interesting essay on the elements of user
experience. (he has a browser bug that may require you to scroll down to the
content)
HannaHodge is closed -- "It is with both sadness and great pride that I must inform you of the end of an era for us at HannaHodge. As of July 2001 we will cease operations."
"Many users go to Web sites seeking specific information--and are eager to leave as soon as they find it. This means designers may have trouble steering users to material they're not actually looking for, even if the users would find the information valuable. "
Interesting article in Design Matters What's in a name? (and I'm not just saying that because I partipated)
"Are there two information architectures? One influenced by presentation and one influenced by structure? Is the presentation-based IA better served by the name "information design?" Does the medium really matter? Is print IA/ID different from web-based IA/ID in meaningful ways?"
Part project management, part IA and part usability,The Visual Learner's Guide to Managing Web Projects in a nice simple intro to the real secret of successful web sites: plan it before you build it.
Guess what-- it's free.
Download the PDF and go kill a few trees on the company dime-- you'll earn it back for them with what you learn. Hey! be sure to check out page 55. #'s!
So You Want To Be An Interaction Designer shhh.. don't tell them!
at least I think it's IAish...
Functional Spec Tutorial What and Why
Lou is heading cross country. Okay, this is only tangentially IA, but Lou is a good writer. The polar bear didn't suck...
great presentation on the use of walls in the creative process. mark Rettig manages to marry the theoretical with the pragmatic as only he can do. My favorite part is when he explains how to keep whiteboards white -- move over Heloise!
The heart of IA is in planning a site.
Meanwhile the conversation on defining IA ranges on, both on my site and off
(scroll down to Wednesday the 20th)
"a compilation of excerpts from Nathan Shedroff's Experience Design."
How It Works: Online Maps for Here, There and Everywhere
be sure to click the "multimedia" show for how it works. I love this series,
but I love info design and explanations in general.
Blurb Gallery (via webword.com)
"Surveying the variety of ways we display introductions to longer articles...
I keep finding myself working on sites that have news or portal-like layouts, and each time I start from scratch thinking about how to display the headlines and summaries. No more, I started this gallery to capture the many ways it's done, and perhaps I'll eventually map these to the audience and business goals."
Designing Help Text (also via webword.com)
"Some users will have difficulty no matter how effectively and thoughtfully an interface is built. Others will need assistance whilst learning how to use a complex and extensive application that contains a number of features.
Given that help text might be required, how is it best implemented? As mentioned above, it is preferable to include as much assistance as possible permanently on-screen. " I so agree to this. An ounce of "tip" is worth a pound of "support documentation"
The Open Directory Project has a robust IA section
I've decided to start collecting definations of IA. Feel free to add any you come across or heck, make one up!
From Addwise
"Information Architecture (IA) is the process of organizing and presenting data to the user in a meaningful, clear and intuitive manner. IA is the foundation of all great websites. All other design aspects - form, function, metaphor, navigation, interface, interaction, visual, and information systems - build upon the groundwork of information architecture. Initiating the IA process is the first thing you should do when designing a website."
webworld's interview with lou
"Information architecture involves the design of organization and navigation systems to help people find and manage information more successfully." "
Lou again, on O'reilly
Information architecture involves the design of organization, labeling, navigation, and searching systems to help people find and manage information more successfully.Organization systems are the ways content can be grouped. Labeling systems are essentially what you call those content groups. Navigation systems, like navigation bars and site maps, help you move around and browse through the content. Searching systems help you formulate queries that can be matched with relevant documents.
Jesse James Garrett in his "Elements of user Experience" says
Information Architecture: Stuctural design of the informaiton space to facilitate intuive access to content.
Stephen Downes gives a philosophical definition
Well - what is an information architect?
From my own experience, I would say that the practitioners are professionals, versed in every aspect of web design, adept communicators, and gifted visualizers - they are people who eat, sleep and dream web design and structure. But you can't put that on the job description.
Or - as I Sing the Body Electronic author Fred Moody observes: information architects are the sort of people who understand that the instructions on the shampoo bottle are just wrong: "Lather. Rinse. Repeat."
Squishy says
Information architecture is the science of figuring out what you want your site to do and then constructing a blueprint before you dive in and put the thing together.
Shel Kimen says
"What is information architecture?At its most basic, information architecture is the construction of a structure or the organization of information. In a library, for example, information architecture is a combination of the catalog system and the physical design of the building that holds the books. On the Web, information architecture is a combination of organizing a site's content into categories and creating an interface to support those categories. It stems from traditional architecture, which is made up of architectural programming and architectural planning. "
Somebody explained what an IA does to her mom like this
"You know when you're on a website and you see a bunch of navigation choices to click on? I'm the one who decided what the choices are, what they are called and where they take you when you click"thank god she added
Much like our real world namesakes, we design spaces for human beings to live work and play in. The big difference is the materials we work with: cement is replaced with thesauri, timber with hierarchies and steel with interaction flows.
information architecture - a whatis definition is based on technical writing....
"information architecture is the set of ideas about how all information in a given context should be treated philosophically and, in a general way, how it should be organized."
and finally (because I have got to get some work done today)
Information architecture, as the name implies, is basically about taking content and a structure to present that content to an audience. Whether the content is intended for a private audience on an intranet or for the public, it is the information architect's job to ensure that information is well-organized and presented in an easily accessible interface.MORE...
Lou Rosenfeld has joined the ranks of the bloggers. What is unique about the "bloug" is that it comes with a special narcissim guarentee. You'll get no such thing from me (though perhaps I should consider the warning symbol...)
This is one of the most beautiful sites I have come across.
Old thread on the 800x600 pixel war (found because I was catching up on the kaycee thing and no I won't bring it here, don't panic). The thread is as interesting because of the arrogance of the factions --both geek and design-- as it is for the discussion of the problem.
IASlash redesigned while I was away and looks 10000x better (IMHO). They do seem to be suffering from the summer news lull everyone else is, though. even kottke is full of his travel pictures...
On the argus site (perhaps you've seen it) an interesting interview with Vivian Bliss
"People: An Interview with Vivian Bliss
A librarian with a JD, Vivian discusses the trials and successes of designing and maintaining an enterprise-wide information architecture within Microsoft's intranet environment. "
http://argus-acia.com/people/bliss_profile.html
~~~
New software designed for IA's to let them design
http://www.silverboots.com/index.html
their white paper is a bit-- well, you read it and let me know what you think.
http://www.silverboots.com/whitepapers.html
~~~
PLAY (Via http://www.giantant.com/antenna/)
"Play is a Swedish HCI research studio which "investigates and invents the future of human-computer interaction." They've published a bunch of interesting papers, on interface topics from Baby Faces to Hierarchical Flip Zooming to Designing Everyday Computational Things to Pirates!. "
http://www.viktoria.informatik.gu.se/groups/play/
~~~
Steven Johnson is always readable. His interview with Cory Doctorow is no exception. Anyone interested in collaborative filtering or new browse methods should check it out.
http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id=1703
~~~
The Joys of Prototyping (via xblog.com)
"At the heart of any good user-centered design process is the practice of
prototyping. By creating and testing interfaces in rough format, designers
are able to feed through improvements and feedback from users quickly and
easily. This in turn helps to ensure a final product that is an evolved
solution, in the sense that it has been through a number of iterations and
emerged as fit for the job in question."
http://infocentre.frontend.com/servlet/Infocentre?page=article&id=154
If you know me then you'll know I tend to drop the I off of IA quite a
lot... so INDULGE ME...
BUY THIS BOOK....!!!
"Beginning with the root definition of architecture as its "conceptual
organization, its intellectual structures"., the author makes clear its
function as "identification of place", goes on to identify the basic
elements and concepts, examines the use of natural features of the
landscape, analyzes primitive place types, geometry in architecture, space
and structure, and other key concepts.
>From the campsites of primitive man to the sophisticated structures of the
late twentieth century, architecture as an essential function of human
activity is explained clearly, and illustrated with the author's own
excellent drawings. Highly recommended as a well-organized and readable
introduction."
(it's by my old design theory tutor from architecture college...)
You need this book
shoot on over to the Carbon Log. Noel's on fire these days...
What is Audio Design?
by Gavin Shepherd, with Stephen Turbek
This report is a discussion of the issues regarding using audio elements and sound tracks in modern interactive environments.
http://reports.razorfish.com/frame.html?rr049_audio (PDF)
If you want to know why IA is needed, think of any huge organically evolved website, then go visit the Winchester Mystery House. Much like Sarah L. Winchester, many companies seem to feel that the "building must never stop." Sarah was afraid of ghosts who were held at arms length by the sound of hammers; companies are frightened by the market. And their websites have the equivalent of stairs that lead to nowhere (404) and doors opening to two story drops (fatal error)...
"Mrs. Winchester never had a master set of blueprints, but did sketch out individual rooms on paper and even tablecloths!"
Eerily enough I was just chatting with a fellow IA who told me about a client who sketched out the IA on a cocktail napkin, and off it went to production! It's true!!! Tours at 3, 5 and 7. Children under 12 admitted half-price.
OPENING THANG
Still busy, though I am occasionally sneaking off to add a blog entry here and there. I finally solved the a-list mystery, thanks to Anil. Check out the blog for the story.
Now I need something new to obsess about. I'm thinking it might be typography...
I love type. I think I feel about type the way hetmen feel about women. I don't understand it, am incredibly drawn to it, fascinated by it, can stare at lovely type for hours.... I download font after font only to choke when the time comes to use them, and I end up choosing Tahoma over and over again (no, I can't explain my weird Tahoma fetish) for print and Verdana online. I suppose it's time to look for a typography class.
Some recent type-sites I've been exploring
and netstar's freshfont
Lines & Splines http://www.linesandsplines.com/
And Chad writes:
"before I fall asleep, here is the beautiful weblog I promised:
and here are two great examinations of typography:
http://www.textism.com/writing/
http://www.textism.com/textfaces/ "
DESIGN MATTERS
tired of the 216 and need more colors? get more crayons
the return of psychedelia (via metafilter.com)
Hobo Signs (via giantant.com/antenna/)
The iconic language of the hobo
IA MATTERS
RE: Cory Doctorow. (via tomalak.org)
"The idea is that you have a folder on your desktop, you put some things in it you like, and it will fill up with things that you'll probably like. It figures out what you'll probably like by finding peers in the network who have taste similar to you and telling you what they think is good." dude!
BLOG OF THE DAY
In that "html chic" category of cool designs + lots of humorous little insights accompanying the links.
USABILITY MATTERS
Statistical Research: Pop-ups more noticeable and more annoying
"Internet users are far more likely to notice pop-up ads than banners,
but they are even more likely to be annoyed by the pop-up ads."
Business 2.0: Better Data Brings Better Sales. (via tomalak.org)
Jakob Nielsen. B-to-B sites often try to get away with approximate pricing, because of the assumption that the two companies will meet in person to negotiate. Even so, users still like detailed price information that discloses how much each feature or option will cost.
MARKETING MATTERS
Darwin Magazine: Do You Really Need a Customer Czar? (via tomalak.org)
"Some top execs can't imagine life without a CCO; skeptics contend that for many organizations, creating another seat at the boardroom table could very well be a recipe for disaster. Does your company need a CCO? Or is this a management fad you'll want to take a pass on?"
TECH MATTERS
prepackaged css layouts. via kirk (morecrayons.com)
BlueRobot's Layout Reservoir has some elegant examples of CSS layouts:
Glish.com has some cool layouts too:
As does the Noodle Incident:
Noodle is dropdead gorgeous, btw...
NEWS & COMMENTARY
Some of dot-com jobless having fun
"Valerie Hoecke, at age 28 already a weary veteran of the dot-com world, is now focusing her time and energy on something new: rock climbing." Go Val!
Spam vengeance feels oddly satisfying; a simple click costs spam software companies from a few pennies to a few dollars.
read article
CommerceNet: Most ecommerce firms outsource work
"Almost three-quarters of ecommerce-enabled companies are currently
outsourcing, or planning to outsource, parts of their work."
APROPOS OF NOTHING
thank god for geocities.
AND FINALLY
Adam of V-2 writes:
"Excellent, and I mean AMAZING, article in James Gleick's "Best American Science Writing 2000." It's not available online (believe me, I looked), but it's worth picking up the book for. (Anyway, the book also has a piece by *The Onion*, so you know you can't go wrong.)
The article in question is called "When Doctors Makes Mistakes," by Atul Gawande, and while it sounds like a FOX TV special, it is a compassionate and surprisingly deep inquiry into task and failure analysis where "failure" is literally a matter of life and death.
Gawande deals with "latent errors" built into systems which assume human infallibility, cascades of trivial errors in complex systems leading to systemic failure, critical-incident analysis, and the search for the elusive sixth sigma of quality.
It's not IA precisely, but just exactly 'cause it comes at IA-centric issues perpendicularly, it sheds some innaresting light on our concerns. It's fascinating to see, for example, how long it took relatively trivial human-factors insights to be accepted even in truly mission-critical areas like anesthesiology. And anesthesiology adopted these insights far ahead of the rest of the medical/surgical profession!
Anyway, I think it's worth a shout-out to your readers...
Plus, as you know, v-2.org has been nominated for a Chrysler Design Award, further information regarding which may be found at
http://www.chryslerdesignawards.com
I am of course near-mute with gratitude and amazement."
Congrats Adam!
William Safire contemplates misuses and reuses of words, include our fave, Information Architecture
"Word thievery in engineering has become especially acute," Tim Groninger, a project engineer seethes, "due to the ever-growing hunger for words in the world of computers. I can no longer use the word architecture in the traditional sense. The word now implies the design and construction of computer networks, not buildings."
Peter's come up with some Further Reflections on Information Architecture
"IntroA bit back, attending the ASIS Summit on information architecture spurred me to write some reflections and projections on the field. This past week I attended Intranets2001, during which the subject came up, but this time among non-practitioners. Their perspectives lead to further reflection.
Discussed here:
What is IA?
Information Architecture != Architecture
Who Develops the Information Architecture?
Stop Whining About Marketing--Become Marketing!"
I have no opinion on this at this time. Heck, let me check.. yeah, I think I've actually run out of opinions. I've got to go lay down....
Victor posts his Notes from the NYIA meeting on "How do we justify, sell, and measure IA and usability?"
It's interesting to contrast this with the SF one.
Anyone figure it out yet?
I said this on the SIGIA list, I'll say it again....
Sometimes I wonder why we have to fight so much.
Buildings are not built without blueprints (well, the winchester mystery house was. Hey, it *does* remind me of many large websites). Nor cars. Nor toasters! Amazon is more complicated than a toaster, don't you think?
In college you learned your papers would be better if you wrote an outline first.
When we sew clothes we use patterns to assure it will fit the human who will wear it (we even measure the end user first to assure success.)
Our whole lives we are taught that we should carefully plan out any project that will take a lot of time or cost a lot of money. Yet websites are built again and again by somebody "throwing up some pages." Over and over again when the schedule is short, the part that is often tossed out is the planning, the blueprinting, the thing that will make the product coherent. The IA.
I don't get it.
From: Gleanings
To: flashaholics
Subject: Gleanings: I lied
OPENING THANG
Okay, I wasn't going to glean today, but it was link-mania yesterday: the universe was conspiring to share interesting stuff with me, and how could I not share back with you-all?
IA & DESIGN MATTERS
Human Factors International Articles
ones I'm excited to read include: Managing Your Defense Against GUI's from Hell, Pull Down Menus: Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Key Tips for User-Centered GUI Design and Icons: Much Ado about Something
~~~
Like to critique other people's work?
~~~
Information Architecture, an electronic web guide
"How many times have you gone to a web site looking for specific information and you weren't able to find it? Organizing informational content on a web site can be a very difficult and complicated endeavor, and most web developers lack the skills necessary to perform such tasks. Luckily, a new discipline is emerging in the web world that is tackling this very problem.It's called Information Architecture. "
~~~
How Architects Think
"The purpose of the experiment was to study the role and potential of mental
imagery in the architectural design process."
LEARNING MATTERS
Good site for learning the basics of web design and webmastering. Simple and friendly.
~~~
Barnes&Nobel University"It's FREE - join today! Enter an online classroom now and learn everything you wish they'd taught in school. Live instructors and students are online now! "
USABILITY MATTERS
The Non-Verbal Web
"In preparation for a class I'm teaching this quarter on Interface Design, I re-read Norman's The Design of Everyday Things (aka POET), which I am using as one of three pillars of the class.
I was struck (again) by the concept of perceived affordance. My communications background causes me to think of this as "the non-verbal language of objects" -- it's how I perceive the object's mode of interaction. Whether my perception matches the design reality will determine my satisfaction. "
~~~
Helping and Hindering User Involvement - A Tale of Everday Design
"This case study provides a detailed account of the obstacles and facilitators to user involvement that were identified during the design of a computer application. The factors that affected user involvement included contracting design services, selecting users, motivating users, facilitating and mediating meetings and offering points of focus for user contributions. "
~~~
Bad Human Factors Designs
"A scrapbook of illustrated examples of things that are hard to use because they do not follow human factors principles. "
my favorite
NEWS
Greenfield Online: Consumers don't want Net-enabled cars
"Consumers are far less interested in having email or music downloading
facilities in their cars than they are in having built-in systems to
deter thieves and sensors to alert them to hazards on the road."
~~~
IDG.net: Unproductive email like "being killed by friendly fire"
"While lawmakers and company bosses are increasingly concerned about
the levels of spam email, a new study says that unproductive internal
emails take up 30 percent of employees' time spent reading email."
~~~
Netcraft: Domain name registration slumps
"New data from Netcraft shows that there has been a dramatic reduction
in new domain name registrations."
~~~
SBC: DSL users just love their high-speed Net
Internet users with high-speed DSL connections at home say their DSL
link is an important household technology and would rather sacrifice
other media before they gave up their DSL.
~~~
MSNBC: Gadgets offering 'convergence' show whole can be less than sum of
parts. (via tomalak.org)
It is an old story that keeps getting retold. Bewitched by the promise of "convergence" -- the blending of communications, entertainment and computing -- and galvanized by the Internet, engineers and marketers are dreaming up a new class of high-tech Swiss Army knives.
~~~
Guru: Engineers Won't Design Next-Gen Systems
"It's not you guys" who will build equipment and systems that are easy to use, said Norman, of the Nielsen Norman consultancy. "You're the wrong people." Instead, future systems will be designed "by psychologists and social scientists working in combination with engineers and technologists," he said he predicted.
APROPOS OF NOTHING
why are we glad flash exists? today's apropos of nothing should prove the joy of the medium:
Kung-fu, stick figure style. it was just like the tavern scene in "crouching tiger, lousy title" except everyone is a stick figure.
this arrived with the subject heading"The latest demonstration of the power of the Internet..."
http://user.tninet.se/~prv247p/hatt/hatten.swf
and in that same category of "because we can, we will"
http://member.iquest.net/~derecho/pika.swf
I cannot recommend these two short flash works too highly. my jaw dropped onto the floor (esp.. the second) turn up the sound and enjoy.
~~~
kate points at the very goofy swedish fjallfil
she says "Have you run across www.fjallfil.com in your travels? It seemed timely in light of a recent chi-web discussion about drag-n-drop interfaces (but since I'm fairly new to the list I felt a wee bit shy about submitting such a very silly site). enjoy. "
no one should ever have anything against silly! (oh, and you can click over to English at the bottom)
Been thinking a lot about rules put forth by gurus. A woman recently put forth a post on the SIGIA list about how some higher-ups came back from a conference with a bag full of rules she was now expected to live by. They included:
1. "3 goals of a site have to be identified to determine the direction and voice for the site"
2. "There should only be a maximum of seven links on each page, more than that and we lose the user. It's just too many choices."
3. "Users won't click on items they believe are advertisements. Banner ads only work if they appear on the right side of the page."
4. "Users are trained to respond to "blue" or underlined items on a site to get somewhere else.
5. "There is no need for a button and a text click through (to the same page) on the same page."
Each of these "rules" is derived from a larger, smarter principal that someone has apparently determined is too complex for the idiots building websites.
Let's take a look:
1. "3 goals of a site have to be identified to determine the direction and voice for the site"
Let's translate this one: determine the goals of the site before you start building it. Goals need to come form multiple sources:
What are the business goals? (customer loyalty? investor excitement?)
What are the engineering goals? (easy to maintain? extensible?)
What are the sales goals? (more banner space? Customized pages for cobranding opportunities?)
What are the marketing goals? (reinforced branding?)
What are the user's goals?(I want to learn? find? buy? I need it to load fast? Work on my 3.0 browser?)
It's called requirements gathering, and no site should be built without it.
New rule: Do requirements gathering before you start designing a site
2. "There should only be a maximum of seven links on each page, more than that and we lose the user. It's just too many choices."
A better way to look at this would be "not everything can be the most important thing on a page" A page has to have a visual hierarchy and organization to make sense. Which means somebody gets to have their stuff in the top left corner of the homepage, and someone gets be below the fold. It is important to understand user tolerance of information but people can take a lot more than one might suppose if it is designed well. And sites with only seven links often look empty (I've seen this in user testing) belying the wealth of content that lies below.
New rule: Prioritize your page elements. Design a clear page hiearchy.
3. "Users won't click on items they believe are advertisements. Banner ads only work if they appear on the right side of the page."
It doesn't matter where you put the ads, if people think they are worthless they won't click it. I found the eyetracking study very interesting-- it showed people's eyes were looking at banners. yet Neilsen's banner blindness study showed people have no memory of seeing ads. To me that suggests that some lovely tiny bit of people's brains is quickly taking everything in, deciding what is valuable and trashing what isn't.
What is quite more valuable is designing ads that show the value of whatever is being offered and place them where they have meaning. So ads for a credit card don't make much sense on a greeting card site, but ads for flowers, chocolate, etc do. especially when placed at that important "susceptible moment"-- you've just sent a card.. don't you want to send a present too?
People don't want to be offered stuff they don't want. it's as simple as that.
New rule: Make ads contextual and meaningful whenever possible
4. "Users are trained to respond to "blue" or underlined items on a site to get somewhere else."
They were. and then every site on the web changed the rules (except maybe Jakob).
They key principal here is "make a link look clickable" make it a different color, make it a button, underline it-- do something to say "click me."
I've been in a lot of tests recently where people used "Braille" to find links-- they ran their mouse across the page and watched for the hand to show up. Kinda of a cruel thing to force users to do, no?
see earlier post on links
New rule: make links look clickable. Don't make non-links look like links
5. "There is no need for a button and a text click through (to the same page) on the same page."
I'm going with a flat "no" on this one: I think the real issue is "Should you have multiple ways to get to the same page on the same page." In a recent usability test of a large entertainment site, you could get to each piece of content by clicking on the thumbnail, the headline or the "click here" link that appeared after a short description. Some users used the image, some the title and some the "click here" link. None of them hesitated or were confused as to where to link-- I believe because each found a link they recognized would work for them.
I recently was shopping for a cd, and couldn't figure out how to purchase it. There was no "buy now" button. However the price was linked to the shopping cart. I didn't know that, and I started clicking randomly on things until I managed to hit the price link. Bah.
Why did I put up with this frustration? Honestly, it was the cheapest price on this particular cd. If it wasn't, I would have just bought it from Amazon.
New rule: support different people's ways of doing things (support different mental models)
Got an expert's pronouncement you need debunked or re-interpreted? write me
Hungry for more? IBM has a terrific article that goes after "the rules" of software design: Debunking the myths of UI design.
From: Gleanings
To: Clickers
Subject: Gleanings: fair to partly bloggy.
OPENING THANG
A quiet weekend, and the few things I had to do got cancelled. What a pleasure. As well as long walks, a movie and a trip to the flea market, I wrote like crazy in the blog.
http://www.eleganthack.com/blog/index.html
As an experiment, this Gleanings is made up 97% of blogs. (it would have 100%, but I get interesting mail...)
DESIGN & IA MATTERS
Funny and engaging article on using flash well (xblog.com)
"My name is Squid Vicious and I'm a Flash-aholic."
http://www.zdnet.com/devhead/stories/articles/0,4413,2665825,00.html
A step-by-step guide to making icons (giantant.com/antenna/)
http://www.iconfactory.com/howto_home.aspfrom http://www.iconfactory.com/
Mini interview is with Bryan Boyer
http://www.kottke.org/
Usability rant on Jabber, from Matt Haughey (theobvious.com)
http://a.wholelottanothing.org/archived.blah/3/01/2001/#494
Some Thoughts on Design for Mobile/Wireless Devices (peterme.com)
http://www.peterme.com/
A List Apart (zeldman.com)
"Three web designers discuss trendiness and innovation in design, and list 15 sites that made a difference in the year 2000."
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/declination/
TECH MATTERS
Building the (New) Webmonkey Toolbar (captaincursor.com)
"So after years of procrastinating I finally wrote the documentation to the dropdown Webmonkey toolbar. Enjoy."
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/12/index1a.html
EMS (zeldman.com)
"A discussion at Little Green Footballs explains again why stylesheets that use ems, with the best intentions in the world, often produce web pages that are illegible for many readers."
http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/weblog.php?y=1&x=archives/00000214.htm
APROPOS OF NOTHING
Mike, apparently living off a diet of cotton candy, has been in a happy place all week. Start on Monday the 16th, stop when you hit the naked lady.
http://www.biggerhand.com/
of maybe he just read this (camworld.com)
http://members.aol.com/maxxdaddy/mw3/weird.txt
this is where I leave blogs for my mail...
From the fucked company newsletter:
"I'll now be donating a large percentage of Fuckedcompany's unsold
inventory to non-profit organizations. That's non-profit BY CHOICE -- the
organization must have only charitable intentions."
http://www.fuckedcompany.com/
From George:
1040 for dot-com employees:
http://www.thoughtpolice.com/bayboyz/1040DotCom.gif
And thinking of the darkside of online dating... Be afraid, be very afraid.
http://www.psychoexgirlfriend.com/voicemails.html
Today Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville sent out a message stating that Argus is closing their doors.
I'm not even sure if I can write about this.
When I was a html hack in the old egreetings days, I came across their Web Review articles. I remember being delighted by the information within, and printing them all out and putting them in a blue binder (I can see it from here, sticking out of my bookshelf.) I have referred to that binder again and again throughout my career.
When I found the O'Reilly book on IA, I felt my chosen career was validated. Here was a whole book on what I did everyday! And it included a lot of what I did (and a whole lot of what I didn't). This is at a time when I had to do a lot of fighting every day to defend the value of good IA. I sat the book on a prominent place on my desk, as if to warn people: I do something real. Something important. Pay attention, there's an O'Reilly book on it!
Argus was IA to me. I remember being crushed when I heard that they only hired folks with a masters degree or higher, thinking that ended my chance of working for them.
When Egreetings needed a company to help rearchitect their catalog, I fought long and hard to bring them on. They hired them, but I had just quit, ready for a change. I nearly changed my mind in hopes of working with them. I didn't realize that chance wouldn't come again. I did have the pleasure of meeting Chris Farnum, a brilliant IA who was coming onto the project as I faded into the sunset.
But I was again elated when Lou Rosenfeld invited me to join a group of IA's for dinner in Boston at the first ASIS summit. I was so nervous, so sure I would say something foolish.... But somehow everything went smoothly, and I was so pleased that Lou was friendly and down-to-earth as well as smart and funny.
At the ACIA convention in La Jolla, I met Samantha Bailey-- another witty insightful nice argonaut. I also got to meet Keith Instone, whom I'd admired for his work on usableweb.com forever. I was nerveous and I thought he was teasing me a little, until he gave me a goofy grin that put me at ease. I was beginning to wonder what was in the Ann Arbor water-- not a mean Argonaut in the crowd. When I finally met Peter Morville at this year's ASIS summit in San Francisco, I knew someone was doing genetic experiments in Michigan.... too much goodness for one small town in the midwest.
When Lou asked to interview me for ACIA, it was the biggest thrill of my career. I knew I was doing something right-- Argus noticed me.
So yes, I'm very sad. Still, it's important to keep perspective. It's not the end of the world. No one died. We still have Peter and Lou and Sam and Keith and Chris and the rest of the argonauts. The quest for the golden fleece is ended, but the heros are still around. So while I am sad, I still have hope of working with these fine folks. I still look forward to the next book, the next Strange Connection, the next conference where Peter reminds us to slow down, Lou suggests we keep innovating...
Argus is still IA to me. But now I look forward to the next quest!
addendum: Peter Morville writes...we found the golden fleece in the wonderful staff and clients and colleagues we've worked with over the years...and after a brief rest, I too am looking forward to the next quest.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web was the first book on information architecture as a discipline on the web, where it has come to fruition. Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville helped defined the job of IA as it exists in many organizations today.
Now, four years later, a second edition has appeared. It is richer, deeper, fuller and more than ever a necessity for Information Architects and Web Designers. Where the first edition was a primer on the basic concepts, this edition takes you deep into the subtle complexities of IA, while still written in an accessible voice. A single chapter, such as the introduction to search, can worth the price of the book alone.
This is a must-read. If you've got the first, you still need the second-- they are that different.
See also Boxes and Arrows interviews with Lou and Peter.
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things : What Categories Reveal About the Mind An important work for content architects in particular. His Metaphors We Live by is also a key work for IA's.
I know it may sound odd, but I believe IA's should try folding origami from diagrams. The act of using a diagram to create a 3d object is both satisfying, relaxing and makes you consider what it takes to write halfway decent instructions. I'm sure there are other hobbies that would produce the same set of feelings and skills (model airplanes? knitting) but origami is my choice.
Of particular interest here is the "Phone Folding" --text only instructions.
A good site is Joseph Wu's origami page . Or you can straight to the Files and Diagrams.
From: Gleanings
To: bored stiffs
Subject: Gleanings: lame but here
Today was the all time record slow news day. Luckily I found the Journal of Conceptual Modeling... that should keep the IA's on the list busy. The rest of you can bake pie.
IA MATTERS
the journal of conceptual modeling
NEWS
Gnutella, Napster ... What's the Difference?
APROPOS OF NOTHING
ecards that didn't make the cut
(may have racy content and porn ads)
* SURVIVAL EXPOSED!
Nine nutbags try to survive in paradise. An AtomFilms original.
How to make an apple tart, French style. easy and tasty.
250g flour
1g egg
80g sugar
125g butter
pinch salt
break egg into mixing bowl, add sugar and salt, mix vigorously with a fork or whisk until white (but not foamy) then progressively add flour. when spoon doesn't work, use hands to mix. when all flour is all there, crumble with your hands until mixture is like coarse sand (make sure all large chunks are well broken up into a fine mixture).
cut butter into small pieces,then add to mixture. work into a homogenous mixture.
rest one hour in the refrigerator
take out, then work a little to soften, and then roll out and line shallow tart dish (9 in).
peel apples (tart-tasting. Jonathan, roma but never red delicious--about 5) and quarter, removing core. slice each quarter in half, then half again, making thin slices. layer these slices in a circular spiral pattern. Sprinkle lightly with a mixture of cinnamon and sugar.
bake for about 30 minutes at about 400 When apples are soft and crust is nice and brown, it's probably done.
From: Gleanings
To: faithful listeners
Subject: Gleanings: Other People's Gleans 2
IA MATTERS
from Andi:
globalization UI issues
interview with every IA's favorite comic artist, Scott McCloud
EVENT
Conference from Creative Good (Mark Hurst) in San Francisco.
NEWS
from Muffy:
I see London, I see Uranus
from Tracy:
wap
from Vic:
what do you get when you cross a goat with a spider?
APROPOS OF NOTHING
Sixteen-year-old high school sophomore Becky Atherton, believed
to be the last remaining American who did not hate Microsoft,
announced today that she was "tired of being different" and would
now hate Microsoft just like everyone else.
LINK-O-RAMA
On CHI-WEB a call was put out for favorite CHI and web design resources here it is (it's a bit short, but that makes it manageable for this list)
http://argus-acia.com/index.html
http://Flazoom.com
http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/
http://is.twi.tudelft.nl/hci/
http://stc.org/pics/idsig/
http://usableweb.com/
http://websitesthatsuck.com/index.html
http://websitesthatwork.iab.com
http://wsupsy.psy.twsu.edu/surl/
http://www.acm.org/
http://www.acm.org/dl/proc_bysig_list.html#SIGCHI
http://www.acm.org/sigchi/hci-sites/
http://www.alistapart.com
http://www.asis.org/
http://www.asktog.com
http://www.baychi.org/
http://www.bogieland.com/infodesign/
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~cspgpjw/hci.html
http://www.contenu.nu/200006.html#usabilityislikelove
http://www.contenu.nu/resources.html
http://www.electricseed.com/joeclark/usability.html
http://www.foruse.com
http://www.goodexperience.com
http://www.hcibib.org/
http://www.hcirn.com/
http://www.ida.liu.se/labs/aslab/groups/um/hci/
http://www.info-architects.net/
http://www.jnd.org
http://www.lynda.com/
http://www.sandia.gov/itg/index.html
http://www.system-concepts.com
http://www.uidesign.net
http://www.uie.com
http://www.usableweb.com
http://www.useit.com
http://www.webmonkey.com
http://www.webreview.com
From: Gleanings
To: read-herrings
Subject: Gleanings: for girls with glasses and men who make passes
IA MATTERS
read these books.
and one from biggerhand.com
"because sometimes it's good to remember that things should be fun.
and that fun and usability are NOT polar opposites."
NEWS
j*sus f*cking chr*st. what the h*ll is happening in our society?
from tomalak:
SJ Mercury: Online companies violate our privacy because we let them.
Dan Gillmor. They lobby for what's hilariously called self-regulation, and
create utterly toothless privacy-watchdog organizations that barely even bark
at the worst violations. We are not people to these businesses. We are data,
and we are fair game.
Xerox PARC: Free Riding on Gnutella
APROPOS OF NOTHING
this will make you happy, esp if you are from the midwest
http://web.0sil8.com/
FEEDBACK:
a friend writes regarding http://www.usps.gov/stories/spw :
"Wow... I'm speechless.
Okay, new web phenom here? This is the second time this week I've looked at a Flash cartoon that went on so long that I just closed out the window & gave up - it would be nice if people would start giving some indication of the LENGTH of these things instead of just leaving you at the mercy of their Flash movie."
the wonderful world of web-aps. this will keep IA's in business for years to
come
great conversation started by peterme on the CHI-WEB list
"What does a conceptual model look like"
Finally, something to show the client!
http://www.usability.com/tug_3_Product_Stages.htm
Conceptual design: the cornerstone of usability.
huh?
DESIGN MATTERS
There seems to be a revival of mocking jakob neilson (well, if you're gonna
demand fame, you gotta take your lumps.) Biggerhand.com sends this new
repository of all thing mocking jakob.
http://www.untickalock.com/jakob/index.html
By the way, apparently the infamous useit.com is about to undergo a makeover.
Don norman says his and jakob's sites have been redesigned and are being
user-tested as we speak. I'm waiting with baited breath...
but you can make it up to him: his birthday is coming up (thanks Mike!)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/wishlist/26JQ6PQQHD3T8/103-3658829-8248653
Honestly his latest alertbox
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000806.html
is much more inflammatory, bashing non-standard design and insisting (come on jakob!) that reputation managers will replace brand. Quite well working, much like a bad cup of coffee will get your blood running even before the caffeine hits the bloodstream.
Now that we're done beating on Jakob, check this out:
http://www.patricklynch.net/viz/viz020100.html
great article that explains why print has cause designers to design their
pages upside down...
It also helps explain a phenomenon I've seen in user testing I call "land
and scroll" Users come to a page and -before it's even finished loading, as
soon as they have anything vaguely resembling a page-- they scroll. I've
seen a quick up-down 'getting the lay of the land" and an instant permanent
scroll, pushing the global nav and any banner navigation down. hmmm
While we're at it, why not demystify another hero: Tufte!
Don Norman takes him down a peg on the CHI-WEB list
http://www.acm.org/archives/wa.cgi?A1=ind0008a&L=chi-web#30
APROPOS OF NOTHING
hey! Mexican wrestler game!
http://www.sbermprod.com/guest/wrestling.html#
plus lucha swag http://www.luchaswag.com/
don't know what I'm talking about? http://www.firstcut.com/9807/n1.html
(thanks Tracy!)
IA MATTERS
creating trust in cyberspace
iacandy
a bunch of truly beautiful odd new visualizations.. information design and IA are one.
plumbdesign thesaurus/
and the story behind it
www.thinkmap.com
more
http://inxight.com/
more
smartmoney
from
http://www.smartmoney.com/intro/tools/
more
http://www.artandculture.com
hey, anyone going to any of these?
BRAND
The Evolution of Brand Strategy
The Changing Roles of Identity and Navigation Design
Uncanny
The Art & Design of Shawn Wolfe
Published by Houston
Best known as the man behind Beatkit, the ubiquitous "brand
without a product," Wolfe was deconstructing consumerism and
brand fetishism since before he knew that's what he was doing.
See the cover image at:
http://www.emigre.com/CBUN.html
NEWS
Did you think that you can stop worrying about downloads?
Fast Company: Why the Long Wait?
Latency, says Reed, directly affects the quality of users' experience on the
Net. Although ISPs aren't blind to this issue, too few of them agree that
latency is the defining metric of their networks' performance.
Napster cannot be killed.
Industry Standard: It's Not Dead Yet.
Kevin Werbach. Rather than delaying a resolution of the major issues
surrounding online music distribution, the Napster injunction has accelerated
it. The injunction raised the stakes and also brought Napster tremendous
mainstream publicity.
yeah, these guys are the victims. sure.
Wired News: States: Labels Fixed CD Prices.
Thirty states filed suit Tuesday against the five biggest record companies and
two music retailing giants, accusing them of conspiring to fix CDs prices --
an act that the states say cost consumers millions of dollars.
the war between design and usability
USABILITY VS DESIGN
DESIGN MATTERS
A little while ago I asked what designers have against capitalization. Mike
of biggerhand.com has been kind enough to let me share his response to me
with you.
me: "What "do* designers have against capitalization?"
mike: "they get used like exclamation marks: Too Often And For Emphasis!!!!!
(usually the emphasis is that the copy sucks, but we'll build around
it with exclamation marks, or "bangs" in marketinguese, and caps.)
in the event of cap & bang bloat i usually strip them all out and get
the client to put them back in. they generally put back about 25% of
what I took out.
In one particularly dire situation I talked marketing down by telling
them that caps added significant overhead in k-count. We then came to
the compromise that we would capitalize the first word of every
sentence and the CEO's name. To give them a "warm fuzzy" I agreed to
capitalize the first word in every paragraph too.
I like making people happy! (<--bang)"
NEWS BITES
from tomalak
Business 2.0: Five Questions With Mike Mulligan, CEO of MapQuest.
And while they've got a brand that people know, it's a brand that's not
relevant online. It's like Brillo. Everybody recognizes the brand Brillo,
butit doesn't do you any good online. And everybody recognizes the brand Rand
McNally, but it doesn't do them any good online.
and for more on Rand Mcnally's struggle to play catch-up (also one of gleanings favorite
topics)
Business 2.0: World to Privacy Sites: Now or Never.
Looming legislation threatens to make many of their current functions
obsolete, and recent high-profile embarrassments have forced many of the
sites
to reconsider their entire raison d'tre.
Business 2.0: The Perfect PR App.
The other day, I received a routine press release. It wasn't time sensitive.
It wasn't interesting. There was absolutely no way I or anyone else here
would've written about the contents of the release. Yet, it came in a FedEx
envelope sent via the highest, and most expensive, priority.
Computerworld: States formally object to proposed settlement between Toysmart and the FTC.
The objection was submitted by Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly,
who said in the filing that the effort to sell the customer data "is a breach of
Toysmart's promise and constitutes deception pursuant to the Consumer
Protection Act of Massachusetts"...
found another great resource; a blog on all sorts of useful stuff: Mersault*Thinking - Information Architecture, Usability, UI, Better Design
Strange Connections, a biweekly colume by Peter Morville reminds me of the heyday of web architect. His writing is funny and smart, and a pleasure to read if you are one of us trying to carve a niche in the brave new world of IA.
Argus's Events | Full Calendar of Events lists upcoming IA conerences and event....
Wow! What a fine collection of information architecture resouces, white papers, and the no longer hard-to-find IA glossery.
Argus Center for Information Architecture
UI guidelines for the palm pilot.
thanks Kayla Black for pointing these out.offtopic...anyone else love Kawabata's palm of hand stories? Are they available for the palm?
Found a new reference jjg.net: information architecture resources.
What a great collection of resources! I'm gonna be a long time combing through these...
Of particular help is the collection of links to Information Architects trying to define the field. good luck! I have often thought that pure information architecture is categorization and labeling...everything else we do is interaction design, or interface design or usability. In a way I think the Information Architect is like the webmaster of old, doing what needs to be done, whether it was in the job description or not.
Well, everybody is doing it, so I may as well too.. time to get on the weblog bandwagon and put my thoughts down on the web for all and sundry's approval/dismay. www.blogger.com is a truly amazing site... I can't resist.
Eleganthack is supposed to be devoted to Information architecture (as opposed to devoted to my resume, as it is right now)
So, to start the dialog...
A while back there was an article on a study that showed men and women navigate cities differently. Men tended to use maps to form a cognitive model of a space, then expresses directions in this way "go south 1 mile,
then turn west for 2 miles..." Women however used landmarks for wayfinding "turn left at the red house, then right at the Denny's.."
I never saw the original study, and I'd be curious to read it..
That said, I wonder how this can apply to wayfinding in information spaces. How, as web designers, can we create landmarks to assist navigation? How can we make our structures transparent so they can be used to navigate? Should
be design differently based on our understanding of our audience's preferred navigation method?
A friend and I were discussing this over lunch, and we thought that breadcrumbs actually help both styles of wayfinding...
Entertainment>Humor>Bitterness>Things_That_Suck_
(yahoo, natch)
this both conveys a hierarchy and provides language that is vivid enough to act as a landmark.
Thoughts? Are there any studies/papers on this topic?
