I recently presented at a conference on the humble wireframe and thought it would be a good idea to run through some key points. I have also noted that some feel the wireframe is dead, though if anything its more alive now than ever. Pay heed to 37 signal’s take on the subject…

If a wireframe document is destined to stop and never directly become the actual design, don’t bother doing it. If the wireframe starts as a wireframe and then morphs into the actual design, go for it.

In the presentation I attempted to answer these questions;

Wireframes

• • What are they?
• • Why do we use them?
• • When should they be used?
• • What are the different types?
• • How are they used in a project life cycle?
• • Why are they important?

What are they?

They are a visual representation of the content of a web page that is the culmination of user research, business objectives and content. Best brought together in a sequence of pages to illustrate paths of navigation and interactions on the page.

They are working documents that are not finished designs but are likely to change as the design process progresses and functional requirements are clarified.

They are NOT…

• • Meant for an external audience without an explanation of context
• • Meant to be the design of a page
• • To portray any graphic elements
• • To convey the brand of a website

Why do we use them?

To help gain understanding  They ensure the business understands that the interface is where the user interacts with their products, where engagement begins and conversations start.

To help project workflow
They allow us to focus on the functionality of a site. They are a fast and cheap way to produce an idea of how a page on a site may work. They can be developed in parallel to creative concepts, and redrawn easily.

To help stakeholders They promote debate and conversation around important elements of a site. They are a focal point for collaboration between stakeholders in a team. To help designers and developers They allow development teams to start developing functional aspects highlighted in the wireframe templates before visual design begins. They render the structure of the site from a concept into a skeleton of the final design, ready for the surface design

 When should they be used?

Jesse James Garrett very neatly summarised the five phases of website development in this model and you can read more about it here. His concise and accurate analysis of the project development phases is seen in the excellent book - The Elements of User Experience.

In short, wireframes are the skeleton of a site and precede the surface design and come after the structure. However in the agile process of development a more layered approach enables developers and designers working simultaneously. Wireframes are evolving documents of discussion and this should always be remembered.

What are the different types?

Hand drawn sketches Are a very quick and fast way to convey a layout to others that can be changed rapidly. They are the best precursor to computer aided drawing and their low-fidelity format encourages experimentation and honest critique.

Collaborative sketches
The only real difference here is that a team produces the wireframes together. It helps the group to discuss reasoning behind solutions and iteratively sketch solutions. Several solutions helps the team explore different approaches and it provides a framework for participants to articulate their ideas.

Annotated wireframes They are produced to describe the functional elements to development teams. Elements are explained in small paragraphs alongside the diagram and this enables the wireframe to be understood without verbal explanation. They are valuable tools to clarify function and focus on a page.

High fidelity wireframes Mainly produced to canvas opinion from users in interviews about a layout or concept. They should always require a usability expert to explain the context and purpose of the diagram. It really is the nearest step before presenting the surface design of the solution. The line between wireframe and functional prototype is a thin one here, it may be better using resources on a working prototype.

How are they used in a project life cycle?

Even in the Web 2.0 world of development with AJAX interfaces the wireframe has a place. It may struggle to show all interactive elements (though the Yahoo pattern library’s use of wireframe diagrams negates this somewhat) but it still gives a document that can digested by large specialised project teams.

The wireframe can evolve into HTML or Flash prototypes and is a tool that encourages collaboration - this is its most important strength.

The diagram below highlights a typical journey of a wireframe through a product development cycle. It is an iterative cycle and one that moves at different rates to other tasks in the work flow of a team.

Why are they so important?

• They ensure accurate planning for functional specifications

• They ensure all project team members are well briefed

• They enable developers to start work on new functionality before the visual design begins, helping to minimise development costs

• They track changes in the design process as decisions are made to the interface, this minimizes project creep

In summary, they are critical to the success of a design. If anybody claims not to use them you should be wary of the methods they employ. A wireframe is the compass that will keep a project on course, and a journey without a map is a hazardous one.

A recent article by Alex Iskold brilliantly captures the separations of where we imagine semantic search should be and the reality. Even if it were trying to knock Google off a top spot, what he highlights is that it would be an unnecessary exercise.

Google does its thing very well. Few would argue with that. Alex suggests that semantic search should do something completely different…

To really showcase semantic search, these companies need to come up with innovative UIs that will help users to understand the power that is being put at their fingers.

I also think it should display results differently, the interface should encourage an exploratory experience and allow lateral thought to occur during research. Iskold states we should move away from  the search box, as this is the wrong type of input for a user.

Search Patterns

Peter Morville is currently producing a book on search patterns and this will also highlight how facetted navigation enables the user to experience a different search journey. He has made the slides available here on Flickr.

If you look at the core of what should be shown is the relationships between items, that give relevance to the user’s query. Somehow a system needs to be designed that will reveal elements that have relationships and connections. Ontologies could be made, linking different data sets as if they were relational databases.

If a user found truly relevant and accurate information around an entity then a business objective could be fulfilled. Really targeted advertising would occur. Users are often more forgiving of adverts if what they see is relevant.

Images as a search device

But the challenge is in the interface, how do you convey a fluid, ‘noosphere‘, visually? It has to be visual because the variety of content types are so different, and to scan and associate quickly - images could allow instant recognition.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth

Recently Mike Laurie wrote a post about the use of video, virals and such like and he ended the post highlighting the Photosynth software developed by Microsoft. The video shows the potential of this software and it’s impressive. One quality is the ability of a system to collate images from Flickr that have been tagged with recognised terms and build those images around a 3D model.

Another element is the resolution of some of these images is 300 megapixels allowing a user to zoom right into them and read or see the contents.

Photosynth showing Flickr images mapped to 3D models of the subject

If you think about this collation of files that have been tagged by a massive variety of users (from Flickr in this instance), it seems to be a big step to Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the semantic web.

Sure these are only pictures, they are not documents, however when you think about the metadata in the file and how this can be organised to conform to a widely accepted mental model then this is really exciting.

An interactive mental model

Imagine an interactive concept model around a physical object, you could extract the related items around this and draw relationships between inter-linked entities. I recently designed a taxonomy for a science magazine, and it had to encompass every type of science from physics to psychology to civil engineering. How would you draw relationships between these fields?

Well, what I like about this model is that this would be a visual representation of a knowledge landscape (in this case using images) that could easily be with video, audio and standard web pages. It would also be a 3d representation that would encourage digital discovery.

At the moment it is perhaps too flexible for your average user, but give it time. As more digital natives reach maturity and form the majority of the browsing public, this interface will not phase them at all.

Google’s repository of human entered queries

We have a vast amount of data against document types about relationships between one and another, search engines have log files where keywords and most relevant results are displayed.

Around any search, even if it is a mathematical equation, there is a physical object that can be related to it. Be it the theory’s creator, university, or even the theory itself the physical entity (or even known concept) could form the basis of the visual model.

If we truly want to move towards a semantic web than this type of interface would offer a rich, interactive and flexible approach to showing layers of detail that would encourage digital discovery and serendipitous finding.

Producing a list of most relevant links is still a compromise to what we could display to our users. It could be far better to show a knowledge landscape for each query where there are paths to other areas of knowledge and layers of related data that can be sorted by a series of user interactions.

In a way Microsoft has produced a microfiche for the 21st century, the difference though is the librarians that have tagged it are now the users of the system and they create the content. The machine has enabled the creation of something that is entirely user  generated but it will also help in organising this huge potential of harnessing the world’s knowledge.

Consider how Google are also integrating wikipedia entries to their maps and geo-locating photographs. By using the map, as mental model in this case, they are merely super imposing extra data types directly onto the two dimensional base.

Perhaps this is the greatest challenge to interaction designers and visual thinkers. Visually represent the knowledge available from an interlinked network of sources that are authorities around a subject area. As Alex Isold points out we are far from the solution yet.

This image was shown during Peter Moville’s talk about IA 3.0. What is interesting about it is how he linked this to Christopher Alexander’s text about design in architecture and also Peter Merholz’s essay Metadata for the Masses. In which he highlights ‘desire lines’ how paving is built once you see the paths that people tread.

If we look at online behaviour, user paths give us a solid idea of routes to content, where they return to and where they tend to go next. Human behaviour tends to follow patterns, see this article about mobile phone usage for an example of how predictable we tend to be.

Engagement is Conversation

This pattern of behaviour is something that good web analytics managers can see by interrogating their data. Alec Cochrane and I recently presented on the subject of building and measuring engagement and he summarises our talk here.

Metrics can tell you the most popular paths to frequently visited pages and we can change the interface accordingly. This can help us formulate our persuasion architecture but of course there are other things to consider…

No place like home

The homepage on a site suffers in a different way as it’s a starting place, a returning place and contains areas created as a diversion (meant for conversion) by many different stakeholders.

Add to this the fact that many users from search, email or RSS may never see it and it is an area that seems to be in a state of struggle. Serving the purpose of communicating a message from the site owners as well as serving the user.

Of course the more routes you have to your content the better the overall measure of the engagement your site has with your community of users.

Elements of engagement

A concept model can describe elements of engagement that need further exploration

But if we look at this in another way and think of the home as a place that should react to user’s wishes regularly, then it would be far easier to create an engaging experience.

Personas can help here but going back to the concept model would bring the greatest clarity about what needs to be presented. The concept model describes the whole site but also captures the key elements of engagement, and the parts that need representation on a homepage.

Taking this into account a typical homepage needs to offer;

1. Fresh content that is regularly updated with visible changes aided by the use of images. (Users check back frequently for news)
2. The use of themed areas and a cluster of stories around a subject area
3. If Jobs are offered they need a better promotion with an idea of the amount of job types displayed to the user
4. A consistent placement of sign-up areas throughout the site, this will enable conversions to occur and conversations to begin between you and your users.
5. An improvement of the graphics and images used on the site needs to be made to convey quality and of being a trusted authority. (Maximise promotional areas and do not give too much emphasis to ‘most popular’ widgets. These regions can take up large amounts of screen area and though they drive some traffic, without accurate measurement we can never be sure of the effectiveness of these devices)
6. Research material (white papers or case studies) need to be placed in an obvious position with more ‘evergreen’ content in the form of useful research that is graphically promoted.
7. Use blog content in a way that enriches themes or offers other angles on an existing story (also helps in changing of content on homepage). Opinion pieces also help in conveying authority and tone at the place where some users are visiting for the first time and also engage with returning users looking for an opportunities to converse.

Context, placement and pathways

The points above are based on news sites that offer different elements and in turn different modes of user engagement. Obviously looking for a job is not the same as researching and looking for case studies. So context is always the major factor when we think of what elements to display.

Put together the user’s path through the site, the context of where they have come from and what they are interested in and you have the ingredients to build the best engaging experience. The tricky part is to have an adaptive interface that will allow you flexibility.

By being aware of context, placement of content to reflect interests and user’s paths it will give a road map for engagement success.

A year ago I was involved in a major restructure of 7 major websites. Each had a new taxonomy and controlled vocabulary created. A clear vision of the direction of each site was drawn up and site maps and wireframes produced. The one problem we had, was there wasn’t a generic metadata schema that was adhered to. It was a combination of ad hoc, legacy tags. Some originated from the SEO team and some from the developers and database administrators on each site.

The problem was, to enable users (internal staff and external consumers) to be able to find what they needed and to discover content serendipitously, the metadata needed to be rigorously structured and adhere to recognised standards.

Various kinds of metadata were important to the sharing and re-use of articles, and this post will highlight these areas and also illustrate how we incorporated these into the metadata schema.

Purpose of metadata

The lack of metadata in a file, adversely affects search engine retrieval but also the working efficiency in collaborative teams. Data is lost, assets are not published and effort in creation is wasted. Ensuring effective metadata implementation in the documents we create and publish results in gaining competitive advantage in the search domain but also an increased efficiency in our working practice.

Without metadata management intellectual property rights become eroded, and liability increases. Files such as an image, PDF, video or audio all need to be tagged to provide the user or employee a method in finding valuable content.

A set of Metadata Standards should govern the implementation of consistent and uniform metadata architecture. Consistency in metadata is important to enable information sharing across an organisation and to make optimal use of document management tools which rely upon this.

Metadata Organisations and file formats

For metadata to be effective, it must be incorporated into the workflow from creation to publication. This emphasises the importance of any content producer making a concerted effort to synchronise their information management.

There are significant contributors in metadata standards and after analysis the following organisation’s standards formed a basis for the metadata schema.

These are:

• Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI)
• International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC)
• Publishing Requirements for Industry Standards Metadata (PRISM)

These standards are evident in the following formats that create types of metadata:

• Adobe Software’s Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP)
• Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF)
• Resource Description Framework (RDF)

To aid in classification of file format types we used the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to give us a definitive list of file types. Its list, the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) covers various formats that were used and may be used in the future. All other taxonomical types of labels (countries, regions etc) we looked towards the ISO for their classifications.

The types of metadata

There are four main areas of metadata in terms of semantic grouping.

These are:

• Descriptive metadata – Describes the contents of a file
• Administrative metadata – Data that can not be retrieved or inferred from the content and pertains to management of the content within a system
• Rights metadata – Asserts the ownership of the content, who owns it and who may distribute it and usually pertains to the usage of the document.
• Technical metadata – data about the physical properties of the content

All four areas have specific use for different reasons. The descriptive quality helps the item properties to be found either by search or by a user interface element on the page. This can be online and also offline in an application such as Adobe Bridge.

Drafting a schema

The schema was designed to incorporate the four main uses of metadata. These different facets to metadata result in different uses throughout the workflow of a publishing process.

These are revealed through tools the Adobe suite of applications and in the content of the websites where the ability to find our information is paramount to the quality of the user experience. The importance of classifying different aspects of our content is becoming increasingly important as new technologies based on the XML platform come into fruition.

The properties are unique and their use is dependent upon the content of the resource that is being tagged.

The list below outlines what we thought was of most use to be tagged from the moment content was created to the moment it became published.

The image below shows exactly how these fields are applied in practice.

Risks of not managing your metadata

Unless a unified metadata strategy is initiated there are risks that;

1. The data communication between enterprise applications will be flawed. Thereby negating any efficiency that may be gained through hardware upgrades, workflow will be inefficient, content will reside in silos .

1. The investment of designing taxonomies needs to be implemented at a technical level and this requires taxonomy management and data architecture. Not following up the investment of a metadata implementation by employing a data architect or someone responsible for metadata management is a critical weakness in the enterprise’s information management.

1. Little or no use can be made of existing content and it often presents a valuable commercial resource. As the file has substandard metadata we immediately lose our content but we need to profit from its creation and value. Without a way of implementing a schema, content is effectively lost as soon as it is created.

With so many content creators working daily, the management of this information is our most important challenge. The content needs to be found easily, both internally amongst colleagues and externally amongst users.

The future

Certain properties in the schema pave the way for future search technologies. For instance entity type (such as brand, product, location, event) are complex in their variety. However this label allows that complexity of context to be stated and clarified.

Perhaps its for this reason that I see metadata being the foundation of semantic search. Only with a rich metadata schema that incorporates several different facets will we start to enjoy highly advanced searches over content that has inherent relationships. The challenge for interaction  and interface designers is to design the interface to be intuitive and allow searching in a unique, non-text field way, that is more exploratory than is possible at present.

Tagging images at source enables a standard to be reached when all images are used during a production process, both for print and online. If they are tagged properly, valuable metadata can be captured inside the JPEG file that can be read by applications later, either on or off line.

Optimising images enables;

• · speedy retrieval of images from within an image archive
• · resource sharing across different departments or companies, allowing a greater library of images available to all
• · Metadata inclusion within the files themselves. Enabling a higher level of findability when the files are used online within websites

To ensure that this occurs, guidelines should be followed by the image creators and those who manage the administration of these images. As tagging images can be highly subjective the guidelines drawn up here are designed to be quick and simple to create within the Photoshop File info panel.There are four main fields that need descriptive information to ensure images hold metadata that will provide SEO benefit and enable the files to be found easily.The fields are;

• · OBJECT – What the image is of. Is it a person, animal, logo, building or machinery?
• · LOCATION – Where the photograph was taken, this is an entity type that helps searching for specific images around a subject area by specifying geographic place. For images such as graphics, this descriptor will not be necessary.
• · DATE – The date on which the image was created.
• · REASON – The purpose for the image being created and what the image illustrates (seen in the description field below). This is another entity type.
• · KEYWORDS – This enables searching for the image within an archive and externally

The image above has been taken for use in a magazine and online. As it is a generic image of food there is also a good chance that it could be searched for. Once the image has been downloaded from the camera it is here where the initial information needs to be added via an application, preferably Photoshop.Using the File Info command a box will appear like the example shown below. Within the first option, Description, all the metadata can be added that will aid SEO and will be maintained when taken into other applications such as Fotoware. The first option in the menu (description) uses the metadata to populate other areas, such as IPTC info areas further down the option list.

Photoshop File Info Interface

1. Document title field

This is effectively the OBJECT attribute mentioned earlier. It must be a concise description of the image contents in as few words as is possible. This will also form the JPG file name and for this reason has important SEO implications. In this example the image is called rhubarb_diced.jpg. The author’s information can also be added under this field.

2. Description field

This is the area that holds information about the LOCATION and REASON for the image’s existence. It also holds information regarding the DATE. The description should be targeted and concise. The description field should not be used as a further way to inform the art editors on the picture’s usage. This should be done in a separate document as all date within file info refers to metadata and will remain with the image after it has left the production desk.

3. Keywords field

For search engine optimisation and search through the Fotoware’s online interface - FotoWeb. These keywords are really important as they define the ease in which a user can find the appropriate image.

The image above shows a user searching for images that have been tagged ‘Langley Vale Farm’ and Fotoweb has returned 640 results. To narrow the search the categories list on the left hand side enables a user to drill down into results that have been put into relevant sections.

Clicking on ‘Land’ enables the user to see the 18 images that have the keywords associated to them. Clicking on a thumbnail allows the user to preview the image and also to examine the metadata. Here we can see that the term ‘Langley Vale’ has revealed the image of the farm on the Langley Vale estate.

4. Copyright field

It is important that the correct copyright information is displayed and Photoshop can help ratify if a copyright license agreement is in place. The © logo will appear next to the file name of the Photoshop file. The file info panel will allow the creator or the picture editor to establish what copyright information is in place.

In Summary

Where possible, images should be tagged following the what (OBJECT), when (DATE), where (LOCATION) and why (REASON) of the image. Where images have rights management issues keywords and copyright information will help give a minimum standard to the tagging of images.If this data is within the JPEG of an image then there is a much higher chance of the images appearing in a search engine results page (SERP). Tagging images this way now, also helps in maintaining a standardised approach to tagging of images that will ensure placement in SERPs in the future as crawlers become more adept at reading metadata from different file types.

Luke Wroblewski - Content Page Design Best Practices

One of the talks at the IA Summit was by Luke Wroblewski, author of two books and various resources published on his site. If you can see/hear the presentation at this location, I would urge you to do so. There will be something in there I have missed!

The content he shared, was an insightful window into how we design pages and how the business requirements of a page may actually work against it. It really reminded me about the mechanics of persuasion, and he highlighted some insights explicitly. The following observations were made by Wroblewski.

The web ecosystem

Conceptually, although we illustrate site maps as tree-structures, we know the pages exist with specific unique relationships to other web content.

We also know that the paths to content are becoming more fluid and not just about search. They are becoming more about authority recommendations from trusted sources or conversations around subjects with peers.

Wroblewski breaks this ecosystem down into;

• Communication – Instant Messenger, Twitter, Email

• Display Surfaces – Facebook, Netvibes

• Content Creators – Blogs, websites

• Content Aggregators – Digg, Slashdot

• Search – Google, Yahoo, MSN etc

This ecosystem will be different for every site, and every user has their own network (whether its explicitly or tacitly known).

Presenting the user with clear CTAs

Calls to action are often ignored and yet it’s the reason for a user’s site visit. On news websites, users want to read content   and yet commercial pressure tends to crowd the content area.

This slide highlights the NY Times content area

Wroblewski showed some examples of where advertising and irrelevant page content took up 76% percent of screen real estate leaving 24% for content. He compared that to the New York Times which had a 90% focus on content.

Surely a no-brainer as to what we need to do? Obviously the business context needs to be considered here but a few charts made me think about the rationale used in designs.

This slide outlines the access areas that a page needs to display, note that it must be adaptive and that the technology of the site doesn’t prescribe a treatment for the interface.

Instead of showing everything available on the site on every page, we need to be more targeted about what we present to the user. Wroblewski backed up his observation by urging us to do some thinking for our users.

Why do they bounce

He cited the book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz. The upshot is that when confronted with too much choice, a user will use the back button, the most simple choice – and bounce rates are inevitably increased unnecessarily. More bad news is that the peak value for a user conversion was between 2 and 3 seconds.

This slide states the attention deficiency of users in general  

The idea of giving the user a tailored experience, and not making the user think is exactly what helps define a good design and fulfil its business objectives.

Design principles for engagement

From what Wroblewski said about good content page design , I took his comments and also added some of my own to form some overarching principles.

1. Content – build for focus, deliver on what you offer, short, concise and easy to scan, forms the best platform for engagement. Build bespoke channels for visitor flow but ensure they are flexible. Flexibility, or adaptable user paths are key to an engaging and versatile site that can accommodate changes in site structure and user needs.
2. Calls to action – think about CTAs and their presentation, give clear choices and make sure they are not too numerous. CTAs (and even the necessary evil of advertising) will be welcome if relevant.
3. Context – Maximise credibility through visual design, this helps build trust. Build credibility through visual hierarchy in the minimum space possible and an appreciation of a user’s situation (where they came from, the origins of the traffic). Make sure the user gets easily grounded on arrival  and can orientate themselves.

I think Luke Wroblewski deserves great credit for crystallizing the thoughts of many designers and getting the statistics together to back up his common sense approach to the problems designers face.

By stating methods to enable engagement, Wroblewski has furthered my thoughts behind the arts of persuasion and conversion. For this reason I have bought his latest book, Web Form Design and will be posting a review on the site, later in the year. Form design is a major hurdle where so many users fail to convert, and I believe this book will be invaluable in addressing that.

Leah Buley - How to be a UX team of one

If there was an award for the most enthusiastic and passionate speaker I think Leah Buley would take it.Her presentation, How to be a UX team of one was a real hit, at the recent IA Summit in Miami. Anything with cartoons immediately gets my vote.

It was engaging and inspirational with the hand drawn elements serving to convey the speaker’s personality and it was a refreshing change to the usual slides.

I urge you to look at the presentation itself alongside the podcast of it that you can download here or listen online.

What the main thrust of the presentation gave me, was just how highly sensitive design professionals have to be to the immense variety of tools, methods and disciplines when designing a solution.

The slide above really captures this and is a great aide memoir to you if you are a UX team of one. Even if you are not, to be aware of the elements is really important.

This table doesn’t include design and so Buley proceeded on outlining a three step process, or method, of how she comes up with the designs. She covered off a variety of ways to brainstorm effectively, then the advantages of working with an ad hoc team and finally ways to pick the best ideas. Ways of generating and refining, but no mention of concept models - one day their moment will come!

Gathering peers unconnected with UX is still a valuable exercise that we should all do more of. Its real collaboration and also serves to break down barriers between teams that can help and not hinder. Different perspectives from different disciplines gives new insights and also stops the misplaced thoughts of designers being precious prima donnas.

Design principles were outlined, transpiring to be the  alignment of business goals and user needs. They helped in refining ideas that were generated through the design process, but importantly were also to help defend those ideas. Contextual elements were not talked about here but perhaps that was a given?

The last slide felt like a call to arms for all those long-suffering designers out there who have to be a UX team of one. Buley states that this approach will build confidence, establish your authority and shows that you care.

Now all you need do is grab a sketch pad, some colleagues  and imagination and go and make something great. This was a talk that was brilliantly delivered with a message of real clarity.

Andrew Hinton (Inkblurt) - Linkosophy

Ok a bizarre word to start off with. That grabbed the attention and yes, the talk covered links. But it was more about an explanation of IA, and as Hinton stated, ‘moving the conversation about it forward’.

From the start Hinton mentions emergent theory and I think that’s a very good place to start. If you look at the practice of Information Architecture it is very much in an emergence. It is only as old as web design itself.

He reminds us of where we have come from. With references and examples from the old way (Encyclopedia Britannica) to the new (Wikipedia). The closed expensive accurate way, to the open, inexpensive and ‘close enough’ way.

We experience spatial and semantic information. Links, categories and rules give us the context and the connection to these ‘possibility spaces’. The link between these spaces defined as findability. However, Hinton states:

Findability is only useful in service of context and connection

He states the practice is a shared history of learning, and a community of practice. We are an emergent group. There are many new factors emerging within the context of the discipline which is still defining what it is.

Slide showing convergence of the elements of IA

Hinton explains that IA is just a part of user experience, alongside interaction design and usability. Peter Boersmo covers this in more detail here when talking about deep IA - though it is I feel different to Mathew Milan’s idea of what deep IA is. Of the ’sister’ disciplines, Hinton states that;

IA defines the relationships and connections between contexts. IXD is the interactive function within a given context. This overlap is seen in navigation…

I feel interaction design should move even closer to align with IA, they are inter-dependant. Perhaps we should be a part of the same discipline and converge.

Hinton looks again at the Web 2.0 darlings, Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook and states that IA is occurring here in a big way. Its a type of architecture that is different to the top-down classifications of the past. However it is concrete and vitally important to the site success.

Hinton explains that IA can be a thing, an activity, a role, a practice and a title. No wonder people are confused when they hear what IA is, and perhaps we are becoming more confused as practitioners. Hinton reminds us it depends on the cultural context of where we operate in.

A key takeaway for me is a realisation that IA is not going to die, it will not go away. We will always need to know where we are going, we need to help people classify, sort, signpost illustrate the paths that they wish to take and can not find.

Perhaps we are information guides as much as digital architects, building online spaces. It is a desire to help sort chaos, to define some level of order to enable humans to collaborate and interact within communities for their benefit.

Hinton ended this excellent talk to a great conference with a quote from the author William Gibson. We will no longer distinguish between the digital and the real world as the population of digital natives become ever greater. He remarks that one day our grandchildren will look back on us as quaint - the way in which we defined real spaces from digital ones.

I have a strong feeling he will be proved right. I have no doubt we need to embrace this philosophy, forget about barriers and think about the different ways of organising and presenting information.

As Sir Tim Berners Lee stated recently,

The future is always in the past and for the web particularly. In a hundred years, 15 years will seem to be just the infancy of the web, when the semantic web wasn’t even completely deployed.

Lets look forward to greater collaboration and a convergence of the physical with the digital. The need for the continuing expansion of the IA to incorporate all the different elements of UX is critical to the success of our work, and our discipline.

Mathew Milan - The Information Architect and the Fighter Pilot

If you click the image above you will go to a response to the presentation by Mathew Milan, that contains the presentation slides with audio and numerous comments from readers beneath it.

From my point of view this was the most thought provoking of the presentations because it touches on elements of my design education, that of reflective practice. But it is really important because of the ramifications of Milan’s observations, and the ensuing discussions…

I commented on the post:

….The fighter pilot story was an excellent way to re-frame how we think of ourselves as design practitioners. The OODA model (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act) is very similar to the reflective practice model talked about by Cal Swann.

He said that ‘The design process is iterative. It can only be effective if it is a constant process of revisiting the problem, re-analysing it and synthesizing revised solutions’

In effect it is a PAOR model - Plan, Act, Observe and Reflect. Its the reflection part that is important (perhaps the differentiator to Boyd’s) that feeds into the next cycle. In reflection we evaluate and prepare to synthesise our next move.

What we also need to remember is our ability to garner tools, techniques or tricks from experience. In the fighter pilot’s situation that may be through training or combat, in our experience it is through many different types of work.

Then we gain tacit knowledge , the ability to intuitively know when something is right and looks good. That is what defines great designers (or fighter pilots, sports stars, dancers etc).

Designing for emergent systems relies on tacit knowledge and no process or methodology will give you that.

It was a wordy comment to make I admit. But a presentation like this is meant to inspire and start discussions and Milan has a knack of conveying complex concepts in an easy to understand way.

The upshot is, we need to be able to adapt, those that do will survive. He states that we need to embrace the Chi (the unexpected or unorthodox) and the Cheng (the expected, orthodox idea).

Deconstruct to reconstruct

We need to synthesise our ideas faster, use our solutions appropriately. To construct effectively we need to deconstruct, break down to build up. Milan suggests we are too fixated with structure, we work to ‘permanent grids’, we are bad at ‘unstructure’.

This element harks back to Jared Spool’s presentation. How we become entrenched in methodology without the ability to move onto using techniques that perform well in emergent situations.

Milan states that we are only half a discipline. He didn’t really explain this in the presentation but he does in this post.  He states that our interaction design qualities are addressed easily (wireframes, flows etc) with visible elements. Knowledge management areas such as taxonomies and metadata are also a well-documented.

However his concern is the ‘deep IA’, the value of what we do beneath the deliverables.

What is the value of ‘deep IA’?

Well maybe the answer lies in the arts of persuasion, understanding user paths and designing with empathy of context. Emerging and adaptive systems are chaotic and unpredictable, but so is any design process.

There are always mental leaps that occur that can not be rationalised or explained. But we must embrace these relationships, that may be tacit and intangible, this is what we must be able to do effectively - use tools that bridge these chaotic unknowns.

I personally think the tool to do this effectively is the concept model. Its versatility to show various problems and relationships, its freedom and ability to show complex layers, make it a core tool to help exhibit fundamental elements of ‘deep IA’.

A fascinating talk that will help define a new direction, it was the meat between the bread of Spool’s keynote and Hinton’s closing plenary.