Prospecting in the 21st century
I have been sitting on this post (and maybe this fence) for some time and a recent article finally gave me the impetus to write this.
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Firstly, I would like to highlight some opinions of UX (and UCD) themes in evidence in the last 6 months:
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Eric Reiss in the Journal of IA took a balanced and considered view to these opinions. Framing them with a sense of perspective and presenting some deeper thoughts about UX and the role of IA in all of this. I particularly like his focus on business reality and the clarion call to embrace Information Architecture as the label that defines what we really do;
Ultimately, it will be our understanding of disciplines both within and beyond IA, that will ensure us a place at the table around which the big decisions are made.
Why UX must be present in the advertising industry
I think it’s important to reaffirm why we should not have an elitist view of UX and why IA is at the very core of the user experience collection of disciplines.
Clearleft and Adaptive Path do excellent work as UX design companies. But they are a minority in a huge marketplace of varied design companies and to say that UX doesn’t have a place in other types of business is contradictory to their usual UX evangelism. Isn’t it much better having people in all sorts of businesses doing information architecture and interaction design under the umbrella of UX?
In the company I work at, we are growing our UX offering around a product and it is a slow but sure process of convincing people that this approach (with the right designers) can really work for their business. However, we must also embark on communication and design work as our market is not as big or as mature as the US or UK. These are driven by the need for business survival but it also ensures we have diverse viewpoints on our projects. Different perspectives provide value.
The concept of baked-in marketing
…there are so many opportunities for engagement through interaction, conversation, utility and actual *use* between the initial message and the product itself.
A day before Peter Merholz posted his view on UX and advertising, Andrew Hinton highlighted that product development and communication go hand in hand. This closer alignment will have repercussions for UX – pushing it into mainstream design consciousness. Just about every design pursuit will need to look at wider issues that surround the customer and product. Companies will strive to engage, to create interaction. Creating users who become customers.
Service design is the natural progression from UX – taking interactions across platforms and concentrating on the invisible and tangible connections around customer or user interactions. Information architects should be at the heart of this design work and don’t be surprised to start to see IAs appear in companies that you didn’t even think of as ‘digital’.
Let’s also remember that this isn’t just the domain of designers but all stakeholders. We must realize UX work is done by those who do not call themselves designers. This can have both good and bad sides but if there are more people who know what we are talking about, in the right domains, this can only be for the good.
Design practice – risk and innovation
The reality of the times, is that a business needs to innovate and create better products, faster than before. But they need to mitigate risk, and UX methods offer a way of backing this up with real and relevant data. It seems at this stage to be a correct and considered way to ensure you have the right approach.
But the caveat is how to interpret data from users and it can be a minefield. The best designers will filter and discard many findings and see the real gold in reams of user interviews. This level of skill is learnt through experience. The ability to be a synthesiser of data and create meaningful relationships between themes is a core quality of any designer.
Conceptual work needs verification with customers at some stage and even Apple does this before they go to market. So to say they do not listen to users is a fallacy. They have conducted ethnographic studies with their customers, observing them using their products in their homes and offices for weeks.
The amount of data they acquire from these sessions would warrant a convincing case to not go for persona creation or user interviews, ever. They pretty much know how people feel about and use their products, so for them to innovate they need to pick up on areas that are hinted at by user comments and their behaviours through their usage. Concepts that are achievable by being verified with customers who have previously talked about the ‘what ifs’ and the ‘nice to haves’.
Action research and design doing
Negating risk by investing in research that is actionable is a shrewd move, especially in a marketplace where customers are more vocal and more likely to be persuaded by peers than ever before. For business, the value of UX can be seen in exploring hypotheses backed up by quantitative and qualitative research.
Optimization, concept creation and execution on innovative ideas can all be handled and explored by UX teams. Considered product developments and the tangible tools to be innovative, create real business value.
Software design, integrated service design and product design all benefit from design research. In my opinion UCD is purely another way of obtaining the right information. I wouldn’t design anything without ensuring a brief that included as much background information as possible. Would you?
Design thinking is one thing but design doing is a far more powerful act for business. A necessary part of this act is to gain real insights from user (or customer) research.
Envisioning the future by studying the present
It is not just interface design. It is not just about making the world more usable and ethically correct. It’s all this and more. It is a force for changing business in its approach and to make it economically stable by providing for needs but also satisfying wants beyond the present day. This is the business value of UX. How you interpret the data you collect, and create something truly unique, relies on the teams skill set and experience.
All of this leads me back to my belief that UCD as a philosophy and UX (and especially IA) form the foundation for the best products and service design. A whitepaper was released as I wrote this, defining UX – written by academics, practitioners and industry. It would be good if this were a full stop to the infighting and misinformation the discipline faces, but somehow I doubt it.
Euro IA 2010 – ‘Strong IA feels real’
Last week I was in Paris for an entertaining, yet equally perplexing Euro IA. The majority of talks were a thought provoking foray into the usual domains of information architecture but also service design and co-creation.
The opening keynote from Oliver Reichenstein was a strange experience, part personal take on the field and part philosophical reflection on how he personally arrived at his own professional destination.
I am an admirer of his work and yet elements of those great data visualizations and experiments (the web trend maps) were not mentioned here. He did attempt to explain his user experience diagram but after claiming metaphors were only useful to a point, he then likened IA to ‘the recipe for user experience’. This gastronomic reference, was a recurring theme throughout the two days.
Contradiction seemed to be the order of the day. On the one hand stating that he found IA used too many ‘bullshit’ terms that were unhelpful, he then described his own design process as ‘dialectic’. I find philosophy in alignment to IA has never been helpful to our profession. It doesn’t resonate with me as thought-through – ‘the architecture of the mind’ that Reichenstein holds up as one of his views is unhelpful to a layman and really only strengthens the opinion of those who feel that IA is intangible. Even Reichenstein says that ‘if you stretch metaphors they break’.
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Ian Fenn wrote a fictitious tweet, and yet ironically it was exactly what it felt like after he delivered his keynote.
It was a shame that this opportunity was lost of convincing the group that he didn’t just use the term because he liked the phrase. But unfortunately that seemed the real reason if you take the talk at face value. |
His comment that ‘strong IA feels real’ was ironic, as this ia felt unreal, unrealistic and abstract. Even if it works for him and his company, I felt he didn’t tell the whole story.
I think therefore IA…
Other talks also reflected the philosophical aspect. Koen Claes focussed on designing for memory (enjoyable but try selling that to a CEO). Peter Bogaards talked about the similarity with gastronomy to aspects of what we do as UX people.
All thought-provoking stuff but really it had the feeling of some in-joke that only UX people would get, and that those from other communities who were present, the product managers, marketing and developers would look on and question.
This is not a practical application or useful in my opinion and after talking to a few attendees after day one they felt the same. These talks gave more attention to the experience of being human than the thing that we design. Though the two are obviously connected, it becomes too indiscernible from existentialism.
Lean IA, service design and Ubicomp
The second day proved far better, more real and more tangible. More useful to talk about how to design in an agile way, using co-creation and the methods and skills found in the scrum processes of product development teams.
Here Jeff Gothelf, Johanna Kollmann and Franco Papeschi proved that the application of our skill set is the most important thing in our domain. The tools and methods are fine but not as important as engaging the team, working collaboratively and transparently and being an agent for change.
Their approaches were the exact opposite to the mysterious design master. This is the future of UX, with Claire Rowland and Chris Browne representing service design and ubicomp in a very comprehensive, fascinating talk.
Christophe Tallec also talked about how the theory of the wisdom of crowds, has usefully been applied to a product. These emerging fields becoming more relevant every year, and I guess in the not too distant future these fields will become facets of the same discipline.
Aimless ends
The closing plenary was given by Paul Kahn where he stated that Facebook was not important to him. But with its 500 million users and a previous slide stating how the biggest sites are user generated it just seemed he was being provocative for the sake of it.
As he ambled through several sites that he liked, it was similar to surfing a smashing magazine post of cool dataviz sites. The structured and non structured aspect of metadata is well documented but the talk really just seemed to meander without purpose.
His closing message that user-centred design is best tackled by saying ‘you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink’ was uninspiring. Did this statement derive from too many failed projects? One he showed – though it used a neat UI trick it was where he openly admitted he didn’t have numbers to know if it was effective or not. Who knows?
Summing up
There were a lot of great presentations and Martin Belam has gathered the talks on his site and are well worth a look. But keynotes are from thought leaders. Surely they have a responsibility to not use the platform as a casual debate (or product promotion) with throw away comments?
Or perhaps that is their call, but I do ask as an attendee for the speakers to prepare the material and avoid being self-indulgent or misleading. Give us something real. Give back something tangible to this community.
I remember last year being at a talk where a student pleaded – ‘give us something we can use’. From the keynotes, I was left with the same feeling…
The challenges and changes in digital design
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After 10 years of job title changes we come back to being designers, albeit ‘user experience’ designers for users and for people.
In 1999 it seemed to be so very new and we were on the same page, but now we see the different disciplines needing to embrace and unify before they fragment completely. It needs to change soon, to move on with an admission of guilt for the turf wars, the inflated egos and finally gain some appreciation for each other’s craft. |
What Google does
 Bradley Horowitz at The Next Web 09 courtesy ofDailyM |
After Jeff Jarvis had his take on Google we had somebody from the inside – Bradley Horowitz.Horowitz was the man who advised Yahoo to buy Flickr and after redefining his role there he made them acquire Delicious. Previously he had formed Virage (video categorization engine) and sold it to Autonomy after dropping out of his degree at MIT Medialab where he worked on image categorisation technologies. Read more… |
Holistic concept models: an ROI blueprint
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I read a post recently that illustrated how concept models are rarely used in the right way and are often misunderstood. Are they really worth doing at all?
Now seems a good time to expand on the tool that Dan Brown has popularised through his book Communicating Design. Not as simply a stand alone tool but one that can provide a blueprint for giving solid ROI on design, analytics and testing. |
Creating user centred taxonomies
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When you organise content on a web site, how can you be confident its relevant and clear for your users? The following walk-through tells of how you can ensure you build a site with users’ interests at heart.
What is a taxonomy? The term ‘taxonomy’ is a bit of a misnomer, having its origins in Biological study denoting sub-species within a species classification. However, in the business sense of the word, taxonomies can encompass a whole range of different elements that, broadly speaking, are ways of classifying content under categories recognised by a user group. |
Extending the experience
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Synthesis of research, business culture and product goals ensures a UX team sits in the middle of a web development process. However the team can benefit by not being solely project focused…
User experience is heavily associated with brand experience and as technology becomes less visible and more pervasive, the two elements will converge into one. User experience adds substance to the brand experience – experience design defines the brand.
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Creating User-Centred Taxonomies: Part Two
The second part of Creating User-Centred Taxonomies, on the FUMSI site, has been posted here…
The diagrams featured are also available on Flickr
Creating user centred taxonomies on FUMSI
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Published here, the first in a two-part article I have written about the mechanics of creating user centred taxonomies. |
Tools and techniques for managing website evolution
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This post started from the ideas of a two-part post written last year by Seth Gottlieb & Brice Dunwoodie. It made me think about a list of tools and techniques that content editors could use whilst editing in a collaborative environment. The post is a point of reference for those involved in the daily running and development of sites that are continually evolving. |
IA Summit 2008 UX Matters review
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After several blog posts, UX Matters asked me to do a proper job on it and it is now live here, in an overview of all the highlights of the IA Summit 2008. |
The answer is in the interface
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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… |
Optimising images to ensure findability
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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. Read more… |
IA convergence and emergence
 Andrew Hinton (Inkblurt) – |
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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. |
IA and its changing general dynamics
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Mathew Milan – The Information Architect and the Fighter Pilot
If you click the image to the left 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… |
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Information Architecture 3.0 - Peter Morville
A holistic view of where we have come from and where we are headed was outlined from a founding father of IA. A notable comment was;
‘Iterative design is good but you need a structured method to stop going around in circles.’ Read more…
Managing taxonomies
This post is reflective of the business environment I work in, notably in the B2B publishing sector. However, I feel that all sites would benefit from this approach if they use a site search technology, a CMS and a specialised group of individuals.
Taxonomies on business-to-business websites are industry based around the communities that interact with their content. The problem that many sites find is that the content can evolve and the taxonomy can not adjust to changes in what the content creators produce, or with what advertisers wish to sponsor, with regards to useful popular content. Read more…Tweet
Ambient Findability
I guess you could say this is a meme map of Morville’s observations, research and his ability to see into the future of the trends of Internet based technologies.
Its an interesting, and enlightening, discussion about what we as humans want and need from technology. It seems the text is intended to propagate more discussions and in turn discoveries around the subject of findability and technology. The book certainly makes you think about where we are heading as a society, but also the importance of the products we use and how they become integral to our lives.
Being able to orientate ourselves is a natural human instinct. In the 21st century, findability is a concept that we must ensure is present in the products that are developed (have a look at this great article about its importance just published here on A List Apart).
Its an inspirational read for many reasons, never trying to present answers, but certainly showing the questions that we need to answer if we are to harness the information monster we have created.
You should expect to read something that will present concepts and not case studies or solutions to problems. This book is about the bigger picture and the troubles of information management we face as a society.
Verdict: A philosophical study of where we are, and where we are going that proves Morville is at the forefront of thought leadership when it comes to Information Architecture.
Designing Web Navigation
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James Kalbach succeeds in bringing together the fundamental components that determine great, and not-so-great, user interfaces. The UI itself must always be respected and the author illustrates exactly why in the journey the book takes us on. What the book does is show how this can be achieved, from the past, notably from the present and into the future. The illustrations are in colour (critically important for any design book) and give clarity to the text’s important insights. Read more… |
IA collaboration - two heads can be better
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Two months ago I wrote about a case study, how it was implemented and what the results were. I thought I would go into the detail of the information architecture and how collaboration with my colleague helped us reach a successful conclusion to the project.
I was extremely fortunate to be working alongside a taxonomist, Rachel Hammond. We were sat beside each other and interacted continuously on the same project daily. This made for an extremely good collaborative working environment. |
Persuasion Architecture - getting the ROI on IA
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Persuasion Architecture has been around for years, Bryan Eisenberg (and his brother Jeffrey) founded the term and has been successfully establishing it as a concept and a measurable process. However, in a recent post, he states that after 7 years we still must be aware of usability and optimising the user experience. Regardless of the passage of time, sites still struggle to be successful. Read more… |
Visual Language 1.0 - BBC layout guidelines
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Any web designer or IA will find this document really interesting and high value. It makes you thankful for institutions like the BBC who readily share their research with the public. This openness and transparency is really admirable and only possible through public funding. Find out the style and layout properties for the forthcoming BBC web pages here. |
ComputerWeekly.com- An IA case study
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This was not so much a redesign, or even a relaunch, but more of a resurrection of a site that had become tired, old and ineffective. Its many shortcomings were highlighted with the onslaught of the new generation of sites from competitors that used user-generated content and a more social networking approach to their presentation layer. As this site represented the best of computer related business journalism, it was apt that it should be the company’s first site that underwent a complete overhaul from the ground up. |
Concept Models - illustrating business strategy
In his book, Communicating Design, Dan Brown has a chapter devoted to the concept model. Initially I thought that these were little more that an add-on for a web project but after using them for nine months I can safely say they are integral to any new site or redesign. The power of them is largely in their simplicity, nothing more than a few circles and lines, and their ability to communicate without complication. It is this clarity that makes them instantly engaging amongst any group, be they business owners or developers.
It allows a common ground to be reached in terms of a vision for the site or project. It is a mental model and the tangible document between what the IA is thinking and what the rest of the team is wanting to see from the site. Add the users into this and you have the IA basics right there. Essentially the IA basics, it places the user at its core (user needs), the business interfacing with the user and its own objectives (the products’ context) and the actual content that will be produced often in the form of a product (content).
You can also blend in real world statistics to give credence to your thinking, many business owners like to be shown a few figures to back up your arguments and it makes for a more in-depth read.
The great thing is that the client identifies with this A3 colour print, they put it on their wall. It defines where they are heading, its ‘the star to sail their ship by’ as Peter Merholz said recently at dConstruct…
For the IA its also the way we can ensure that user needs are in the fabric of the structure of our site. Not only by persona led taxonomies but by defining areas that users will feel a part of and then creating areas around these zones. By using the model as a basis for site structure, the site map can be spun out fairly rapidly and its presence ensures the user needs, the business goals and content types are never missed in the design process.
I find that this document is the most important in many ways, as it crystallizes the thought processes of a team and defines how a project will be tackled and what the likely outcomes will be. All with the user at the centre of the design process, and that can only ever be a good thing.
See Dan Brown’s presentation at IXDA on the subject here
Metadata - signposts in the wilderness
Peter Morville’s book – Ambient Findability, is as much a philosophical muse as a book about the current state of play in the world of search and the future technologies. What he does say however is that the power of metadata is something that we can not underplay the importance of.
I recently have compiled a Metadata schema for the company I work for. Based on the Dublin Core set of rules for metadata and also the IPTC set for news (and PRISM and MIME for file formats) it endeavors to produce a set of metadata standards that can be used for text, images and video or audio file types. Obviously these days tagging your files is an involved process, how do you go about tagging an image for example, Google have made a game of it here
Tags and folksonomies will always be fraught without a metadata approach that has been thought through and applied systematically. It also underpins a good information architecture. Categorization will be successful when metadata has been carefully considered.
Once implemented finding will become an easy task. Content that has taken time and money to create can now be found, enjoyed and re-purposed. Saving money, increasing productivity and giving the user an enjoyable experience.
Now surely everybody can see the business value in investing in metadata and information architecture??Tweet
The return of the Content Inventory
Luckily I haven’t had to do these for a while as the projects have moved on to the core IA tasks but more about those in the coming weeks.
Content Inventories or Content Audits ( a less detailed look at the physical make up of your site) are time consuming and do take a fair degree of concentration to achieve the end results. They are not fun, they are dull and if you do them make sure you get paid every last penny for the trouble.
Nobody in their right mind would ever do these for amusement (unless they are twisted) but they are so important in gauging what the site is all about and what it has to offer.
An Excel spreadsheet earlier today
The importance of an audit comes out when designing the new structure of a site. It also helps to gain real inside knowledge that not even the site owners may have.
Being the most knowledgeable in the team about the product is never a bad thing and gives you much needed ammunition for future battles. For instance they may be sentimental about an item that rarely gets any traffic, only you will know the facts through analysis of web metrics – the decision to remove the item becomes easy.
Statistics to back up the arguments – evidence based design decisions
You will also see where content is sparse but where traffic may be heading and be able to raise this to the content providers. Some analysis tools also give you overlays of the users’ click behaviour – another great tool for deciding priority of the content.
The main areas covered in a Content Audit are;
- Page ID – Allows future references in documentation to be made easily. The Home page starts with a zero, and decimal from there on in.
- Existing Navigation Category – News, Products or Suppliers for instance.
- Page Description – What is it you are looking at? Is it a News home page, a product listing or a contact page with Vcards?
- Page Elements – What is actually on the page? Name the individual content types. Poll, news article headline, body text, image etc.
- Format – What is the file type? HTML, JPEG etc
- Content Location – Where does the page reside? Use URL string
- Links to – Where does the page link to? USe URL string
- Purpose – What is the point of the page??
- Author – Who created the page
- Publisher – Who published the page
- 3rd Party Content – What external content is served up here
- Traffic – What are the traffic stats associated to the page or section
And that is it. All you have to do now is go through each unique page type and fill out the spreadsheet. Once that is done, you can then create a suggested structure on a new tab.
Compare and contrast with your client group and watch them marvel at your Excel prowess (you will be a master by now) and your irrefutable page analysis and recommendations. All in a (few) days work (or a week for a large site) for an IA. Things only get better from this point on…..
Content InventoriesIA process defined
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After five months, nine different projects and several workshops, presentations and seminars I have finally gathered together several deliverables that define a decent core IA strategy. Of course its based on the three principles of good information design; our users, the context of use and the content that is being served up or requested. |
UX Intensive - Adaptive Path, Amsterdam, June 2007
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Sometimes attending events do nothing more than affirm that you are doing the right thing. That you know a bit about what you do and that there are many like-minded individuals out there who are moving in the same direction.
This event proved all those things but also gave us some excellent food, in an area of Amsterdam that was devoid of drunks, stoners or sex workers. Amsterdam is a wonderful city and the trip reaffirmed that fact. It also provided some great workbooks on design strategy, information architecture and interaction design. I only attended the IA event (my company’s budget too tight to splash the cash on the three day course) but it was well worth it. For an overview, view this UX Intensive page. Chiara Fox did a very good job of outlining IA and all the various facets of the work that it encompasses. There wasn’t any real new news that we could take home but just an affirmation of what we do know. All in all a good trip and money well spent. |
Parts of the Process
I have just completed a four week project on a large computing website and although I am an IA virgin I am happy with the results. My colleague produced the taxonomy and controlled vocabulary and with the help of the polar bear book, Communicating Design and the fantastic Elements of User Experience, I think I am getting to grips with the dark arts of information design.
Its tricky that the more you read the more you feel impelled to produce increasing amounts of deliverables but obviously time and money are deciding factors here. You must strike a balance. This project has produced 9 documents in total. They are, in chronological order;
- Content Inventory
- Information Scheme (requirements gathering)
- Taxonomy
- Controlled Vocabulary
- Navigation scheme
- Wireframe
- Concept Model
- Site Map
- IA Strategy Report
I feel that they are all crucial to produce a design that is truly user centred. They do rely on quality research data and user related deliverables (such as personas) are critical to the quality of output. Persona led taxonomies are what really underpins the structure in this context heavy environment but more of those later….
What is important here is although two of us did the work, many more people helped create the end products. For a successful team you need to collaborate but you also need different skills in the core group. UCD and information science together seems to be the right mix.Tweet
Collaborate or feel the consequences
After reading this article http://www.peterme.com/?p=536 I was somewhat saddened and the also transported back to a time 7 years ago when I was a lowly web designer working for an information architect who headed up our design team.
She was of the opinion that the surface design was all we were good for, our thoughts concerning interaction of the user with the interface was little more than icing on the cake that she had lovingly baked. She was frustrating, she ring-fenced her domain, no colleague or client could get into her information utopia. Don´t get me wrong, we respected and admired her courage and stubbornness. She usually got her way but she never got user centred design.
Back in the room….yes 7 years on and the old problems seem to still be there. There appears to be a disconnect in IA from a UCD approach. Even in the Polar Bear book we have overtones of how UCD is the poor relation to information organisation. I would like to propose we drop this outlook and the reasons are clear. As more people with different ideas contribute to the information mix we will have to embrace the user, put them at the centre of everything we do and allow their behaviour to permeate through our taxonomies. Let our taxonomies become Persona led and multi-faceted.
Just as IA is reaching its highest point it is in danger of falling flat on its face. I emplore it as a discipline to embrace interaction and interface design. Collaboration is the key to its success as we are on the threshold of implementing processes that are solid and enduring.Tweet
Content Inventories
This hurts! There is no other way to describe your first job as an IA. Mind-numbing and boring but very necessary to establish a starting point for a site redesign. It may take a week to do but the information you gain from the excersise is rich and from it you can make informed decisions about the direction your site will go in.
After doing two I realised how important these are to any refresh or redesign. Structural problems are obvious and the hidden gems in your site are revealed. With the aid of web analytics you can see the most popular areas. With search logs you can see how a user finds your information. This can also be the basis for your controlled vocabularies once your taxonomy has been created. Use social bookmarking sites to note the tags your user’s are compiling and that you are reflecting the language they are speaking.
Whatever you think about the hard slog of doing a content inventory – stick with it. It probably will be the best research time you spend in getting your site the redesign it deserves.Tweet
