Adaptive Path Blog

Like most folks in the office, I’ve joined the Twitter bandwagon. I find it’s an easy way to keep in touch with folks I don’t see on a regular basis. And learn new things about those a I do see.

Just now I checked out Twist, a site that lets you chart how much folks are twittering about a topic and plots them against each other, over time. It’s a neat way to see how topics ebb and flow. I thought it would be neat to see how much the five senses are talked about on Twitter.

I think it’s fascinating that folks Twitter the most about things they see so much more than any other sense. I would have thought that smell would have ranked higher. I wonder if it’s because we are used to sharing things we saw with our cell phone cameras. Or if it’s just part of human storytelling. “You’ll never believe what I saw on the way home today…”

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Dolores Blog showed thousands of colors to people and asked them to name the colors they saw. They then plotted those names on a color Wheel, printed in the color. They have a blog post describing the project. The resulting image is beautiful. They then added a filter so you can search for different color names and see where it is on the wheel. It’s based on a study to test the universality of language.

When I first saw this, I thought it looked like a type of tag cloud. I like how their filter let’s you expand and contract the colors that appear on the wheel. It certainly helps to illustrate how ambiguous language is. I love that there are at least four different colors all called “chocolate.”

It also started me thinking about what other types of visualizations could be done. There are certainly lots of things that could be done intersecting it with other data, depending upon what you are interested in. Being able to see the color names along with if the namer was colorblind, their gender, native language and other demographic data would be interesting. I found myself wanting to click on a color name to get more information like how many times that name was used for this color.

What ideas for visualizations do you have?

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I’ll admit it, I’m stubborn. Perhaps it’s my pedantic librarian roots, but I like words to mean what they mean. It drives me nuts when vendors take perfectly good terms and corrupt them for their own purposes. For example, it took me years to accept the use of the term “taxonomy” in a non-scientific classification context. Now it’s something that I use all the time, but I’m sure to be clear what definition I am using. Language is ambiguous enough as it is without vendors and marketers muddying the waters further.

“Ontology” is one of those words that up until yesterday, I felt protective of. It drove me nuts when folks would use it as a synonym for taxonomy or thesaurus. “We have perfectly good words to describe these things,” I’d tell myself. “We don’t need to use ontology as well.” Perhaps it was my own failure to truly grasp even the original meaning of the word that led to this stance. I mean, “the metaphysical study of the nature of being and existence” is a bit much to work into casual conversation. But ontology has just made a huge jump to the top of the list of words I use on a regular basis. Why is that?

This week I’m attending the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, CA. I’m finding myself surrounded by big brains who think and dream in OWL standards and RDF triples. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a conference where they actually show lines of code up on the screen. But this emersion has been great. I’m making all kinds of strange and wonderful connections between what I know and what I sort of thought I knew but now realize I had no idea about but oh gosh am I excited about it now.

The best example of this is “ontology.” I finally understand what those database folks mean when they say it. Ontologies aren’t synonyms for taxonomies — they work together. Ontologies are the rule sets — they set up the structure of how things are related to each other. They take the “related terms” of a thesaurus and completely blow it out of the water with the complexity and depth of relationships that are possible. With an ontology you set up how concepts and information relate together, and then use that as a blueprint to build out the instances, or what I would call the taxonomy or thesaurus.

But the ontologies go one step further than just being glorified vocabulary maintenance tools. Because of their close relationship to data modeling and database content, they allow connections, learnings, and inferences to become clear. And they, along with some other technology that I don’t fully understand yet, make those connections happen. I’ve said for years that building a thesaurus will help improve the results in your enterprise search system, or that you can relate terms in your thesaurus together to auto-populate related content or highlight cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. But I now see that this was only one part of the solution. The semantic relationships within the ontology are what enable the computer build out those connections. It’s the magic fairy dust that makes this stuff happen. And oh boy is that cool!

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Founder Indi Young was interviewed by IA Voice, an IA Podcast channel in Europe about her mental modeling process. The postcast of the interview is available on the IA Voice site. Indi describes it as “kind of like a whole course compressed into a few minutes.”

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I’ve been doing a lot of research into “advanced” topics in information architecture in preparation for my day in the UX Intensive. It seemed to me that I couldn’t talk about advanced IA topics without talking about Enterprise IA. But the more I’ve dug into the topic, the more I’m realizing that there really isn’t that much there there.

Most of what I’ve read about EIA is really core, basic principles of IA. They focus on understanding the business context, what the users need and a deep understanding of the content. The emphasis may shift a bit being a little less about content analysis and modeling and more on the business context and facilitation skills, but really, that seems a subtle shift to me. You have to understand the social and political factors that your IA is going into if you have any hope of it succeeding. To me that subtle shift isn’t enough to warrant the new label of EIA.

I do, however, believe that something called EIA exists. Though, I’m starting to wonder if like the unicorn it only exists in our imaginations and mythologies. To me, Enterprise Information Architecture is something that happens in large organizations, when different business units come together and start playing nice with their information structures. I’m talking stuff like the holy grail of a single product vocabulary used by all departments (something that at PeopleSoft we were never able to achieve despite my best efforts). Or better yet, crosswalks, switching vocabularies, or meta-thesauri that map like terms between business units and their databases. This means that the marketing department and the support department and the developers can all use their own terminology, but the end user has a seamless experience as they move through the content of the site, as they search various databases, and most importantly, they don’t have to worry that they aren’t finding all the relevant stuff.

I’m not sure that I buy Lou Rosenfeld’s vision of a board of directors that oversees information architecture within an organization. Perhaps we’ll get there one day. And we certainly need visionaries like Lou campaigning for such things if they are ever to exist. But I hate for IAs to think that unless they have an IA department they aren’t really doing EIA. Sure it’s easier with a team. But I think even one person, with the backing of their department, can make a lot of change in the right direction.

At some point, you’ll need more than one IA. I certainly found this at PeopleSoft. We needed one IA to keep the websites running smoothly. But we also needed someone who started to work at this more strategic, inter-departmental level. Someone who understands the basic, core principles of IA and sees them implemented throughout the organization, even if they have to do a lot of the implementing themselves.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t see EIA as this big, different, evolutionary progression from “regular” IA. EIA is regular IA, just with a slight tweak in focus.

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I returned home from the IA Summit 2007 last night, and a burr has been rubbing my hide ever since. Since the Summit happened in Las Vegas this year, there was a lot of talk about the UX of Las Vegas, and how bad it was. Or rather, that Las Vegas didn’t really have a UX because it was bad. Because if you planned a UX it had to be a good one.

Huh?

Folks, everything that we come into contact with we have an experience with. That experience may be positive, or negative or neutral. It may be planned or accidental. It may be created out of an effort to make the world a better place. Or it may result from manipulative and selfish motivations. Either way, we (the users) are having an experience with said item, be it a website, a hotel, a towel or a piece of gum. Not to mention the fact that these are subjective determinations unique to each individual.

What I don’t understand is when the term “UX” took on the implicit connotation that to have a UX, whatever it is must derive from a place of wanting to improve the world. When did UX mean to make things better and good, to be altruistic and benevolent? Now, don’t get me wrong. Those are very noble goals, and they are certainly motivators for the work I do. But, come on.

“User experience” is a neutral term, in and of itself. It’s something that just exists, that just happens. Labeling it as a good UX or a poor UX or a manipulative UX is needed to clarify what type of experience we are talking about. For as much as IAs love their labels, this is a strange instance for us to forget them.

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Andy and I finished up our work with Linden Labs and Second Life at the end of last week. We presented our findings and recommendations to the team, and had some good discussions about future directions they can go in. It was an intense, fun project, full of unexpected joys and experiences.

The team we had on this project was great. The folks at Linden are amazing—so insightful, so passionate, so committed to making Second Life better for their residents. That was probably the thing that stood out the most to me—just how passionate everyone we worked with was; both on the Linden team and the residents we talked with. People just don’t get excited like that with enterprise software. We couldn’t help but get caught up in their excitement. It led to a very fun project—much laughing and good team spirit as we explored the world together.

As Andy mentioned when we started this project, at Adaptive Path we don’t have a prescribed methodology that we apply to every project. Rather, we have approaches that we tailor to each individual situation. It was interesting the way our approach changed and worked in the unique environment of Second Life. Some things, like the way we conducted interviews, were the same as in the real world. If anything, they were enhanced by having a visual representation of the interviewee and us on the screen. (Though I think we still wish that we had found an animation to let us shake hands and other forms of body language.) At other times we found that our usual methods didn’t work so well. We’d start whiteboarding and then realize that we had just drawn a web interface. We had to consciously remind ourselves to step out of the web box.

The response we have gotten to this project has been overwhelmingly positive. Residents and the blogosphere alike are happy that Linden is working on making their product better. Blogging about the project as we were working on it was also something new for us. We thank Linden for being open to us trying this form of a case study.

I think the AP team has realized that there may be something in the future of virtual worlds and it’s something we’ll be watching, and participating in. I know I’m not ready to abandon Andromache Ayres yet—she’ll still be hanging out in Second Life in the future.

So thanks Linden Lab, for this opportunity. You have a great team and were a great partner to work with.

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When Nate Bolt of Bolt | Peters first came to me when I was an information architect at PeopleSoft suggesting we do online recruiting for our user studies, I was skeptical. I had always recruited users using a recruiting agency. It was a painful process, but one that I was familiar with, and therefore comfortable with.

But Nate showed us the joy that is online recruiting, catching people while they are in their passionate task. As the team at Bolt | Peters worked with Ethnio software, it became a joy to do recruiting. My fellow researchers and I would sit around the computer screen, watching the results of the screener survey come through. We’d pick and chose who we thought would be a good subject. Recruiting had become fun.

When Andy and I got to the point in the Second Life project to recruit users, I went in with high hopes. We got a list of recommended users from Linden, all of whom were very insightful. But Linden didn’t have a stash of new users in their back pocket to recommend to us. So, Andy and I decided we’d hang out in “newbie” areas and find folks to talk to. It would be a snap.

Boy, were we wrong. I spent hours walking up to people, checking their profile to see how “old” they were, and then IMing them my pick-up line. “Hi, I’m working on a project to improve Second Life. Do you have a half hour to help me out?” I was surprised at the number of people who turned me down. They were about to log off. They weren’t interested. They completely ignored me. I felt like the market researches that hang out in malls asking passer-bys if they’d like to take a survey.

Why was it so easy to get people using Ethnio’s recruiting tool, yet so hard to find people in world? I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences in experiences and why they were different. I think first, in world we were coming up to people cold. With the Ethnio recruiting, people had filled out a survey first saying they were interested in participating in the study. We were essentially doing the recruiting survey by talking to folks.

I also realized that what I was asking probably sounded fishy to folks. I was looking for people who have only been in world a month or two. They aren’t real secure in what they are doing in world. I was asking for a ½ hour of their time, and to call a 1-800 number and talk to a stranger. There’s a fair bit of distrust in the world, especially for new folks as they learn the ropes. Perhaps asking them to join the study without establishing any trust ahead of time was just too much for some.

The folks that we did get to talk with us were great. But if I were to do recruiting in world again, I would approach it differently. I think I would advertise the study as an event that people who were motivated to participate could come to. It wouldn’t quite be the same as getting them in the middle of their passionate task, but I think it would be more efficient. And it would help establish me as a legitimate researcher, not someone who is working a scam.

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We are about halfway through our user research interviews. The research process has been an interesting combination of real world behaviors mixed with the Second Life experience. We’re conducting individual interviews with residents. Andy and myself meet the interviewee at a special conference room Linden Lab has let us use for the occasion. We all sit around the conference table, chatting a bit in world, and then we call the interviewee on the phone.

The rest of the interview happens as interviews have in most other projects. We talk about passionate tasks, goals and motivations, pain points and successes. We conduct almost all of the interview over the phone. The only difference between these interviews and others I have done is that we can see each other’s avatars on the computer screen. We aren’t making use of the ability to make our avatar shake hands or do other gestures. It’s all a verbal exchange on the phone.

But somehow it feels very different than other remote interviews I’ve conducted. The fact that there is a representation of each of us on our screens makes the encounter feel more personal. The way the resident has customized the look of their avatar gives us an insight into their personality that you don’t get from calling someone you’ve never met.

I’m a bit frustrated because I feel like we should be taking advantage of the opportunities that being in this virtual world presents to us. But we haven’t figured out how to do that. Talking seems the most efficient and effective way of learning. Using the IM or chat in world slows down the conversation, and you lose the dimensions of voice intonation, pauses, laughing and other verbal clues. And we don’t really gain anything by following an avatar around. In this brave new world, old tried and true methods seem to be working best. Who would have thunk it?

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A lot of the work I’ve done as an information architect has been on systems that I don’t use. I’m not a purchaser of enterprise software, or a database admin who has to keep one up and running. I’m not an electrical engineer who gets to choose which control panels and circuit boards belong in a new factory. But I’ve designed successful information architectures for websites that help people not like me do the things they need to do.

Occasionally I get to work on a project that is closer to my own experience — an e-commerce site, a news site, or a photo sharing site. My own personal experiences have certainly given me an insight into how people use these sites. However, user research is still invaluable to get a full picture of how people use the system. I am not the target audience, even if I do buy things online, read news, and share my photos.

The Second Life project has been interesting because I find myself drawn to the world in ways that I haven’t been with other projects. I never spent hours on the weekend exploring how PeopleSoft General Ledger worked. But I find myself intrigued by the Second Life world. I want to learn the lingo, explore the controls, figure out what constitutes good design in world. I don’t want to be a newbie who doesn’t know how to fly or pick things up.

We start user research today and I’m really excited to talk with residents to get their perspectives. Because even though I am a resident of the Second Life world, I am not the target audience.

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