Adaptive Path Blog

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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Our project with Second Life has kicked off and we are starting with discovery, talking with stakeholders, trying to get a better feel for the pain they’ve been feeling, the direction they want the product to go in, and so on.

Yesterday I had my first “interview.” I shadowed a liaison for about an hour, in world. Now, I’ve done user research before. I’ve done my fair share of remote testing, phone interviews, screen sharing with tools such as Ethnio. But yesterday, yesterday was just cool.

It started out with me updating my Second Life software, since it had been a number of weeks since I had logged on. Then I had to download Skype since that would be the easiest way to talk with the liaison, rather than doing chat in world.

I logged in and the liaison magically found me. She teleported to her office and we spent the next hour talking, walking around the world, teleporting to different locations so she could show me how things work. She was so energetic and passionate about Second Life it was hard not to get excited with her. I still don’t have a good grasp on just how big and gnarly their problems are. But I have a much better idea of what life is like in world. Which is good because until then all my time there had been spent standing in an empty field by myself trying to figure out how to put on a different shirt.

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I received an email the other day asking me about resources I would recommend for someone who is interested in learning more about writing for the web and the science of content management. I did a quick browse through my bookmarks and came up with these starting points. I like these resources because they are good aggregators of content, a way to keep on top of trends, or are communities to get involved with.

CMS Watch [ http://www.cmswatch.com/ ] is a great place to learn about the industry, what products are out there, trends and what not. There’s a lot of good stuff in their information architecture section, even if IA isn’t directly in your realm of control.

The Content Wrangler [ http://thecontentwrangler.com/ ] is also a great source for news in the industry, as well as collected articles published elsewhere. They also have a great list of upcoming conferences and events.

There is also the CMS Pros [ http://www.cmprofessionals.org/ ] which is an organization focused on content management.

The Information Architecture Institute [ http://www.iainstitute.org/library/ ] has a library of resources — both online, books, presentations, and blogs — that cover CMS and writing for the web. If you become a member (it’s not that expensive) you get access to their great mailing list of professionals all over the globe.

Boxes and Arrows [ http://www.boxesandarrows.com/ ] is an online publication that focuses on information architecture and the user experience. There are a number of articles on CMS, and how content can be better created and organized on the web.

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Last week Todd Wilkens and I did our two-day Beyond Best Practices training for a big, multi-national corporation. We spend a lot of time in that workshop talking about the future, the types of changes and affects user experience professionals can have on their projects and companies. We talk about methods and examples and ways folks in UX can bring about the change they’d like to see in their organizations.

One of the attendees came up to me during a break and asked me a simple question. She said, “what do you do, when after a re-org, someone comes in and says ‘can’t you just put an image there, and change this text, and oh, re-label the global nav to be this instead?’” She said this is a constant battle, where they are forced to defend their position as user experience experts to anyone in the marketing department who has “done web stuff before” and has a new, better way to do things.

I spoke to her about the need of defining roles, of picking battles, of creating a record of success that proves her decisions are good decisions with positive outcomes. I spoke about the need to channel the excitement and energy into something that will support her in her efforts to build a user-centered site. I spoke of the need of having executive support behind her that can back up her decisions. But I still can’t help but feel that I let her down, that I could have helped her more.

Talking with her, it brought back memories of my days at PeopleSoft. We were always putting out fires, being reactive instead of proactive, and constantly fighting against being treated as order takers by the product marketers. The PeopleSoft web team did a great job of proving that we knew the business of the web, and eventually we earned respect for our knowledge and expertise. But that respect took a long time to build, and there were a lot of battles that we fought, many of which were lost (being forced by VPs to call “Training” “Education Services” comes to mind).

Working at Adaptive Path, I’ve had the luxury of not having to deal with these types of project issues anymore. Sure, we have our share of issues, but clients come to us when they are ready to work with us. And if we push them to do something they aren’t ready for, well, as much as we may not like it they just don’t do it. But we don’t have to live day-to-day with the compromises of a corporate site. As external consultants we have a different relationship to the stakeholders and business owners. We are brought in for our expertise, we (usually) don’t have to fight to prove it.

It reminded me that for all that we are doing to push the field forward, there are still a lot of folks in the trenches, fighting the good fight over whether to change the link from “training” to “education services.” And damn, I’m glad that it isn’t me anymore.

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I spent this past Holiday week in northern Colorado visiting family and friends. We had great fun and lots of wonderful food, as I hope many did. While I was there, talk turned to the internet and the web, as it is aft to do with my boyfriend and me, and I was struck at the number of people who were on dial-up or had no internet access at all.

Dial-up? I haven’t used a modem since, well; I can’t remember how long it’s been. All the designing and consulting that I do as part of my job assumes a broadband connection. I can’t remember the last time a client was concerned about how a site would perform over a 56k modem. With all the Flash, big images and Ajax on sites these days, how slow and painful it must it be to surf the web.

What kind of effect is this going to have in the long term? How many folks will go without because the cost of a satellite connection is prohibitory expensive? How do usage habits change when the only access comes via work or requires a drive to a local library? What kind of cultural divide is growing between those that live and breath the web without even thinking about it and those who can’t?

These used to be issues that were often discussed, but I hardly hear about them anymore. I always assumed it was because they were solved, not that they’re just being ignored.

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Lately I’ve gotten the feeling that there are those who feel that information architecture and interaction design are at odds with each other. I don’t mean to get into another debate on defining the damn thing or anything like that. But for me, information architecture and interaction design have always been very closely intertwined. Where does one stop and the other begin? It’s often hard to tell and in the end, does it really matter?

Adaptive Path recently did a project focusing on vertical search, and specifically integrating multiple search engines into a single experience. I consider the work I did on that project to be mostly information architecture because it was so focused on search — a key component in the “ways to find things” toolbox.

But it also required a lot of interaction design. How do you take three very different interfaces and provide one overall experience to them all? Good question. There was much wireframing and musing over the controls and filters we presented to people to figure that out.

Interaction design is certainly the darling of the Internet and user experience community right now. I think the excitement of Ajax and what it brings to the web experience is a driving factor behind this. Sprinkling Ajaxy-goodness on a page is cool. Spending the day thinking about how can we make things move and glow and change effortlessly? That’s the most fun part of interaction design (at least for me).

But that doesn’t mean that information architecture has to take a backseat, that due to its librarian roots IA must be quietly sitting in a corner pushing up its glasses and wearing a cardigan sweater (no offence to the librarians out there. Remember, I am a librarian after all). But IA is more than just rearranging brochures and product descriptions on a marketing site. There are a lot of really cool and interesting IA-centric problems out there still waiting to be solved.

Jesse asked me today what it was that was exciting about IA. There’s lots. Take that vertical search project for one; search is way cool and very interesting and nowhere near solved. With search comes good things like metadata, tagging, controlled vocabularies and taxonomies. Okay, so a taxonomy doesn’t sound or look as cool and sexy as Ajax does. But for the folks so inclined towards it, there are really slick things that can be done with a solid information governance policy. Which gets us to Enterprise Information Architecture; that umbrella concept that runs through a whole organization.

But we are still left with the underlying feeling that infrastructure is not hot. Think back to Jesse’s Elements of User Experience [ http://www.jjg.net/elements/pdf/elements.pdf ], or Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn where he talks about the rates of component change in buildings [ http://sb.longnow.org/Bldgs%20slides.html ]. Information architecture fits squarely in the infrastructure layer. It’s the support that everything else hangs on. If you can’t find what you are looking for, it doesn’t matter how well designed the item is.

We still need IA to make a good user experience. All the Ajax in the world couldn’t make a great site if there wasn’t a solid structure and organization holding it together. I hope we don’t lose sight of that.

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Search is a subject that I’ve always been interested in. Especially internal or enterprise search, within a site. Not web search like Google or Yahoo!. Sure there’s lots of search engine optimization (SEO) or marketing (SEM) tricks you can do to improve your ranking in the web search engines. But that’s never really held any fascination for me.

Enterprise search — now that’s fascinating! It’s much easier to tune an enterprise search engine to make the results you want float to the top. (Assuming, of course, you have access to your IT department to make the changes you want.) Weighting of metadata is a simple way to do this. Tools like Verity or Vivisimo make categorization, “best bets,” and other changes to results lists easy easier to do. Though I have to admit, the librarian in me is very skeptical of the promises that those companies make. I don’t trust their auto-classification engines to do a job as good as a person could (or to do it in the time they say it takes). And I firmly believe that having someone to care and feed the classification/taxonomy/vocabulary/whatever-you-want-to-call-it is the best way to get good results.

Recently, I started looking into what is being called “vertical search.” It’s taking the approaches traditionally used on enterprise search (like classifying results) and applying it to the web at large. Folks like Kosmix and Clusty are leading the charge. This sounds a lot like what Northern Light (remember them?) was doing back in 1999 and 2000. However, unlike Northern Light, who used people to come up with their categories (the blue folders), Kosmix and Clusty are using complex algorithms to determine what the web pages are about. Kosmix, for example, focuses on a subset of the web (e.g., travel, health, politics) and subdivides the results into different categories.

Just like with the enterprise search engines, I’m a bit skeptical about this approach. The classification that they are doing isn’t very sophisticated (they use categories like “basic information” or “blogs”), but it is certainly more helpful than a list of thousands of results ala Google results. It will be interesting to see where this goes. A hybrid approach using both algorithms and human-moderated categories seems like it would give the best results. Though I don’t know of anyone really taking that kind of two-pronged approach. Do you?

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Amanda asked me a question the other day that got me thinking. “What is the name for navigation systems that emerge from tags?”

Hrm. Good question. “Folksonomy” is the term being used for an uncontrolled vocabulary that is made by lumping together different people’s tags. But I don’t know that I’ve heard of an emergent navigation system based solely on tags.

The more I started thinking about navigation based on tags, the more the information architect in me started to worry. The problem with free-form tagging is that there is no relationship between the terms, except colocation, and frequency of use/appearance. There are limited applications (that I can think of) where a navigational structure based on colocation and frequency would be the optimal method to use (news may be one, where the “top news” items are highlighted in a persistent nav sort of treatment, but would change as the news changes). The risk of the system becoming a self-fulfilled feedback loop is large; a small number of tags bubble to the top and then stay at the top because everyone keeps clicking on them. The Technorati’s top 100 list is like that in many ways.

Amanda pointed out that on Flickr and You Tube the navigation is aggregated “stuff”: Most Popular, Yours, Your Contacts, etc. I would argue that the navigation still isn’t driven by tags in these cases. What the sites have done is to create spaces where the content within the space is organized by tags, but those spaces are consistent, ever-present and not tag driven. “My Contacts” is not a tag. The content that appears within “My Contacts” is tag driven - it’s the photo stream of people I’ve tagged as friends. But “My Contacts” doesn’t change to “vacation” just because “vacation” is the most popular tag at the moment.

The idea that the global navigation of a site changes and flexes based upon the ebb and flow of tags used on the site screams out against the ideals of consistent, clear global navigation that I’ve believed for years. But after the knee-jerk reaction has passed, I wonder if there is an appropriate use for such a system. I’m just not sure.

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