Adaptive Path Blog

On every project, there comes that time when the original information architecture has been picked apart and your team has worked out a new structure for the site, and you think to yourselves, “this seems right, but how do we know for sure?” This question becomes especially important when the new site structure also suggests a need for new sections, new content, and new features.

This was the situation we faced on our recent project to redesign Changemakers.com. Before we took the leap to design, the team felt that validating our proposed design was important, especially for a redesign that fundamentally overhauls a system’s structure. The trouble is, how?

After rejecting more traditional techniques like card sorts, we hit on the idea of a scenario-based exercise to help us validate the proposed IA. Read on to discover what we did, and how to run your own scenario-based IA validation exercise.

Looking Before You Leap

During user research for Changemakers, we found that Changemakers.com serves as an important social network for change-minded people and that users were interested in finding other people through two important lenses: location and issues. We also knew that the Changemakers team had been planning to add a groups functionality to the site and our user research reinforced that this would be an important feature for their users, as well. In our redesigned information architecture, we identified these areas as key hubs for the new information architecture.

With this revised information architecture, we setup a working session with the Changemakers team where we all rolled up our sleeves and got busy with our scenario-based IA validation exercise.

After briefly presenting the revised IA, we shared a user scenario to show how a person might expect to move through the content and information on the site. (No interface sketches were included at this point, just allusions to the types of information that users would be finding within the scenario.) We then asked the team to follow the same story and, using a basic storyboard template, sketch ideas for the corresponding UI. We took about 15 minutes to sketch, and then another 30 minutes for everyone to share their sketches. Working quickly helped the team, some of whom had never sketched interfaces before, to get over any initial fears and just start sketching.

The resulting storyboards helped us validate that the IA was essentially complete for supporting a target user experience-i.e., nothing major was absent that would have prevented “Lucy,” our fictitious user, from achieving her goal.

In doing this exercise, we were pleased to see that the new hub sections of the site (locations, issues, and groups) seemed to have natural, intuitive relationships—even in rough sketches. The team also ended up sketching some new ideas that we hadn’t considered-for example, a “projects” section. These ideas weren’t pervasive or urgent enough to warrant revising the IA, but they definitely hinted at different directions that it might make sense for Changemakers to take the site in the future.

If you’re interested in trying this out on your own projects, here are the steps we followed and some sample templates of the Storyboard and IA Scenario. Good luck, and let us know how it goes.

Scenario-Based IA Validation Exercise

1. Write a scenario that describes a user moving through the site to achieve a specific goal. Include starting points and ending points. Where does the user begin? What information brings them into the site? What do they move through along the way? Where do they end up? What do they do with what they find?

2. Create a storyboard template that roughly maps to this scenario. Include a blank panel for each “scene” in the scenario.

3. Using simple visuals (stock photos or rough sketches) take the team through the scenario. Visuals help because they reorient everyone from a systems-oriented, IA view to a people- and usage-centered view of the system.

4. After talking the team through the scenario, give everyone a storyboard template, and ask them to sketch out the screens that the user is seeing at each point in the scenario.

5. Give everyone about 15 minutes to sketch as much as they can and then the opportunity to share their sketches with the larger team.

6. If new information, functionality, or categories emerge in the sketches, point them out, and discuss as a group their impact on the new information architecture.

It’s a rare and special moment when life hands you a new first. I had one just a few weeks ago, when I found myself on my first panel discussion. It was at a gathering of software product managers who use Scrum, an Agile software development approach.

Here’s what I learned: when speaking on a panel, you never know what question you’re going to get next.  That makes each one feel a bit like the pop-up that gave me a black eye the last time I tried to play softball. I could see it coming; it appeared to be slow and easy. But alas, I just couldn’t land it in my mitt.

Normally I love to spout off. To an audience? Even better.  But this was a little different, because I’m sensitive to the way that the Agile and UX communities talk and think about each other, and, frankly, because the questions coming from the audience were so very specific about how to run an Agile project. So I was kind of shy.  I did a fairly good job dodging questions until someone threw a zinger aimed straight for me…

“How do UX people measure burndown?”

Crack. Swish. Thud. No answer.

Burndown, in case you’re wondering, is basically a measurement of how quickly the team is doing the work. Each day, everyone gives an estimate of how many hours of work they have left, and the estimates are all added up, and that’s the burndown, or velocity, of the work. If you measure this regularly, you should see a steady and precipitous drop, steep and to the right. That’s a healthy project.  Because Agile evolved as an antidote to slow, unfathomably-difficult-to-predict waterfall projects, knowing that things are progressing at a brisk pace and that the work is actually likely to finish when predicted is understandably important.

But I have to say, the question stumped me. Part of me wanted to quickly manufacture a way to actually measure UX burndown, to show that us UX folks can play nicely. But another part of me — the rude, argumentative part –  wanted to say, “that’s not the point!”

Flareups, not burndowns

I’ve thought more about this since then, and here’s my beef: where UX design really has the most to offer Agile is not in getting the nitty gritty design work done. Placing the buttons and aligning the labels must be done just as surely as dotting your I’s and crossing your T’s. But that’s not the high value UX work.

No, what UX designers offer that’s special is help building a vision for what the product can and should be.  This is not a reductive “getting things done” approach.  It’s a generative “what does this have the potential to be” kind of approach. A good UX designer should encourage the team to ask that question, facilitate a process that brings the whole team along in answering it, and then make those answers tangible, doable, and, yes, a little bit pretty.  (Jeff Patton, who is one of the strongest and most coherent voices for Agile + UX unity, has more to say on the importance of the designer as facilitator over on his blog, Agile Product Design.)  Basically, I’m talking about the opposite of a burndown. Dare I say it? A design flareup!

Sprinting with design

That’s not to suggest that design must equal bloat. In fact, at Adaptive Path we have some ideas that we’ll be sharing in our upcoming two-day workshop Good Design Faster for how to make design as lean, swift, and results-oriented as Agile. Much like Agile development, our take on design sprints includes short, fixed periods of productive abundance and a “finished” product at the end — in our case an interactive prototype. (You can find out more if you’re interested, and register with the code “BLOG” to save 10%.)

I do believe that Agile and UX can find a way to work peaceably and productively together. In fact, many teams are doing so already.  But we haven’t gotten very good at sharing the hows and the whys with folks in the Agile community yet. It’s time. If you’re doing interesting work with Agile teams as a UX designer, please consider submitting to Agile 2009, so we can all learn from each other.

Back before I discovered the joys of user experience, I wanted to work in TV. I loved to watch TV, and so I naturally assumed that I’d also love to work on it. I soon discovered that knowing how much effort goes into making TV actually sucks the joy out of watching it. But not before I put in some time at, ahem, Fox News Channel. Yes. I know. Please forgive me. I comfort myself with the thought that this was way back when the channel first launched and before it achieved its astoundingly evil successes — back when the only commercial spend it could drum up was ads selling products to protect you in the event of an intruder or a nasty fall.

Recently I had a chance to talk with someone who still works in TV — really good TV — and gets to think about user experience, too!

Audrey Chen is the senior information architect at Comedy Central, where she leads IA for the web sites behind some of the funniest shows on the air. Audrey shared how she came by her awesome job, and then managed to grow an IA practice where one hadn’t existed before. She also touched upon emerging challenges for IAs, including designing for community and tagging for video. Audrey will be speaking at UX Week about information architecture in TV Land. I’ll be taking notes.

In the meantime, you can read the entire interview with Audrey here.

If you’re interested in seeing Audrey (and others) at UX Week, you can register using the code BLOG for 10% off the price.

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The good folks at Boxes and Arrows have made the audio available from my IA Summit presentation, How to be UX Team of One, and I’ve synced it to the slides on Slideshare.  This presentation features lots of tips and tricks for anyone who works as a solo UX practitioner from time to time. It also includes some dirty secrets and ends with a Howard Dean style whoop and holler. Enjoy!

Even though it was in Miami this year, a California kind of vision came to me at the Information Architecture Summit last weekend. Everywhere I looked, I saw pioneers and homesteaders.

Pioneers

It used to be that I went to the Summit because of the pioneers. It was the one place where you could find all of IA’s early champions all together. There’s Jesse James (Garrett) and Kid Peterme! The Argus Gang! Polarbear hunters! They all came together year after year at the Summit. And even if you were a new kid in town, you could walk around in your stiff new boots and your ten gallon hat, and sort of bask in the reflected glory.

Homesteaders

But this year I found myself inspired by a different group — the crop of people who are working as teams of one in organizations that haven’t previously known user experience professionals. And these are the homesteaders. It’s like they’re building little ranches and growing crops in soil that can be hard to work with and — heaven help them — they’re spreading our civilization to places where it’s never been before.

I used to be a homesteader myself. My presentation at the Summit on how to be a user experience team of one was my attempt to share my thoughts on the experience. But even I was surprised by how many people I found last weekend who identified with the situation, and how much they seemed to crave a larger discussion about how to be successful when you’re a team of one.

Hardscrabble living

The challenge is, when you’re just bringing UX to an organization, the role can feel very embattled and small, and it can rattle your faith in your own contributions. I met a lot of people who told impressive stories about what they were accomplishing, but who nevertheless seemed almost sheepish about their work and how they were going about it.

From time to time I also hear more established folks in the field talking about how IA is yesterday’s news and the future is interaction design, design strategy, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. That’s stuff and nonsense. Don’t get me wrong, those things are all great and important and it’s wonderful that we’re advancing collectively as a field, but there are still a lot of places where basic problems of structure, findability, and language have yet to be resolved, and it’s the homesteaders who are making that happen.

Homesteaders, the work you’re doing helps us all. You’re spreading our field to new outposts, and you deserve as much support as we can give you.

So, I’ll open up the question, what can we do to help?

One of the perks of working at Adaptive Path is the opportunity to meet and share ideas with others from all over the world who are working on the same problems.

Last night Henning and I had the pleasure of meeting with the German chapter of the IXDA , where we learned that practitioners in Europe are facing the same challenges that we face in the states.

Chief among them is a business community that is increasingly curious about experience design, but who still don’t quite get it. While the success of products like the iPod and the Wii have certainly made decision makers more receptive to the idea of design strategy, it turns out we’re all still working our way towards a common language that helps us get the message across to people outside of our field.

Service design is evidently also a hot topic just like back home, and in Germany as at Adaptive Path, practitioners are still figuring out what that means. Henning cleared his throat to permit himself a small rant on the topic, which was actually quite insightful and got some heads nodding. He pointed out that service design is nothing new. It’s been happening in places like restaurants, travel, and retail for years. Designers, he says, can learn a lot by training their gazes on those established fields and seeing how they create a cohesive experience for their customers.

Many thanks in particular to German Leon and Neil Clavin for organizing the event, and to Oliver Kapelle from NeoMotion for giving us a warm soapbox from which to preach our thoughts on design strategy.

A friend just clued me in to the Feltron Annual Report (the 2007 edition recently came out).

How have I not stumbled across this marvelous example of information visualization before? The Feltron Annual Report is designer Nicholas Felton’s report of his last year, a detailed catalog of personal minutia like amount of coffee consumed, music listened to, books read, locations visited, public transport taken, and lots more. Best of all, it’s full of fascinating charts, graphs, and numbers — all well considered and beautifully rendered.

I think this would be fascinating to anyone (check it out!), but it’s particularly interesting to me because I’ve recently given myself a personal project to improve my visual skills and sensibilities.

Unlike others at Adaptive Path, I don’t have a formal background in fine art, industrial design, etc. I come from the very left brained world of library and information science. While I love that Adaptive Path is a home for people with lots of different types of backgrounds, I’ve seen the benefits that come with being able to visualize a concept quickly and communicate precisely what you mean with a modicum of aesthetic integrity. Even better if you can do it with a sharpie and a sticky note.

My self improvement project has been slow going. I started with Betty Edward’s classic Drawing From the Right Side of the Brain. I realized that I am actually capable of doing a passable drawing of something when it’s sitting in front of me. The challenge is to be able to visualize something in my head and then render it on paper. I think this has something to do with why I like the Feltron Annual Report so much. It’s not just clever and gorgeous and a sterling example of good infographics, it also gives you a little insight into Nicholas Felton’s life in ways that I wouldn’t have thought to to ask, but which he clearly had a vision for how to communicate.

So now I’m working my way through a rapid viz workbook, which promises to teach me to transform the ideas that are in my head into something visual and tangible, but it too has been a challenge. I’ve hit a wall at elementary perspective drawing. Anyone out there know how to draw in two point perspective? Tips and tricks are most welcome.

Now don’t be jealous, dear readers, but I finally got to fly on Virgin America. And, yes, the reports are all true. It is very cool. From the clever safety video to the intelligent lighting system, it’s evident that Virgin America has an expansive understanding of what constitutes experience, and that they’ve thought very broadly about how to make that experience as delightful as possible for passengers.

Meet Red
Of course the cherry on top is the inflight entertainment system mounted in the headrest in front of you. It offers a range of services that read like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — food, talk, read, play, shop. This entertainment system is called Red, and when the flight crew talk about it, they call it that, “Red,” like that’s its name. They say things like “Red can do it all.” “Check Red for the prices.” “Open the pod bay doors, Red.” Oh, sorry. That’s HAL.

A Touch Screen World
You find yourself surrounded by people using these little touch screens — watching tv, chatting with other passengers, playing games, listening to music — and this is what makes it really interesting. It’s like being plunked down in the middle of an immersive market test. Different user behaviors are on display all around you. To your left, to your right, through the cracks in the seat in front of you, you see:

• The Fearless Explorers – easily tapping away at their screens, scrolling around, hopping back and forth between pages.
• The Uncertain Ones - a wobbly finger extended slowly towards the screen, pausing there, suspended in mid-air, clearly unsure of what to touch, for fear that it might be the wrong thing.
• The Forceful Pokers – a finger pointed like an accusation, poking at the screen with slow determination. The guy in the seat next to me was a Forceful Poker. The passenger sitting in front of him had to turn to say “you’re pressing too hard!” (Evidently I’m not the first to observe the forceful poking. A PopSci blogger complains about it here.)

I was actually really intrigued by this idea of behavior models for a touch screen world, and I made a grand plan to do further undercover research on my return flight and share my new model with all of you. Alas, my plan was thwarted.

What Happens When Red Goes Offline
On the flight back, we all received a typewritten letter informing us that Red was regrettably out of commission. We would all receive a free drink and a snack for our troubles. As it turned out, they never gave out the free snack. And not having Red to play with somehow drew my attention to all the little things that detracted from the experience. The flight was an hour late. Grumble grumble. The arm rests don’t fully fold up into the seats. How are you supposed to lean into your companion and take a nap? The adjustable headrests don’t adjust. Maybe mine was just broken. And no airline magazine! What the hell? Where is my crossword puzzle? Whither my beloved, beloved sudoku?

Still Air Travel, After All
So, is Virgin America really the nightclub in the sky that some have described it to be? Um, probably not. Turns out it’s still just air travel, with all of the uncertainties and annoyances that it has always had. And my disappointing trip back home was a strong reminder of the need to provide compelling alternatives to even the most complete computer-based solutions. But overall, it’s clearly a very thoughtfully designed experience. And the world can certainly use more of those.

Last weekend at the Dwell on Design conference I had a minor revelation when I passed by a collection of sample boards and wondered to myself, why don’t we make deliverables like that?

For those of you who aren’t frustrated DIY decorator types like me, sample boards are used in interior design to convey the general feeling of a space while showing proposed materials, colors, finishes, furniture, etc. They’re a bit like mood boards, except that instead of a general visual design direction, sample boards focus on the real thing – real materials, real layout. Imagine a big poster board covered with floor plans and fabric samples and little tile cutaways and sketches and product images – basically a gestalt of structure, texture, feeling, and visual richness.

There are a lot of deliverables that interior design and experience design do have in common, but as far as I know, there is no equivalent for this type of holistic view in the work that we do. This is a real shortcoming.

At Adaptive Path we talk a lot about how to communicate the feeling and, well, experience in experience design. And yet our deliverables are often focused on very specific aspects of a project – a site architecture, a set of wireframes, a content inventory. These are surely all important things, but rather narrow in purpose. This often puts a burden on our clients to do some mental synthesis to imagine the resulting experience. Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don’t.

Perhaps we could alleviate some of this burden with a sample-board-like deliverable (experience boards, anyone?) that blends structure, design principles, core behaviors, characteristic interactions, and even, maybe, a little bit of feeling. Preferably involving poster board.

I actually think Adaptive Path’s recent movie for Charmr is a good example of a deliverable that brings together feeling, specifications, and experience, but movies like this take some effort to put together. Are there simpler ways to accomplish the same thing with less overhead? Is anybody out there producing deliverables that communicate the gestalt? If so, please share.