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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?
As per annual tradition, a number of us are headed to the IA Summit to speak or just soak in all the IA goodness that we can. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that this year’s Summit is Miami. This time around, Leah Buley will tell us How to be a user experience team of one while Brandon Schauer will be talking about the Long Wow of user experience. I’m honored to be on the stage with Mags Hanley of WTG and Karen Loasby of the BBC where we will be talking about developing junior programs for user experience teams. Stop by and say hi!
Microsoft is holding MIX, its annual “future of the web” conference in Las Vegas next month. Kim Lenox and I are excited to be bringing our message to this venue as part of the user experience track debuting this year. On March 6th we will lead four intensive sessions over the course of the day. Each session includes hands-on activities where you get a chance to really learn something new. We are focusing on design strategy, interaction design, information architecture and design methods. Participate in the entire day with us and you will take away all the techniques needed to be successful in defining and designing your next product.
If spending a day with Kim and I in Vegas is enticing enough by itself, then maybe you’ll want to come check out a sneak peek of new IE8 features or compete against your peers in Rock Band. 
If you are going to attend, then please drop me a line at <danh at adaptive path dot com>. We hope to see you there!!
The big news for our 2008 events is that we’re coming home. We’ll have three major events in San Francisco, starting with our UX Intensive, a 4-day hands-on workshop addressing the essential disciplines of user experience: Design Strategy, Design Research. Interaction Design, and Information Architecture. The event takes place February 19-22 at the Hotel Kabuki, in the heart of Japantown (great parking for locals!).
We’ve got an end-of-the-year sale going on with our events, with heavily discounted pricing through December 31. (For example, all four days of UX Intensive SF are currently priced at $1,695, compared to the full registration rate of $2,495. Use promotional code BLOG for an additional 10% off.) Don’t let your 2007 training budget go to waste!
Last month, I traveled to Vancouver for our most recent UX Intensive (and even taught the Information Architecture day, as Chiara couldn’t make it). I took photos of the event, which featured a remarkable number of activities that ensure you just don’t learn about these UX methods — you practice them.
Some of my favorite pics:
Brandon sketches, and a video camera shows what he’s talking about…
There was lots of writing on walls…
Though some groups preferred the floor…
And lots, and lots of stickies…
I was asked to write up a list of favorite design-related books for the newsletter site Freepint. I have no idea when such a thing would be published, and I realized it was ideally suited to the AP Blog. Enjoy! (These are *personal* choices and don’t reflect the views of Adaptive Path blah blah… and add your favorites to the comments…)
The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman. It’s almost hoary to mention it, but it’s one of the few books that changed my life. I’ve written more about it here
Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud. A brilliant long-form essay on the nature of creativity, how humans process visual information, and the power of narrative.
Designing for People, Henry Dreyfuss. Written over 50 years old by America’s pre-eminent industrial designer, it lays out a user-centered design philosophy long before the phrase “user-centered design” entered our professional language. Refreshing clear, straightforward, and free of the BS that clouds much design writing.
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte. These two are required reading for any one involved in communicating visually. (His later two you can pass on.)
Who Built America?, The American Social History Project. This CD-ROM, based on a textbook, set the standard for what a multimedia digital book should be. Developed in 1993, it’s marriage of text, sound, imagery, and, video, along with it’s engagement with archival sources, still inspires.
The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton. The most recent book on the list, but definitely worth inclusion. A delightful book-length essay on the power that architecture has on our emotional state, fabulously illustrated with perfectly-selected photos.
How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand. This is one of those books that every IA has read, even though it has nothing to do with IA. Stewart looks at how buildings evolve over time, and his book serves as a reminder that all of us are creating things that people are going to *use*.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. Still the best “web design” book out there, with a strong focus on what it actually takes to build great sites. And I’m not saying this just because I was a technical editor.
Interface Culture, Steven Johnson. Getting a little long in the tooth, but Johnson’s book is the first extended piece of critical writing on the subject of interface and interaction design from the viewpoint of a non-designer. Valuable in recognizing how interface engage with the culture that creates them.
The Cluetrain Manifesto (multiple authors). Written in the midst of Web 1.0, this tract on what it means for businesses to meaningfully engage in business online contains deep truths that still frighten most organizations.
Design Research, edited by Brenda Laurel. About half to two-thirds of this isn’t all that valuable, but the remainder of the book more than makes up for it. Brenda probes the boundaries of research, which is essential as we design for an increasingly uncertain world.
Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling. What happens when everything is, well, information? Bruce delves into the subject of spimes and reorients your view of things in the world. And, hey, I even dug the (oft-criticized) graphic design.
And heck, why just books? Why not also, The Films of Charles and Ray Eames? So good. So insightful.
(And, of course, there are the books written by my colleagues… but those go without saying…)
On June 28th, Adaptive Path is hosting Alex Wright’s presentation on “Ancient Information Architecture” from 6pm until around 8:30.
See event details, and please RSVP by marking “Attending” or “Watching”.
About the talk:
“Computer science is currently so successful,” wrote the philosopher Werner Kunzel, “that it has no use for its own history.” The technology industry’s relentless fixation on the future has led to a kind of collective historical amnesia, often blinding us to the rich history of information systems that preceded the digital age. In this presentation, writer and information architect Alex Wright will take us on a tour of the deep history of information systems, drawing on material his recently published book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages. From ancient folk taxonomies to Ice Age social networks, classical libraries to medieval memory palaces, Renaissance encyclopedias to early computer networks, people have spent tens of thousands of years developing strategies for coping with an ever-growing stream of data. Along the way, we will look for patterns of information-sharing that seem to recur throughout human history, examining the historical relationship between information technology and social change.
Alex Wright is a writer and information architect who currently works for The New York Times. His articles have appeared in Salon.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Believer, Harvard Magazine, and other national and regional publications. As an information architect, Alex has led projects for Yahoo!, Microsoft, IBM, Harvard University, The Long Now Foundation, and the Internet Archive, among others. He has previously spoken at Gartner Group, the Institute of Design-Chicago, UC-Berkeley, the ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit, Seybold, and various Web industry conferences. Alex holds an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College and a B.A. In English and American Literature from Brown University. He writes regularly about technology and design at http://www.alexwright.org/
I did my Master’s thesis project (play with the prototype) on creating digital piles and piling as an alternative to folders and messy desktops. It’s interesting to see that Apple, who did work in this area about 15 years ago, is finally incorporating them into the Leopard version of OSX, albeit in a way I didn’t expect, making the piles spring out of the Dock, not on the desktop. It was rumored to be added in earlier versions but nothing ever appeared. Now it seems it has. Nifty.
I wonder, however, if putting these stacks in the Dock loses some of the readiness at hand and visibility that make our physical piles so useful. When I researched how and why people pile papers on their physical desks, I found some really interesting things about the anatomy of piles and how they get used that I then tried to build into my piling system. Based on my research, I came up with a set of design principles for piles:
Looking over the new Stacks feature, I find few of these design principles being used. Granted, no one at Apple asked me, but I have to wonder how much the designers looked at physical piling behavior before creating Stacks. Most of my principles are fairly obvious with even a brief study of piling behavior. I didn’t spend overlong researching my piling system, but the time I spent in the field was invaluable to understanding what seems to be obvious, but definitely has some nuances that could be reflected in any digital re-creation.
I also can’t help but wonder whether having Stacks on the desktop instead of in the Dock wouldn’t have been a better design choice, so that some of the usefulness of analog piles could be recreated and reimagined more broadly. This doesn’t mean that Stacks won’t be useful, but possibly not as useful as they could be. Imagine physically being able to “scatter” stacks by holding down your mouse button and wiggling it over a pile. Or simply being able to see at a glance what the top three items you last touched in a pile were.
Apple, I think, did the same thing with Widgets — marginalized a powerful tool. By pushing widgets too much off to the side (effectively creating a widget mode) instead of incorporating them onto the desktop itself, they rendered widgets a lot less useful. I fear that’s the fate of Stacks as well. We shall see.
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.
That’s right — Adaptive Path is coming to Europe with our UX Intensive in Amsterdam. Four days (18-21 June) of training with hands-on activities taught by:
We know that the European UX community has evolved, but there has been little training to really meet its sophistication. We’re excited to bring our workshop for intermediate-to-advanced practitioners to The Continent.
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