Adaptive Path Blog

Check out this video technology sketch of a smart wine rack. thingM says these sketches are part of a product development process that “focus on users’ experiences first and technological details later”. They also mention that a final product might not end up looking anything like the sketch because the point of making it is to develop the conceptual model of the experience.

Looks like a really effective way of both communicating and thinking through a product concept — especially for a product where understanding interactions within a physical context is important.

Last November, I spoke at Chile’s first information architecture conference. The audio recordings and presentations decks have been posted.

I was asked to speak in the “banking” track, and this gave me an opportunity to develop some new material derived from case studies. I really enjoyed rolling up my sleeves and getting down to brass tacks. My talk, “Beyond Transactions: Experience Strategies for Financial Services,” (presentation deck, Audio Recording) recounts stories from 2 projects I’ve worked on at Adaptive Path, and the five lessons learned:

• Talk to your customers
• Coordinate across channels
• Make the abstract concrete
• You’re establishing a relationship
• Don’t chase “best practices”

You’ll need the audio recording in order for the presentation deck to make sense. And vice versa.

I also strongly suggest looking and listening to Jorge Arango’s presentation (deck, audio) on Deep Context, which was a real eye-opener for me.

Check out Chiara’s latest essay where she discusses what exactly gets information architects and user experience professionals so excited about tags.

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, you may have found yourself in an airport. Any troubles using a check-in kiosk? Locating your gate? Making a connection? Did you find yourself staring at the “arrivals” displays when you actually wanted “departures”?

Or perhaps you’ve been holiday shopping. Some stores probably delighted you — clear selection, items juxtaposed in interesting fashions, and knowledgeable staff helping you make sense of an array of choices. Other stores may have frustrated you — searching in vain for what you want; clueless salespeople giving misguided suggestions; items on shelves that are tagged for a different item.

Whatever you’ve been up to, you’ve doubtless come into contact with information architecture. When done well, information architecture can help you make sense of the world, accomplish your goals, delight in unexpected serendipity. When done poorly (or, more typically, not intentionally addressed at all), information architecture will simply get in your way, and probably piss you off.

I’m thinking of this because of some recent brouhaha in user experience blogs and mailing lists on Joshua Porter’s post “Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture.” What Josh’s post fails to understand is that, well, information architecture cannot die.

Information architecture has been around as long as there was information that needed to be related to one another. My favorite definition of information architecture comes from David Fiorito in a mailing list post: “organization, categorization, and navigation
(maybe that should be wayfinding).”

Organizing, categorizing, and helping people navigate an information space will never “die.” And it’s not solely a web phenomenon — the IDEA conference that I organized showcased examples of information architecture from a breadth of fields (museum design, park curation, media arts, information visualization, etc.) and demonstrated that wherever there is complex information that needs to be presented for people to engage with, there is information architecture.

So, I would argue that information architecture’s impending death is greatly exaggerated. However, I believe that this current swell of discussion comes from a valid place of concern — that information architecture is stuck. There have been some attempts at moving the discourse forward, but that continues to be drowned out by quotidian discussions around “How do I make my web go better?”

Still, I have hope. The response I got from the IDEA conference suggests there is an audience for farther-reaching, channel-and-media-crossing, information architecture discussion. Early reports from the reviewers of submissions to next year’s IA Summit suggest there will be much conceptual groundbreaking happening in Vegas. Chiara’s post from earlier this month suggested many tasty unsolved problems.

So put away your mourning clothes and break open that pad of post-it notes. Let’s continue to unstick information architecture and apply it’s principles and approaches to all the complex information problems we face!

My family is participating in the Guest at Your Table again this year. It’s a program that collects money for social justice causes. The cardboard box that you put money into sits on your dinner table, and on one side of the box is a panel about people not having access to clean drinking water. As I explained this to my six-year-old daughter, her response was, “Wow, we’re so lucky to have faucets!” For her, the whole system of reservoirs, pipes, plumbing, sewage treatment, etc. was completely summarized by the one visible part of the system: the faucets.

How often this is true, especially with digital products. What users physically experience represents the system to them, and how it works. The interface is the system. You can have the greatest interaction design or information architecture in the world, but wrapped in crappy industrial or visual design with poor affordances, the entire system is perceived to be bad.

If only this worked in reverse! How many nice-looking objects do you own that function terribly?

Yesterday, at the 7th Society and Information Technologies Encounter taking place in Santiago, Chile, Jorge Arango gave a talk called “Deep Context,” where he addressed what I found to be a fascinating challenge in practicing information architecture in Panama (where he lives).

He cited Beyond Culture, a book where Edward T. Hall puts forward the distinction between low-context cultures, where cultural beliefs and practices are made explicit in laws, rules, etc.; and high-context cultures, which rely on people having close connections over a long period of time, and context is not made explicit. (I’m not satisfied with discussions of this I’m seeing online, but to get a fuller sense, try High Context vs Low Context and Communicating Across Cultures: High and Low Context.)

Jorge’s point is that information architecture is very much a “low-context” practice — highly rationalized, very Western European — and he’s had challenges engaging with this practice in the more typically “high-context” societies in which he’s worked. He recognizes there’s a bit of an oversimplification here, but I think this is a trenchant point.

Information architects, and, frankly, pretty much all user experience designers, use tools, approaches, and methods that attempt to rationalize the situations we observe in order to design systems that fit those contexts. But these rationalized approaches may poorly integrate into high-context cultures.

I don’t know exactly what to make of this, except for learning of this kind of cultural difference that has a direct impact on the work I do, particularly as the nature of experience strategy and design becomes more global. Thank you, Jorge, for opening my eyes!

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.

IT Conversations is sharing a selection of presentations from our UX Week 2006 event. Sessions offered up so far: Chiara Fox on Understanding Your Content, Dan Saffer on What is Interaction Design?, and, most recently, Steve Portigal on Cross-cultural Research. When you listen to Steve, you can follow along with his slides, which he’s uploaded to Slideshare.

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?

There’s a range of vocabulary that can be used to refer to user experience: ‘usability’, ‘interface’, ‘human centered design’, etc. What term we use seems to depend on what sells — within an organization, you use the terms that connect with the values and the understanding of the people you’re working with.

Adaptive Path recently conducted a survey of over 800 user experience professionals to create a base of quantitative insight into how organizations value and practice user experience. One of the simpler questions was, “If you use other terms [than 'user experience'] that are similar in meaning or intent, which terms do you use?” Here’s the terms we heard, ordered by the number of times mentioned:

93 Usability
63 Consumer experience
28 User centered design
21 Customer experience
20 User interface
14 Interaction design
13 Information architecture
11 Design
10 Brand experience
10 User interaction
8 Experience design
6 User satisfaction
5 Customer satisfaction
5 Ease of use
5 Experience
4 Customer journey
4 User interface design
3 Human factors
3 Interface design
3 Look and feel
3 User research
3 Visitor experience
2 Brand user experience
2 Client experience
2 Customer service
2 Experience strategy
2 Goal-directed design
2 Interface
2 Intuitiveness
2 Joy of use
2 Learner experience
2 Online experience
2 Product design
2 User advocate
2 User-friendliness
1 Aesthetic
1 Analytics
1 Audience experience
1 Audience-centred
1 Brand
1 Brand image
1 Brand value
1 Caller experience
1 Comprehension
1 Constituent experience
1 Consumer insights
1 Context
1 Customer centered design
1 Customer centered usability
1 Customer enjoyment
1 Customer focus
1 Customer-based product development
1 Defensive design
1 Delight
1 Donor experience
1 Ease-of-use leading to productivity
1 Educational experience
1 Emotional resonance
1 Emotional-centered design
1 Employee experience
1 End user
1 End-to-end experience
1 End-user centric
1 Enjoyment
1 Ethnographic study
1 Experience architecture
1 Experience planning
1 Experiential perspective
1 Field study
1 Flow
1 Form factor
1 Fun
1 Function
1 Functional design
1 Functionality
1 Good experience
1 Graphic design
1 Guest experience
1 Human centered design
1 Human computer interaction
1 Human experience
1 Human interface
1 Human systems integration
1 Human-machine interface
1 Humility
1 Information environment
1 Information Strategy
1 Interaction
1 Interaction model
1 Interactions
1 Journeys
1 Keeping them happy
1 Learning experience
1 Legibility
1 look-and-feel
1 Magic/Magical
1 Man machine interface
1 Marketing goals
1 Meaningful experiences
1 Member experience
1 Motivations
1 Multi-sensory experiences
1 On-brand
1 Overall customer satisfaction
1 Participant experience
1 Perception
1 Personalization
1 Product development
1 Product feature list
1 Product strategy
1 Product use
1 Programming experience
1 Rapid design
1 Readability
1 Reader
1 Research
1 Shopping experience
1 Site experience
1 Site optimization
1 Software design
1 Solution design
1 Stakeholder experience
1 Stakeholder value
1 Story
1 Total customer experience
1 Touchpoint
1 Usability evaluation
1 User
1 User adoption
1 User behavior
1 User centered
1 User centered design approach
1 User centred design
1 User design
1 User engagement
1 User environment
1 User experience
1 User experience design
1 User experience research
1 User flow
1 User friendly
1 User interaction design
1 User mental model
1 User needs
1 User perception
1 User study
1 User-based usability testing
1 User-focused design
1 User-friendly design
1 Value
1 Visitor
1 Visual experience
1 Visual interaction design
1 Visualization
1 Web experience design
1 Work practices
1 xDesign

Based on some interpretation, about 42% of these responses refer to the end person/human/being in the phrase. About 29% use the term experience, and a little more than 26% refer to the activity they perform (e.g., design, research, development).

Note that these were all “write-in” responses for alternative to ‘user experience’ used within organizations. When asked if respondents used the term ‘user experience’ within their organization, about 89% said yes. We’ll be sharing and reporting on more of the results as we study the data — there’s much more to come.