Leah Talks With Audrey Chen About Bringing IA to Comedy Central

by Leah Buley

July 9, 2008

Leah Buley recently sat down to talk with Audrey Chen, the Senior IA at Comedy Central. Audrey has led the IA for sites such as TheDailyShow.com and ComedyCentral.com. Be sure to catch her this year at UX Week, where she’ll be speaking about her experiences. Here, Audrey shares her thoughts on founding an IA department, new challenges in the field, and what it’s like to design for monkeys and robot chickens.

Leah: Hello, Audrey. First of all how did you get your awesome job? What’s your background?

Audrey: I kind of stumbled into this just by making lots of mistakes. I’m one of those people who couldn’t decide on a major until the day that they absolutely had to be declared. And then I ended up with two because I couldn’t decide. Basically, I kind of agitate wherever I am until I find a fit, and I guess I’m just really lucky that I stumbled into IA.

I came at it from design. I used to be in the design group here for several years and design never quite felt right for me. I was the one who was always going back and looking at the data and usage and things like that. I also really enjoyed coding, so for a long time I actually thought that maybe I should be a coder. I liked how it felt a little more interactive to me than just strict design. When you’re coding something, you’re building it with the understanding the user is going to interact with this thing and that whatever you’re building has to respond. So I kind of flirted with developing for a little while. But then, as the web here for us at Comedy Central matured, it just became clear that there was this hole in IA and interaction design, and I really wanted to be the one to fill it. I liked how in IA or interaction design, you let the user tell you what they want first. Again, it just felt a little more interactive. It suits my personality I think.

Leah: You founded the IA department at Comedy Central. How did you make it happen?

Audrey: The biggest challenge was for such a long time being a group of one, and trying to make people understand where IA and interaction design fit in the process. So much has come from personal relationships. It’s actually a really good thing that I came out of design because knowing those guys really well has helped a lot. Our field is all about communication, right? And so you need to know how to communicate with people. You need to know how to understand their needs on their terms before you insert yourself into their process. It’s about finding the holes and explaining what we do in terms of how it would make other people’s lives better. Like going to a designer or a producer or a product developer and saying I’m actually going to make your life a lot easier so you can focus on the things that you really like focusing on and not worry about some of these other things that you don’t.

Leah: You have a small team. When you’re in a resource-constrained environment, how do you prove your value?

Audrey: By sharing a lot, by participating a lot. The more you give away, the more you end up getting back, I think. It’s about learning not to be too protective about what you do and what you share and what you know. I think a lot of times you find groups where they try to draw really hard boundaries and be really protective about their domain. I really think they end up shooting themselves in the foot because, on a very human level, it’s sort of unpleasant to work with people like that, right?

Leah: Absolutely. Can you mention some specific examples of situations in which you shared and in turn benefited from that process?

Audrey: The Daily Show was the first site that was re-conceived from the ground up that IA was involved in. It was a painful first project but in the end I think it turned out really well. We had a lot of conversations about how open we wanted to be with our content. And you definitely saw different personalities come out on different sides of the issues. Take tagging. Tagging is one of the backbones of the Daily Show. We talked a lot about tagging and whether or not to allow users to tag the content themselves. What you don’t want is a situation where the most popular tag is, like, “awesome” or “fun.” A word that is totally un-useful to anybody else. Unfortunately, I think you see that on a lot of systems that allow user tagging.

It was important for the show and for us as fans that we make this really curated experience for people, a really useful experience. So it was almost less important that it would be personally useful — that you could personally index the information the way you wanted it. And it was more important that it was useful on a group level.

Leah: So many sites struggle to build a community, whereas you come with this huge community almost built in. I’m sure there’s a lot of enthusiasm there that you can harness to make a really interesting experience, but sometimes that enthusiasm can be challenging, too. How do you think about community?

Audrey: There’s a huge amount of goodwill behind the Daily Show and Colbert, and a lot of our properties. But specifically with community what’s interesting is if you look at the Daily Show crowd versus the Colbert Report crowd. Obviously there’s a lot of overlap, but the Daily Show is much more a straight news show, whereas the Colbert Report is about his personality, and he’s constantly soliciting the crowd. He’s asking the crowd to do things for him, with him, send him stuff. That means the web presence of Colbert is huge. For the Daily Show, we become stewards of the content and a little bit less of the community, which makes our job a little bit easier. It also makes Colbert incredibly, incredibly daunting. As we’re looking at what kind of value we can add, the community has already done so much. They’ve indexed the site. They’ve started their own campaigns. And because they’ve done so much, it’s really hard to see where we can add a lot of value in there. Whereas with the Daily Show, we could think less about that and more just strictly about how do we add value through the content itself. That’s a much easier task.

Leah: Have you come up with any rules of thumb for how to add value to an already active community, or is it something you guys are sort of still working on as you go?

Audrey: For community, we’re definitely working it out as we go, and I think it’s going to be a lot of trial and error. And hopefully we get a lot of feedback along the way.

Leah: What’s interesting to me is that the challenges for information architecture have evolved in the last decade, and the different web properties of Comedy Central really show that. The Daily Show is all about content. Colbert is more focused on community. We have some pretty good tools now for indexing and tagging and all these techniques to make content findable, but then community is this new kind of challenge, and we’re grappling with how we as information architects can really leverage and further the experience of this community — and that’s something we’re in the midst of figuring out. What are some of the other next generation information architecture challenges that you are seeing in the work that you’re doing right now at Comedy Central?

Audrey: I really wish that there were more tools out there to index video and audio. For the Daily Show, we indexed that content through brute force. It took a lot of people. We watched every single minute of every single show, and through sheer manpower, through monkey power, you know, we went through ten years of content. There are these great tagging systems and great ways of organizing information. But it almost feels like the machine is really good at eating sandwiches, and if we feed it a sandwich it knows what to do with the sandwich, but we’re trying to shove soup in there, and it’s like, “I don’t know what to do with soup!” So we need machines that know how to slurp soup. That would make my life so much easier. Even turning content management over to the fans, no matter how it’s done, it still seems a little bit silly to have to do it with people. We looked at things like using the closed captioning feeds to index them. But even those are done by people literally watching the show and typing it in as it’s going, so there so much bad data in there. Meanwhile, what seems to get the most press is things like facial recognition software, so when you’re watching video, being able to identify faces and people in locations rather than, you know, actual content.

Leah: How deeply indexed is your content? Is it just at the level person and subject, or does it go deeper?

Audrey: For the Daily Show, the idea was to make threads that we could connect throughout the clips. So, if you’re watching a video about monkeys you could find the other 24 clips on monkeys. And, we try to be a little less concerned with a one-off mention. But at the same time, recognizing that maybe he’s talking about robot chickens one day and maybe that’ll come up again in five years. We don’t really know. Thankfully IA is so front-loaded in the process, that for the Daily Show, by the time everyone else here was really in pain, slogging through the material and making sure the database was good, I was like, “I’m going home, see you guys tomorrow.”

Leah: That means you’ve been able to work IA into a position in the organization where it’s up front. A lot of people complain that they never get positioned in the right spot, that they don’t have a seat at the table. Would you say that you’re in the right spot, and if so, how have you made that happen?

Audrey: Well it’s definitely always being tweaked and looked at. I think one of the problems, and this is also a problem with having such a small group, is that the workload is always so big. It’s always full steam ahead and you never really have a chance to stop and look and, and say okay, how could we do that better? Because doing that takes time, and when you’re barreling ahead you really don’t have that time. But hopefully on the horizon there will be and we always try and adjust it along the way.

Leah: Does that mean you’re hiring?

Audrey: We are! We are absolutely hiring and so if you know anyone who would like to work for Comedy Central, please be in touch at IA@comedycentral.com!

Leah: Okay, good to know. Well this has been a real pleasure. Thank you so much, Audrey.

Leah Buley is an experience designer for Adaptive Path. She is interested in ways to build support for user experience inside organizations. She loves to hear success stories like Audrey’s.