Boxes and Arrows: Stories by B&A Staff

Chicken Run: Summit Closing: Sunday

B&A Staff — Tue, 26 Mar 2002 05:21:35 GMT

ASIST IA Summit Summary Sunday, March 17 (St. Patrick's Day)

One of several chickens seen in the crowd. (photo Erin Malone)

Sunday morning found 240 tired IAs eagerly grabbing breakfast and pondering the chickens that had been set up in a little farm scene in the conference area of the hotel. All I can say is that a lot of pictures were taken of the chickens (and a few of them even "mysteriously" flew the coop). Panel Business Context of the Information Architecture in Content Management Systems Lisa Chan, moderator, Amy Warner, Samantha Bailey, Paula Thornton, Bob Boiko The panel began with brief intros and bios of the panelists by moderator Lisa Chan. Bob Boiko opened the panel discussion by talking about what IA and CMS have to do with each other. CM systems generate sites and the architecture for a CMS is at the enterprise level involving development of templates and structures that will then render individual sites and structures. If you can generalize and think at the abstract level, if you can map and think larger, then you can practice IA at the enterprise level. Paula Thornton followed and talked about the challenges of working with CM systems due to their immaturity in the marketplace. She illustrated the challenges of vendor selection and shared some strategies and vision for how to work around the vendor offerings. http://www.asis.org/Conferences/Summit2002/thornton_cm.ppt

Samantha Bailey (photo Erin Malone)

Samantha Bailey presented her views on how a CM system can give more functionality and ease to the IA. She spoke of the challenges of selecting a CM system and the need to prioritize where your efforts go. She warned against letting a CMS solution that makes things easier for the end customer make things more difficult for the internal team that must use the CM system. She closed by stressing the need for synergies and collaboration across all members of the team that will select, implement and use the CMS solution. http://www.asis.org/Conferences/Summit2002/bailey.cm.ppt Amy J. Warner closed the panel by discussing the importance of maximizing the investment in taxonomy and metadata and how leveraging those elements throughout the system will lead to a higher return on investment in the long run. She made the point that the more time spent at the input stage, appropriately tagging and applying content to the taxonomy, the better the retrieval experience at the output point. The audience then proceeded to ask general questions as well as asking about examples of taxonomies to look at for reference. Peter Merholz (the Bad Peter) polled the audience to see who uses a CMS (20-30) and who was happy with their CMS (4), which led to the panelists talking about the fact that CMS solutions generally are never adequate off the shelf, and must have a lot of customization done to fit the organizational needs.

Case Studies : Parallel Sessions

Jesse James Garrett talks about the IA of everyday things, including the architecture of the popular radio program, "All things Considered" (photos Erin Malone)

The Information Architecture of Everyday Things Jesse James Garrett Jesse James Garrett gave a very interesting presentation in which he dissected elements from the world around us. The premise: IA is all around us. IA is as old as communication and wherever there is information there is architecture. He was making a point, that an IA can reverse engineer just about anything and he used concepts from basic design principles to illustrate this point. He showed a series of slides that illustrated the types of communication and inference a viewer can have when two pieces of information are put together. These slides reminded me of the basic design exercises I had to do when I was in design school: composition, juxtaposition, scale etc. Jesse went on to say that humans are patternmakers and naturally desire to organize information. IA is the juxtaposition of individual pieces of information in order to convey meaning. He then illustrated these points with a series of reverse engineered examples: juxtaposition, implicit architecture, explicit architecture, random access, linear access, non-linear access. The examples were drawn from everyday life -a restaurant menu,the index in Harpers weekly, the program notes from NPR's "All things Considered" and the Land's End catalog. Jesse ended by challenging the audience to take these ideas and translate them to the web, but to beware of the pitfalls around constraints imposed by the medium. He noted that conventions are not necessarily best practices and that user behavior must always be kept in mind. Overall, the presentation was a goodintroduction to information architecture, but there was some concern among the audience - those who came from the design world - that these concepts only add to the fear that IAs must know everything instead of supporting the collaborative relationship with a designer to make an experience. Jesse was also asked by an audience member to spend some more time making examples from more vernacular samples, rather than examples of things that were professionally designed (e.g. The Land's End catalog, the Harper's weekly index). Several audience members recommended good books to check out and Jesse promised to add them to his reading list attached to this presentation. Choosing the Best Path: Techniques for Assessing and Improving Information Scent Jason Withrow Jason Withrow presented the concept/metaphor of information scent. The concept of information scent originated at Xerox Parc and is related to the concept of information foraging, which basically classifies people as infovores that are following the scent of information. Jason discussed how users will continue clicking or working their way through a site if they can still follow the scent of the information or if the scent gets stronger. The user relies on a semantic network of nodes of concepts and connection of terms. This places a strong reliance on a commonly understood vocabulary and synonyms to execute the integral labelling system that provides the scent. Jason points out that information scent tends to work best with focussed information. One example that has proven to help keep information scent existent on pages is the use of "also see" links. Facet Analysis Louise Gruenberg Louise has had a diverse set of experiences from instructional design to library and information science. In this discussion, she gave an overview of faceted classification development. Her talk was very informal and even provided an opportunity for exercises to explain how facets can be derived from a collection of things. These examples included a collection of fruit, science materials for a particular age of girls, and the process of selecting clothing from an online ecommerce site. Gruenberg explained the history of faceted classification - a technique from library and information science in which items can be categorized in more than one way. For example, a piece of fruit might be categorized by taste with "facets" for sweet, sour, etc. and also categorized by color, with "facets" of particular colors. Typically facets are:

are mutually exclusive, representing a characteristic not found in the other facets,
can't be further sub-divided - although this decision is made by the person doing the categorization and is based on how important further sub-division is,
and have non-hierarchical relationships with other facets

But while traditionally librarians have focused on creating mutually exclusive facets, Gruenberg argued that's no longer a critical factor, since database-driven sites make it easy to display information in more than one place - in contrast to the physical world where only one copy of a document might exist. Facets can be used to help information architects analyze the site's content and functionality by various topics or functions, or even by metaphors. For new sites, this is done via a top-down approach, while a bottom-up approach works better for overhauling existing sites, Gruenberg said.

Lou Rosenfeld and Erica Bruce lunch (photo Joe Sokohl)

Following the parallel sessions, another fun chicken lunch was served so slowly that many attendees were barely served before the hour was over. Despite the food, the level of conversation was more animated than the day before and it was obvious that old and new friends were enjoying the dissection of our craft and had a lot of things to say. Case Studies : Parallel Sessions New Roles in Information Architecture Peter Morville, Semantic Studios http://semanticstudios.com/events/ia2002/ Peter began the presentation by reviewing the distinction of the "good Peter" and the "bad Peter." Peter Morville claimed to be "good Peter" and Peter Merholz the "bad Peter." There is a long history of both of these Peters having different opinions on the definition of an information architect. But the central thought of his talk was the next generation of information architects and the titles and roles they will have in the coming years. There is a glut of information and IAs should begin taking an entrepreneurial role in applying what they have been doing for the web across the enterprise. Education and Information Architecture Andrew Dillon, Rong Tang, Karl Fast, David Robins, Louise Gruenberg Moderated by Andrew Dillon, the Education panel presented a diverse set of quick presentations around the current and future information architecture curriculum. David Robins presented the cross disciplinary program that has been developed at Kent State University. Rong Tong presented a survey of IA courses and certificates offered across the 54 ALA accredited LIS (Library and InformationSciences) schools in the country. She did not offer any assessment of IA courses offered through design schools. She also surveyed the course objectives and statements to gain an understanding of the type of content to be covered by these courses.

Karl Fast talks about his experience at LIS school. (photo Erin Malone)

Karl Fast shared his current experience with the LIS program in which he's enrolled and warned about the perspective from which the courses are being taught. The LIS program has not pulled itself out of the old world of Libraries and physical books and card catalogs. The curriculum needs to be taught with a richer perspective as to how and where the skills can be applied. Louise Gruenberg offered the audience a series of questions and asked for small groups to discuss them. The groups were asked to share their answer to one of the questions with everyone. It was interesting to see that each group ended up taking a different question and everyone felt that schools need to be multidisciplinary in their teaching approach and that practitioners need to be part of the faculty. The floor was then opened up for questions.

Steve Mulder, Nam-Ho Park and Louise Gruenberg are a few who took advantage of Five Minute Madness and spoke their mind. (photos Erin Malone)

Five Minute Madness Gary Marchianini, moderator Five minute madness is the opportunity for all summit attendees, excluding presenters, to have five minutes to speak. The speaker could give a presentation-and in this case we saw two, Rashmi Sinha presented a brief overview of the faceted classification system designed for Flamenco, and Matt Jones (who broke the "no presenter" rule) gave a brief presentation. Or they could just take the microphone and speak their mind, offer insights or ask questions of the audience. There were 17 people brave enough to get up and speak and the topics covered everything from Brad Lauster thanking the people he had met to Jeff Lash putting an invitation out on the table for IAs involved in intranets to join the Yahoo group of intranet IAs, to Tony Bull, a graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill feeling wishful that he could take the title IA, but he didn't see it yet because of the uneven acceptance of IA as a title to David Austen reminding everyone that the SIGIA-L list has a website to Thomas Pole, an engineer, challenging us (IAs) to not let engineers get away with it when they say they can't make something to Don Kraft thanking us for letting him learn about information architecture. It was a diverse set of people who spoke on a wide range of offerings. It was also one of the neatest things about this conference. Wrap Up Andrew Dillon Andrew Dillon closed the summit with some thoughts about where we started on Saturday morning. He felt we have a community, which was exhibited by all who attended and included an international presence. We are beyond definition. There is evidence of progress, shown by the case studies which were not all rosy and perfect, shown by the discussions around IA in education and IA in business relationships and by the types of topics discussed over the weekend - Metadata to metaphors, ROI and ethic, usability and facet analysis. He concluded by saying that there would be an IA summit in 2003 and that Christina Wodtke would lead the planning efforts. Dillon also reminded us of other community initiatives-Boxes and Arrows, SIGIA-L, the info-arch.org group, the special ASIS Journal coming out in August that will be devoted solely to IA and all the books and new editions being worked on by many of the attendees. The committee for 2002 was thanked again and the 2002 IA Summit drew to a close.

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Most of of the observations in this piece were written by Erin Malone. Since chickens can't write and one person can't attend three parallel sessions, other portions were written by Lisa Chan, George Olsen, Thomas Vander Wal and Christina Wodtke.

Summit Beginnings: Saturday

B&A Staff — Tue, 26 Mar 2002 05:23:22 GMT

ASIST IA Summit Summary Baltimore Maryland 15-17 March, 2002 The 2002 Summit in Baltimore has come and gone. Boxes and Arrows was in attendance covering the events, the social mixing and the controversies. Throughout the summit we made some new friends and took a lot of pictures. We hope that those who attended will share their stories as well.

Izumi Oku, Matt Jones and Brad Lauster demonstrate the international IA gang sign. (photo Christina Wodtke)

Friday, March 15 The summit kicked off with the traditional Friday evening cocktail hour. Tentative attendees came together, introduced themselves, had a drink or two and as easily as they flew into town, became fast friends. The evening was marked by continuous exchanges of exclamations as badges were read and email correspondents from the SIGIA-L list met in person for the first time. Large groups of people peeled off together for dinner and more socializing. The summit had officially begun. Saturday, March 16 Saturday's events began much too early for many but most of us managed to be there on time. After a brief breakfast there was a short intro by Richard Hill, - who took a moment to introduce the inter-organizational (ASIST, CHI, AIGA and STC) group formed to address the cross organizational issues and needs of the IA community. Then Andrew Dillon took the stage and began with an overview of the summit's history. He introduced and thanked the committee members for their work in planning the summit and described some of the challenges they faced as a committee. He gave a brief explanation about this year's theme "Refining our Craft" and laid out the format–full group presentations, parallel sessions of case studies and poster presentations–which all support the learning and refinement of what we do. Andrew then introduced the keynote speaker Steve Krug. The Keynote: Confessions of a SIGIA-L Lurker: A Pinhead's View of Information Architecture Steve Krug Steve Krug, author of "Don't Make Me Think: The Common Sense Guide to Usability," was simultaneously serious, analytical and irreverent as a speaker. His corporate motto, "It's not rocket surgery," illustrates this unique combination of qualities. In his presentation he attempted to squeeze the entire field of IA through the wringer; to note the difference between IA and usability and to dissect the top five things IAs talk about on the SIGIA list.

Steve Krug chats with Don Kraft following his keynote address. (photo Erin Malone)

A self-confessed lurker on the list, Steve stated "I am not an IA, I don't even play one on TV." He talked about his professional background–moving through his career from typesetting to computing to tech writing to usability consulting. There was an interesting comparison of the "Lou and Peter" (Rosenfeld and Morville) version of IA –"IAs organize information to make it more understandable" –to the Richard Saul Wurman version of IA–IA's organize information to make it more accessible. He noted Boxes and Arrows and paraphrased some of his observations from the Nathan Shedroff article about claiming the name and the turf and the angst of many practitioners over names. He then shared that his insights have been gained through experience and observation. Throughout his talk he made fun of himself, his background - as far as being an expert on IA-and his presentation, which only added to his funny and approachable style. The top five things that he thought we spent time talking about on the SIGIA list were:

Tools
Lots of discussion about who uses what, what's best or better than this or that
Defining things
He noted that we like to frequently define who and what we are a lot. He illustrated this point by showing the cover from the Richard Scarry book "What do people do all day" as well as Jesse James Garrett's "Elements of Experience diagram" and Challis Hodge's "Experience Design Roles" model. He noted that it looked like a putting green and he wasn't sure what it meant in terms of the relationship of one role to another. But he liked it.
Big IA versus Little IA
Mr. Krug stated he always forgets the difference between the two, which got a big laugh.
Research
He felt that research had very little practical application to the practicing profession. He said, " if you can prove it, then it's probably obvious," and then stressed that we need to make sense to people and apply principles and best practices to specific cases. He cited Jakob Nielsen's closing talk at the Usability Professionals' Association conference last year in support of this.
ROI (Return on Investment)
From what he observed while lurking on the list, we seem to have a tough time with ROI because most people who need IA can't afford to even rent one. Our best bet is to educate and generate best practices. We need to stop grabbing for turf and give intelligent explanations of what we do.

Overall, Krug's keynote was irreverent, self-effacing and designed to spark debate around several points. He turned the mirror on us, through his observations of the list and the topics we discuss, and offered friendly "outsider" advice on how we can improve ourselves and the profession.

Information Architecture and Usability: Responding to the Keynote Lou Rosenfeld, moderator, Keith Instone, Christina Wodtke, Andrew Dillon and Steve Krug Following the keynote, the panel responded to the keynote and questions posed by Lou and the audience.

Christina Wodtke, Andrew Dillon, Keith Instone and Steve Krug respond to the keynote. (photo Erin Malone)

Starting the session, Lou mentioned that even though he was not present, Jakob Nielsen always seemed to dominate the conversation. Christina Wodtke made a brave statement and said she felt IA needed to be given away and taught to other people. She felt there would still be master craftspeople, but for the discipline to progress we had to be more open about giving away our knowledge. She supported this by giving an example from her company (CarbonIQ) conducting training workshops and getting more business as a result. Clients learn about information architecture and then decide they don't have time to do it themselves and hire an IA, because once they are educated they understand the value. Q. An audience member asked if there was an IA list of heuristics, akin to Nielsen's list of heuristics. A. Steve Krug - A body of best practices is better than a list. Christina admonished usability folks for not doing a better job of informing design. Usability fails because test reports wag the finger at us and do little to inform the design process. Q. Why are we so preoccupied with usability? A. Andrew Dillon - It is unhealthy when usability and IA are divided. All work of the IA should be concerned with the user, therefore usability is important. Q. Are we shying away from design and should we take more ownership of it? A. Andrew Dillon - Yes, we should step up to the plate and do it. Keith Instone - We should collaborate more. CW -We are designers. IAs architect. Architecture = Design. We have to engage in creative activities and need to be taken to task for what we create.

Christina Wodtke, Andrew Dillon, Keith Instone and Steve Krug answer questions (photo Erin Malone)

Q. What is the importance of ROI? A. SK - people need to educate people who spend money that usability and IA are worth spending money on. Case studies trying to prove ROI are not a good use of time. He recommended doing usability tests on the product and having the business / marketing people come and watch real people use their product. Then pitch for what you can do to make the product better. Christina Wodtke shocked us all by saying that ROI is a big lie. But we have to talk to the CEO about how their business will be improved - in dollars and sense. Q. What is the language that communicates the value of what we do? A. CW - Instead of inventing our own language, adopt the language of others. Talk business with the business people. Understand marketing terms and needs. KI - Learn the language of business to make the case. They are receptive to our messages. Audience comment - There is value that comes from being multidisciplinary and being able to educate other people in an organization. Q. John Zapolski, from the audience, asked the panel to comment: We haven't talked about the relationship between IA and design. There are many problems similar to those in IA that have been solved in the design space. A. CW - When the web came around we created new processes but we forgot that we can borrow from other disciplines. We have been scared of design by the "magic." We need to find the balance between the white coats of science (research) and design. Q. What is the role of IA and research? A. KI- There is frustration with being able to apply research. AD- Lots and lots of research had to be done before we got there - before "it's obvious" came out of the evidence. It's not just a series of outputs. The role of research is not to prove anything, it's to check things and disprove things. SK- Research may not be able to prove things, but people looking for research are looking to prove something and that is what's bad. Case Studies : Parallel Sessions E-Greetings Case Study Chris Farnum http://home.earthlink.net/~crfarnum/cfarnum.ppt

Chris Farnum talk about user testing the taxonomy for eGreetings. (photo Erin Malone)

Chris Farnum, a former Argonaut (member of Argus Associates), presented the work he did while at Argus to redesign the card collection organization, taxonomy and search at the eGreetings.com. He presented their methodology and processes and went into detail specifically about the card sorting, prototype testing and other methods they used to learn from users. Farnum detailed the process used to define the controlled vocabulary direction and then showed how that evolved to paper prototypes used to determine the final taxonomy direction and facet level. He showed samples from the toolkit used in their testing and talked about the findings, which surprised them because of the preconceived assumptions and how they shaped the design. The second part of the presentation showed their work done on search once the browse structure and taxonomy were defined. To Farnum's credit, he talked about how he and the client disagreed, therefore ending up in two competing prototypes to take through testing. In the end, the client design was preferred by users and Farnum was forthcoming about letting the audience know that although it was difficult, he listened to the users when making the final recommendation. Farnum ended his presentation with the bittersweet information that the search part of the project never launched because the company was sold, but that if you look at the site today, many elements of the classification scheme and homepage organization that they designed are still being used. Information Architecture for the Enterprise Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Merholz Peter had some brief thoughts on IA for the Enterprise. http://www.peterme.com/assets/enterprise_ia_peterme.ppt Some of this included an observation of the evolution in customer-centric practices despite decentralized customer relationships. There was a lack of coherence with interaction with customers. It didn't help that departments didn't talk to each other. Then the buzz of customer relationship management systems was seen to solve that decentralized customer relationship. In actuality, they bridged the operational side of managing relationship and did not allow for a holistic approach to customer interaction. All enterprises did with CRM was "put a single face on decentralized organization." The old way was to shove the message and brand perception to customers. The new way is to have interactions with other people and with many business units. Striking a balance between the new and the old allows for consistency and for innovation. Peter presented the five steps toward meaningful consistency.

Centralize web/IA efforts - treat them like an internal consultancy.
Build organizational awareness even with external justifications and quick wins.
Study Customers - understand their approaches, share IA on needs not company structure.
Develop a style guide beyond the visual. It should include content display, navigation systems, interaction elements, rules and should be extensible.
Implement a CMS (Content Management System) - a document system is not sufficient, make it easier to do the right thing than to do your own thing.

Lou Rosenfeld talked about the hyper-evolutionary model: Enterprise Information Architecture. http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000078.html Over the past couple years IAs have been focused on users and content for websites, but have not been applying what was learned to the entire company. It seems as though this context for IAs is being ignored Lou's presentation focused on the history of IA practices for the web and internet. He discussed how an IA's skills transition to benefit enterprise: ecommerce, reduced costs, clearer communications, shared expertise and reduced reorganizations. He later dissected some of the "sins" of that prevent enterprise IA from working: Business Units Five Deadly Sins

Greed
Ignorance
Slothfulness
Fear
Loathing

IA Five Deadly Sins

Overreaching
Haste
Overextending
Presumptuousness
Naivete

He did offer some suggestions for how enterprise IA can succeed (aka: Lou's Pipe Dream):

Structure
Offerings
Economic Model
Marketing
Staffing
Timing

MetaData and Taxonomies For a More Flexible Information Architecture Amy J. Warner You go to the doctor when you feel ill. You go to Dr. Warner when you feel information overload. Amy J. Warner PhD Gave an insightful and clarifying talk. Many "don't give me any of that librarian stuff" IA's were held fixed to the edge of their seats by her explanation of the continuum of controlled vocabularies and taxonomies, from synonym rings to full blow thesauri. First she walked us through the building blocks of "taxonomies" (a word she and other LIS educated folks are slowly and cautiously beginning to adopt in order to clearly communicate with businesses). All classification efforts start with metadata. Metadata falls into five categories: administrative, descriptive, prescriptive, technical and use. It is descriptive metadata that we most often use in controlled vocabulary creation efforts. So once the descriptive metadata is harvested through indexing efforts, the classification can begin. To begin the process, she presented the levels of potential complexity in controlled vocabularies, from the simple equivalence-based synonym rings, through the hierarchal classification schemas/taxonomies into the rich and full blown thesauri (the Cadillac of controlled vocabularies) that include associative relationships as well as equivalence and hierarchal. Which to go with? Depends how much time for creation and maintenance you need, and what you are trying to do with your controlled vocabulary. After all why get a Caddy when a Hyundai might do? Next, she dove right into the importance of business context for creating controlled vocabularies. We saw this throughout the conference: people are figuring out how to talk IA to business. Dr. Warner made complex ideas clear and more importantly relevant to solving the problems we all face today in our information situated lives. Next time you get a chance to visit this doctor, be sure to go!

George Olsen and Liz Danzico lunch (photo Christina Wodtke)

After the first set of case studies, we all gathered for a lunch of rubbery hotel chicken and more socializing. Another set of parallel case study sessions followed lunch. Case Studies : Parallel Sessions BBCi Search - Why Search Isn't Just a Technology Problem Matt Jones, BBCi Search http://www.blackbeltjones.com/presentations/asist2002/asist.ppt Matt's presentation focused on the research and development of a taxonomy process and supporting tool at the BBC. In addition he gave some insights on evaluating the effectiveness of search user interfaces/interaction designs on websites. Through user research and testing, Matt was able to put together an internal team and supporting software to tag some of the BBC's web materials and provide strategic content programming for search results. Some future thoughts on search for the BBCi:

Development of an answer engine.
Distribute the building of the taxonomy to the editorial staff.
Develop facets.
Provide a suite of search interfaces that other business units can repurpose.
Context andconversation: profiling the users, building a community.
Drive search experience with facets.

Some of the features that Matt described in his presentation will not be available until around April 20. References to other materials associated with Matt's presentation: http://www128.pair.com/louis/home/bloug_archive/000039.html http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000040.html http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000075.html Reflections on H2G2 - Collaborative effort of peer-reviewed knowledge base(brainchild of Douglas Adams) Peoplesoft.com Chiara Fox, Peoplesoft and Peter Merholz, Adaptive Path http://www.asis.org/Conferences/Summit2002/peoplesoft_case_study.FINAL.ppt Chiara Fox of Peoplesoft and Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path presented their work from the design of the Peoplesoft site. They detailed the team, the methodologies and techniques used to learn about the content and their users. They then discussed the specific processes for content analysis and mapping and showed various artifacts from their work. Audi Razorfish James Kalbach, Razorfish, Germany Jim Kalbach from Razorfish Germany presented three major highlights from their year long work on the design of the Audi Germany website. The Tool

Jim Kahlbach presents the Audi germany site case study. (photo Erin Malone)

The group used Adobe GoLive as both their site mapping tool and wireframing tool, allowing for instant HTML prototypes and collaborative working and updating. The goal was to find a better tool for version controlling, efficient updates and changes to the site as it progressed. While it met most of their expectations, ultimately it was the wrong tool for the job because not everyone on the team adopted it and the project pushed the limits of what the product was capable of. Jumping Boxes Jim showed how the team solved the problem of variable browser sizes by implementing a solution they called "Jumping Boxes'. Following Audi's motto of "Better design through technology," Razorfish used technology to adjust the page layout based on the screen size. It detects the browser size and serves the page design that best fits the size of the browser. He demonstrated how the page moves modules of content down and over, while at the same time several modules of content are anchored in place. The design rendered first, depended on browser size. The exact technology was not detailed but Jim speculated that it involved client-side Javascript and CSS. All this work was done to support a strict grid design - three different designs were implemented- and to maintain the right navigation scheme. It was an interesting problem and solution, although Jim commented that it was an overly complex solution to a simple problem. Right-hand Navigation versus Left-hand Navigation The bulk of Jim's presentation covered this component of the project and he detailed the extensive user testing the team did to find out if their solution would be usable, learnable and accepted by users and the client. The Razorfish team was challenged to create a site that was competitively different and the right-hand navigation was a key element in their solution. Their studies- with 64 people in usability tests, eye movement analysis and interviews - surprised them in that their hypotheses were very conservative and the results more than showed that the site was learnable and quite usable with a right-hand navigation scheme. They plan to publish their research, so I won't spoil it by attempting to quote the presentation. The final results of the tests satisfied the team and the client and the site was launched with a right-hand navigation system. Panel: The Art of Deliverables Noel Franus, moderator, Jesse James Garrett, Dan Brown, Erin Malone, John Zapolski The panel opened with brief intros and bios of the panelists by moderator Noel Franus. Overall the panel was a great show and tell of different philosophies surrounding deliverables that IAs produce. The panel represented both internal and consulting IAs.

The Art of Deliverables panelists, from l. Noel Franus, Jesse James Garrett, Dan Brown, Erin Malone, John Zapolski (photo Joe Sokohl)

Jesse James Garrett walked through his "visual vocabulary" for diagramming information structures and interaction flows. Garrett said he intentionally designed his system to work with the lowest common denominator - PowerPoint - in an effort to make the diagrams as widely accessible as possible (although the visual vocabulary templates are available for a variety of software programs.. Jesse went into some high level discourse about visual vocabulary and how it could be used. One example that he shared was the reverse IA engineering of Yahoo! Mail which is currently available at on Boxes and Arrows. In contrast to the other panelists, who often presented poster-sized diagrams, Garrett argued that diagrams should be made to fit (or tiled) onto letter-sized paper so that they can easily be printed by a wide variety of people Dan Brown stressed deliverables should have three essential components. Coherence - done by making sure you're working with as complete a set of information as possible, identifying the dimensions of the information to be presented and the overall message the diagram should convey. Context - created by including references to previous work that forms the basis for a particular deliverable. Relevance - done by making the deliverables self-referential. http://www.greenonions.com/dan/portfolio/ Erin Malone discussed some of the process and organization behavior (acceptance) that revolves around the production of deliverables as a collaborative (share the map & use it) tool for business owners and engineering. The deliverables are used as a communication tool and not the end product of her group's work. She included techniques for annotation, the need to iterate, and parallel work on developing the functional specifications. http://www.emdezine.com/designwritings/files/UsingFlowmaps.ppt John Zapolski explored the Zen-like aspects of producing deliverables. Design is not just an activity of making things, but also of making sense. He provided his own definition of IA: an area of design concerned with classifying, organizing, and structuring information so that it becomes meaningful. He believes that we need time to think so that we can make things well. He described a good model of being able to analyze a concrete situation and understand it at an abstract level but then being able to apply the abstract again to something concrete. He drew a distinction between deliverables intended for "problem seeking" and "problem solving" parts of a project. Problem seeking deliverables include such things as explanations of user goals, concept maps, content audits and inventories and systems analysis. Problem solving deliverables include such things as conceptual models (of the proposed solution), flow maps and user interface specifications. http://www.asis.org/Conferences/Summit2002/john_zapolski_IAsummit02.pdf

One of Mike Lee's three dimensional IA artifacts (photo Matt Jones)

Dinner and Posters Following the deliverables panel, the attendees were invited to grab a buffet dinner, socialize and meet the poster presenters. During the day the foyer of the hotel conference area was transformed as people put up their presentations and posters. The dinner hour allowed people to interact with the authors and ask questions about the project. One of the most interesting posters was that of Mike Lee. Lee spent time analyzing the site map deliverables IAs make and wondered if their meaning/understanding would be enhanced by taking them into the 3d realm. He had 3d models of various site maps and charts converted into these three-dimensional explorations. He also demonstrated how to take one of these. Lee specifically noted on his poster that he didn't know, yet, how this concept in presentation would apply in practice, but it was nice to see innovative thinking in how we visualize our solutions. The Posters Where the Wireframes Are: The Use and Abuse of Page Layouts in Information Architecture Practices Dan Brown http://www.greenonions.com/dan/portfolio/wireframes_poster.pdf Modeling Access Control Vicky Buser and Michael Sullivan A Living Archeology: Excavating The Past - Mapping The Future Serena Fenton Information Flow Diagram Dennis Huston http://www.seaempty.com/SEImages/informationtheory.html Location, Path & Attribute Breadcrumbs Keith Instone http://keith.instone.org/breadcrumbs/ Dimensional Deliverables: Exploring the Realm Between Paper and Screen Mike Lee http://www.visuallee.com/ia

Kimberly Peters explains her poster (photo Joe Sokohl)

Discrepancies Between Business Requirements, Use Cases, Design Documents, and Actual Development Richard M. Oppedisano Sample Personae, Process Flow Document, and Wireframes for an Interactive Television Project Kimberly Peters

Claude Steinberg discusses his poster (photo Joe Sokohl)

Auditory Context Diagrams, Representations for Organizing Information Presented Vocally Claude Steinberg Information Architecture's 'Dirty Little Secret' and the IT Project Iceberg Lee Sachs Vision Based Requirements Unifying User-Centric Interaction Design With Requirements Analysis Methodologies Laura Scheirer

DCIAs gathering (photo Joe Sokohl)

Following dinner and posters, the local DCIA local group invited everyone to attend their monthly event, which they scheduled in the bar of the hotel. From the looks of the bar, a large portion of us took them up on their offer and conversations about IA took place late into the night.

Our Favorite Books: Recommendations from the Staff of Boxes and Arrows

B&A Staff — Tue, 03 Dec 2002 20:16:46 GMT

“I'm not a full-time usability analyst, information architect, interaction designer or user experience designer. I'm a web developer, the one who divides his time by managing projects, creating sitemaps and wireframes, writing HTML and client-side coding. These are the books that have I've learned from, the books that I'm inspired by, and the books I turn to when I'm stuck with a usability problem.”
—Joshua KaufmanTo welcome in December and the holiday season, the staff at Boxes and Arrows has put together a list of their favorite books. These are the tried and true, the books we loan out again and again, recommend endlessly or buy for fellow colleagues so they won't keep taking our copies. These are the books we can't live without or have learned great lessons from over the years. We have gathered them together just in time for holiday gift giving. (Note: recently released books do not appear in this list due to being so new.) We hope you sample some of these and invite you to share your favorites with all of us in the comments area. Books about Information Architecture or for IAs “Content Management Bible” Bob Boiko There's a reason why this book is called a bible. This book has been fundamental in helping me understand some gaps I had about content management. Lots of great practical approaches about the life-cycle of content management processes and systems. Madonnalisa Gonzales-Chan “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” (Second Edition) Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville The latest edition of the landmark book on information architecture from a library science perspective. If you need to do some heavy-duty structuring of content, you need this book. George Olsen “Information Anxiety 2” Richard Saul Wurman This second version will appeal to the conceptual in you as much as it does the practical. Wurman, who coined the phrase “information architect” almost 30 years ago, gives us historical context, as well as a map for what may come next. Complete with a cameo bit of writing from Nathan Shedroff, the book will leave you with tools to make sense of overwhelming amounts of information, no matter what the media. Liz Danzico “The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization” Elaine Svenonius Great introduction to various areas of information management, organization, access, and retrieval. Touches on academic and practical issues. Madonnalisa Gonzales-Chan “Mapping Web Sites” Paul Kahn and Krzysztof Lenk From the founders of Dynamic Diagrams, this book is a richly illustrated exploration into the process of creating maps and other artifacts for communication. Beginning with the definition of classic maps, the authors cite parallels to information maps used to plot out and communicate a website. Contained in the book are several case studies that show luscious samples of maps, informational diagrams, planning diagrams, process diagrams and topic map diagrams for several websites. The pair also spends a considerable amount of time defining sitemaps with lots of examples that define the breadth of possibilities. Erin Malone “Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace” (Fifth Edition) Joseph M. Williams If inconsistent link labels make you cringe and jargon makes you angry, you need to get this book. It provides you with ten elegant strategies for refining and iterating the written word so that it makes sense for your audience. As you read, substitute the words “information architecture” for “writing” and watch the book transform into persuasive strategies to use in everyday IA work. Liz Danzico “Thesaurus Construction and Use” Jean Aitchison, Alan Gilchrist and David Bawden Need I say more? Very practical information on how to get started on building a thesaurus. Fundamental information in getting started with the standards associated with construction and some considerations for how a thesaurus is applied. I believe it's a great introduction, but anyone new to this LIS stuff should be cautioned that it may be quite overwhelming. Madonnalisa Gonzales-Chan “The Tipping Point” Malcolm Gladwell A book for anyone interested in the stickiness of information. A look into what makes information resonate, and what motivates people to pass information on. Gladwell's examples can be applied to information architecture, design, fashion, cooking, friendships... any situation where social epidemics can have influence. Liz Danzico “Unlocking Knowledge Assets” Susan Conway and Char Sligar Great case study on building a knowledge management organization system at Microsoft. So maybe the whole book isn't relevant to you but there is definitely lots to think about on such topics as taxonomy management, search or information retrieval, and building a community of practice. It has definitely given me more thoughts to reflect on for user research from the perspective of search logs and such. Madonnalisa Gonzales-Chan

Books on Interaction Design and HCI “About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design” Alan Cooper My first practical introduction to software application and interface design. If anything this book is a really good introduction to the basics of application UIs. Madonnalisa Gonzales-Chan This book was one of the first books I got on interface design. Filled with practical advice for a variety of problems encountered in application design. Despite its age (1995) it is still a handy reference if you design software applications. Erin Malone “The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design” Brenda Laurel Definitely a fundamental collection of articles on HCI before the web. I still recommend it especially for some of the foundation research on HCI. Madonnalisa Gonzales-Chan “The Art of Interactive Design: A Euphonious and Illuminating Guide to Building Successful Software” Chris Crawford While this renamed second edition isn't out yet, I've been a fan of Crawford's writings for years, since his seminal classic, “The Art of Computer Game Design.” He's devoted years to pondering interactive storytelling, with ideas that have been well ahead of their time. In the meantime you can see his past essays at http://www.erasmatazz.com/Library.html George Olsen “Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques” Kevin Mullett and Darrell Sano This is one of my favorite books. I have a copy for home and a copy at work. The authors equate the problem solving process for interaction design to the problem solving process of information and graphic design. Unlike the other HCI/Interface books written by software developers for other software developers, this is one of the few books, that as a trained graphic desiger, I could relate to. Erin Malone One of the few books on user interface design that explicitly draws on the visual design principles that artists and graphic designers have spent centuries beta testing. While its UI examples are all traditional software (other examples range from currency design to the famous map of the London Underground), it's a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the principles behind good UI design. George Olsen “Human-Computer Interaction” (Second Edition) Alan Dix, Janet Finelay, Gregory Abowd & Russell Beale Great textbook introduction to HCI. One of the important textbooks for my own introduction to HCI. Madonnalisa Gonzales-Chan “Mind Over Media - Creative Thinking Skills for Electronic Media” Mark von Wodtke While at first glance, this book may seem a little dated—the web isn't even mentioned—it is a book I return to over and over again. This book is filled with various techniques and how-to's for thinking about creativity, interactivity, hypertext, data models, information design, and perception. There are discussions of how to present and visualize information and ideas—concept mapping, diagramming, metaphor—as well as how to plan the process of creativity in the context of a practical problem to solve. Each chapter builds on the previous and several chapters have a series of exercises at the end to test your learning of the various techniques. This is one of the best books in my library for an interaction designer. Erin Malone “Reinventing the Wheel” Jessica Helfand Reinventing the wheel brings together an amazing collection of paper wheel charts. On the surface this sounds strange, but these wheels pack in layers of complex information into an easy-to-use compact circular format. The collection ranges from wheels created in the early 1900's to circular information design from as late as 2001. Each wheel is presented on its own page with a brief description of its history and how the information works. Anyone interested in information design and interaction will treasure this book. Erin Malone

Books on User Centered Design “Contextual Design” Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt After you've interviewed users, Beyer and Holtzblatt show you how to turn the information into useful models to analyze the problems and come up with solutions. However, the techniques are geared toward large-scale business process re-engineering projects and typically need to be scaled back for most other projects. Also Beyer and Holtzblatt are a bit weak on the process of coming up with a design. George Olsen “Customer-Centric Product Definition” Sheila Mello An extremely useful book from the product development field, which has been popularized as the “Voice of the Customer.” Mello provides a detailed method you can use to not only understand user needs, but also prioritize what things to focus on. I particularly like her use of survey research techniques as a way of reality-checking proposed feature sets developed by qualitative user-centered design techniques. George Olsen “The Design of Everyday Things” Donald Norman This book is about awareness—awareness that your frustration and grief in using a product may be the fault of the design itself. You are then free to question your interaction with products with objectivity and purpose. If you already know these concepts, Norman's book empowers you, leaving you a vocabulary to express yourself. If you are still learning, be prepared that you'll never look at every day objects the same way again. Liz Danzico Formerly published as “The Psychology of Everyday Things”, This is the book that everyone calls the “essential text” for designers of any type. The ideas Norman discusses can be applied to so many different fields because it uses examples that everyone encounters in everyday life. If you're a usability professional and you want your web-illiterate grandmother to understand what you do, read her an excerpt from this book. She might not understand the technical details of your work, but she'll better understand the everyday concepts of user-centered design. Joshua Kaufman “Designing from Both Sides of the Screen” Ellen Issacs and Alan Walendowski Co-written by an interaction designer and a software engineer, this book offers the first look at how front-end user experience and back-end technology issues intersect—something we too often ignore. Besides offering some useful guidelines, the authors detail the creation of the instant messaging application and the give-and-take between the front-end and back-end needs during development. George Olsen “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” Alan Cooper A extremely good overview about why most high-tech products are so frustrating to use and the value of paying attention to user experience. It's perhaps best at dissecting the issues of corporate politics that user experience architects have to contend with. Cooper gives an overview of his extremely useful personas and scenarios technique but it's not covered in as much depth as it could be. George Olsen “Mastering the Requirements Process” Suzanne Robertson and James Robertson One of the most comprehensive books on developing requirements. While it's written from a software engineering perspective, it goes far beyond technical requirements to consider issues of visual presentation, legal concerns and corporate politics (although it doesn't cover content at all, due to the authors' background). It's quite readable and never pedantic. The bare bones version of the authors' approach is available online , but the book explains the thinking behind it in more detail and provides examples and a case study. Another good book is “Exploring Requirements” by Donald C. Gause and Gerald M. Weinberg. George Olsen “The Media Equation” Byron Reeves and Clifford Nass There isn't an experience design professional who doesn't advocate for the user. We consider social constructs and human experience of our target audience with unflappable resolve. With this book, Reeves and Nass challenge our notion of social constructs. They reveal that there are social relationships not only occurring among people, but between our users and the interfaces they encounter. Find out what happens when an aggressive interface confronts an aggressive human personality. Liz Danzico “Software for Use” Larry L. Constantine and Lucy A. D. Lockwood Often times densely-written with some really confusing terminology, but packed with ideas that make it well worth wading through. Constantine and Lockwood have some powerful ways of modeling use cases and offer useful specific steps for moving from high-level design down to the design of individual screens. George Olsen “User and Task Analysis for Interface Design” JoAnn T. Hackos and Janice C. Redish The key to starting the process of good user experience design is understanding the target audience and what they're trying to accomplish. This book's strong points are how think about breaking activities into specific tasks and how to go about observing and interviewing users, although the last section offers a good survey of techniques for moving from analysis design. It also has a good chapter on the all-too-often overlooked issue of how to provide documentation and training for users. George Olsen

Books on Design “Design Writing Research” Ellen Lupton and Abbot Miller This collection of essays, divided into three sections, Theory, Media, and History, cover over ten years of critical writing about graphic design, media and design history. The essays range from a look at “Modern Heiroglyphs,” —an essay that accompanied the exhibition Global Signage:Semiotics and the Language of International Pictures at the Cooper Union—, to “Laws of the Letter,” —a look at the history and theory of typography, —to “McPaper,” —an analysis of USA today and the infographics contained therein. The essays are smart, easy to read (they are essays) and cover a wide range of subjects. Erin Malone “The Design of Sites” Douglas K. Van Duyne, James A. Landay and Jason I. Hong Don't try to read this cover to cover, it's not meant to be used that way. Instead the authors present a collection of design issues and potential solutions, similar to the approach Christopher Alexander's “A Pattern Language” took for architecture. You may not use their advice, but it's good for crystallizing a nagging issue and jump-starting your thinking about solutions. George Olsen “The Elements of Typographic Style” Robert Bringhurst This small book is a must have if you spend any time thinking about page design and typography. Despite being geared toward graphic designers and traditional print work, it is also a useful resource for the screen designer. The chapter “Shaping the Page” covers the concept of the Golden Section and the mechanics of creating a well-proportioned page. This information is as applicable on screen as well as in print. New media designers will find this book interesting for it's historical perspective as well as its practical application. Erin Malone “Pentagram: The Compendium” The Pentagram Partners A 300-page showcase of one of the worlds best design studios. Published in 1993, you won't find cutting-edge design, but you will find a stellar collection of graphic, architectural and product design (but no UI design). There are numerous annotations explaining the thinking behind the designs, ranging from brief notes to lengthy essays. While it touches on many graphic design principles, don't expect an organized textbook on design. Rather it excels at giving you a right-brain gestalt of what design is about. George Olsen “The Non-Designers Web Book” Robin Williams For having no design background, I really value Williams' book. She also has other titles related to design in general. Very approachable and full of great examples. Madonnalisa Gonzales-Chan

Books on Usability “Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” Steve Krug Usability without dogma. Witty and to the point, Krug offers useful guidelines for using “advanced common sense” when designing and practical advice for usability testing. It's also a good book to give to managers or others outside the user experience field to give them an overview of the issues involved. George Olsen This is my favorite web usability book. Straightforward and humorous, this book will tell you in a few hours what would take days to find by digging through all of the user research. If Nielsen is the guru of web usability, Krug is the Yoda of web usability; he's very wise in the ways of the users. My favorite aspects of “Don't Make Me Think” are the excellent screenshots, examples and illustrations Krug uses to explain his ideas and how easy it is to implement web usability. Joshua Kaufman “Don't Make Me Think” is one of the few usability books that I have read cover to cover, rather than skimmed for reference. This is the book to keep around and offer to folks who don't get it. Humorous yet pragmatic, Krug offers advice that anyone, no matter the budget, can follow. Erin Malone “design by people for people: Essays on Usability” Edited by Russell J. Branaghan http://www.upassoc.org/store/usability_essays.html Whenever I need to dig into my personal usability library for advice, this is the first book I pick up. It's a collection of the best essays published in the Usability Professionals' Association's former newsletter, Common Ground. The book is a composite of 27 essays on topics ranging from experience design to consulting, usability methods to conceptual modeling. UPA members get a $10 discount when purchased from the UPA site. Brenda Janish “Designing Web Usability” Jakob Nielsen According to B & A's Christina Wodtke, a guru is a critic who prescribes rigid, oversimplified rules of website design. There is no better way to describe Jakob Nielsen, who uses “guru” four times on his biography page (http://www.useit.com/jakob/). “Designing Web Usability” is full of oversimplified rules, but those rules are backed up by years of research and a solid discussion. Joshua Kaufman In this book, Mr. Nielsen transcended the rigid guru role and became the teacher the web so desperately needed in 1999. He moves from observation to principal with clarity, bringing empathy to website design—and most of his insights are as valid now as ever. His earlier works are too academic, later works are too didactic, but this book—like the little bear's goods in goldilocks—is just right. Mr. Nielsen's finest hour in print. Christina Wodtke “E-commerce User Experience” Nielsen Norman Group “That's just your opinion. Show us some research to back that up.” We've all heard that at some point when suggesting an interface change to improve usability. Well, these guys did the research so you don't have to. The Nielsen Norman Group performed usability studies on a number of e-commerce sites, in a variety of industries, and published their findings in this amazingly easy-to-use (and heavy!) hardcover version of the “E-commerce User Experience” series of reports sold on their site. As a practicing IA, the 207 guidelines proposed aren't surprising (although they do provide a nice structure for the book), but this is the book I reach for when a teammate, client or manager needs convincing of an interface change that might be hard for them to swallow (the Executive Summary in each chapter makes that task even easier). This book is well worth the hefty price tag, and will quickly become one of those books you store under lock and key with the label “secret weapon.” Brenda Janish “The Usability Engineering Lifecycle” Deborah J. Mayhew If you get only one hard-core book on user experience design, this is the one. Despite the title, it actually covers most of user experience design. While it trades breadth for depth, its one of the few books that acknowledges that not everyone has time to do things the “right” way, so it also covers how to scale-down methods from it's “heavyweight” approach, as well as how to substitute quick-and-dirty alternatives. Mayhew is actually willing to put some time estimates on how long particular steps may take. The main weakness is its failure to address issues of content, information architecture, and visual design (the author does traditional software development), although at least the book acknowledges these may be important if you're doing web-related projects. George Olsen “Usability for the Web” Tom Brinck, et al Most usability books simply discuss the rules and guidelines of web usability. “Usability for the Web” not only discusses the rules and guidelines, it also shows you how to integrate them into the web design process. According to the authors, every stage in the design, from requirements gathering to post-launch is an opportunity to affect a site's overall usability. To help you realize these opportunities, the authors have filled these pages with forms and checklists that enable you to easily incorporate their techniques into your current projects. This is a great book for web designers and project managers alike. Joshua Kaufman “Web Site Usability Handbook” Mark Pearrow Pearrow's “Usability Handbook” is my how-to book of web usability. It covers many web usability topics including the usability toolbox, design guidelines, heuristic evaluation and usability testing. The Handbook is different than the aforementioned usability books because it reads more like a textbook, offering chapter summaries, hands-on exercises and discussion topics, which all help to make the book more of an exploration than straight read. If you've already read the rules and guidelines, and you're looking for usability in practice, “Web Site Usability Handbook” is recommended. Joshua Kaufman

Books for Writing Well “Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace” Joseph M. Williams If inconsistent link labels make you cringe and jargon makes you angry, you need to get this book. It provides you with ten elegant strategies for refining and iterating the written word so that it makes sense for your audience. As you read, substitute the words “information architecture” for “writing” and watch the book transform into persuasive strategies to use in everyday IA work. Liz Danzico “Untechnical Writing: How to Write About Technical Subjects and Products So Anyone Can Understand” Michael Bremer While this short book is written primarily for technical documentors—peoplewho write instruction manuals and guide books for software—IAs and the like will find it full of valuable tips, tools, and methods for organizing your thoughts, clarifying ideas and processes, and communicating them to users. Bremer also offers useful techniques and guidelines for more mechanical matters like collaborating with developers, creating effective page layouts, editing, even designing interfaces. A former Director of Creative Services at video game pioneer Maxis, Bremer writes in a casual, straight forward style, and intersperses his text with insightful, often humorous quotes from a variety ofnotable authors and pundits. If your job requires communicating complex ideas to normal people, read this book. Ryan Olshavsky “The Web Content Style Guide” Gerry McGovern, Rob Norton & Catherine O'Dowd When planning Boxes and Arrows, I found it nearly impossible to find a good style guide focused on online usage to resolve questions like “email” vs. “e-mail,” or defining “GSM.” WCSG filled that void. George Olsen Get it out of necessity; continue to use it out of love. While it's not the Chicago Manual of Style or the Associated Press Stylebook, it doesn't pretend to be. Current examples, techniques, and references make this book worth reading cover to cover. Liz Danzico

Learning from Others “Crossing the Chasm” “Inside the Tornado” Geoffrey Moore If you want to be ahead of the technology curve, learning more about Moore's thoughts on the product lifecycle could be your lifeline to product and company success. Many of the practical ideas presented provide a good strategic edge for those wanting to learn more about product marketing and management and introducing high-tech products to the general public. Madonnalisa Gonzales-Chan “From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games” Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins Surprisingly easy to read for an academic publication, this collection of essays examines how assumptions about gender affect the design, development and marketing of computer games, and proposes approaches for avoiding the gender stereotyping prevalent in game designs today. Essential reading for video game programmers and designers, and helpful for anyone designing websites, e-learning, or interactive entertainment for children. Brenda Janish “Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing” Henry Petroski Bring a pencil and a can of soda with you when you read this book. Petroski outlines how some of the most common inventions came to be through iterative product development. While we've been advocating for learning by example, competitive research, and iterative usability testing, engineers have been doing this for years to develop such wonders as pencils, aluminum cans, and paper clips. Liz Danzico “Making Movies Work” Jon Boorstin Re-titled and re-released after being long out of print, Boorstin offers a masterful analysis of how movies move us —from the “voyeur's eye” for detail, logic and plausibility, to the “vicarious eye” attuned to emotional truth, to the “visceral eye” that takes in the gut reactions of the lizard brain. While written for filmmakers, with specifics from camera angles to film scoring, it's still thought-provoking reading when thinking about the “experience” side of user experience. George Olsen “Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word” Walter J. Ong Imagine what the world was like with no dictionaries, reference books, libraries, no Internet. A culture where words mean what they do relevant to individual situations. This kind of direct semantic ratification is still used in oral cultures today and is the foundation for all communication we are now familiar with. This book explains how each act of discourse, no matter what the modality, calls for our consciousness of the cultural implications affecting the exchange, as well as an awareness of our own cultural biases upon interpreting it. Liz Danzico “Radio: An Illustrated Guide” Ira Glass and Jessica Abel http://www.thislife.org/pages/trax/comic/comic_base.html This 32-page black-and-white comic book, co-authored by NPR's Ira Glass and cartoonist Jessica Abel, provides an inside look at how “This American Life” radio stories are researched, written and produced. Offered ostensibly as a primer for people who want to submit stories to the show, its unsung value is as a uniquely insightful analysis of what makes narrative compelling. A nice look at the elements of the “radio user experience” that can be applied to the medium of online storytelling as well. This belongs on your bookshelf next to Scott McCloud's “Understanding Comics.” Brenda Janish “Understanding Comics” Scott McCloud Who would think that a book called “Understanding Comics” would have anything to do what we do? Well, lose your cynicism and dive into Scott McCloud's visual world. Learn some of the most important aspects of conveying information from a comic book artist. This terribly accessible book can be read in one or two sittings, and the knowledge gained makes it a must-read for any comic book enthusiast or anyone responsible for telling stories with pictures. Liz Danzico

Books on Brand “Building Brand Identity” Lynn B. Upshaw While Aaker gives you the big picture when it comes to brand strategy, Upshaw provides a more hands-on treatment that's a good complement to “Building Strong Brands”. Like Aaker, Upshaw does take something of a top-down approach to brand strategy, although he emphasizes the importance understanding a brand through customers' eyes. George Olsen “Building Strong Brands” David A. Aaker Like information architecture, branding has had difficulties clearly defining itself. However, it's far more than just a catchy name and cool logo, branding is sum total of your customer's experience with your company. Needless to say, user experience is an important part of that equation, so user experience architects should be familiar with how they fit into the larger issue of branding. Aaker offers a good introduction for novices and experts alike. George Olsen

Books on Marketing “Counter-Intuitive Marketing” Kevin J. Clancy and Peter C. Kreig Want to know why some many companies launch products that fail or pursue strategies that go nowhere? The authors offer an acid criticism of marketing as it's too often practiced. Unfortunately, their solutions aren't that practical except for the largest companies. They're hard-core quantitative marketing research guys, so their answer to everything involves six months and six figures. Still they offer a compelling vision of how market research done well can complement user-centered design techniques. George Olsen “Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing” Harry Beckwith We're often in the position of having to sell clients or colleagues on the intangible benefits of our skills. While Beckwith's book is aimed at marketing, much of the advice is highly applicable to these situations. George Olsen “Truth, Lies and Advertising: The Art of Account Planning” Jon Steel A fun read about what's known as “account planning” by the man behind the “Got Milk?“ ads and other memorable ad campaigns. Account planners at ad agencies play a role that's quite similar to user researchers and user experience strategists. They seek to deeply understand customers needs, wants and desires in order to prepare the creative brief. Not much in the way of practical details, but enjoyable and quite useful if you're dealing with people from an ad agency background. George Olsen

Books on Business “Business and Finance for IT People” Michael Blackstaff Like sales, accounting is one of those things most user experience professionals probably avoided in school. Yet it's critical to understanding business managers' concerns about the bottom line. Blackstaff walks you painlessly (okay, relatively painlessly) through the subject in plain language, using good analogies of how business balance sheets compare to your own finances and explaining the specifics of ROI calculations. Unfortunately, it doesn't cover “managerial accounting,” the kind of recordkeeping used to track operations—which is probably even more valuable to know. If you get satellite TV, the “Accounting in Action” telecourse on the PBS You channel includes an approachable introduction to managerial accounting. George Olsen “Designing Business: Multiple Media, Multiple Disciplines” Clement Mok In his chapter on Information Design, Mok reveals the subtleties of design disciplines—distinguishing information arts, information design, and information architecture from one another through a visually rich comparison to traditional offline examples. Whether you're a practicing experience design professional or a colleague of one, this book gives you a common vocabulary to discuss design strategy. Liz Danzico “Design Management Institute Journal” While this isn't a book, I highly recommend subscribing to the DMI quarterly journal. You can subscribe without becoming a member. This group focuses not only on the design manager but also on the role of design in business. This is the big design—industrial, product, interactive, etc. If you are interested in how the work you do affects business —and vice versa—this journal is a must-read. Erin Malone “The Harvard Business Review” A valuable collection of thoughtful and well-written white papers, with a surprising number of articles that are applicable to user experience (even if they're not labeled as such). But more importantly, HBR offers a good way to keep up on current trends in business thinking—helpful if you've got to sell user experience to bosses or clients—as well as a good way to learn more about management skills and general business skills. No it's not cheap, but it's definitely worthwhile. George Olsen

Books for Consultants “Flawless Consulting - A guide to getting your expertise used” Peter Block Ever worked with a client and offered your expert advice, only to find out later that they totally ignored it? This book offers advice on how to get others to take that advice and respect your expertise. Although I don't freelance much any more, this advice can be as useful in-house as with external clients. Erin Malone “Graphic Artist's Guild Pricing & Ethical Guidelines” Graphic Artist's Guild This book is put out every year by the Graphic Artist's Guild. The book defines every role and discipline you could imagine in the design world and the new media world—designer, illustrator, web designer, art director, creative director, HTML production, etc. The book includes salary information collected from national surveys as well as pricing information for various types of projects in different size markets. I have found this to be a godsend when having to estimate projects for new clients. It also contains great contracts and other documents that you can use in your freelance business. If you freelance or work for yourself, you MUST own this book. Erin Malone “Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully” Gerald M. Weinberg and Virgina Satir Invaluable advice for those in the business of providing advice. While the focus is on independent consultants, much of it is equally applicable for those working in-house. Witty and memorable anecdotes illustrate how to figure out what the real problems are and how to carefully give and receive advice. George Olsen “SPIN Selling” Neil Rackham Forget the plaid polyester suits, Rackham observed 35,000 sales calls and proved that the sales techniques commonly taught are usually counter-productive for high-value purchases—like hiring consultants. Instead Rackman focuses on consultative sales approach, focused on understanding the needs of your customer. If you're a consultant, the advice is invaluable to making a living. If you're not, Rackman's approach dovetails nicely with user-centered design and gives you a way to make allies out of your sales staff. George Olsen

Books about Management or for Managers “Collaborative Web Development: Strategies and Best Practices for Web Teams” Jessica Burdman When it comes to the nitty-gritty details of web design, like scoping projects, setting up workflow, and managing team dynamics, this book by Jessica Burdman is an invaluable reference. Not only does it thoroughly cover essential management aspects of the design and development process, but Ms. Burdman has also graciously included a CD-ROM of templates of the deliverables she mentions in the book. Great reference if you're just setting up shop, or are looking for documentation to support an existing process. Brenda Janish “Managing for the Short Term” Chuck Martin I just started reading this, so my review is based on the first chapter. Needless to say, these days bosses and clients are looking for clear and immediate results. This book looks like it gives you a good picture of the pressures they're facing. George Olsen “Quality Software Management: Anticipating Change” Gerald M. Weinberg User experience professionals often act as change agents whether they want to or not. One of the wisest consultants I know shows how to deal with organizational change in this book, the last of a four-volume series that pulls together his decades of experience. If you like this, I highly recommend the other books in the series, as well as “Becoming a Technical Leader,” which despite its title is applicable for anyone seeking to improve their people skills. Don't be put off by the titles, they were purposely “geeked up“ to make these human-focused books appeal to the software engineering market. George Olsen “What Management Is: How It Works and Why It's Everyone's Business” Joan Magretta Written by a former editor of the “Harvard Business Review,” it provides a quite readable primer on what management is all about. Consequently it's a must-read for user experience professionals, so they can understand how user experience fits into the bigger picture of business. Rather than getting bogged down in the how, the book focuses on the “what” and the “why” of the core principles of management. It also gives good attention to the management of non-profits. George Olsen

Managing Your Career “How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job” Dale Carnegie From the man who brought you “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, this sappy, sentimental, often times over the top with positive enthusiasm, book will remind you that you can have it all. Common sense advice—that we often forget—on handling difficult people and situations that will go a long way to keeping you happy in your life and career. Erin Malone “Managing Transitions - Making the Most of Change” William Bridges In today's fast moving, ever changing economy, this book is just the ticket to help understand how you react to constant change—most specifically in the workplace. The author offers various tools and techniques for helping people carry out change. This is an excellent book if you have employees, but it is just as useful if you are the employee who not only has to accept change, but implement it as well. Erin Malone “Orbiting the Giant Hairball - A corporate fool's guide to surviving with grace” Gordon MacKenzie Whimsical and irreverant, this book is full of advice your boss will never tell you. The author, a former creative director at Hallmark, offers advice for how folks within the corporate world can unleash their creativity despite the bureaucracy of the corporation. MacKenzie shares personal experiences and advice for inspiring corporate colleargues to find their lost child self. It is full of funny illustrations and a quick read. Get it for yourself, a coworker or even your boss. Erin Malone

IA Summit 2003 Wrapup Part 2

B&A Staff — Sun, 30 Mar 2003 22:58:01 GMT

Sunday, March 23 Knowledge Compass: opening windows, punching holes in stovepipes, forming communities, connecting people to people Jane Starnes Jane Starnes, Sr. Information Specialist at Intel, described herself as a taxonomy specialist, and the heart of her presentation about implementing a “knowledge sharing” solution is a vocabulary of categories that everyone in her organization understands. The problem: 79,000 employees, many departments and organizations, no central document repository, and a real need to communicate across these divisions. Her challenge: to facilitate expertise sharing, open windows between organizations, and create reusable best practices. The solution: a repository containing categories of links, related resources and best practices, with experts who can answer questions for each topic. Jane described her design process, how she got the organization involved, and how the project rolled out (she had usage numbers to meet). She explained how the screens work, and how experts are chosen. Key takeaways: Management needs to value and reward participation in the project, but collaboration in any company usually requires a big culture change. —Dorelle Rabinowitz Kids in the Mi(d)st - the process of building a design team that includes people whose ages range from 9 to 55 Nancy Kaplan Nancy Kaplan and her team from the University of Baltimore are doing interface design for the International Children's Digital Library. Nancy talked about their unique design process. They have gathered a team of children who are considered design partners, not just research subjects. When the team (adults and children) does contextual inquiry, for example, the children do the interviews, ask follow up questions, and take pictures. The adults take part in the research, but having children trained to participate in the research adds value and unexpected insights to the process. Teaching the children how to do research was not easy: they have limited attention spans and making the value of observation clear to them was hard. Only when they had gone through the entire process of using their observations in an actual design exercises did they understand the value and get better at it. Another challenge was the group dynamics: the group was made up of children of different ages (8 to 11, approximately), and was a mix of boys and girls. It took a lot of team building to turn them into a design team. The children were also active partners in the design of the user interfaces. Again, they had to be taught how to come up with ideas that go beyond the obvious. They became real designers once they mastered a few tools (i.e., Flash and Dreamweaver—teaching them Flash only took an hour!). Once they could start making their own designs, their design ideas became exciting and insightful. Once they began designing, they were taught various exercises in design prototyping. A big advantage of having a kid design team is that they haven't yet been socialized like adults. They have high expectations of technology, and that is an advantage. Kids say, “I want it to do X,” where X can be anything. At the end of the presentation, Nancy said this has been the most fun research she has done in her life and there was a lot of nodding in the panel. They also called for other universities to start using a similar process. More information about their design process (and pictures!) can be found at their website (http://www.icdlbooks.org/adults/adult_info.html). —Peter Van Dijck Persuasion Architecture — Waiting For Your Cat to Bark Bryan Eisenberg, John Quarto-von Tivadar Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-von Tivadar focus their work on commercial websites, of which there are four types: e-commerce, content, lead-generation, and self-service. Each website tries to persuade its visitors to take action, the measure of which is the conversion rate. But the website must meet the visitor's goals before the business's goals can be met. Conversion rates for retail stores are around 40%, but for websites it is only around 2-3%. Obviously websites are not meeting their users' goals as well as they could. The web industry has a 70% failure rate in web-related projects. In any other industry that would be completely unacceptable. The Minerva Architecture Process (MAP) is something used at FutureNow to help improve the success rate (and conversion rates) of web projects. It prompts non-expert users to create persuasive systems by allowing non-technical business people to learn and manage the development process. There are six steps in the MAP process: uncovery, wireframe, storyboard, prototype, development, and optimization. Creating different personas is very important. Marketing personas help the sales process, while design personas help the development process. There are three elements that go into persona creation: demographics (the attributes of the persona, like age), psychographics (the buying decision process), and topographics (how demo- and psychographics mesh with similar selling processes). —Chiara Fox Cross-Cultural Information Architecture: Lessons from Japan Adam Greenfield Adam Greenfield discussed the differences, challenges, and some of his experiences of practicing information architecture in Tokyo, Japan. He broke the differences he sees into three types—cultural, social, and cognitive. The media environment is very image-dense in Japan. Motion on the page is greatly privileged. They like things to be animated and pop off the page. Every company wants its website to reflect the heart of the company and the dreams of the users. He told the story of the Farting Salaryman, an animated mascot that farts or burps when you mouse over it. It shows people that the company is human and has a heart. These differences have implications for the architect.

First, humility: you must admit you are embedded in your culture.
The Japanese are a risk-adverse culture. CMS and dynamic sites are seen as risky. You have to work to defuse that.
Expect to produce non-standard deliverables, such as “before” and “after” diagrams, heavily annotated schematics, and use cases.
Deliverables we are used to don't contain enough information and details. Proposals that are 50-60 pages that say little are more important than shorter reports that say everything. You need to show that you have worked hard on the client's behalf.
Expect to justify all of your decisions. It's not enough to say something is a best practice. You must provide supporting documentation. Names are important (such as Jakob Nielsen, Lou Rosenfeld, and Peter Morville) and credentials count. You don't.
Dare to be suboptimal. This is a challenge. You may not be happy with the results of a project (since they may not match your ideals of a "good" site), but if the client is happy, then you have to accept that.

—Chiara Fox Panel: Making Connections with Techies: Five IAs and one IA-friendly programmer share their tips and tricks for making connections with technical types to build sites Moderated by Chris Farnum and a panel discussion by Margaret Hanley, Kristen Truong, Dennis Schleicher, Jodi Bollaert, and Simon Wistow Chris began by stating he wanted the panel to be a bit like “Politically Incorrect,” and described how the “useratti” and “techies” have a fair amount of misconceptions about each other. Margaret focused on the right time to design together and to design alone. It's important to know who “owns” the documents, when to bring them in and collaborate, and how much detail is required to satisfy techies. Kristen explained what technologies IAs should understand, and what IAs should explain to techies. Her tip: IAs can help resolve disconnects between teams. Dennis posed a question, “who's playing in what sandbox,” or, where does IA end and tech begin? He says we both look at the same data but ask different questions about it. His diagram, showing IA between Creative and Tech sparked much discussion amongst the panelists. Jodi discussed communication problems, especially among project managers. Her tips for managers and for IAs are all about getting involved in each other's processes. Her plea, “Techies are people too!” got a big audience chuckle. Then the techie, Simon, came up to the podium. “Techies love food,” he said, explaining how to improve relationships. His point: Techies and IAs work on the same problems, both dealing with interface design challenges. It's extremely valuable to work together, a lesson he learned when he was moved away from the design team and productivity dropped severely. His self-deprecating comments, calling techies “aesthetically-challenged trolls with a tendency to patronize,” got the biggest laugh of the morning. But his point was well taken by the audience. —Dorelle Rabinowitz Employees' Experience Levels and the Relation to Usability in a Web-based Information System Mike Alexander Mike Alexander presented the results of a usability study conducted to determine if the level of experience that a user has with the system affects the usability issues uncovered, the success rate of tasks, the use of work-arounds to complete tasks, and the level of perceived usability issues. The study was conduced by Mike along with Hsin-Liang Chen, both of the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin. The system being tested in the study was a web application used to configure settings and features used in monitoring industrial equipment. Nine experts and nine novices were each asked to perform ten tasks using the system. The success rate, time on tasks, and perceived level of success and difficulty was recorded and analyzed. The results showed that expert users were not any more likely to successfully complete a task. However, experts were able to complete almost all tasks significantly faster than novices, and were less likely to use the Help feature. Users were not always consistent in their expressions of difficulty in relation to their ability to successfully complete the required task. In some cases, little difficulty was expressed though they were in fact not successful; in other cases, users could easily complete tasks but expressed a considerable level of difficulty. —Jeff Lash Impact of Behavioral-Based User Research on Site Design Richard Omanson Richard Omanson of User Centric, Inc. presented different ways to gather behavior-based information that can be applied to a user-centric methodology. The techniques were grouped into three categories. In each of these three categories, Richard mentioned several techniques and technologies that can be used to gather and analyze information. An explanation of the technique was provided, along with an example, and a summary of the benefits and limitations. The categories and their associated techniques were:

User assessment (for inferring goals and expectations from behavior)
- Card sorting
- Search term analysis
- Site traffic analysis
Design assessment (for conducting usability tests on the design)
- Reverse card sorting
- Usability testing
Site assessment (for inferring reasons for shortcomings from behavior)
- Page ratings
- Traffic path analysis
- Eye movement analysis
- Link click analysis

For many of these techniques, Richard demonstrated or showed screenshots of various shareware and proprietary technologies that may aid in the process. The presentation concluded with a graph showing all of the techniques mentioned, plotted by Actual/Predicted Behavior vs. Reasons Explained/Not Explained. The slide can serve as an excellent starting point for determining the best techniques to use depending on the type of information that needs to be gathered. —Jeff Lash Teaching Information Architecture Chris Chandler, Matt Fetchko, Eric Reiss Is information architecture a course or a curriculum? Can IA be taught at all? Three instructors from three different institutions set out to give us insight into their approaches, methodologies, and successes in teaching information architecture. Chris Chandler, adjunct lecturer at UCLA, gave a comprehensive overview of the undergraduate “boot camp” he team-teaches with Lynn Boyden. Although students come to his class with only basic web development knowledge, coming out of his class they are good at “talking their way into a job.” Over the years, Chris has learned to tailor his course—at first, the duo assigned a lot of reading. A 300-page reader was daunting for the students, however, and now the reading is much lighter. At the end of the semester, students engage in a mock project where experts from the community come in and present a scenario. Students have one hour to ask as many questions as they can, another hour to figure out the problem, and another hour to present. Matt Fetchko, adjunct assistant professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program, a graduate program at New York University, presented his approach next. Matt gave a survey of information, starting with clay tablets and continuing into the present. Matt offered us tips and strategies for keeping students involved throughout classes. Making each lesson interactive and bringing real examples is key. As with other teachers in the group and in the audience, Matt advocated for group work in class, despite student protests. Finally, Eric Reiss, an independent consultant who teaches courses primarily to business students, challenged us with the question “Can anyone teach IA at all?” He pointed out that some may say it can't be done, but he believes it can, although it's not about lectures, exams, or grades. Reiss's approach is very different, since, instead of a captive audience over a series of weeks or months, he sees his business school students over a concentrated day or two. His goal is less to teach students IA, then to get them to think about IA. Thus, he likened his role as more of a “midwife than teacher.” He pointed out that trying to encourage students to simply read a book on information architecture without instruction (with all respect to Peter Morville who was moderating the session), is like asking them to read a cookbook. Teach them how to think. “Set free the rules,” he urged. Rationality means knowing the rules; creativity means knowing when to break them. The conversation that took place after the “official” presentation was just as active. Many of the attendees in the room currently teach information architecture, making for a detailed discussion with real problems and resolutions. Topics ranged from the skill level needed for IA students to the concern with working with real clients from the community in a class. Victor Lombardi, from the Asilomar Institute of Information Architecture, was identified as a point of contact. He is currently championing a research initiative for AIfIA with the goal of recommending an information architecture curriculum. —Liz Danzico Selling the Deliverable: Presenting IA to the Client Seth Gordon Sitting in this session I really felt like a good friend was sharing some hard-earned wisdom he'd gained through years of presenting his work to clients. Seth gave very practical, usable advice on both the content of an IA meeting and the dynamics of the client/consultant relationship (although I believe his advice is just as applicable to internal client relationships). His guidance included tips on establishing the relationship and gaining credibility and trust, setting meeting goals and a realistic agenda, logistics of controlling the room, and even the positive side-effects of an unexpected coffee spill. Throughout, he emphasized the importance of remembering that the client wants you do well, that you were hired because they trust your experience and expertise, and that you should always strive to make your team look competent, and to make your clients look good. —Brenda Janish “A Spirit of Simplicity”: What Information Architects Can Learn from the Arts and Crafts Movement Michael Magoolaghan

Michael Magoolaghan. Photo by Erin Malone

Michael Magoolaghan's presentation on the similarities in the goals and ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement to that of the work of the IA was a refreshing look back to the past. IA's are constantly looking forward to the future and new technologies, but Michael reminded us that there are important lessons to be learned from our recent history. The Arts and Crafts movement of England and specifically of the United States is one such period that offers lessons for the modern IA. In the Arts and Crafts movement, buildings and objects were intended to be useful, beautiful, and affordable. This is not that different from the desire that our work be usable, desirable, and useful. He then went on to expand on the Arts and Crafts ideals—Simplicity, Honesty, Utility, Organicity, Craftsmanship, and Harmony—taking each and comparing them to desirable traits within the work of an IA. Finally, he cautioned that while the Arts and Crafts movement upheld these ideals, it was often within the context of a socio-political movement. He concluded by asking some important questions: How can we take an honest approach to design? How can we utilize structural decoration? How can we treat a homepage like a hearth? How do we find and provide joy in our work? All good questions to ponder as we make our way in this fast paced modern world. —Erin Malone Hypertext Gardens, Architecture, and IA Mark Bernstein

Mark Bernstein and slide: The ultimate aim of all creative activity is a website! Photo by Erin Malone

In contrast to Michael Magoolaghan's gentle and retrospective presentation, Mark Bernstein took charge of the space and his presentation much the way a sideshow barker commands that you attend his latest show. Mark was entertaining, provocative, and at more than one point downright antagonistic. He began by proclaiming that we do not want to recreate the failures of the Arts and Crafts movement. He challenged the label Information Architect and whether or not there was architecture involved. He then proceeded to show the audience a flurry of images of important buildings to illustrate his points, making analogies from the architecture to the work of the IA. His presentation was fast-moving and contained a lot of quotes from the famous architects Walter Gropious and Louis Sullivan. Mark also spent some time reviewing the IA literature and taking the authors and the community to task for only talking about all that is wrong and bad out there. When he was finished, many in the audience were stunned into silence. A few people asked some very good questions, but most folks left with a lot to think about. —Erin Malone User Experience and IA: Panel Moderated by Jesse James Garrett with panel discussions by Terry Swack, Jess McMullin, Chris Fahey and Peter Morville

The IA and UX panel: Peter Morville, Chris Fahey, Jesse James Garrett, Jess McMullen and Terry Swack. Photo by Erin Malone

This panel had quite a large crowd, and Jesse James Garrett started things off by questioning the audience on their expectations about the panel. Is Little IA/Big IA really a runaway train? Terry said she's glad she can concentrate on what she does best, and that there are always people who can do the other things. Peter questions whether there is a meaningful difference between UX and IA, and states that the dispute is really a political issue. UX vs. IA is not the only model, and he rejects monolithic views. Then there was some audience discussion about IA vs. UX beginnings, and why the IA term was assumed given its legacy. Peter said he just liked it. Chris spoke about cross-pollination within the UX field as a whole, while Jess described his experience of adding UX into an already working engineering process. After that there was much audience participation. The McDonald's example of methodology was discussed. (You can still create exceptional results, but not by following the methodology.) And our work should be about the end results, not deliverables. Unfortunately time ran out on this lively debate while it was still in progress. —Dorelle Rabinowitz Metadata Harvesting Karl Fast Karl Fast's presentation on Metadata Harvesting gave a glimpse into a new way of understanding metadata. He opened with the basic definitions of metadata and buildt on those definitions with metaphors of metadata that exists everywhere (music notation, library catalogs, HTML headers, passports, product brochures). We live in a distributed, heterogeneous network of electronic/digital information and our information environment is constantly changing. Metadata is likewise changing to reflect this new environment. After his descriptive opening, he compared the Open Archives Initiative to search engines. He provided several other examples of supporting the bridge between people and information: Napster, Gnutella, Z39.50, and RSS. All these forms of technologies are not new; they are just different ways for providing an infrastructure for metadata across networks of information. Karl did not offer new models but his analysis of metadata standards and models could offer us insight into future ways to connect people and information. He emphasized the need of Clifford Lynch's recombinant and migratory metadata in order to support the dynamic nature of information. He offers a starting point for all of us to see how metadata is really all around us and how it could be useful as we produce more information. —Lisa Chan Information Architecture versus Visual Design: The Movie or When Worlds Collide: Collaborative friction between information Architecture and Visual Design Kim Ladin

Five minute madness. All photos by Erin Malone.

After being saturated by two very full days of talks on every IA topic under the sun, it was a welcome relief— for my last session of the summit —to sit back and watch a well-produced video presentation starring some of the colleagues I had seen that weekend. Kim Ladin of Hot Studio presented a video she produced consisting of a series of interviews with eight or so design and IA professionals on the topic of visual designers and information architects. Despite a technical glitch in the very beginning which left Peter Merholz's first segment silent (I know...Peter Merholz, silent...eerie), the series of interviews gave me new insight into how IAs are perceived by designers, and vice versa. After shedding light on how IAs and designers differ in their expectations and approach, Kim provided suggestions on how we can all just get along. Many suggestions involved developing mutual respect, assuming competence on both parts, and getting everyone involved as early in the process as possible. Interestingly, Simon Wistow (sacrificial techie on the IAs vs. Techies panel earlier) pointed out that many of the issues between IAs and designers parallel the sore points between techies and IAs. The common lesson: we need to work together, collaborate, and appreciate and respect our differences. —Brenda Janish Five Minute Madness A favorite tradition from past summits has been five minute madness and this year was no different. Everyone is offered the opportunity to come up and say a few words—about the conference; about the profession; about themselves; about their other agendas (i.e., contribute to Boxes and Arrows, contribute to Digital Web, join AIFIA, volunteer for an initiative, attend DUX, etc.). It didn't really matter. This year, the lineup to the mike started out slow, but once people started coming up there was no lack of commentary and thoughts. All aspects of IA were addressed—from thanking the summit presenters, to thanking the community at large for being together, particularly in these early days of the war, from an observation about the international attendees to shout-outs about the AIFIA organization initiatives. Boxes and Arrows was wished a happy birthday and some folks offered their services within academia to address the research needs of practitioners. The topics were as varied as the speakers and were a showcase of the diversity of this community. —Erin Malone Conference Chair Wrapup Christina Wodtke, this year's summit chair, wrapped up the weekend with a few words of thanks to Richard Hill and some food for thought about being an IA. She challenged us all to live! To be passionate about life and all it offers and to continue to learn and be curious. And with that, the summit was over for another year. —Erin Malone

Summit Photo Albums

Other Summit Summaries & Thoughts:

Summit Notes/Presos/Posters:

Contributors Brian Arbogast de Hubert-Miller is the Information Architect for the School of Information Studies at The Florida State University. He is also a full-time member of the faculty and specializes in information architecture theory, experiential learning, and professional practice. Dan Brown has been practicing information architecture and user experience design since 1994. Through his work, he has improved enterprise communications for Fortune 500 clients, including US Airways, Fannie Mae, First USA, British Telecom, Special Olympics, AOL, and the World Bank. Madonnalisa Gonzales-Chan aka. Lisa Chan wrangles the volunteers for Boxes & Arrows. During the day she is Metadata Services Manager at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Liz Danzico is a Product Manager of Search and Browse at BN.com and teaches Interface Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Liz has a B.A. in English from Penn State and an M.A. in Professional Writing from Carnegie Mellon. She is a copy editor at Boxes and Arrows. Chiara Fox is the Senior Information Architect in PeopleSoft’s web department. Before joining PeopleSoft, Chiara was an Information Architect at the pioneering consultancy Argus Associates. Seth Gordon uses his understanding of user research and IA to improve user experiences and solve business problems. He has recently completed consulting projects for the Nielsen Norman Group and Razorfish. Visit him at www.gordy.com, where there isn't a drop of content about user experience. Brenda Janish an editor for Boxes and Arrows, is an information architect at iLeo in Chicago where she has helped design consumer-facing sites for clients including Kellogg's, Procter & Gamble, McDonald's, and the U.S. Army. Jeff Lash is a Usability Specialist and Information Architect at MasterCard International and writes the IAnything Goes column for Digital Web Magazine. His personal web site jefflash.com proudly has no IA-related information. Erin Malone is currently a Product Design Director at AOL (America Online). She has been a practicing interaction, interface and information designer since 1993. She is editor in chief of Boxes and Arrows. Dorelle Rabinowitz has over 15 years experience working as an information architect, designer, producer, and a storyteller in new and old media. She’s been at SBI and Company (formerly Scient) for three years as a lead information architect. James A. Spahr works as a designer and programmer for Designframe Incorporated. His design work has been showcased in Graphis Books and in ID Magazine. He teaches undergraduate Information Architecture and Graphic Design at Pratt Institute. Peter Van Dijck is a Belgian information architect who specializes in metadata and international information architecture. He is the author of a book called “Information Architecture for visual designers” that will be published in September 2003. His site is http://petervandijck.net.

IA Summit 2003 Wrapup Part 1

B&A Staff — Sun, 30 Mar 2003 23:56:49 GMT

Information Architecture “Making Connections” March 21-23, 2003 Portland, OR Introduction: Friday, March 21

IAs attend the AIFIA hosted cocktail on Friday evening.
Top image: Brenda Janish and Dave Robins. Bottom image: Rashmi Sinha. Photos: Erin Malone

Spring is in the air and 400 +/- IAs are gathered together for networking, knowledge sharing, drinking, schmoozing, eating and drinking. It must be the annual ASIST IA Summit. Held in Portland, Oregon this year, the summit was well attended and seemed to be just what the doctor ordered. Despite the beginning of a war and major roads shut down by war protesters, folks managed to gather from across the country and the world to rub elbows with their own kind—just the thing for a conference with the theme “Making Connections.” As Richard Hill commented, “I came here to escape from the war—this is my reality,” a sentiment seemingly held by many attendees. As usual, the summit began with a host of pre-conference workshops and seminars. Despite a few that were cancelled, the overall attendance seemed to mirror past years. Many attendees arrived early just to be able to shop at the well-known Portland mecca, Powells. In fact, this author ran into more IAs at Powells than any other downtown place during the conference. (We IAs do seem to love our books.) The traditional cocktail hour on Friday evening was abuzz with stories about war protests and excitement over the next two days of events. Old friends greeting each other and as usual a lot of new faces to match the friendships already formed online through the lists and blogs. The evening was capped off with many smaller groups peeling off around the city for group dinners and the AIFIA (Asilomar Institute of Information Architecture) hosting a members gathering in the hotel bar. Saturday, March 22 Keynote: Stewart Brand “Digital information lasts forever, or five years, whichever comes first.” —Jeff RothenbergIntroduced by Peter Morville, this year's keynote was Stewart Brand. A long time netizen, Brand was the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of the Well and more recently author of How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built (Viking-Penguin, 1994). He is also the president of The Long Now Foundation (which is building a 10,000-year Clock and Library) and a co-founder of the All Species Inventory and the Long Bets Foundation. Brand spoke to us of the similarities between architecture—structure—and information spaces. He shared several illustrations from How Buildings Learn, to make the point that well-crafted structures adapt and evolve over time and that structures designed as “art” fail in the long run because of their inability to evolve. This point then led into the concepts of layers of change and pace layers. “Learning (fast) plus continuity (slow) equals robustness and adaptivity.” Pace layering can be found in all durable systems. Layers move at different rates in a civilization. Each layer moves at a different rate. Brand reminds us that the concepts behind this are important to understand and learn from as we design structural systems. Pace layering applies to IA, to architecture, to governments, to civilizations. The concepts scale. Brand closed his presentation with a discussion of the Rosetta Project and its associated website. All in all, Brand was entertaining and very thought provoking. The topics he discussed apply to Information Architecture or are metaphors for the way we need to design and think about the information systems we are working with every day. He was open to a variety of questions and often responded to a question with another question for the audience to ponder. Sites discussed: http://www.longnow.org http://www.longbets.org http://www.rosettaproject.org/ —Erin Malone Information Architecture, and People Fu-Tien Chiou Fu-Tien Chou, as the first session of the conference, began at the foundation: with an overview of traditional architecture, site planning, and information. He set out with a critical analysis of the comparisons between traditional practices and information architecture. In traditional architecture, standards such as construction and occupancy types dictate much of how an architect can construct a building. They must also be designed for flexibility. Buildings have regulations one must follow to ensure life safety, although they may or may not advocate design. Despite the regulations, there are structures that make statements (e.g., museums) and that tell a story (e.g., monuments). What, then, might this tell us about information architecture online? It, too, has construction types (e.g., site must be static or dynamic), has purpose (e.g., personal, non-profit, education), and can be designed for flexibility (e.g., transactional, content-oriented, expressive). With a building, one can distinguish recognizable physical elements. We can name parts such as a wall, window, and door. However, buildings can also be designed so that these elements cannot be distinguished from one another. This kind of design also has a purpose, even though it may not fall into our categorization system.

Fu-Tien Chiou. Photo by Mike Lee.

What implication does this have for the web? We also have recognizable elements. Chiou compared a site's:

Page to a Room
Link to a Door
Label to a Sign

All of these elements make sense in context. But what if we look at the elements from a different point of view? Chiou showed us the Taj Mahal as an example. By viewing its silhouette, the audience was able to identify the structure (overall view). A closer looked revealed the entrance (full view). Zooming into the door, we saw the door in context (human scale). More complex sites that must be scalable and customizable are forcing us into more of a planning role. “We no longer design sites, we plan sites.” Chiou emphasized that the traditional architects are not the builders. IAs can learn from this coordinator role; many of our tasks in the process might be the same. Traditional architects assume the following roles:

Know the user/client contact
Have multiple checkpoints and receive sign off on a design
Design before building
Document
Test before putting together

Chiou challenged us to think about “how one makes a space, a place.” He defined place as “a space with character.” Our task then, as IAs, is to create meaningful spaces. Overall, he urged us not to get information from just one source—it is all connected. —Liz Danzico Wayfinding and Navigation in Digital Spaces: Panel Moderated by Rashmi Sinha, with a panel of Mark Bernstein, Susan Campbell and Andrew Dillion “We talk about navigating when we mean understanding.”After brief introductions, Rashmi started things out by saying that everyone was interested in a lively discussion, and that the panel was designed to bring different perspectives to the table. Mark clearly wanted to provoke audience reaction when he stated that he believes IA is a force of repression. Then he discussed “lies” like clarity, hierarchy, and search, and that the journey is just as important as finding what you are seeking. His key lesson from hypertext literature: prescriptions don't work, structure changes, and cycles are central: “the chorus of a song comes back and it's not a mistake.” Susan's position was almost in direct opposition, that structure is the experience, and that architectural metaphor should be used to guide design. She discussed different design methods (rule-based, patterns, and building blocks) and how these methods relate to different IA examples. Her message: Structure communicates meaning. Andrew, on the other hand, was uncomfortable with metaphors, and questioned most IA's complete obsession with navigation (which leads to the similarity of so many sites.) The missing link: semantics. His argument: information is about so much more than space, it's about meaning, value, and imagery. It has a shape. The audience responded to these provocative comments with many discussion points: We have inadequate tools to describe complicated experiences. Why is semantics being ignored (and is it)? We still struggle with dimensions. We talk about navigating when we mean understanding. Of course, time ran out while the panel was responding to these points. Notes from the panel: http://www.rashmisinha.com/talks/navpanel/ —Dorelle Rabinowitz Model of Attraction: Providing a Central Framework to Think About Information Thomas Vander Wal In this session, Thomas Vander Wal presented a framework he developed that describes the relationship of information to users, which he has named the “Model of Attraction” (MoA). He believes the framework provides an accessible way for people to understand the relationship between users and information, as well as going beyond just understanding the process of finding information (which IAs tend to focus on) to what users do with the information once they find it, and how they get the information to follow them.

Thomas Vander Wal at the podium. Fu-Tien Chiou looks on. Photo by Mike Lee

He then discussed other metaphors used to describe users and information, namely “navigation is broken” and “information foraging,” both of which he believes have shortcomings when it comes to users retaining and storing information, and users getting information to follow them. He went into detail about the four phases of attraction: seeking information; recognizing information; retaining/storing information; and following (the user's access to the information after they have found it), as well as attraction receptors: intellectual/cognitive, perceptual/sensory, mechanical/digital, and physical (how are people using this information in the physical world?). Thomas pointed out that understanding attraction also requires understanding repulsion—essentially, repulsion of unwanted information also helps users find what they seek. The remainder of his talk covered more detailed aspects of the MoA, too detailed to cover here, and I highly recommend learning more at his site: http://www.vanderwal.net/essays/moa/030322/. —Brenda Janish The Sociobiology of Information Architecture Alex Wright In this entertaining and interesting talk, Alex Wright went all the way back to the beginning of life—to Eukaryotes— to begin to draw parallels and lessons for information architects. The talk was not so much about IA, per se, as it was a look at the evolution of nature and the way information has been shared between organisms and beings over the course of the world's history. Alex drew parallels for IA from the hive minds of ants and bees as well as the social communities of schools of fish.

Alex Wright explains how sociobiology is relevant to IA. Photo by Erin Malone.

He spent time looking back at early humans and how we have shared and disseminated knowledge via hierarchies and social networks. His survey across these various systems was an interesting overview of how these systems can work and how each one is built on the lessons of what came previously. He made a few predictions for the future based on the past—distributed syntax and the creation of personal information architectures. The full set of slides can be reviewed at his site: http://www.agwright.com/presentations/asis/wright_asis_032203_files/frame.htm. —Erin Malone The Psychology of Information Architecture Jason Withrow Jason Withrow followed the Sociobiology of IA with a look at what IAs can learn from psychology. Understanding simple concepts from the field of psychology and the way people think can help an IA create a more powerful site. In addition, Jason specifically offered examples of where psychology research has been misapplied in the field of web design, such as the 7 +/- 2 rule that often is cited as a rule for limiting the number of items in navigation. He pointed out that this research originally applied to the amount of numbers that humans can hold in their short term memory when asked to recall. This clearly is not the same as a page with a series of navigation links. There is no need for short term memory here—the navigation is persistent.

Jason Withrow discusses the specific psychology concepts that IAs should understand. Photo by Erin Malone.

Jason discussed the following concepts in more detail:

Memory: He pointed out the misapplication of the navigation model rule and then talked about cases where memory does matter, such as deep within sites where the navigation is local to an area. In this case, other cues are helpful: breadcrumbs, color coding, top level heading, and page titles were just some examples given.
Mental Categories: The ways people group items. Specifically, Jason discussed:
- Template matching: Some sort of perfect representation of an item which is then compare to everything else to see if it matches
- Prototype matching: When a person has an idealized representation, it doesn’t match perfectly but is close enough
Transference: How learned behavior in one situation is transferred and applied to other, similar situations

Understanding these concepts and deciding when and how to apply them, or not, can help make a site more learnable and, in turn, more usable to more people. —Erin Malone Designing a Usable Intranet for Wachovia Bank Kathleen Meter The Wachovia intranet redesign was a huge challenge for Kathleen Meter. Wachovia, a financial services company with 20,000 employees, had merged with First Union, adding 60,000 employees. There was a huge need for improved communication across the entire new organization. Kathleen faced many trials, from 85,000 employees with different (and often competing) priorities, to major time constraints. The first part of the two-phased project combined both firms' legacy intranets into one interim site, and then into the final design. Phase two (currently in progress) involves migrating over 400 intranets onto the new platform. To design this intranet, she used heuristic evaluations and content inventories, which led to brainstorming sessions, after which schematics were prepared, surveys were done, and usability testing was performed.

Kathleen Meter. Photo by Mike Lee

Kathleen is currently in the middle of phase two, migrating existing intranets to the new look and feel, which presents a whole bunch of fresh challenges: Who goes first, who's ready to go first, and what content should be migrated. Her approach was to create a process to engage participants and make them partners. Using templates and a style guide, the migrating sites are allowed flexibility of content, while standardizing the look and feel. Kathleen's overall challenges are time, resources, and support, and they are still evolving. —Dorelle Rabinowitz

Wachovia.com Redesign Project Samantha Bailey

Samantha Bailey. Photo by Erin Malone

Redesigning the Wachovia internet site fell to Samantha Bailey. Her task, to merge two robust branded websites while maintaining channel parity and minimizing customer impact. Her team took 3 months to decide how to proceed; and even though the merger was completed on paper, in reality it took far longer internally. Changes to the status quo were almost guaranteed to make someone unhappy. Samantha discussed her planning options, her solution, and told an engaging story about the battle for the homepage, which was eagerly discussed in the audience as well. Her team benefited from Wachovia's leadership support, which helped drive their user-centered design process, but Samantha was honest, declaring that IA is the art of compromise, and she wonders whether the redesigned site is truly user-centered. Lessons learned: Top down buy-in is of critical importance. —Dorelle Rabinowitz Using Personas and Scenarios to Guide the Ford.com Site Redesign Dai Pham More often than we'd like to admit, personas are used only at the start of a project. But how often are they actively used throughout the site development process? Dai Pham of SBI/Razorfish showed us not only how to inform the planning and information architecture phases, but how to carry the personas through the content strategy, design, and testing phases as well. The Ford team created three personas in all: A primary and two secondary. The primary represented the audience segment that was most difficult to design for. This primary persona drives the design, since, by designing for the most difficult, the team could meet the needs of the secondary personas as well. While the user research and information architecture teams created what IAs know as personas, the team began involving the content and design teams. The designer created a kind of persona “mood board:” a visual representation that embodied the characteristics of the personas. Meanwhile, the writer got involved by developing content directions that corresponded to each persona. Further, the designer mapped color palettes to each persona to show how color could mirror the characteristics of one over another, and how they could be combined. Since the team had worked with Forrester at the start of the progress, they mapped the final personas against the client's key metrics to show how the personas were supporting the metrics. Finally, the team used the personas to screen participants for usability testing. During testing, they could gear questions to the individual characteristics to ensure that the final product met the needs of the audiences they intended to reach. This rich overview left the group with practical tools for integrating personas into the entire site development process. —Liz Danzico Ontology Development and Relationship Modeling for Enterprises and Enterprise Websites Brett Lider Brett Lider "gets jazzed about waking up ontologies and vocabularies." To demonstrate how a well modeled and tagged content in a CMS sytem could pump custom content tailored to specific audiences, he walked us through some scenarios with fictitious car company GoMobile. Diagrams were used to display how different car models and available options could be associated by geography. That's to say that a specific European model might only have the option for a modest stereo and small wheels, while the North American version could also come with sporty wheels and the boom boom system. The pages served up would reflect available options while suppressing those that weren't. But, he cautions that these industrial strength systems are best suited for organizations with deep pockets for deployment and maintenance costs. But, knowing the underlying concepts is still valuable because they can be applied to smaller systems. —Seth Gordon Content Analysis and Modeling for BBCi Margaret Hanley

Margaret Hanley. Photo by Erin Malone

Margaret Hanley's presentation provided a great foundation in describing the process and deliverables for content modeling. The context of her content modeling was the BBC's regional websites. Her group was tasked to expand access to content easily and to streamline sharing inside and outside of the BBC. The problem was that many of the content creators were fixated on playing with the html tables and not really on developing content. They were looking into establishing a workflow process and even finding ways to leverage assets that BBC already owned such as video, images and audio. In order to get a handle on the type and amount of content they had, they established a process that included a site audit, content inventory, content audit, content modeling, and classification scheme analysis. The deliverables from these processes gave them some insights on the context, structures, metadata, and understanding of existing controlled vocabularies. From there they were able to conduct some content modeling and establish a metadata framework that would cover all their content assets. The content then was converted into data models which became the framework for their content management system. The outcome is that they have a system that includes content objects which are put together to create collections, and templates display the collections with appropriate logic behind them when published. The project provided them the flexibility to reuse content across the network, freed up time of writers to develop more content, and also gave them a mechanism for managing the context of materials they have in a fast and orderly manner. —Lisa Chan Content Modeling and Analysis for EastEnders Celia Romaniuk There were several factors in the motivation to do content modeling. These factors included a redesign of the visuals, brand, and navigation, the need to transition to a content management system, a system of controlled vocabularies and relationship modeling. Using the “friend of a friend” (FOAF) model, she began to study the relationships among the characters by using RDF (resource description framework). By having a series of “classes” that utilized relationships, content creation and maintenance would be easier. The current workflow process was based on an episode date database, the personal memory of writers, and various volunteers who were available to answer questions. For example for one radio series they used index cards to track the plot lines of the series. The goal was to change the information in the character profiles automatically and to answer audience questions using RDF. The RDF would give them the ability to manage timelines and events and provide content creators the opportunities to develop content features based on the RDF. By identifying relationships using a grammar of noun, verb, object, a content creator could formulate a complex matrix of relationships, plots, and events in the lives of those in the soap opera. Celia's method included content indexing, search log analysis, ontology research, and collaboration. She examined the components of the storyline to get an idea of storyline structures to aid in the RDF development. She explained that her next steps were to actually develop the framework for sharing and to see if her model could be repurposed for other soaps. —Lisa Chan Scent of a Web Page Jared Spool Jared Spool's discussion began with his statement that there are seven types of navigation pages, and that we would only discuss 5. He then demonstrated how difficult it can be to find specific information on the web, and what a negative experience it can be. But, he says, there is hope! There are different types of successful pages and predictive user behaviors that we can design for. Jared went on to describe content pages, galleries, trigger words and how the back button is “the button of doom.” He also explained how successful pages use descriptive links and details to guide users in their selection or path. He gave amusing positive and negative examples, and explained his interview-based design methods: first he interviews testers and finds out what interests them. Then, a test is designed around those interests. This method is in direct contrast to typical user testing, which he referred to as Leo DeCaprio tasks, or asking someone who knows absolutely nothing about a subject to describe the first new thing they learned. Jared's research proves that we can learn more from involved users, and he gave a list of links for anyone that was interested further. —Dorelle Rabinowitz Tools for IA: Panel Moderated by Nick Finck with panel discussion by Madonnalisa Chan, Bob Boiko and Andrew Hinton You might expect that a panel discussion about IA be focused on differing opinions about improved Visio features. The panel at the Summit, however, surprised everyone by presenting us with a different view of IA Tools. With Nick Finck moderating, the three panelists set out to present tools from different areas of expertise:

Madonnalisa Chan: Search
Bob Boiko: Database Design
Andrew Hinton: Presentation of IA

Each panelist discussed tools that they use not only to create the information architecture deliverables, but also to inform the decision to start a new project. Query analysis tools, for example, could be used by an information architect to identify symptoms of a larger issue – either with the search engine or the presentation of results. Another tool, perhaps a wireframing tool, could be used to present the solution to the client or business owner. —Liz Danzico The Accidental Thesaurus: Enhancing Search Precision through Manual-Selected “Best Bets” Richard Wiggins Many users use search engines to find starting points on a site. But the general results a search engine returns are often not what a user needs or wants. Part of this is due to the fact that search engines can't tell the difference between new content and archived or leaf pages and starting points. This is complicated by the fact that users enter the query terms they think of, not the labels on the site, expect official sites to be at the top of results lists, have complete coverage of a site, and expect disambiguation. To help, Richard Wiggins of Michigan State University suggests a registered keywords approach he calls the "accidental thesaurus." To create an accidental thesaurus, first review your search logs to find the most popular search phrases. Plot your queries and you will get a Zipf distribution, showing that a small number of unique searches accounts for a large number of all searches performed. Enter the most popular searches into a database and match each phrase to "the best" URL. A database with only 1000 entries can assist users with 50% of their searches. At MSU they manage this database via a web interface. When the user searches, first the keyword database is queried, then the search engine. The results are presented together on the same page, with the hand picked results at the top. This improves both end-user and content provider satisfaction. Any non-trivial site can benefit from this technique. —Chiara Fox Designing the Right Search Interface for your Users Whitney Quesenbery Through usability testing with health information sites, Whitney Quesenbery discovered that some search usability problems have nothing to do with the search engine itself. Users often have trouble formulating their query. They know what they want but cannot find the words to express it. The location of the search box in the site design can impact if users can even find search. Users may have exact locations where they expect to find the search box. The search results page also greatly influences a searcher's success. Placing the search again box above results may "hide" the results and users may not realize they are there. The results must include enough information (such as headlines or titles and abstracts) so users can decide which results will meet their need. Options to refine search are often ignored. There are three key search personas. There is the InfoSeeker, who needs help getting started. They are primarily a browser, but will search if frustrated. They need good links to get them to what they need. The Gatherer wants new details, not the same old information. They need good launch points and a search that narrows from there. The Hunter is an "advanced" searcher, and knows specifically what they are looking for. They need a good search with professional results. Depending upon the type of user, the search should look and behave differently. The search also has to match the type of site. On a site focused on a single, narrow topic, with a single primary audience, the search helps to locate specific, detailed topics. A deep site with a single, broader topic may have several audiences. The search here aids in navigation by exposing all of the site content on a specific topic, cutting across the site hierarchy. A broad site, with multiple topics or sub-sites, will often have many audiences. Search narrows the collection to a section of the site. Search makes the connections between sections or topics on the site. —Chiara Fox Tax Services' Public Website in the Netherlands Sanne Peek Sanne Peek of Informaat, a Dutch Internet consulting firm, presented a case study for a search interface on the Dutch Tax Service Web site. Peek explained that in the design, they used three different techniques to address the needs of two different audiences. The audiences - individuals and business - approach the site with a variety of tax-related questions, but the real difference between the two is timing: individuals tend to need tax information only twice a year while businesses need it throughout. This distinction became a key factor in their search design. Informaat employed three approaches to support users in their search for tax information. In the search algorithm, the first approach, they prioritized different information depending on the time of year. With this technique, they were able to address the different needs of individuals and businesses. During certain times of the year, users asking questions about individual tax returns were far greater than those asking about business. The second approach called for integrating the call center and the content management system, to allow quick updates to FAQs. They also created a page of top ten FAQs, which was again driving by the time of year. Lastly, Informaat developed several “alternative” methods for finding tax information, which included “best bets” generated when search terms were not found, and an index of frequently used keywords. Peek then entertained questions from the audience. When asked why the site didn't ask users to self-identify on the opening pages as either individual or business, she explained that in many cases, people do not know whether they should be filing as an individual or as a business. —Dan Brown Representing Many Voices: Challenges in Government Site Design Anne Galloway Anne Galloway presented a case study of a site she worked on for the Canadian government. Galloway presented her experience as an anthropologist and ethnographer in working with a diverse group of users. She was asked to design a community site for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Galloway had to build a site to support the collaboration and interaction between program officers, stakeholders from the public and researchers. From an ethnographer's point of view, the greatest challenge is the vast cultural gaps between these distinct user groups. Given that arranging cross-functional meetings was inconvenient, Galloway instead represented absent voices at her sessions. At any given meeting, she had to balance the needs of the participants with stakeholders who were not there. The site is currently in the prototype stage and is due to launch later this year. Paper that the presentation came from: Representing Many Voices: Challenges in Government Site Design Powerpoint slides —Dan Brown Posters Saturday night's poster session was varied and deep with the types of posters presented.

Posters from the top: James Spahr with Brett Lider, Dan Brown, ChiFoo magnetic poetry, viewing the posters, Kim Prater. All photos by Mike Lee.

Jenny Fry and Chang Su presented "Methodological challenges in Information Architecture: Adventures in re-indexing federal statistical websites" (http://ils.unc.edu/govstat/papers.html). A journey through top down and bottom up approaches which ultimately led them to use an integrated approach. Pren Lee showcased her work to rework the information architecture of the University of Texas Law School's student portal. (http://utdirect.utexas.edu/law/students.WBX). The changes are subtle but significant and Pren presented her work with a stack of research to back it up. Heidi Adkisson gathered statistics on the locations of various e-commerce page elements from 75 sites and produced a series of visuals to showing their most common locations. (http://www.hpadkisson.com/papers/asis_poster_small.pdf). One particularly beautiful area of her poster was the scatter plots that showed where functions like 'search' and 'view cart' are most commonly located. Grete Pasch presented: Fast, Cheap and in control: Managing metadata for streaming media. She spoke about how the Universidad Francisco Marroquin is managing streaming media of classes and guest lecturers. Aaron Louie's poster was a dense and through review of facilated classification as it relates to Information Architecture. (http://students.washington.edu/ajlouie/IASummit-Poster-Louie.pdf). Thankfully Aaron has made a PDF of this text heavy poster available online. James Spahr was insane enough to try to map every single peice of traffic that occured within a site over a 2 year span. (http://www.designweenie.com/images/Spahr-IA_Summit_ApacheMaps.pdf). The poster is a hypnotic, cryptic and dizzying visual. Washington DC area IA's (Dan Brown, Stacy Surla, Meg Cole, and Marcy Katz) poster: 'Making Connections' is a wonderful diagram that mapped the various levels of activity in their local IA community. Kim Prater's poster was on wayfinding on the web. Specifically on how users construct mental models of sites and how search processes effect these mental models. Member's of the Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon (http://www.acm.org/chapters/chifoo/) made magnetic poetry out of a statistical analysis of the SIGIA-L list. Hilarious. If you missed the poster session, you missed out on the poster that came closest to being a brilliant piece of art. (Although James Spahr had many people ask him for framed copies of his map, he thinks the magnet poetry was a much cooler poster.) —James Spahr Information Overload: A Love Story Thom Haller Thom Haller ushered in a first for the IA Summits. He delivered a prototype performance piece, a comedic monologue with slides and props that focused on the pressure of finding appropriate labels for oneself in a world overflowing with information and demanding standardization.

Thom Haller. Photo by Mike Lee.

Thom set the stage by drawing on the code instilled in him by his early days as a Boy Scout. He then took us through his transformation as a gay youth and his search asa student whose opportunities followed the corridor of interstate 75 from West Virginia to places north. He reviewed the highlights of his career seeking labels for what he did and desperately trying to avoid life in a mauve cubicle. Family photos projected on a hugescreen brought the past into a cinematic present. Throughout the performance he reenacted his torment by manhandling a Play Dough brain he molded and then sliced into warring halves. He “danced” through a sense of places using Hoola Hoops and then wore them as oversized label jewelry dominating his presence. Thom closed by sharing his current label as an information designer, playing out that role in our nation's capital-- a place far way from I-75. We laughed, we cried, we enjoyed. An audience of about 50 people immersed themselves in the information space that Thom created. We came away caring about how labels affected one of our own, and we were reminded by his performance that Information Architecture is a compositional art with a domain much larger than the Web. —Brian Arbogast de Hubert-Miller Part 2: Sunday Summit Photo Albums

Other Summit Summaries & Thoughts:

Summit Notes/Presos/Posters:

Day 2: IA Summit 2004 Wrapup

B&A Staff — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 22:38:27 GMT

Sunday February 29, 2004

The panel discusses the use of narrative in design.
(photo Erin Malone)

The Use of Narrative in Interaction Design
Marisa Gallagher, Nancy Broden, Jonathan Woytek
Conference Description | Handout

This group of speakers explored the idea of various mental models as internal representations of the external world, comparing the typical narrative model with web design and a user's experience of a website. They suggested the value of drawing parallels between theatre/film and web design, using the script as a strong conceptual model, and defining the impact of narrative on the deliverable and thought process around web design.

The panelists suggested that following the user's narrative thread through the web design process creates a strong bond among team members, as well as between team members and project, as they explored the roles that narrative can play in creating enriching experiences on the web--not just for users, but also for design teams.
--Lara Ferguson McNamara

Texas inspired carpeting at the Summit hotel.
(photos Kiersten Lammerding)

Bottom-Up Information Architecture: Re-Designing an Enterprise-Class Web Site
Sarah A. Rice
Conference Description | Handout

14 Things Users Want to Know
Jared Spool
Conference Description | Video presentation

I must admit that I only attended this session because I had never seen Jared Spool speak and thought to do it while in the USA. I expected that the '14 things' would be a list of guidelines to follow when designing sites.

I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong. Jared discussed their recent research (so recent that they have not yet finalised conclusions) aimed at identifying what users want to know, undertaken by analysing discussions in online forums. The team has been analysing questions and discussions about chronic illness, technical support and investing, and has identified 14 major types of problems and questions, consistent across the three domains. I didn't note a full list of topics, so look out for an article on the UIE website soon with more details.
--Donna Maurer

2003 Dublin Core Conference: Building Metadata-Based Navigation Using Semantic Web Standards
Bradley P. Allen, Joseph T. Tennis
Conference Description

In this presentation, Brad Allen and Joe Tennis led us through a case study of the website they helped build for the 2003 Dublin Core Conference, where they put semantic theories about web navigation to the test. Their consistent focus on RDF as the fundamental representation for metadata in the Semantic Web, combined with their subject-specific ontology development, produced an automatically generated faceted retrieval interface for the conference site.

Successful in many respects, this approach to a "bottom-up" organization of knowledge also held some challenges, including blurred boundaries between multiple levels of related terms and how to connect them for searching, and the issue of how to deal with a much larger set of data automatically. An intricate examination of this developing strategy in action, this presentation left no doubt in my mind that further research is critical to the future of information management.
--Lara Ferguson McNamara

David Hoffer with a pretty cool information graphic.
(photo Erin Malone)

Information Design and Information Architecture - Together Again for the First Time
David Hoffer
Conference Description

It was good to see a number of presentations about information design at the IA summit (Dan Willis' was the other that impressed me). I know that I spend a lot of time on the structure of the content, and less time on looking at how the content should be designed to meet user needs. David's presentation had excellent examples of well-designed reports, plus stories outlining how the reports evolved.

David's presentation has inspired me to think more about design at the detailed level. It was clear that the presentation inspired other listeners as well, when James Spahr jumped up excitedly to suggest some improvements to an excellent report and diagram.

The statements that summarised this presentation for me was "the same user research tools that you use to develop and IA can be used to do clearer information design" and "There is a direct correlation between Information Design and Information Architecture / Interaction Design, but they are also distinct disciplines that require different skills."
--Donna Maurer

An Ethnographic Study of How Stockbrokers Use a Web-Based Trading System
Laurie Gray
Conference Description | Handout

Laurie Gray, Senior Usability Specialist at HumanCentric Technologies, presented this case study of how site visits and observations contributed to a greater understanding of brokers' work habits, the different types of users, and how the current electronic trading system could be redesigned and extended to meet the users' needs better.

Laurie and a SME (subject matter expert) from the undisclosed client, a national financial services firm, observed and interviewed 16 brokers over a three week period. These contextual inquiries included unstructured questioning along with a short standard interview. The brokers were asked to show how they do their work, and their actions and comments were logged. The data was analyzed and different patterns started to emerge. Some brokers, for example, leaned more towards mutual funds, while others were stock-focused. The 16 brokers were plotted on a chart of 5 different axes, similar to a semantic differential analysis. The results showed that different types of users used the web-based trading system different, and that there were significant holes in the system where users needs were not being met.

This case study is an excellent example of how contextual inquiry can uncover the root problems users face and help to define requirements for a product. Though HumanCentric employed a more "lightweight" CI methodology, the approach was appropriate given the timeframe and it illustrates the "real-world" application of a proven methodology.
--Jeff Lash

Using Machine Learning Techniques to Populate Dynamic Interfaces
Miles Efron
Conference Description | Handout

Karl Fast just before his presentation
(photo Erin Malone)

Information Visualization: Failed Experiment or Future Revolution?
Karl Fast
Conference Description | Handout

"Information visualization is the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition."

Wow, what a brilliant, exciting talk about a critical issue to IA/UX professionals. Admittedly, it was conceptual without immediate action items for practitioners back at the office, but the presentation offered much food for thought about the future of visualization and interaction. And that's a wonderful concep: they are interrelated! Fast provided an overview of prior visualization experiments, referencing some major texts and inventors like Ben Shneiderman and Stuart Card. He offered a definition from "Readings in Information Visualization": "Information visualization is the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition."

This sounds like a general strategy of offloading the mental workload and maximizing fast perception of symbols, abstractions, signs, etc. towards enriched understanding of data. Fast offered some myths about information visualization that he debunked. For example, the death of text is greatly exaggerated. In fact, he applauded the use of textual representations in many cases. Also, there has been improper application of information visualization that may have contributed to a negative stigma among IA folks. One example is the classic dynamic slider application for videos, which raises all kinds of interaction issues (not to mention some common sense). Can you drag a slider across 50 megs worth of actor names? Nice question. Hard problem to solve. For Fast, information visualization is about problem solving and finding the proper representation that makes the interaction and information access transparent and meaningful.

The talk was rather fast-paced with lots of information, maybe even too much to absorb in 45 minutes. Unfortunately, he ran out of time for questions, but he did certainly spark some inspiration and discussion, based upon the buzz in the room. As a conference attendee told me, "This is one of the most important presentations at this conference".
--Uday N. Gajendar

Jessica Moore and Joseph Matthews
(photo Mike Lee)

The Blind Leading the Blind: Theorizing a Web for the Visually Impaired
Jessica Moore and Joseph Matthews
Conference Description

Section 508 guidelines give dos and don'ts for Web accessibility but fail to provide a cohesive approach for how to design sites for the visually impaired. In their talk, Jessica Moore and Joseph Matthews of AARP Services, Inc. presented strategies they developed in their redesign of AARP's website. Moore began by noting that their site is far from perfect, since they've had to make compromises to support a broad base of browsers.

Moore argued good information design is the foundation of making an accessible page--organizing content into blocks, and then determining the appropriate order of the blocks to be read (which may or may not be the same as the order they are displayed on the page). The order should be documented as a content outline that can be referenced during visual design and coding. Moore suggested the following order to content:

Header (including home link, search, etc.) - while one might think it's repetitive, users can enter a site at any point and it's useful in getting oriented
Contextual information (page title, topic, "you are in," etc.)
Main navigation
The main content of the page
Sub-navigation
Cross-promotional content
Footer

One important consideration, Moore said, is not only paying attention to consistency within your site, but also paying attention to being consistent with other highly-used sites, since users become familiar with certain conventions. Moore said it's important to actually test your site with screen reader programs, such as JAWS, to catch specific issues, such as truncated link descriptions. Likewise, she said, it's important to test with actual visually-impaired users, whose behavior differs from what a sighted person might expect, such as tuning out repetitive document information generated by the screen reader, just as a sighted user might tune out repeated navigation. Another key issue to remember, is that designing for users with poor eyesight is not the same as designing for those without sight.

Matthews talked about how most Section 508 issues can be eliminated by using semantic mark-up--HTML as it was originally intended, for example, using the H1 tag for first-level headlines. Cascading Style Sheets should be then used to provide visual formatting. One advantage of using CSS for formatting its that it makes it easy to provide alternate stylesheets, for example for a "large print" version of the site.
--George Olsen

The Design Methods panel discussing methods and process.

Andrew Hinton asks the panel a question.
(photos Erin Malone)

Design Methods and IA Panel
Panelists Jesse James Garrett, Victor Lombardi, James Spahr. Moderated by John Zapolski

It's always good to start a panel discussion with a definition, and being a design panel, John started with a definition of design:

"Design is to design a design to produce a design"

Zapolski helped us further by explaining that the panel would be focusing on the second design.

But seriously, this was an interesting and constructive panel. The discussions centred around what is driving the acceptance of design methods, why methods are becoming more frequently used, and the disadvantages of methods in a design process. The panel also discussed ways to improve the use of methods by ensuring that practitioners understand the background of a given method and know how to apply the method properly.

As you can expect from a short panel discussion, there was no strong conclusion to the discussion. However a quote from an audience member summarised it for me:

"A design method does not a design make"
--Donna Maurer

James Kalbach
(photo Mike Lee)

Information Search Experience: Emotions in Information Seeking
James Kalbach
Conference Description

James Kalbach did his homework. His talk on the role of emotions in information seeking was the most well-research presentation I attended at the summit.

James started by surveying research about how people look for information, including a detailed look at Carol Kuhlthau's six-step information search process and the link between the perceived complexity of a search experience and feelings of uncertainty. Kuhlthau's work shows the link between emotions and information seeking, and indicates that reducing feelings of uncertainty and complexity should be a key goal of design.

James then presented his information search experience (ISX) model. ISX has four dimensions:

Needs (problems or gaps)
Uses (solutions)
External Factors (context for information seeking)
Internal Factors (prior knowledge, experience)

ISX also has three planes, or levels at which users engage information:

Physical/action
Cognitive/thought
Affective/motivation

The ISX dimensions and planes form a matrix that can help designers understand how users feel at each stage of the search process. The ISX model isn't meant to be academic--James presented it as practical tool to help with feature development, user research and other tasks.

The two slides of references at the end of James's deck make a great starting point for anyone interested in the role of emotions in design or search.
--Gene Smith

Children as Design Partners for Educational Web Sites: Challenges and Lessons from the NIDA for Teens Project
Nancy Kaplan, Jennifer Isenberg
Conference Description

Rapid User Mental Modelling at eBay: a Case Study
Larry Cornett, Dan Ido, Kirsten Swearingen
Conference Description | Handout

This presentation covered both the rapid user mental modelling process used in the Ebay IA redesign, as well as Ebay's project approval process.

Ebay had experienced organic growth over the past few years, which led to a growing sense of complexity for new users. The IA redesign project was the first major effort to evaluate the structure of the entire site, and was guided by user mental models, business goals and existing features and content on the site.

Ebay may be one of a handful of organizations that must base its IA decisions on hard metrics. As Larry Cornett explained, Ebay knows the nominal value of bids, listings and registered users within its system, and can calculate the impact of design changes based on those values. Understanding the business impacts and ROI of IA changes was critical for this project's success--it had to be justified in the same way, and on the same footing, as any other project within Ebay.

By demonstrating the business benefits, the Ebay user experience group was allowed some freedom with their methodology. One of the tools they used was rapid user mental modelling (RUMM). Kirsten Swearingen of Uzanto Consulting explained how their three-step RUMM process--explore, understand and verify--was used to guide Ebay's redesign. For the Ebay project, RUMM involved:

Exploring the domain through interviews and free-listing exercises with users and stakeholders. A list of 300 tasks was generated in this stage. Tasks were divided into three groups: core tasks, boundary tasks and horizon tasks.
Understanding user mental models through an open card sorting exercise. Twenty-eight people participated in the card sorting, and one of the card sorts was done by a group of six people. This resulted in a premliniary IA with five top-level groupings.
Verifying the proposed IA through a closed card-sorting exercise with 1000 participants. This card sort was done online, and the results confirmed the architecture developed in the previous phase. It also helped further expand the site map.

This mix of methods generated both qualitative and quantitative data. The quantitative date was important because the design research had to be both persuasive and defensible to Ebay management. The final deliverable from the RUMM process was a revised site map for Ebay which is currently being used to guide the IA redesign.

Though he wouldn't give numbers, Larry emphasized that the IA redesign project "achieved significant positive ROI." He offered four "key takeaways" for IAs undertaking similar projects:

Talk to decision makers in their own language
Don't "special case" your project
Gather persuasive quantitative data
Track success & bank credibility for future projects

--Gene Smith

Jesse James Garrett talking about Brand
(photo Erin Malone)

Brand Driven Information Architecture
Jesse James Garrett
Conference Description

In an interesting look at the links between brand architecture and information architecture, Jesse James Garrett outlined some of the major elements that make up a brand and then linked them to what we already know about IA. As examples, he described how brand language can drive nomenclature, how brand priorities can help us to prioritise content and how brand semantics can drive the semantic structure of the IA.
--Donna Maurer

J-Flow Interactive Design Tool: From Sitemap to Prototype
Peter Boersma, Jacco Nieuwland
Conference Description | Handout

Architecting Time: Designing Online Events and Other Magic Tricks
Katrina Friedman
Conference Description | Handout

Uday Gajendar discusses IA and Beauty
(photo Mike Lee)

The Aesthetic Imperative: Four Perspectives on Aesthetics to Impact the User Experience
Uday Gajender
Conference Description | Handout

Donald Norman argues that attractive things work better. But how do user experience professionals talk about "beauty" in a way that's useful in the design process. Uday Gajender, an interaction designer at Oracle Corp., sought to provide a framework that information architects could use to include aesthetics as part of the total design effort. Gajender discussed four models from different fields: philosophy, psychology, computer science and architecture. None is superior to the others, he said, rather they provide different viewpoints for approaching the issues:

Optimal Flow - Based on the work by Milahy Cziksentmihalyi, this viewpoint emphasizes the sense of deep personal engagement commonly found in immersive games, puzzles and websites. A prototypical example was the computer game, "Myst."
Lifestyle Design - Described in John Dewey's "Art as Experience," this aspect is demonstrated in products by such as the Sony Walkman and Apple iPod that merge sensual beauty and functional power, creating both a pleasing artifact and experience.
Machine Beauty - A viewpoint articulated by David Gelernter, in a book of the same title, that values on the union of power and simplicity in technology. While Gajender only alluded to Bauhaus, Bauhaus design is a good example of this approach's focus on transparency of use and directness of results. Current examples include the OXO Good Grips potato peeler or Palm OS user interface.
Spiritual/Cultural Appeals - A fourth viewpoint, articulated by architect Walter Gropius, takes a holistic look at how the relationship between a product and user add or detract from personal beliefs and cultural values. As a current example, Gajendar pointed to the proposed "Freedom Tower" at New York's Ground Zero site, which seeks to communicate patriotic and human values of: perseverance over tragedy, hope and renewal of prosperity.

Gajendar said he hoped these viewpoints could be used to created products that are not only functional, but emotionally and physically satisfying and memorable.
--George Olsen

Peter Merholz backlit by a really cool chart
(photo Erin Malone)

Then a Miracle Occurs
Peter Merholz
Conference Description

We all know the Miracle that Peter's presentation was about--that step between research and design where a bunch of things fall together and a design comes out. It is difficult to explain how we move from user research to a design, and Peter's presentation provided some insight. He discussed issues with analysing large volumes of text-based data and outlined an approach based on task analysis, mental models and thematic models where the model can be used as both an analysis and presentation tool. Peter also outlined examples of other fields that study human behaviour in the design process (which sidetracked the discussion into cow paths in university campuses).

Peter Morville kicks off the session with the AIfIA prize.

Dan Willis gets a stack of UX books.

Audience members waiting for the 5 minute madness to begin

Margaret Hanley, this year's conference chair kicks off the madness.

Donna Maurer
(photos Mike Lee)

While Peter still did not manage to define the miracle (if that is even possible), he provided some additional ideas to help us all to bridge the gap between research and design.
--Donna Maurer

5 Minute Madness

While there are two full days of listening preceding it, the "Five-Minute Madness" session is the information architect's chance to be heard. Ending the Summit each year, this hour gives everyone attending the conference the opportunity to take the floor (for five minutes), speaking on reflections about the weekend.

To start the activities, Peter Morville presented Dan Willis with the AifIA-sponsored first prize: a hefty supply of experience design-related books and a bag. Dan promptly placed the bag over the books and continued back to his seat. When the audience suggested putting the books in the bag, Dan quickly pointed out "I'm a user and I'll do it an way I damn well want to!"

With that as its start, the hour didn't slow down. Here are some of the highlights:

The information architect from RSA Securities talked about the value of the conference, this being her first time. Since she is the sole information architect at her company, she doesn't get the opportunity to share ideas like this often. To express her feelings, she then broke out into song. Really.
The IA Slam was a key theme. Because of it's content (to design a 'smart' refrigerator, one information architect expressed real concern about what they had been asked to do. The role of an IA on a project, he expressed, should have been to advise the client against such a product. Lively and near-heated discussion ensued. Members of his team at the Slam, as well as other participants, fell into agreement and disagreement. In this mock scenario, some argued, it was about doing great work not pushing back. The IA Slam is sure to be back next year with more good debate to follow.
Jesse James Garrett diplomatically expressed his dismay at what has become of the discussions on the SIG-IA list, and encouraged those in agreement to join the AIfIA list instead.

As always, there seemed to be more people than time. Gives us something to look forward to next year!
--Liz Danzico

Christina Wodtke encouraged us to be confident in our IA abilities as we work with others. We have good ideas, so just speak up and go for it!

This is a great feature of our conference, and it works well with the creative and supportive networking environment we have when we get together as a group. What an awesome way to wrap up a fantastic weekend!
--Sarah Rice

And thus the summit drew to a close. Attendees scattered across the city and around the world. We can only hope that next year's summit is as interesting, lively and well-attended.

Check out Day 1

For More Information:

IA Summit official schedule
http://www.iasummit.org/conference.htmlSession presentations and handouts linked here as well
Summit blog
http://www.iasummit.org/blog/
IA Slam
http://www.e-reiss.com/Seminars/IA%20Slam%20mini-site.aspx

Blog writeups and more reviews

Brett Lider - Every Breath Defying
http://everybreathdeathdefying.com/blog/archives/cat_conferences.html
Tanya Rabourn - Pixel Charmer
http://www.pixelcharmer.com/fieldnotes/archives/cat_form_conference.html
Dan Saffer - Celtic Knot
http://www.celticknot.net/blog/archives/000899.html
Kieth Instone - User Experience.org
http://user-experience.org/uefiles/facetedbrowse/
Donna Maurer - Maadmob
http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/
Jesse Wilbur - jdwilbur
http://www.jdwilbur.org/weblog/index.php
James Spahr - Design Weenie
http://www.designweenie.com/blog/archives/001309.php

Videos:

Poster Sessions Videos
http://www.cmsreview.com/IA/Posters/
Content Management for IAs Session Videos
http://www.cmsreview.com/IA/audiovideo.html
Jared Spool Video
http://media.skybuilders.com/IASummit/Summit/Spool.rm

Summit Photo Albums:

Day 1: IA Summit 2004 Wrapup

B&A Staff — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 22:39:22 GMT

Five years and counting. This year's ASIS&T IA Summit, held in Austin Texas, seemed to me to be the best yet. Perhaps it is because of a lighter mood in the air, or because there are more jobs than ever being advertised, or because this year there wasn't a war starting at the same time as the summit. Or maybe it was just because we were in Texas, where everything is bigger, and we were communing with our people after a long year.

Texas Longhorn painting in the hotel.
(photo Erin Malone)

MJ and Lou Rosenfeld and Javier Velasco with baby Iris—complete with conference badge.
(photo Mike Lee)

Club DeVille: Location of the Adaptive Path birthday party
(photo Mike Lee)

Whatever the reason, this year's summit, themed "Breaking New Ground," seemed to have the right mix of new and returning folks, a nice variety of interesting and well-attended pre-conference workshops and several tracks of presentations to suit the IA of every flavor. While deciding which presentation to attend was at times daunting, you were guaranteed not to be disappointed no matter your choice. My only regret was that I couldn't be in three places at once.

The Friday cocktail hour was lively and a first chance to catch up with old friends as well as an opportunity to meet new folks. This was also our collective chance to meet the newest IA, Lou and MJ Rosenfeld's baby girl, Iris, complete with her own badge. Cocktails were followed with a lot of smaller groups doing the "Texas barbecue thang" and finally the three year birthday party for Adaptive Path--drinks supplied. Needless to say, the first few hours of the summit were jovial and festive and promised for a great weekend.
--Erin Malone
[Editor's note: while we attempted to have full coverage of this year's summit, the sheer number of presentation options and the small size of our volunteer staff made it impossible to cover absolutely everything. Apologies to presenters who are not covered here.]

Saturday February 28, 2004

Opening Keynote
Achieving a State of Trans
Brenda Laurel
Conference Description

"We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us."
--Winston Churchill

Conference attendees listening closely to Brenda Laurel
(photo Erin Malone)

Winston Churchill's famous remark was not directly quoted by Brenda Laurel in her opening keynote speech, but anyone in the audience familiar with the saying likely had a hard time not thinking of it. In an interesting hour-long presentation that covered topics ranging from evolutionary theory, media studies, computer science research, and the work of her design students at Art Center College of Design, the noted author, designer, and teacher argued that today's information architectures go beyond simple structures in which we work to complete activities and tasks. Extending Churchill's point to address contemporary information ecologies, Laurel insisted that famed media theorist Marshall McLuhan missed the notion that media would become indistinguishable from living systems. In fact, today's information systems extend across physical, temporal, psychological, and linguistic boundaries, and have begun to define new spaces of human life.

Brenda Laurel
(photo Mike Lee)

Citing the Baldwin effect--a hybrid evolutionary theory that postulates that a species' learned behaviors affect the direction and rate of its own evolutionary change--Laurel presented several examples in which designed information systems have begun to create fundamental changes in the way we experience the world--from the way we use our bodies to navigate virtual environments (Char Davies VR environments), to the way we plan and react to communications across specific media, to the systems we have created that allow for new forms of status and social currency for the individual (think Amazon's reviews). In effect, the systems we are designing impact not only our current perceptions and relationships to the world, but define future possibilities by shaping how we think and act as a global culture, as a people, and as a species. Inasmuch, Laurel reminded the audience that it is critically important to consider our teleology, and to set our intentions wisely.

True to this year's conference theme, "Breaking New Ground," Laurel's presentation kicked off two days of broad and deep looks at new ways that information architects are considering their work. Though many of the arguments were perhaps a bit esoteric for many in the audience, at the very least attendees came away with new questions to ask about information architecture, a few interesting examples to ponder, and a bit of eye candy to help get the intellectual sugars flowing early on Saturday morning.
--John Zapolski

Taxonomies, Controlled Vocabularies, and Ontologies Panel
Amy Warner, Katherine Bertolucci, Kathryn Lewellen. Moderated by Chris Farnum
Conference Description | Handout

"The way we order represents the way we think." --Steven Jay Gould An energetic, standing-room only crowd attended one of the first sessions of the conference, a panel on taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and ontologies by Katherine Bertolucci of Isis Information Services (http://www.isisinform.com), Amy Warner of lexonomy (http://www.lexonomy.com) and Kathryn Lewellen of Thomson's legal and regulatory division (http://www.thomson.com). Taxonomies, Controlled Vocabularies, Ontologies; any one of these topics, alone, has depth enough to warrant its own breakout, but in combination these three topics convey how very deep our industry goes. This session was broken into three mini-presentations:

Katherine Bertolucci shared experiences and insights gained from her work developing a taxonomy for Snoopy and Determined Productions. Taxonomy, according to Ms. Bertolucci is not only a tool for the retrieval of information but also as a means by which you can help your client or company understand their existing systems.
Amy Warner provided guidance for the development, maintenance and evaluation of controlled vocabularies. In particular, Ms. Warner's presentation delved into methodology. What I found reassuring in the process she described, was the inclusion of stakeholders early and often the process and an emphasis on testing and validation.
Kathryn Lewellen argued for a new definition, or at least perception, of ontology in the absence of well-adopted standards. Ms. Lewellen's presentation also broke down the concept of ontology, providing a better definition, outlining benefits, leverageable values and metrics. Ms. Lewellen suggested evaluating your ontology for its potential as a source of revenue and improved customer service.

Overall, this session was an excellent blend of war stories, methodologies, guidance and food-for-thought hopefully provoking those in attendance to reevaluate their existing tools and processes. At a minimum, lucky attendees went home with a brand new set of tools for facing classification metadata challenges.
--Christian Ricci

Dinner at IronWorks Barbecue
(photo Mike Lee)

Austin
(photo Erin Malone)

Emerging Content Requirements for News Products
Howard Williams
Conference Description | Handout

Creating No-Duh Deliverables
Dan Willis
Conference Description | Handout

We usually tend to think of deliverables as artifacts that describes a solution to a problem. In his presentation, Dan Willis described a different class of deliverables--artifacts that conceptualize the problem itself. These deliverables are useful for getting everyone to agree on a conceptual model of what is being built, why it is being built, and how all the pieces fit together. Dan calls them no-duh deliverables because as they solidify, everyone looks at them and says, "No duh! I get it! Can we move on?"

Another theme from the presentation, not clearly articulated but definitely present, was that deliverables are both a thing and a process. This process must involve everyone, not just the information architect. The effectiveness of deliverables, no-duh or otherwise, depends on the effectiveness of this process. You can find examples of no-duh deliverables that Dan has created for various projects on his website.
--Karl Fast

Dan Willis described the goal of the no-duh deliverable as getting different people to talk about the same things in the same way. He pointed out the power of consensus-building and creating a sense of shared ownership in a solution. Dan presented several approaches to requirements-gathering, feature list building and concept presentation that were deceptively simple, yet extremely effective. The basics included: the power of visuals, the value of smart group facilitation and filtering and funneling upper management's generalities down to specific users.

Dan Willis taking questions
(photo Erin Malone)

Dan's basic strategy for success: First, review all the things the task force needs to understand the same way, then think about groupings, then think about change points (or where the information flow changes), then make the concept visual. Once everyone shares the same vision, revision comes shortly after, which is a true sign of success because it represents progress.
--Lara Ferguson McNamara

No-duh deliverables--what are they? As Dan explained, his aim is to create deliverables that encourage people to say 'Stop, No-Duh, I get it already'.

The primary reasons for creating No-Duh deliverables are to build consensus, gain support and share ownership through improved communication. Dan's deliverables include a combination of visuals and text and are both interesting and inspiring. He showed a number of examples of his deliverables, and walked through a case study explaining the processes he used to create a particular deliverable--both the process of distilling complex data, and communicating the conclusions.

Now, Dan can draw, and I can't. Does that mean that I can't create No-Duh deliverables? No, as Dan said "the power of the no-duh deliverable is in the brain, not the pen". I know that I'll be thinking differently about my next set of deliverables.
--Donna Maurer

Discussions during the breaks were often intense
(photo Erin Malone)

XIA@UT: An Extreme Makeover
Jill Burkart, Don Turnbull, Amaris Vigil, Andrew Switzky, Diana Miranda, Leonard Liaw
Conference Description | Handout

Redesigning a Digital Video Library
Gary Geisler, Anthony Hughes
Conference Description | Handout

The Open Video Project (www.open-video.org) is a free digital video library based at the University of Chapel Hill. The project serves two purposes. The first is to be a useful public resource. The second is to act as a testbed for digital library research, particularly research on interface issues.

Dr. Gary Geisler, a professor in the LIS program at Simmons College in Boston (http://www.simmons.edu/gslis/), described the project and the recent redesign efforts. Encapsulating this informative presentation in a paragraph is impossible, and I will not attempt it. But if you are engaged in a similar venture, the Open Video Project is a first class example of how to do it well. And I am pleased to report that all of the research publications based on the project are online (http://www.open-video.org/project_publications.php). One sincerely hopes that the project grows and evolves, and that the research team continues to share the results of their work with the information architecture community.
--Karl Fast

Meeting folks during the break
(photo Erin Malone)

A Critical Review of Enterprise Content Management
Tony Byrne
Conference Description | Handout

Today's CMS vendors are working from several different definitions of Enterprise Content Management (ECM), including a single "function point" implementation, an integrated "suite" of content management solutions, and the "single source of truth" within the enterprise. But Tony argued that ECM is really a discipline that can be applied broadly across all technologies. He suggests that information silos aren't inherently bad, and from a business perspective, there's a reason for silos that we should consider as we craft ECM solutions that fit our various markets.

Tony's was the voice of reason, as he suggested that vendors are still 18-24 months away from solutions that are actually integrated across the enterprise. His suggestion for getting through the next two years with the technology we have on hand is to maintain a strong connection between business processes and content, build specific use-cases for how information needs to flow, and recognize that at each stage of the business process there are different content needs.
--Lara Ferguson McNamara

I must admit that I hadn't thought about this a lot and was expecting to see information about various content management systems. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Tony's presentation was a high-level discussion about Enterprise Content Management as a discipline rather than as software or tools. Tony provided four different definitions of ECM with the underlying concept of each definition and some broad conclusions about the tools that support each definition. He also provided some practical suggestions about what to look out for in an enterprise content management project.
--Donna Maurer

Making Personas More Powerful
George Olsen
Conference Description | Handout

"I needed a tool not just to create empathy, but a tool to help me design." --George OlsenWhile Alan Cooper wrote about the "why," George Olsen presented us with the "how" of personas. George shared methods from his extensive toolkit for developing the more tactical aspects of persona development. We can find full details in the toolkit itself. The talk focused on how to build up the tactical details of the personas, how to define their relationship to the product, the business, and their environment. George, throughout the presentation, encouraged us to develop personas that use the data collected from actual users, filtering out any personal tendencies that may affect the details. And if actual user data is not available, he suggests using substitutes he terms as "User Surrogates," "Informants and Interpreters," "Indirect Sources," and "Ersatz Users" (more details in the Toolkit).

George defined six categories of persona types: Focal, Secondary, Unimportant, Affected, Exclusionary, and Stakeholders. And we must consider them from a number of different angles, being careful to separate our own personality traits from those of the personas we develop. After all, "you are where you live," Olsen explains. Geography, therefore, becomes one of the key topics to consider. To round out your characters, think about whether your characters are the New Zealand or California. What magazines do they have access to? What language do they speak?

Knowing how to put your audience in context to other audiences is critical. To prove his point, he asked the room how many listen to National Public Radio (NPR). And a good number of the audience raised their hands. Although the majority of the people in the room were listeners, only 4% of the population actually listens to NPR.

Knowing the relationship between your persona and the product you are designing is also key. How would the persona interact with the product? Where would the persona interact with it? Should the persona have an emotional reaction to the product? The Toolkit is intended to work like a good editor works with a writer, pushing the writer to develop characters fully. He suggests engaging your organization in the personas, rather than using them as just one deliverable in the product development cycle.
--Liz Danzico

In his session, George Olsen presented his toolkit for creating next generation personas. Personas, in George's view, are too fuzzy. "I needed a tool not just to create empathy," he explained, "but a tool to help me design." His toolkit aims to create personas that help with both the high-level strategic decisions as well as the tactical decisions and the inevitable design trade-offs that have to be made. The toolkit includes several pages of questions that explore:

The persona's biographic background
Business's relation to the persona
Persona's relation to the product or business
Specific goals and attitudes of the persona
Specific knowledge or proficiency of the persona
The context in which personas uses the product
The interaction characteristics of product use
The information characteristics of product use
The immersive characteristics of product use
Emotional characteristics of product
Accessibility issues
Relationships among the personas

Although that seems like a lot of detail, George emphasized that these personas can be developed iteratively. Some of the fine-grained information may not be necessary in the early stages of a project, but it can be valuable later for prioritizing interface and architecture elements. A mix-and-match approach would also work, since some parts of the toolkit will be more relevant to a project than others. (George's slides offer some additional information on the toolkit.)
--Gene Smith

XIA: Xtreme IA
Don Turnbull
Conference Description

While featuring an edgy--even paradoxical--title, this talk was a rather straightforward, matter-of-fact presentation, proposing an accelerated approach to IA based upon hot methods in computer science, known as "pair programming" or "extreme programming" (XP). Turnbull offered a brief survey of the history of programming methodologies and continued with some examples of XP approaches. Essentially, the XP idea is intended to speed up the process and involve rapid iterative cycles of feedback and change, generating newer, faster outcomes of the code. The big question is whether this would work with IA, particularly in situations with massive scalability challenges (ie, hundreds or thousands of objects and peer relationships) and globally distributed teams. The answer was not immediately apparent from Turnbull. Further unresolved issues included:

Under what organizational and cultural conditions would XIA flourish?
How should the time-compressed "pair programming" ideology fit into the IA design cycles, with different stakeholders and agendas and priorities intermingled?
How can somebody ensure effective lines of communication during this accelerated process, to deal with conflicts and trade-offs?

One issue that fueled the fast-emerging controversy over XIA was the emphasis on "code", rather than "design". Finally, doubts were raised among the audience about IA practitioners becoming essentially project managers, a dubious proposition put forth by Turnbull as part of the XIA approach.

So, while raising many serious and valuable questions of process and practice for IA, this

talk floated an idea that doesn't seem quite ready for primetime in terms of implementation. While one person charged that XIA is very "utopian", the concept does offer food for thought, particularly about the aptness of the word "extreme" in a discipline that is often seen as measured, rational, systematic, and orderly.
--Uday N. Gajendar

Lunch?
(photo Erin Malone)

Fun with Faceted Browsing
Keith Instone
Conference Description | Handout

Is there an information architect who doesn't love facets?

After briefly defining what faceted browsing is, Keith took us on a tour of 4 sites that allow faceted browsing (epicurious, IBM product finders, flamenco and MSN shopping), comparing how each handled aspects of the faceted experience. He also showed non-examples--sites that looked like they could contain faceted browsing, but did not quite. Given that faceted browsing is still in its early stages, he raised a number of questions rather than coming to conclusions.

During the presentation, Keith showed screen shots--a live connection really would have shown the way the interfaces work much better. Keith's notes are good, so if you missed this session, read the notes and have a look at the sites at:

Keith is also interested in other examples, so email him if you find a faceted browse on another site. More notes are available here: http://user-experience.org/uefiles/facetedbrowse/
--Donna Maurer

Information Architecture of Content Management-Based Reuse
Ann Rockley
Conference Description | Handout

Ann categorized and described quite a few key terms in this presentation. She outlined the kinds of content one might find in a content management system (locked, derivative and nested) and the kinds of reuse that are possible for that content (opportunistic and systematic). She talked about not only the kinds of metadata used in a content management system (traditional categorization and element descriptions), but also various uses for that metadata (reuse, retrieval and tracking within a workflow).

Ann touched on the business rules for reuse management, including considerations of workflow, approval and use of derivative content. And she suggested various strategies for supporting content reuse, including authoring tools that support structured content, CMSs that handles content granularity at the level that matches your business needs, and delivery tools that can be used to filter content to assist in reuse.
--Lara Ferguson McNamara

Incorporating Research on Navigation in Design Method
Victor Lombardi
Conference Description | Handout

"Does an underlying spatial metaphor make it easier for users to find information they are looking for?" This kind of question was what sparked Victor Lombardi's research for the Summit presentation. The original question was posed at last year's Wayfinding and Navigation Summit panel with Mark Bernstein, Susan Campbell, and Andrew Dillon.

Victor's talk focused on two lines of research: first, the "shape of information," and second, "transitional volatility." To start, Victor shows us a slide with an excerpt from a document. When he asks the audience to identify it, we all immediately could.

Menu example

The shape of information of the information in this menu helped us predict the context, ordering, and grouping of elements. With this information, we become oriented and can navigate, all without the use of titles, headings, breadcrumbs, or navigation bars.

When he compares this to an information architect's view of the menu in wireframe format, it doesn't seem as intuitive. Although the layout makes sense, it pales in comparison to the familiar menu.

Victor Lombardi
(photo Erin Malone)

Referring to research by Andrew Dillon and Elaine Toms, Victor presents two more examples that demonstrate why content itself--because it has a recognizable shape--becomes a kind of navigation. "Content is not different from navigation: In the example of the Chinese food menu we understood what we were seeing, where we were, and what is around us all without explicit navigation, so the content itself--because we are familiar with it--enables us to navigate."

Victor kicked off the "Transitional Volatility" part of the discussion by debunking our "keep navigation consistent" understanding. Research by David Danielson, he shows us, demonstrates that instead of keeping navigation consistent, we should "change navigation in subtle ways." By changing the navigation subtly, users' eyes are drawn to the change and "better prepares users for change and better reveals connections among information."

In the question and answer session after the presentation, an audience member suggested this variation: "Change navigation subtly, but do so in consistent ways."

Finally, Victor describes a methodology for incorporating this research into one's design method. He emphasizes that navigation design done too early may result in a user experience dependent on information organization, rather than the natural shape of the information. Instead, he follows these steps:

Summarize your research
Define resulting experience
Gather and identify content
Link content, retaining shape and expressed desired user experience
Classify information if necessary

Victor's presentation provides just a handful of the rich research out there. At the end of our discussion, Victor encourages us to explore the great research that is out there to help inform our design processes.
--Liz Danzico

Selling User Experience through Value-Centered Design
Jess McMullin
Conference Description

This was a casual presentation about an ever-present issue for IA and UX professionals--how to sell your self (and your services, skills, benefits, etc.) beyond the familiar "good user experience" argument. McMullin candidly declared that the client/business guy wants to know "why bother, who cares, and so what," indicating that this is the audience to be addressed. He suggested that a big part of the "selling problem" is that we are all talking to each other, about ourselves as IA/UX professionals. McMullin hinted at the notion of approaching selling as a design problem. Okay, fair enough. So who is the user? In this case, it's the generic persona of "Scott Skeptic;" he is a fair-minded business veteran dubious about IA/UX in terms of supporting his management and economic goals (i.e., maximizing profit, sales, revenue, etc.).

This is where McMullin advocated what he called "value-centered design", focusing on the "value" to the business as part of the sales message. Ostensibly this should be in the form of measurable, quantifiable results--goals, benefits, dollars, etc. McMullin suggested "value" has four levels: business, individual, the offering (not a cheesy horror flick!), and delivery. And ultimately there needs to be a "fit" of user goals to product functionality that will ensure a practical business benefit.

The talk ended without a specific resolution; in fact, McMullin admitted he meant to offer conversation starters. It would have been nice to hear some "war stories" from his experience in the field as a consultant. Pitfalls and lessons learned about communicating the value-driven message would certainly help this audience back at the office. What to say, or what not to say?. I could see this becoming a workshop for next year. Overall, the talk had a nice direction, with a necessary message to be told, however there were no action items or solid conclusions.
--Uday N. Gajendar

Using Facet Analysis for Improving Information Access to Marginalized Communities
D. Grant Campbell
Conference Description | Handout

When Ninety-one Yeaers of Content goes Digital
Jody A. Hankinson
Conference Description | Handout

Creating a Consistent Enterprise Web Navigation Solution
David Fiorito and Richard Dalton
Conference Description | Handout

David and Richard set out to solve some serious navigation and usability issues for Vanguard, and they came up with some interesting IA tools in the process. They created a navigation matrix, in which they mapped the content of the Vanguard site to compare modes of navigation (structural, associative and utility) with proximity of navigation to content (attached to content, embedded in content, layered with content, is the content) to determine what types of navigation best suited various sections and functionalities of the website.

They investigated the key relationships expressed through different types of navigation, as well as the various content types and the kinds of navigation that support each. By breaking the content functions of their site into the basic categories of examination, exploration and execution, they were able to establish a template approach to navigation that appeased information designers and users alike.
--Lara Ferguson McNamara

Thom Haller leads an interactive session
(photos Mike Lee)

Rebuilding Trust in User Centred Design, Wachovia.com Investing Center Redesign
Samantha Bailey
Conference Description

4 Myths About Taxonimies & Dublin Core: Examples from the Field
Joseph Busch
Handout

Stories from the Field: Never Consider Yourself a Failure, You Can Always Serve as a Bad Example
Thom Haller
Conference Description | Handout

Thom talked about the idea of failure and about different types of failure, and how we can learn from them, pepperred with examples from his own life. The session was interactive, with listeners sharing stories of failures and what they had learned from them. As an end of the day session, it was good to discuss and participate rather than just listen.
--Donna Maurer

The IA Slam Workshop Results
Lynn Boyden, Chris Chandler, Matthew Fetchko, Eric Reiss
Handout

Announcing the winners of the IA Slam exercise. The winners even got medals--how cool is that!
(photos Erin Malone and Mike Lee)

Take four role-playing organizers channeling the spirits of a VP, Product Manager, Marketing, and Engineering Project Manager working for Gencool, a fictitous refrigeration company. Split the 45 attending IAs up into half a dozen teams, and tell them they are at a vendors conference to propose a design solution for the latest company product--the iFridge. Present company background and product concept, and turn the teams loose to design the next wave of connected consumer appliances. In 45 minutes. With post-its and poster paper. What came out of the mix was the first IA Slam--hopefully not the last.

The IA Slam was a blast--definitely the funnest conference session, and the conference highlight for me. It was a great break from the usual format: hands on and got groups talking about how they work on real projects. The organizers stayed in character the entire session, complete with pseudonyms on their Kinko's business cards. From the bottom-line concerns of VP Eric Reiss to the blue-sky baby of product manager Lynne Boyden's dreams, teams had to juggle competing expecations while still producing a workable design.

Solutions ranged from the simple (put a screen on it), to the minimalist (you don't want a screen on an internet fridge), to the flat-out improbable (put a $20,000 70 inch plasma screen on a $10,000 product--there's a reason we design software and not hardware). Some of the most interesting choices came from choosing which features to cut from the initial laundry list presented by Gencool.

After working through different design challenges, teams presented their concepts to the Gencool judg...errr...staff. Nine minutes per pitch, and then the Slam was over, until the next day, when the winners were announced. Congratulations to Team Pink for winning, and special mention to Dave Robertson for provoking a very realistic fight between Product Management and the VP in charge!

Looking forward to what Lynne Boyden, Eric Reiss, Matthew Fetchko, and Chris Chandler put together for next year! Many thanks to the organizers for all the hard work put into preparing a convincing fictitious company as well as all the logistics for the session.
--Jess McMullin

Poster session: poster presenters talk with attendees as everyone grabbed food and drink after a long day.
(photos Erin Malone and Mike Lee)

Recycle, Reuse and Rebuild: Information Architecture on a Budget
Rebecca Sukach, Robert Kennedy
Conference Description | Handout

Rebecca and Robert outlined how they re-worked legacy documentation into a more dynamic and customer-friendly format that provided a consistent flow of content. They did this by identifying and analyzing the existing documentation, defining and classifying it in information blocks, then looking for holes and inconsistencies. Then they supplied basic templates to their content writers, to facilitate consistent content generation.

Once they ensured that the new frameworks provided the right amount of structure for the authors, they focused on user needs to determine the validity of their information design standards. The process was quite iterative, because they needed to constantly adjust various aspects of the design as they discovered the rules of content reuse they needed to follow.
--Lara Ferguson McNamara

Birds of a feather discussions
A nice, new feature of the summit. This block of time offered various BOF groups a block of time to discuss ideas in further detail.

Birds of a feather - Content Management
In a 45 minute discussion, the group discussed content management issues such as whether to implement a content management system and site redesign at the same time, and shared stories about previous, current and future content management system selections and implementations.
--Donna Maurer

Posters

Social Virtual Interface (SVI). Baris Aksakal
Blueprinting: Moving into Precision. Clifton Evans
Taxonomy and Thesaurus: Analogy with a Play. Mark Geljon, Almar van der Krogt
3D images and Metadata: Can We All Just Get Along? Elise Lewis
Visualizing Site Traffic Alongside Site Hierarchy or Flow. Brett Lider
Joint Evolution of Web Browsers and Online IA. Jennifer E. Jobst, Don Turnbull
LUCIA: A Comprehensive IA Process Model. Arno Reichenauer
Building Information for Computerized Systems: Developing Country Scenario. Daniel N. Ruheni
URI as Navigation Tool. Manu Sharma
Metric Aggregation for Social Network Analysis in Blogspheres. Frederic Stutzman, Butch Lazorchak, Jesse Wilbur
Information Architecture & Social Communication: Twins? Javier Velasco
The User Experience from Design to Use, and Back: A Causal Model. Javier Velasco

The first day of the summit ended with folks checking out the Posters, gathering together in groups to do dinners—the AIfIA members did a dinner, another group did barbecue—and others went out for a night on the town. After all, Austin is considered one of the best places to hear live music.

Check out Day 2

For More Information:

IA Summit official schedule
http://www.iasummit.org/conference.htmlSession presentations and handouts linked here as well
Summit blog
http://www.iasummit.org/blog/
IA Slam
http://www.e-reiss.com/Seminars/IA%20Slam%20mini-site.aspx

Blog writeups and more reviews

Brett Lider - Every Breath Defying
http://everybreathdeathdefying.com/blog/archives/cat_conferences.html
Tanya Rabourn - Pixel Charmer
http://www.pixelcharmer.com/fieldnotes/archives/cat_form_conference.html
Dan Saffer - Celtic Knot
http://www.celticknot.net/blog/archives/000899.html
Kieth Instone - User Experience.org
http://user-experience.org/uefiles/facetedbrowse/
Donna Maurer - Maadmob
http://www.maadmob.net/donna/blog/
Jesse Wilbur - jdwilbur
http://www.jdwilbur.org/weblog/index.php
James Spahr - Design Weenie
http://www.designweenie.com/blog/archives/001309.php

Videos:

Poster Sessions Videos
http://www.cmsreview.com/IA/Posters/
Content Management for IAs Session Videos
http://www.cmsreview.com/IA/audiovideo.html
Jared Spool Video
http://media.skybuilders.com/IASummit/Summit/Spool.rm

Summit Photo Albums:

Boxes and Arrows Redesign

B&A Staff — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 23:09:26 GMT

UPDATED This just in: Hillman Curtis joins the panel of judges. The entry deadline has been extended until August 15th, 2004. We compiling put together a crack judging team and have currently confirmed: Andrei Herasimchuk, John Rhodes, Lou Rosenfeld, Nathan Shedroff, and Jared Spool. When Boxes and Arrows first launched in 2001, we were blessed with the design from the talented Gabe Zentall. B&A has been growing and changing and evolving since then, and it’s time to freshen up a bit. But because we love the vibrant community that has made us—from the articles to the amazing discussion in the comments, we’d like to go one step further. We'd like to ask you to redesign us. Erin Malone, Chief Editor and sometime IA has sketched out a site map and a few wireframes [56k PDF] to get you started. But from here the sky is the limit. Do you think the IA needs stretching? Or has she got it nailed? Should our design get sassier? Or is cool and restrained right where we need to be? We'll take submissions until August 1st. Then our panel of celebrity judges (list coming soon!) will ponder over each design’s usability, stylishness, and clarity to pick the future design of B&A. As well as being the designer of B&A, your first prize will be a set of professional books from the fine publishers at PeachPit Press (the parents to New Riders)! Please take a second to read through the rules and background materials. Then get our your pencils and start sketching! Rules: Submission consist of three flat files (preferably png, but gif and jpg will be accepted) of a front page, a search results page and an article page. Please zip these three files and email to: prettyface [at] boxesandarrows.com. No code required. Supporting materials such as adjusted sitemaps, or other supporting pages are acceptable. The logo is not up for redesign. All submissions must be completed by August 1st, 2004. All work must be your original design. Group submissions accepted. Final design will be implemented on B&A. However, changes as required by technological or usability needs may be made. All entrants will be published for the general edification and pleasure of the community. Supporting material Some stats Listing the top 10 domains by the number of requests, sorted by the amount of traffic. Listing the top 5 browsers by the number of requests, sorted by the number of requests for pages. Listing operating systems, sorted by the number of requests for pages. Some requirements: Our users tend to be designers or usability professionals. They print heavily, and complain bitterly about bad print set-ups, low contrast fonts or tiny fonts. The site must:

Be easy to maintain
Load quickly
Be easy to read online as well as printed
Must appeal to everyone from Clement Mok to Jared Spool (both regular readers!)
Support advertising, yet not get in the way of reader’s pleasure
Have a distinct magazine feel—this is NOT a blog.
Must clearly message design but not alienate via arrogance.

The support staff is all volunteer, and Boxes and Arrows currently doesn’t make a dime. Therefore all design solutions must consider a low free maintenance strategy. The future site will feature advertising. It is not yet determined if this will be text-only, a la Google Adsense, or include image ads as well. The designer may consider this in his/her realm of recommendations. Feel free to use the comments section for further requirements gathering! We, the staff, will answer publicly for all to learn!

Site map and a few wireframes [56k PDF] http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/images/062104_redesign/Boxes_Arrows_IA.pdf
EPS logo [190k] http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/images/062104_redesign/logoSpecs.eps
PDF logo [68k] http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/images/062104_redesign/logoSpecs.pdf

Goodbye 2004, Hello to Another Good Year

B&A Staff — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 22:55:49 GMT

"I'm so very grateful to you, dear readers and writers, because day after day you make me smarter."--Christina Wodtke"At the end of 2004, we are all looking back at the year and taking stock of where things are, how the year has passed and what we made of it. I am thankful for this past year--I changed jobs (moved to Yahoo!) and am happier than I have been over the past three years, I have expanded my photography explorations, I trained for and completed my first century cycle race and through it all Boxes and Arrows has been a constant. Boxes and Arrows has gone through some ups and downs this year as well. Christina and I decided to ask our readers to help us redesign, and we had a lot of fun reviewing submissions from around the world. Look for a redesign in mid-2005. We have also been researching a new CMS system, looking for something that is geared towards periodical publishing with editors and multiple levels of administration and publishing. If you have ideas, we would love to hear them. The end of this year also sees Brenda Janish retiring as editor. Brenda, who started as a copyeditor at the very beginning before we launched and evolved into a full editor soon after, helped me carry the editorial load for about a year before our other great editors joined us. Brenda is still going to be copyediting, but we will miss her editorial vision. Thanks for everything Brenda. With Brenda's retirement, we would like to announce the addition of Molly Wright Steenson as a new editor on our staff. Welcome Molly. I want to take this opportunity to thank our other editors, Liz Danzico and Dorelle Rabinowitz--both of whom also changed jobs this year--as did Christina. As you can tell, it has been a bit tumultuous for the staff this year and through it all we still continue to publish. Thanks go out as well to our copyeditors who help support the editorial staff and our great technical guru, Kirk Franklin. Most of all, I want to thank all of our authors--for your patience, for your continued interest in writing for us, even when we get busy and take forever to respond. Thanks for the great things I continue to learn and for keeping us honest. A final thanks goes to you, the reader, without whom we would not exist. You keep us going. Erin Malone Editor in chief

Time for reflection, new beginnings, and giving thanks

Ah the holidays. Time for reflection, new beginnings and giving thanks. Since I recently made a fresh new career move, and in the process moved far away from most of my family and friends, I've been thinking lately about what's important to me and what I'm thankful for--and Boxes and Arrows is up there on my list. Not just because of the thought-provoking, career-helping, and all-around interesting content, but also because it's given me the chance to serve as an editor. So first of all, thanks to Boxes and Arrows for letting me come on board. I wanted the chance to give back to this community--but instead I feel like I've won the lottery. I've been an editor now for over a year, and I've had the chance to work with many remarkable people--some have shared my passion for user experience design and some have shared their unique points of views, and I've learned from them all. Another common trait is their patience--sometimes trying to fit B&A into my overwhelming works schedule leaves many author's articles in my to-do pile too long. Thanks to each of you. At each industry event I've attended someone recognizes my name from B&A and I've been able to have another conversion about Information Architecture or Interaction design or Big IA vs Little IA. Thanks to those folks. Since my world is one big six-degrees of separation game, I wouldn't be at Yahoo! without B&A either. I'm thankful to all the Yahoos who welcomed me as if they knew me, especially to my UED team, and to those people who said nice things about me so I could come here. I'm grateful and impressed by all the people who entered the redesign contest, coming up with ideas to improve something we all care so much about. Remembering why I made the choice to devote my time to this “peer-written journal” and all the benefits I've received from that choice make me extremely thankful. Are there any other wannabe volunteers out there who'd like to get back much more then they put in? Dorelle Rabinowitz Editor

Authors + context = happiness

Reflecting back on my work with Boxes and Arrows in 2004, I must admit that I'm most thankful for the exchage of ideas I get to have with the authors. Exchanging ideas on big-picture IA concepts, reader needs, as well as the best way to hypenate a title: I look forward to it all with every first draft I receive. I suppose that I'm most thankful, then, to be part of the context-making. Boxes and Arrow's shiny and sometimes controversial outside and the messy and industrious inside--to me, this wholeness is the real context of the article. Further, helping to publish an issue of Boxes and Arrows is about creating context for our readers. We work to create meaningful combinations through the juxtaposition of articles. And I like to get involved in the working insides where the author-editor context is (Not to be overlooked is the discussion section of the site where authors, readers, editors, and other surprise guests create their own new contexts.). So thanks to all the authors I've worked with in 2004. I've been flattered to be on the inside as part of your process: Nancy Broden, Jeff English, Alex Kirtland, Brian Krause, Marisa Gallagher, Victor Lombardi, Max Lord, Laura Quinn, Tanya Rabourn, Lynn Rampoldi-Hnilo, Chris Ricci, Jason Withrow, Jonathan Woytek, Liam Friedman (not yet published), Maggie Law (not yet published), John Rhodes (not yet published), Andrea Streight (not yet published). Liz Danzico Editor

Have Yourself a Merry Little Fourth Quarter

Here we are again, at the end of another year. This is the time of year when Erin likes to remind me when we started our little magazine, I said I would be happy if it lasted sixth months. Well, I would have been, so you can imagine my delight that we are entering our fourth year of publishing articles for the professional designer. When we started B&A, all the magazines I could find were either full of beginner articles on design, or academic articles, accessible only by experts. I had Inmates Are Running the Asylum open on my desk as I contemplated this phenomenon, and saw the chart where Cooper illustrates how designers design for beginners and experts, but the vast majority of users are actually intermediates. It struck me that that was true of my experience as a reader, and I set out with many of my friends to try to create a magazine we would want to read. Since then a number of other websites have begun providing more advanced discussions of design, but B&A has managed to continue to attract smart people who both write articles and then enrich them further with smart commentary. I'm amazed and delighted every other week when I see what the Boxes and Arrows community (along with its caretakers, the editors) have brought into the world. I'm so very grateful to you, dear readers and writers, because day after day you make me smarter. When I think a realm is done and buried, you surprise me with something new--a perspective, a technique, a persuasive argument--I hadn't thought of, and once again I feel the pleasant sensation of the cogs in my head turning. I consider my small work of sending out updates, paying for hosting, and dusting out the comment spam as a miniscule price to pay for the intelligence shown here on these pages. As publisher I feel humble, because I know all I did was open a door to all the insight that was already there. And so I thank you all, and hope you will stay with us as we embark on our biggest adventure yet--taking B&A to the next level with a new platform, a new architecture, and a new design. I hug you all. Christina Wodtke Publisher Boxes and Arrows

Crossing Boundaries: 2005 IA Summit Wrapup: Sunday, Monday

B&A Staff — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 20:31:30 GMT

Session Summaries and Reviews

Sunday March 6

The Information Architecture of Things - Part I: What If a Button Really Is a Button? Bill DeRouchey Conference Description In the first of two IA of Things sessions, Bill DeRouchey looked at the need for IA in physical product design, a growing area as products begin to incorporate more complex information spaces. The IA principles we are used to from web projects still apply to physical objects, but the details of deliverables and documentation don't always carry over. DeRouchey notes that a basic starting point is changed in product design. On the web, the action is (almost) always “screen1--click--screen2,” allowing designers to assume that action in most documentation and planning. For physical objects, designers have to specify the action, meaning there must be more physical detail. In his experience, DeRouchey has found that the sitemap morphs into a functional map, inventorying all possible flows and detailing the sequence of events in a user interaction. The functional map starts at the top with the “at rest” state, then branches out into the sequences of actions and events, finally returning to the “at rest” state. Similarly, the wireframe is replaced by wireflows. In combination with scenarios, wireflows show the sequence of events screen by screen. DeRouchey shared one of his most important lessons: due to the continuous rapid prototyping of the object, the physical layout of the controls is too fluid to document and the actions are also in flux throughout the design cycle. Interestingly, the fact that the object hasa physicality that must be accounted for in the functional maps and wireflows, means that designers also need more abstraction in the documentation. Instead of specifying the exact controls and actions in the documents, DeRouchey calls for the use of an interaction matrix that lists all functions and relates them to actions (i.e., use of controls). The interaction matrix also helps ensure that designers account for all possible states/action. By abstracting to this level, designers need only update the interaction matrix--not all other documents--as the physical object changes. For the prototyping stage, DeRouchey suggested using Flash, since it lends itself to showing the actions. -- Weston Thompson This presentation is a great example of the mislabeling of "information architecture," when what is really meant is either "user experience" or in this case "interaction design." The presentation that Bill gave was excellent and of tremendous value to anyone who is working on information systems that have a physical device component. The content of the presentation excellently presented the differences in solution and in methods used to derive a designed solution when moving from a purely virtual (Bill focused on the web side of virtual solutions) to solutions that are a hybrid of virtual and physical interactions. The most important two components of these differences are 1) the level of complex modality that exists within most physical devices; and 2) because the behaviors within these solutions are so transitional in nature, using our conventional methods of storyboarding/wireframing are inefficient or ineffective. My one complaint here, which I feel I must present, is that much if not all of what Bill presented could be equally attributed to most software products. If we think beyond the web into more rich software solutions such as games, productivity software, even collaboration tools, we will find much more rich modality between the software and the existing physical I/O devices that make up the PC. Again, this presentation really discusses the importance of understanding interaction design in order for us to be better at creating interfaces for any information system that is beyond the simple web. -- David Heller The Information Architecture of Things - Part 2: Twenty Years of Lessons Learned James Leftwich Conference Description This was an amazing retrospective of the influences, work, methods, and artifacts of a designer who has been working with and exploring spaces where virtual and physical meet for over 20 years. During this time, he discovered a path that took him through the creation and use of information spaces. He was an early convert to the use of metadata to help with the management and particularly the visualization of information. He had two dyads worth exploring. The first was metaverse versus myverse, where a "metaverse" is a singular structure meant to be visited and consumed and a "myverse" where the structure is dynamic dependent on use, context, and relationships. The other was the use of the term "cyberspace"-that this space is visited and there is a sense of a "downtown" where more things seem to happen. He broke down the myth that there is too much information by acknowledging that the entire universe is nothing but information, and claims that through using better visual tools we can succeed at taming it. -- David Heller A Foray across Boundaries: Applying IA to Business Strategy and Planning Richard Dalton, Rob Weening Conference Description During this practical case study Richard and Rob explained how they had applied the skills they developed as IAs to two different business problems. The first was to discover the features and interest in a potential new service; the second was to identify "broken things" in an existing service. During these projects, they used many of the techniques we use in IA projects: data collection, analysis, organizing and labeling. They used an analysis method similar to Adaptive Path's mental model technique to analyze client and staff comments and to identify capabilities that matched both. They thought hard about different ways to communicate with management and stakeholders-all skills that we use frequently. -- Donna Maurer This presentation was a case study of information architects becoming involved in the strategic planning process. Vanguard's IAs had three goals for their involvement: to make better use of client/user research; to make better use of data to drive decision-making; to create visual analysis tools for business decision makers. One project undertaken focused on discovering new business opportunities, while the other focused on identifying broken business processes and recommending improvements. For the “discover new” project, IAs worked with members of the user research group who conducted interviews with internal and external users and stakeholders. Relevant quotes from the interviews were extracted and grouped like a combination of affinity diagrams and card sorting exercises. The final deliverable was a large poster that presented a visualization of the expressed (and often unmet) needs of users. This poster was pored over by business stakeholders and influenced the strategy and budgetary spending for 2005. For the “identify broken” project, the initial process was much the same, starting with interviews and continuing with the extraction of relevant details. A spreadsheet was created to list the high-level tasks, and associated “points of pain,” with ratings being added by SMEs to indicate severity. Graphs attempted to tie efficiency problems to quality issues, but it was a challenge to determine how to present the graphs to business stakeholders. Ultimately, the scope of the project changed, making the project less successful for reasons outside the control of the IA group. This foray into business planning was successful but challenging. The Vanguard team recommends patience when introducing organizational and process change, and notes you will likely encounter skepticism (from groups who wonder why “web design” people are involved in strategic planning). Working as a group allowed the project to gain perspectives from multiple IAs, which was especially beneficial as the process and deliverables were “invented” along the way. -- Jeff Lash Change, Influence and IA at the BBC Margaret Hanley Conference Description I was pleased to see a number of presentations at the IA Summit that addressed the issue of internal politics. Margaret's presentation was one of these. This case study outlined how Margaret had managed to implement a project involving detailed IA and metadata, selling it to staff and management with different backgrounds and priorities. She noted that there were significant changes needed to systems, people and content; and that incremental change, connecting with people and using networks were the key success factors in this project. -- Donna Maurer Rich Internet Applications (panel) Dennis Schleicher, Jennifer King, Tara Diachenko, Pat Callow, Gene Smith, Livia Labate, Todd Warfel The panel was started with an introduction to some basic concepts as best understood by this panel about RIAs: that there is a change in focus from the page to transitions and flows. This is a change from single scene or screen focus to one where solutions now have more of a sense of story with a narrative, plot, climax, and even character development. Current uses for RIAs are in the areas of guided selling and banking. Dennis then outlined how users experience RIAs differently from more conventional frameworks. Transitions are modally specific, you rest less between change states, and change is more gradual. Then Jennifer and Tara demonstrated two examples of RIAs (one for White Castle and one for Ford Vehicles). Both were good explanations of why the RIA added value to the experience of the user. The White Castle example in particular demonstrated this well by showing competitive solutions that didn't meet the full user expectation due to the limitations of either the framework being used in the presentation of the solution, or the way that the design did not free itself from convention (of the page metaphor) even though it was using an RIA framework. What was missing from both of these examples was the clear demonstration of who preparing the metadata for the content objects was a core contributor to why these RIAs were able to exist and create the behaviors they had. Gene then tried to explore the problem that RIAs is trying to solve and what remaining problems it has to still overcome. He also broke down where RIAs might be more useful in the immediate need. Livia brought out the issue of behavior tracking and metrics and that metrics are more than possible in an RIA, but we need to design metrics into the equation intentionally. Todd closed by breaking down the different platform options for: Flash, Java, AJ+X (ajax), others. Then touched on why current deliverables from the IA are not good enough. Like Bill DeRouchey's presentation, which had a similar look at the failing of “wireframes,” I have to say that I was disappointed that people didn't look beyond the IA community for these answers. This has a very lively question and answer period. People challenged the user-benefit of RIAs and whether or not we really are moving away from “the page” metaphor, or whether or not we are ready to even make this leap if it is one at all. My contribution to this discussion was one of encouraging us to take risks, fail admirably and succeed deliciously. We have been stagnant for far too long and we are starting to see the effects of that stagnation on our space. -- David Heller Practical Global IA Peter Van Dijck, Jorge Arango, Livia Labate> Conference Description Peter Van Dijck, Jorge Arango, and Livia Labate led an informal session on the practical aspects of global IA. They briefly presented some starting points and then opened the floor for discussion. To begin discussions they pointed out that there is a lot of globalization (i.e., in business and marketing), but very little shared or documented about IA in the global setting. They also noted that headquarters (or clients) may assume that you can build something in the US and then roll it out worldwide with no heed given to differences in how different cultures approach the information. The panelists suggested that some content is more suited to this type of approach, such as factual, static, non-marketing content, but that branding and marketing might not fare as well. Some of the more interesting observations from the audience:

You can count on some things carrying over and others not, so isolate those that don't. It will be easier to alter the taxonomy to accommodate the changes if you start that way.
For internal resources it is more acceptable to make the IA the same across countries. Even so, it is best to test, since people may be making workarounds to cope with differences that they don't consider problems or that you don't recognize.
Company culture may override local culture.
Domain knowledge/culture may override local culture. Examples were academics, physicists, and physicians.
People may say “we're different ” than other people (based on geographical or political differences, but tests may reveal that they are not different.
Cultural myths: we need data to understand the reality, not the myths.
Geert Hofstede's “Cultural Dimensions ” can be good for what it is, but can be abused/misused. Use it as a recognition framework not a development framework.
Research techniques do not always work across cultures due to basic differences (i.e., norms of deference and ability to speak honestly about product).
Important to have cross-cultural, bilingual person for testing.
Each person belongs to many cultures. Internet culture is an important one.

-- Weston Thompson Implementing a Pattern Library in the Real World: A Yahoo! Case Study Erin Malone, Matt Leacock, Chanel Wheeler Conference Description This was one of the most practical sessions I attended. The Yahoo team identified a need for increased consistency and stronger brand in their websites (haven't we all) and a need to leverage collective knowledge about design strategies. A pattern library seemed to be just the answer. The project involved the selection of a content management system, the development of the library and substantial change and communications. The messages I took away include:

Don't let technology decide process
Patterns don't need to be exhaustive
Consider the way the content needs to be used - design it to be read in a hurry, and provide deeper background information
The content must be credible

The case study has been written up as a paper, which is much more useful than this review. You can find it at http://leacock.com/patterns/. -- Donna Maurer Leading a team of IAs: The Manager's Perspective Victor Lombardi, Liz Danzico, Neil Wehrle, Karen McGrane Conference Description This panel provided more information on how to manage one's own career than to manage other IAs, but the tips and insight provided were pertinent and useful to beginner / intermediate IAs and those looking to get into the field. Neil Wehrle covered "Getting Hired," with attention paid to how to develop a portfolio, have a successful interview, and handle the offer negotiation process. Victor Lombardi discussed “Developing Your Skill Set,” providing details for IAs on "what you won't learn in school or books." Research, experimentation, collaboration, and invention were noted as the main areas to focus on, along with applying IA skills to other areas. Karen McGrane focused on “Managing Your Performance,” described as how information architects form a relationship with their manager and employer. The presentation covered goal setting, annual reviews, salary reviews, and performance problems, areas that are not specific to IA, but presented as general HR information with an IA slant. Liz Danzico talked about “Next Steps,” offering tips on how to grow in your career within the IA discipline, or across disciplines. Building task forces, attending in-house training, pursuing continuing education, crossing discipline boundaries, networking internally and externally, moving locations, and entering management were all discussed. -- Jeff Lash The Practice of Enterprise IA: 10 Giant Mistakes I Made This Year Lorelei Brown Conference Description Lorelei presented a refreshingly honest look at a project that involved selecting and implementing a CMS, mapping the site, creating new navigation, labeling & visual design, migrating all content, and tagging with metadata--all in 18 months. I won't list out the mistakes, as the lessons learned are more useful than the actual mistakes. Lorelei encouraged the audience to remember that other people don't want to know how everything works, they just want the outcome; that it is incredibly important not to oversell the project; and that you should be willing to take risks. -- Donna Maurer Information Architecture and Alzheimer's Disease: Using IA to Improve the Lives of Those with Impaired Cognition D. Grant Campbell Conference Description For me, this was the most interesting session of the conference, and I'm pleased that I didn't miss it (I had planned to go to a different session as I didn't read my schedule right). Grant Campbell has spent a lot of time since last year's summit examining literature from a number of fields, learning about what happens to people's ability to categorize during early stage Alzheimer's disease. For a complex topic, he presented it in a very approachable manner. He explained the different memory types and what happens to memory in early Alzheimer's--semantic memory degenerates which affects the way people categorize. The literature indicates that people extend names to familiar items, lose the detailed levels of categorization and retain the superordinate categories. He provided some implications for the way we might categorize information for people with early Alzheimer's disease, but indicated that much research would need to be done before we could be confident in supplying solutions. -- Donna Maurer StUX: Integrating IA Deliverables in a Web Application Development Methodology Peter Boersma
Conference Description In this session, Peter Boersma presented a look at how his company approached user-centered design methodology. The company had adopted IBM's Rational Unified Process (RUP) as its software development methodology and tool. A fine tool, said Boersma, except that it does not model the user-centered design aspects. To be most effective, his team developed a complete model that fits onto the RUP. They call it Standards for User Experience or StUX. Boersma said that his team brainstormed to document their process and deliverables, including how they relate to those of other units in the company. Then they structured the results in a diagram that mapped deliverables to phases in the process. The diagram showed RUP streams on one axis (input, inception, elaboration, construction) and UX streams on the other (system analysis, IA and Interaction Design, Usability and Accessibility Testing, Content Design, Visual Design and Information Design). The diagram led to recognition of overlap in artifacts (deliverables and documentation), so they reviewed those and described them in structured templates. Over several months, the team refined the workflow and the deliverables. As possible, they used standard IT terminology for the UX aspects. Boersma said that using StUX led to consistent terminology and practices within the UX team. That, in turn, led to other teams understanding the UX parts better, expecting certain things, recognizing things, and calling them by right name. He stressed importance of developing your own methodology that matches your company, your team, and your needs. Boersma said that simply importing somebody else's methodology misses most of the benefits. Boersma likened StUX to having a cupboard full of all possible ingredients that you use in your kitchen: you don't use all each time you cook, but you have some consistency and great familiarity with how they all work and come together. He said you may call it a framework, if that helps you see it as not limiting or too daunting. In closing, Boersma emphasized that even if you cannot follow your methodology as closely as desired, it helps to have a document to hand over to other teams to explain what you do, how it fits into the big picture, and that you are serious. -- Weston Thompson A Context for Interaction Design David Heller Conference Description David Heller's session presented his look at the relationship between IA, interaction design (IxD), and user experience (UX). Heller said that the Web has had a big role in bringing UX out as a domain, since it brought together disparate groups that didn't mix much in the past (software engineering, library science, gaming, graphic design, marketing). For his talk, Heller focused on digital product design, not the biggest picture of experience design (that would encompasses call centers and such). Heller looked at existing models for explaining and relating the UX areas: Shedroff (All the Skills), Morville (All the Goals), Garrett (Tasks for a Project), Hodge (All the Disciplines), and Knemeyer. Then he took on the task himself. His goal was to represent the relationships while minimizing jargon and clarifying big versus little. Interestingly, Heller started with the solution and broke down what leads to it, starting with the concept, then the form, until he reached the “disciplines ” that make up the aspects of the solution. Heller said that there are many disciplines in our toolkit (i.e., IA, I design, interaction design, etc.,) and that in our work we are crossing boundaries, regardless of our title. He then mapped of those disciplines to the various aspects of the solution (i.e., validation is Usability Engineering; structure is IA; behavior is IxD). In the second part of his talk, Heller focused on interaction design and its relationship to IA--a couple made in heaven. He sees IA covering findability and metadata, while IxD covers search/browse and wayfinding. In closing, Heller asked us to remember that our questions may have answers in other disciplines. -- Weston Thompson Overview & Pre-sessions | Saturday Sessions | Sunday & Monday Sessions

Monday March 7

Inspire Designers, Persuade Stakeholders: The Twin Goals of Customer Research Rashmi Sinha Conference Description Rashmi Sinha started her session with these words: Art of War. Before fully explaining the war, she graded IAs in two categories:

Inspiring Design: A
Impacting business: D

As Don Norman said, “the action is with the people who decide what product to build in the first place. ” Sinha proposes that we use strategic customer research to help define business strategy. First, Sinha said we must understand marketing, since marketing has a big place at the corporate table. It's important for us to understand the definition of market research and its goals: establishing what product, what place, what price, and what promotion. Marketing uses the term segmentation scheme, or simply segmentation, for how they define the customers that are central to their organization or product. They will judge our personas based on that segmentation scheme. For more information, see the Handbook of Marketing (2000). In her research, Sinha found a 1993 quote on card sorts in the marketing literature. She asks why IAs don't know or recognize this background in our work. Then Sinha brought back her Art of War analogy, saying that we need to practice the three aspects of the art: co-opt, pre-empt, and combat. She focused on co-opting marketing. Sinha provided a personal example of how she did joint research with a marketing department. It went well, and she won their acceptance on other findings and recommendations. In closing, Sinha offered a series of tips, including:

Be flexible about methods. Be willing to use marketing's methods and terminology.
Use two different sets of deliverables: one for marketing/business, and one for design/development.
Don't lose your core IA strengths along the way.

-- Weston Thompson Making the Most of Controlled Vocabularies in Search Interfaces Chris Farnum Conference Session Chris Farnum started with the point that if you put time into indexing content, you should make sure to leverage it in the search interface. An important aspect is training people to go beyond the “Google-style approach” -- that is, just typing in a keyword or two and hoping for the best. Instead, we should encourage our users to browse the controlled vocabulary and we should place opportunities to use and learn about metadata in the users's path, without requiring its usage. For real-world examples, Farnum looked at a typical ProQuest article that has metadata galore. ProQuest leverages metadata in their search interface in five ways:

More Like This or Berry-picking. Find one hit that's good and then find others like it (i.e., based on the subject). Farnum showed how to do this by letting the user see the metadata with sideways links like Google's “similar pages.” He also pointed out that this is a good way to support bottom-up searching.
Browsing. Have the user browse the controlled vocabulary instead of searching. Epicurious uses editorially-controlled taxonomy for browsing, based on their thesaurus, offering a way for novices to explore easily. Farnum suggested trying to make this approach data-driven.
Field Indexes. Let your interface help users select terms for each search field from your controlled vocabularies. Farnum stressed that this should be simple and optional.
Thesaurus. If you have a thesaurus, show it off! Farnum said that is especially for useful for expert searchers.
Search Term Suggestions. Farnum pointed out that users take more time on a results page than on the search page, so it is a golden opportunity to help them refine with their search. This is where you should suggest topics, searches, narrowing filters, and other approaches.

In closing, Farnum stressed that these are models for inspiration, not templates, and that you should (of course), choose and adapt based on your audience. The point is to take full advantage of the controlled vocabularies you invest in. -- Weston Thompson Talking the Talk: Helping IAs Speak the Language of Business Scott Hirsch, Jim Leftwich, Harry Max, Jess McMullin, Dave Robertson Jess McMullin moderated this panel, which focused on “how IAs can talk with business leaders to have greater impact and influence with their clients or organizations.” The key is in understanding the language of business, rather than in expecting business leaders to learn our language, and being able to “speak to the needs of business in the terms that they would use if they were talking about it themselves.” Scott Hirsch, who comes from a business background, discussed the seducible moment, which is the optimal time to influence a decision. For management, three points of pain can be brought up to create a seducible moment: technology being broken; the company missing an opportunity to make money or reduce costs; or, some combination of the first two. By defining the problem in language they can understand and describing value in terms of pain, you can then describe why the design or research work being proposed will help alleviate that problem. Jim Leftwich described his organic process where he learned more and more over the course of his design career. Instead of talking about usability and interfaces, he talks about opportunities in the marketplace, the competitive landscape, and creating advantages through patent protection. He noted that the biggest devaluer of design could be the designers themselves, and that charging lower rates than other professional services (e.g., legal) implies that design services aren't as valuable. Dave Robertson noted how, in addition to talking in different language to different internal stakeholders, each business has its own language, and the basic circular UCD process of research/plan/test can be used to understand businesses. Harry Max said that the basic idea of user-centered design is flawed, because we are focusing on the user rather than the value we can bring to an organization. In speaking with different stakeholders in an organization, that value needs to be presented differently. For example, an executive should focus on the current situation, articulate the vision, the quantifiable impact of the solution, and then, if time is left, talk about the plan. However, with a manager or individual contributor, the order is the exact opposite, starting with the plan, then the solution, the impact, the vision, etc. -- Jeff Lash Beyond the Page Gene Smith Conference Description Gene Smith started his session by looking back at some conversations from the AIfIA retreat of October 2004. He heard participants questioning the continued relevancy of certain traditional IA tools and conceits. Those discussions inspired him to looked at the page metaphor and how it is breaking:

From	To
Page is basic presentation unit	Screens, panels, containers
Page is basic organization unit	Multiple, arbitrary units, (e.g. posts)
Web is consumed as pages	Web is a platform
Stuff is assembled into pages	Stuff is delivered outside the browser

Smith pointed out how it extends to our notation systems like flow diagrams (the Visual Vocabulary), site maps, and wire frames, which need to be supplanted with a new generation of documents and deliverables. Smith says this change comes about from disruptive trends like RIAs, RSS/Atom/XML content, and the blurring boundaries between desktop and web. He felt that RIAs played the biggest role in this change, especially due to the transparent transitions that are not page-based. Smith suggested that documenting those transitions might be accomplished with a flows--from a Start State Wireframe to an End State Wireframe--with callouts that explain specific page items. As the page paradigm gives way, Smith said we will see a move toward interaction design, a move from content to software, and a bigger focus on metrics. Smith then looked at RSS/XML. RSS's flexible content model allows the user to choose how to consume and display content. Smith pointed out that this may lead to things like algorithmic IA, personal interface (architecture) definitions, and device-dependent architecture. Smith found that the blurring boundaries between web/desktop are another factor in this beyond the page trend, such as Web 2.0 and its Internet-enabled desktop applications. But, simultaneously, he described a divergence due to multiple synchable, sharable devices. Thus, we need an abstraction of IA - making it less tied to the physical device. Smith said soon we may have more emphasis on content re-use and content modeling, less emphasis on taxonomy or structure. After a quick tour through some sample deliverables and artifacts, Smith concluded that the page is not dead: it is still valuable, but the metaphor is aging. During the Q&A period, Jesse James Garrett commented that he had used the Visual Vocabulary on an Ajax project recently, and that it had worked well, except it started to break down in representing transitions via wireframes. -- Weston Thompson Machines of Loving Grace: User experience for ubiquitous computing environments Mike Kuniavsky Conference Description In this presentation, Mike first outlined the fundamentals and history of ubiquitous computing. He then provided a number of examples of recent ubiquitous devices and discussed the implications for user interface design (e.g. that we might not be designing a display and input methods are entirely different). He also discussed the different ways that we use ubiquitous computing--rather than a computer in an office--ubiquitous devices can become very intimate items that are highly embedded in our personal spaces. He wrapped up with some discussion about ethics and how easy it is to create technologies that have a bad impact on our society, referencing Adam Greenfield's article All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings for more information on this aspect. -- Donna Maurer Why Amazon is Not Enough Brett Lider Conference Description Brett Lider presented an intriguing look at what Amazon is not doing in its CRM efforts and opportunities that he sees for expanding this arena in the age of Web 2.0. Lider started out by saying he was only picking on Amazon because they are an industry leader, and that they need a challenge now and then. Lider quickly explained that Amazon is doing a lot with social networks, good algorithms, and providing APIs for external services to reach in—but they are doing precious little to go out after data sources that could help them serve customers better. He described this situation as common one in an age of e-commerce bound by “siloed technical platforms”). So how can Amazon move beyond this? Lider sees the answer in Web 2.0. He presented the Wikipedia definition of Web 2.0, but found it focused only on the technical aspects. Lider provided his own sense of what Web 2.0 really means: social networks, desktop information, browser history, tastes and preferences, and analog information. But it is the bringing together of these areas that Lider sees as the exciting potential of Web 2.0. Lider presented some examples of low-hanging fruit ready for the taking: Evite could partner with LinkedIn so that users don't have to recreate social networks for Evite; the iTunes store could use a person's iTunes player history file from the desktop to personalize the store front. From here, Lider launched into a look at a suite of Web 2.0 tools used for C2B (customer to business) relationships. Lider noted that the Harvard Business Review had just run an article on customer-managed interactions (CMI) that matches his notion of C2B, and he sees the coming C2B as a place for proactive IAs to have a serious impact. -- Weston Thompson

Overview & Pre-sessions | Saturday Sessions | Sunday & Monday Sessions

Crossing Boundaries: 2005 IA Summit Wrapup: Saturday

B&A Staff — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 20:33:11 GMT

Session Summaries and Reviews

Saturday, March 5

Opening Plenary
BJ Fogg “Did the designer who assigned the CTRL-Z function think of this outcome?”In his opening plenary, BJ Fogg asked us to consider the ramifications of our actions as designers: that we are designing rituals and thereby changing culture. A relatively small group of people, through their designs and products, are changing the the world, and fairly quickly, too. We may also want to change the world, however we may not think about all of the side-affects. For instance, Fogg pointed out that in a serious car crash, he did not see his life flash before his eyes, but he thought “CTRL-Z.” Did the designer who assigned the CTRL-Z function think of this outcome? Well, the ritual was ingrained in Fogg, just as people around the world are changed by the technology around them. Fogg's primary area of interest is in the overlapping areas of technology and persuasion, which he calls captology. He points out that captology can be both good and bad: allowing people freedom of choice or limiting it. He says the techniques used for persuasions in one-time interactions are different than required for ongoing relationships, and Fogg points out that we may see too many one-time persuasions. In order to prioritize how we expend our captology energy (designing for impact/persuasion), Fogg suggests we brainstorm a bunch of sticky notes about target outcomes (user behavior), then place the notes on a decision grid that ranks for importance and feasibility. For the best punch, select target outcomes in the high-easy area (important and feasible). Fogg pointed out that video games are excellent at affecting user behavior since they provide quick feedback on your increasing competency. This type of feedback is especially important for certain groups, such as teen boys. While this is scary in some ways, such as the amount of time players are rehearsing violent behavior, the powerfully persuasive use of technology can be harnessed for other purposes. It's a good example of Fogg's observation that you increase your credibility by knowing what your audience responds to most favorably. In conclusion, Fogg offered up some guiding words to help designers who want to have a positive impact via persuasive technology:

Specialize: Find your niche. The more specialized, the broader the impact you have.
Take risks.
Appreciate (a healthy emotion).
Rebound: We all fail; now get back up and keep going.
Find your “true north. ”

-- Weston Thompson For me, an opening plenary needs be inspiring, entertaining, somewhat practical and credible. BJ Fogg's plenary was all of those, and is easily one of the best plenaries I have heard for a long time. As we expected, the presentation covered many aspects of persuasion. BJ discussed how the tools we use change us; examined some of the common persuasive (and nagging) techniques that are currently being used, and elaborated on persuasive strategies that have the most powerful impact. BJ reminded us that we are creating things that are used by people, and that we are in the position where so few of us can change so many others. We need to ensure that the way we affect those people is planned, not unplanned. This, along with the ethics of persuasion and design, are key issues for us to consider further. -- Donna Maurer Sorting Out Social Classification Peter Merholz, Peter Morville, Thomas Vander Wal, Gene Smith Conference Description This was a very well-structured and interesting panel. Gene Smith started the discussion with a good overview of folksonomy/social classification, explaining that a folksonomy/social classification schema is one where the participants in the content creation are also the ones creating the classification. Gene also showed examples from key sites such as del.icio.us and flickr (these demonstrations need to be shown in real time before people 'get it,' but this wasn't practical in this instance) and walked through the very short history with a series of provocative quotes. Taking a conservative approach, Peter Morville reminded us that context is important, and that folksonomy doesn't suit all (or many) contexts. He also noted that, as interesting as the concept of folksonomy is, hierarchies are not going away. Thomas Vander Wal compared metadata and tagging, highlighting the problems that we have all had with managing metadata. He suggested that, in some circumstances, tagging is easier and can be generated as a by-product of tasks that users are already doing. Peter Merholz discussed three key problems with current tagging implementations: a lack of synonyms, multiple meanings for a tag and incorrect tagging. He also briefly discussed the idea of discoverability, not findability. All together, this was a good panel - it introduced the folksonomy concept, explained the current opinions and provided ideas for the future. It will be interesting to see what happens over the coming year. -- Donna Maurer Thinking Navigation (or Navigation on Vanguard.com Pt.2) David Fiorito Conference Description At last year's IA Summit, one of the most popular presentations was “Creating a Consistent Enterprise Web Navigation Solution,” where David Fiorito and Richard Dalton of Vanguard discussed the process for creating consistent navigational patterns across enterprise websites. At the time of the presentation, the new navigation system had not yet been implemented, so this year's follow-up presentation reviewed the system and discussed the process of applying it to the various websites. One of the major lessons learned was how to present the design before the rollout. Senior executives and managers benefited from a high-level overview with fewer details, while those implementing the design needed more details and background, both to aid in buy-in as well as to ensure the proper execution. They created a detailed, web-based documentation site, and conducted several rounds of usability testing on the site to ensure those implementing the navigation system would be able to find the relevant details. There is nothing on the site that explains the system to end users, but the goal was to make the navigation clear to users, and usability testing has shown that the new navigation is effective. -- Jeff Lash The Confidence Game: The Influence of IA on Users' Confidence Jared Spool Conference description This was the first “Spool” lecture I've ever attended, and it was pretty good. Spool himself is quite a character, with an animated--albeit clownish--persona that kept the audience engaged and the talk moving rapidly. Looking at the issue of “influencing” user behaviors, Spool discussed how content presented at different levels of the information architecture of a website can have an impact on a user's decision-making process. He discussed the purchase of hi-tech items--such as digital cameras--using sites like Amazon, WalMart.com, and Target.com as a reference. It was an interesting study, and it raised intriguing issues about the value of brand and the need to understand users' goals or “outcomes of use”. (Hmm, calling Alan Cooper?) While not as intellectually rigorous as a CHI or UPA case study, Spool's presentation raised worthwhile issues for the IA community to debate. -- Uday Gajendar Spool presented findings from a recent UIE study of people who purchased laptop computers and other electronics online. He found that sites should give the purchase confidence, because confidence results in purchasing enthusiasm. (Of course, you must find the threshold point of confidence, and I'm not sure that Spool clearly addressed that point.) Test subjects were given a stipend, and Spool found that they spent 250% of it at Crutchfield, vs. only 42% of at J&R. Wow! People were confident at Crutchfield--enough so to spend a good deal of their own money in addition to their stipend. Shoppers at J&R, on the other hand, didn't even spend their entire stipend. Spool identified three stages in the ecommerce decision-making process:

Winnow
- Department page: presents collections of likely product candidates.
- Group items usefully and describe them carefully.
- Do not present featured products at this stage; it is too early in the process.
- Are you using facets? Be sure they are the right ones, and that they match the user's mental model (i.e., “shoots 8x10 photos,” not “4 Megapixel”).
- Good example: Lands End's swimsuit page.
Select
- Gallery page: shows selected details about each product in the department.
- Display a small logical group: understand the threshold of “too many” (though Spool did not specify what this threshold is).
Validate
- Product page: deliver the right information so the purchaser can feel confident that it is the right product.
- Example: Crutchfield employs good descriptions written in the purchaser's terms.

A related tidbit that Spool shared: “Worried about cluttered pages? Remember that the page is only cluttered if the information is not relevant to you. If it's relevant, than it's useful, not cluttered.” -- Weston Thompson What makes users decide to purchase? And conversely, what makes them return empty handed? Jared Spool spoke to a packed room about the benefits of giving users confidence in your site to allow them to make important decisions. In a recent study, users were given $1,000 dollars to spend on electronics at various shopping sites. The resulting spends as a proportion of the original stipend varied enormously: on crutchfield.com, users spent 237% of the stipend, on amazon.com just over 90%, and in others as little as 50%. Spool examined why test subjects did not have the confidence to spend their stipend on some sites, even though the purchases were free to them. He proposed that a good IA supports the three stages of shopping: winnowing (seeing a large selection of products and picking the correct range), selecting (picking the product to buy), and validating (checking that the selected choice is correct). Department pages (e.g. cameras), gallery pages (e.g. cameras under $150), and content pages (e.g. Kodak EasyShare Model 123) support these respective stages, and Spool gave specific recommendations for designing these pages. The big surprise is that users don't use content pages to make decisions: they are made at the selection stage, on gallery pages. Content pages are then used to validate these choices. As a result, the most successful shopping sites are designed to support funneling: users are given enough information at the gallery / selecting stage to have confidence that they are looking at the correct item by the time they view its content page. Less successful sites, on the other hand, are designed for 'pogosticking': users go back and forth between content pages and gallery pages. At the end of the presentation, Spool thanked an enthused audience for encouraging his behavior. -- Helen Leech Evangelism 101 Dan Willis Conference Description Dan's presentation was energetic and interesting. He outlined the key aspects of an evangelist, what they do and how to identify one. He presented his “8 random rules of evangelism,” which included “be shameless,” “be fuzzy,” “be tactile,” and “incite the riot.” He continued with a good explanation of ways that different people evangelize and how to work with evangelists. Doesn't sound much like IA? Dan connected evangelism and IA neatly-many of us are involved in selling what we do and what IA is about, and any help doing this is always appreciated. -- Donna Maurer Yet another dynamic, lively, engaging speaker, Dan Willis described the perils and joys of IA evangelism within a company, offering advice and tips. The key takeaway for me was that different kinds of evangelists-pirates and poets-each have certain personality traits and thus need to be nurtured differently in an organization. Timing, patience, and persistence seemed to be the top criteria for any evangelist pursuing positive change. -- Uday Gajendar Content Genres - The Hidden Workhorse of Information Architecture Peter Merholz Conference Description Peter Merholz presented an extended look at a rather simple idea: document genres. He started with the notion that IAs usually look at metadata in terms of author, title, and other descriptive aspects. But he countered that people approaching a task or goal seek custom tools; they need to know the genre of the document. Is it a guidebook, a map, or a weekly independent newspaper? Merholz emphasized that knowing the genre helps set expectations. Genres are often known by visual cues and affordances, but they are harder to convey online. Merholz pointed out that we can find ways to use the notion of genre to help organize unwieldy content inventories, such as large intranets. Genres serve as trigger words for users, which help them move through these large document sets. Merholz acknowledged that this is similar to the notion of content type, but that content type often connotes format. Additionally, content type is jargon in the header of most markup schemes. Merholz pointed out an example use of genre on the Trend Micro web site that helps it stand out from its competitor Symantec. Trend uses genre effectively on product pages to tie in Features, System Requirements, and White Papers. These links help users self-select without forcing them to segment out at the start of the information-seeking process. Merholz also showed mockups of how Clusty and Google could use genre to help people understand and filter their result sets. In his mock-up, his search for “information architecture ” on Clusty resulted in a set of genre types such as tutorials, weblogs, books, and essays, instead of what Clusty gives you now: a mixed-up list of related topics, sub-topics, keywords, and proper nouns. Tying this into the popular world of content management systems, Merholz noted that genre relies on presentation/layout, so the CMS goal of separating those can be counterproductive. As a quick example, he showed a menu: well, we know it's a menu because it looks like one, even though the actual content is pure gibberish. Likewise, he showed actual menu content set up like an essay, thereby obscuring its actual nature. Merholz stresses that presentation sets expectations of what the content is and what purpose it serves, how to use it. But Merholz found a way to bring the two together: He looked at the content delivery method (i.e., PC vs. PDA) as a genre. Then he analyzed sub-tasks to find which content delivery methods were best suited to the sub-task. Merholz's final thoughts were that genre will help us with information architecture, especially in large spaces, and that genre reminds us that IA is really about the content the fact that people are using it. -- Weston Thompson I profess to having an interest in this subject, and attended the session to primarily see what Peter Merholz was up to with thinking about genres and how we can leverage them in our designs. Peter explained the basics of content genres-- that we frequently know which 'type' of document or resource to use based on our previous experience with information. For example, when determining where to eat we might use a local free newspaper to find out about restaurants, then a map to get there. The physical content genres we use are not always used in the online world, and there are additional genres there that we do use. Genres are not the same as templates. Peter discussed situations where a genre will use a particular template to reinforce the genre (and to provide recognizable shape); noting that in other cases many genres will use the same template. Overall, this was a good summary. I'd be interested in seeing what happens when put to practical use, and whether genre identification really helps people to find and understand information. An IA research project perhaps… -- Donna Maurer The 2005 Information Architecture Slam: The Second Annual “Workshop with a Winner” Lynn Boyden, Chris Chandler, Matthew Fetchko, Eric Reiss Conference Description The IA Slam involves teams of eight people working for 45 minutes to design a solution to an IA problem, with each team having 10 minutes to present the design. This year's problem was 'The Merger from Hell' in which the teams had to design a new floor plan for the recently merged Bal-Mart and Fordstrom while maintaining the individual brand identities. Not an IA problem? Of course it was. In coming up with this solution, we used many of the same skills we use when working on a website--managing team politics, identifying the problem, thinking about the customer experience, brainstorming and designing solutions, communicating our designs. The winning team was announced at lunch next day, after a long and tiring evening of judging! This was easily the highlight of the Summit for me. Thanks to team green for being the 'most congenial', and thanks to the organizers (who played their parts amazingly well) for once again running it. -- Donna Maurer Design Patterns in Enterprise UI Architectures Karl Mochel Conference description This was a well-delivered (and much-needed) talk regarding the evolution of enterprise software UI architectures. While I don't think Mochel spoke of design patterns in the true (Christopher Alexander) sense, he did a nice job distinguishing enterprise systems with specific qualifiers (transactional, frequent data entry, cross-functional dependencies, etc.), thereby presenting to the audience of IAs a different problem space than the one usually seen in CMS or intranets. The presentation touched on a variety of ways to organize web-based enterprise functionality (persistent tab, tabless, and contextual tab)--each with its own benefits--derived from an understanding of the user's questions and goals. Mochel also carefully pointed out the advantages of re-organizing functionality to correspond to the user's goals, even while keeping the same pages in different locations. This concept was nicely demonstrated with a multi-step animation that showed a Marketing application morphing from one type of architecture to another, resulting in a slimmer structure overall. I think the audience found this animation most helpful in grokking the abstract concept of “enterprise architecture.” Finally, Mochel described his interest in interactive visualizations and their connection to enterprise architectures, thereby enabling ways of “viewing into” complex datasets. As a next step, it would be great to see screenshots or an actual demo of an enterprise UI featuring examples of decision-making scenarios enabled by such interfaces and architectures. The foundation for exploration in this area has certainly been set with this talk. -- Uday Gajendar IA For the Personal Information Cloud Thomas Vander Wal Conference Description The core idea that Thomas presented here is that, just like the Internet itself is a publishing cloud that we enter to find information, there is a personal cloud that is wholly within our purview, or within our perceived purview. What makes the personal information cloud so important to us as designers and architects of information spaces is that we need to be considering (beyond our current target zone) findability and initial-use. Once information is found and consumed, it will invariably need to be re-used, controlled, shared, and otherwise manipulated. What this means is that information will be structured and re-presented outside our control. No one is really thinking about this issue when they create their information spaces today. Issues of intellectual property, privacy, and brand all become huge concerns moving forward for people thinking about such spaces. The portable nature of information brings up both concerns and challenges about the personal information cloud. Having information be contextualized to location, task, relationships, etc. means that we need to have a much better handle on how our information can be used way beyond how it will be found. -- David Heller Interface Design for Database-Intensive Web Applications Jessica Jackson & Rick Omanson Conference description This presentation examined the fundamentals of interface design when applied to large, database-driven sites such as catalogs and libraries. Scalability and transactionality were offered as the driving influences that can impact the interface design in these sites, and Jackson cited various examples, including CDW and the Library of Congress, with its millions of items. Some key issues included the familiar problems of orientation, navigation, and operations within a large-scale site. The typical questions of “how to organize the content” and “how to help the user find an item” were also examined, along with a summation of some options, including multilevel navigation and breadcrumbs. Predictably, a lively discussion ensued over the value of breadcrumbs: should they show history or architecture, their location and usage, etc. I think what emerged from this talk was a set of basic heuristics and issues--not completely novel or profound--for designers of large inventory sites to consider. It would have been more compelling to examine the challenges of emerging technologies (Flash, wikis/blogs) and the increasing need for search/find/remember functionality within large sites: What are their interactions and how should the architectures respond to them, given the live database connection? There may also have been a missed opportunity to deeply explore what “live-ness” means to interfaces and the supporting IA, and how it can make them very dynamic and configurable. -- Uday Gajendar

Overview & Pre-sessions | Saturday Sessions | Sunday & Monday Sessions

Crossing Boundaries: 2005 IA Summit Wrapup: Overview and Pre-Sessions

B&A Staff — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 20:43:19 GMT

“Overall, the goals of many IAs seem to be maturing with the practitioners themselves, from simple classification to reorganizing business, and perhaps society itself.”This year marks the sixth IA Summit; it was also my sixth summit. I was lucky enough to have attended the first one in Boston, and it is almost amusing to consider that at the time, the main question seemed to be “is this IA thing going to hang around, and should it?” Later conferences, we would flagellate ourselves endlessly about what IA was; but at that moment, IA was like a scent of a freshly baked pie floating in the air, and we all wondered if it would still be there by the time we could track down where it was located. Not so this year in Montreal. While some people might be still wondering how to define it; no one is asking if it will last. The canon is solid, the tools are recognized, the methods enshrined and the goals shared. IAs read the Polar Bear and a few others, they use Visio and a few others, they do personas and card sorts and they all care deeply about retrieval. It's this platform of agreement that is precious, in my opinion, because it allows for practitioners and researchers to then go beyond the platform. The canon admittedly hasn't added much new work since the odd bubbling up of books that happened a few years ago, but perhaps that will change soon since everything else is alive and mutating. Tools and methods are steadily growing to include many new approaches and occasionally new software. This year, folksonomies and RIA's¹ both generated lively discussion, creating camps of black and white “yer either fer us or agin us” debate. The contentious attitude of many of the boosters and detractors of folksonomies distracted from the fact that a truly new categorization method rose out of engineering communtiy rather than the IA community that spends every waking hour thinking about organization systems. Nevertheless, the IAs named it (natch) and at the moment they look to be the ones who will figure out how to take the best of the world of tagging and world of controlled vocabularies to make an even more powerful system. After an energetic boostering of folksonomies by Thomas Vanderwal, and a razor-sharp dissection of their weakness by Peter Morville, Peter Merholtz—who has been known in the past to take extreme positions with much handwaving—offered up a wonderfully balanced perspective on the nature of the folksonomy that pointed to a best-of-both worlds solution of blending strength. He also waxed poetic as he appreciated moments of beauty in collaborative classification choices, epitomized by the Flickr categories “color” and “me.” I have hopes for the future of folksonomies, with champions like these. The RIA panel, thankfully, has moved on from warring between the “flash” and “dhtml” camps, to a more inclusive and sensibly contextual perspective on the application of RIA. They have even embraced the newly minted term “ajax” into their vocabulary. I'm pleased to see the IA community grabbing onto technologies and approaches originally seen as being purely the domain of interaction design and adopting them to the benefit of all. Also from the category of “not actually IA, but… ” Karl Fast's compelling talk on information visualization experiments fueled the fire for those who believe that, as the title of the Summit suggests, boundaries are made to be crossed. As an aside, I would like to say that in my opinion, Karl's talks are among the most compelling given at this and previous Summits and his research promotes the creative brain to bubble with innovative ideas. I hope more academics will bring their emerging research to practitioner forums such as the Summit and B&A, so that their ideas can manifest themselves into new products for humans. Beyond technology and technique, this summit revealed the goals of information architecture are evolving beyond the usual ones of retrieval via search and browse. I suppose that a conference that opens with a keynote speech from B.J. Fogg, groundbreaker in the new science of persuasive technology, would throw traditional findability goals into question. In recent Summits, IAs have admitted that the idea of a platonic organization system is a false one; our choices in categorization always reflect our own biases and values; for example, the Dewey decimal's religion category. But this Summit was the first time where I heard IAs talk of actively shaping world views via taxonomies as opposed to merely passively reflecting user values. A talk on global IA reveals that the Maori are not offended as much as displaced by Dewey's organization system, which ignores their traditional ancestor-categories. Another talk spoke of creating environments that would promote organizational rigor or creativity via labeling and hierarchy choices. It doesn't take much imagination to theorize the future lies in various countries' websites designed to promote their values, from freedom to collectivism. Sitting next to Norwegian and Japanese IAs, I overheard low murmurs of concern over the “disneyification” of classification via the web, where organizations would be as flat and stereotypical as the small world ride in Anaheim. Could something as innocuous as classification be a form of propaganda? Additionally, persuasion approaches was reflected on a personal scale in talks such as Dan Willis's motivating talk on evangelism (which I sadly missed, but experienced via the buzz over “poets” and “pirates” in the hall.), Jess Mcullin' personal scenario planning, and Thom Haller's special brand of IA actualization techniques. Its clear IAs are questioning their identity and reaching out to other disciplines to learn, much in the way a tree explores the neighbor's property with its root system as it looks to feed its growth. Beyond the hearts-and-minds goals of IA, I also noticed a rising pragmatism, most clearly manifested in the well attended Business Design BOF. Admittedly, the conversation degenerated into the usual “how do I get people to take me seriously”, but a few intriguing ideas also arose, such as contextual value of approaches within different markets, and the opportunity to apply design/IA thinking to business problems (perhaps not a new concept to the growing number of IA's who carry HBR and Business Week around, but a compelling one)². Solving a classic business problem was addressed in a terrific presentation by Richard Dalton, in which the popular mental model process³ was transformed to analyze weaknesses and opportunities in business strategy. It worked so well and seemed to be so eminently sensible I felt myself briefly wondering if I had seen it before. It was a glorious duh moment, the kind that makes you change what you do when you get back to the office. Overall, the goals of many IAs seem to be maturing with the practitioners themselves, from simple classification to reorganizing business, and perhaps society itself. It's unsurprising then, that the summit itself came under scrutiny by many attendees. Many many talks were so deeply entrenched in the typical “canon” of knowledge, that this was the first Summit where there were fair numbers of folks chatting during the presentations as well as breaks. With four talks being given simultaneously, I think this should be cause for concern by next years' Summit committee. While 60% of the attendees are new and certainly will love another talk on taxonomies or faceted classification (especially if it is as taut and intriguing as the one given by the Yahoo folks, finally sharing their stockpile of knowledge), the Summit should consider how to serve its earliest audience who are now maturing in their practice. Should it give them up, letting them grow into other conferences and events--such as the IA retreat, the newest forum for conversations of edge topics--or should it look hard at themed tracking, perhaps adding an advanced and/or “weird” experimental track? I can imagine inviting IxD to design a track. or even consider an industrial design track. Of course, the Summit could simply concentrate on serving the new folks who are hungry to learn this now proven discipline, and continue to build out on the proven themes. So were boundaries crossed, at the Summit, as the theme promised? I would say that the many boundaries of IA were discovered; it will be up to next year's planning committee to decide if they should build walls on them, or erase the lines and let the next generation continue to move the edges of IA farther and farther out. --Christina Wodtke ¹Rich Internet Application: website/pages that use rich technologies such as flash and dhtml and take advantage of late-release browser penetration to recreate desktop functionality online. ²New Business and Design mailing list ³Documented in Re-Architecting PeopleSoft from the Top Down by Janice Fraser Overview & Pre-sessions | Saturday Sessions | Sunday & Monday Sessions

Pre-Session Summaries

Thursday, March 3

Paper, Scotch Tape, and Post-Its - a Recipe for Paper Prototyping Todd Warfel Todd Warfel led a great four-hour workshop on the first day on paper prototyping. The workshop began with a presentation on the advantages and disadvantages of paper prototyping: the advantages being focused on cost and efficiency and the disadvantages on incompleteness of design. Then the presentation moved towards more practicalities such as tools of the trade and the dos and don'ts of paper prototyping. Todd takes a very hands-off practice to usability testing, and encouraged us all to try to be as invisible as possible when moderating any usability testing, let a lone a paper prototyping session. After the presentation the audience of close to 15 had a chance to do the work ourselves. We were given a problem, had to make a quick design, and then create a paper prototype that we would ask another participant not on our design team to try out. Todd's presentation was quite good. It was fairly organized, and he demonstrated a keen expertise of the subject matter. -- David Heller Oxygen Meetings: How to Get Diverse Teams to Solve Difficult Problems Daniel Willis This, by far, was the best of the three pre-conference workshops I went to. Dan presents and teaches an invaluable tool for anyone who has to lead meetings where the goal is not presentation, but rather extraction of information towards a decision. Dan is also a very up-beat and interactive presenter, always articulating his points well, and engaging his audience/students throughout. An “oxygen meeting” is a meeting where a cross-functional team is brought together to complete an objective. The workshop was meant to teach the students when to use such a meeting and how to lead such a meeting. The objective of an oxygen meeting and more importantly for its leader is to create a common language among the group, extract (not supply) expertise, and then focus on solving a tangible and well-defined problem. We were separated into pairs, and each dyad had to facilitate a meeting around a supplied problem. All four teams did great, and we had a lot of material to dissect and learn from. Dan demonstrated a keen ability to observe and dissect behavior and thus was really able to give strong and accurate direction to the group. -- David Heller

Friday, March 4

Leveraging Business Value: The ROI of UX Janice Fraser This workshop was a presentation of the work that Adaptive Path and students from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, conducted and published. The central theme of this research is that the more an organization attempts to measure ROI and bring user experience efforts and outcomes into that measurement, the more of a return user experience professionals can provide to the organization. The primary outcome of the research was a great means of articulating the maturity of an organizations relationship with user experience in the form of a staircase model with criteria, so that you can evaluate your own organization against that model to determine how far you have to go towards really gaining value from your user experience design team. This work is connected to the issue of speaking the language of stakeholders in order to better make the case for bringing design from merely a tactical service agency in the organization to a true contributor of the strategy development at the executive level. The presentation further went into how we might ourselves do this work of measuring value. First, we find an indicator that shows the behavioral change that is being addressed in the problem statement. Then, we measure for that indicator and compare the value of that change against the investment made to create it. A key phrase that stuck with me as we were leaving was a discussion on the value of Research & Development. Janice said, "You can't put an ROI on R&D. ROI process will squash innovation." -- David Heller Overview & Pre-sessions | Saturday Sessions | Sunday & Monday Sessions

Interview: Steve Krug

B&A Staff — Mon, 02 May 2005 20:47:54 GMT

“Wow! What an interesting notion: consciously making myself into not-Jakob and not-Jared.”In April 2004, Boxes and Arrows sent a set of questions to Steve Krug for an interview to be published in the June edition. What we didn't know at the time was that Steve is a notoriously slow and methodical writer. Eleven months later, to our great delight, this interview turned up. Thanks Steve! BA: So Steve, what have you been up to since you wrote Don't Make Me Think? SK: Well, it's going on five years. How much detail would you like? I still spend some of my time doing the same client work I've always done, mostly expert reviews. But the nicest change for me is that now I also get to travel around with Lou Rosenfeld, teaching our public workshops, and I really love doing them. This spring, we're going to San Diego, Boston, and Denver. The other big change is that I have a lot more email to answer (or to try to answer). Maybe this would be a good chance for me to offer a public apology to anyone who's ever tried to reach me by email and not heard back, especially in the last year. If you write me again, I promise I'll get back to you. The problem is I can't seem to bring myself to use canned replies, so I end up writing the same answer from scratch again and again, so I always have a backlog. It'd be fine if I was avoiding boilerplate on principle, but it's really more of a character defect thing. BA: What was the trigger for your book? SK: Honestly? I wrote it so I could double my consulting rates. I'd been doing usability consulting for almost years, and a lot of my clients had taken to introducing me as a usability “guru.” (Don't get me started on the whole guru thing.) But when it came to billing, I felt a little like the Scarecrow in Oz: if only I had a certificate or a testimonial or something, I would have felt more comfortable charging high-end rates. So when Roger Black asked me if I wanted to write a book (his design firm, Circle.com, was going to do a whole series of books about web design subjects), I more or less jumped at the chance. I'd always felt that a big part of my consulting work was educating my clients, so I knew I had a book about usability in me—as long as it was a short book. Of course, I was completely unclear on the concept that writing it would eat up an entire year of my life, otherwise I never would've started. The funny thing is, not long after I finished the book I learned from several people who I trusted in the business that I could have doubled my rates anyway, since I was seriously undercharging. Live and learn. BA: OK, so now you to tell me about the guru thing. How do you feel about being called a guru? SK: Don't get me wrong: I think I'm pretty good at this usability stuff. I've always been interested in how people learn to use things, and I've been at it for a long time now, so at this point I have no qualms about thinking of myself as an expert—saying I do “expert reviews,” for instance. And believe me, it's a very flattering to have somebody call you a guru. I highly recommend it, if you ever have the chance. But I think the reason why you hear so much about usability “gurus” goes back to the point I was trying to make in the “Religious Debates” cartoon in Don't Make Me Think. One of the problems web teams face is that we all have a lot of personal experience as web users, so we all think we know what makes a site good (i.e., the kinds of things we like). As a result, most design discussions are full of strong (to put it mildly) personal opinions, usually disguised as facts (“Nobody like pull-downs”). And if you're trying to settle a religious debate (so you can just get the darned thing built), it's very appealing to have someone you can turn to for definitive answers (hence the quasi-religious term “guru”). The odd thing is, I wrote a book that spends most of its time explaining that there aren't many definitive answers, just a few useful guiding principles. But maybe that's what people really expect from gurus, anyway. BA: You have a very different persona than the other big gurus of usability: Jakob Nielsen and Jared Spool. Have you consciously shaped your image as a complement/contrast to them? SK: Wow! What an interesting notion: consciously making myself into not-Jakob and not-Jared. Not that I haven't been concerned about my public image. Since the book came out, it's been important to me that whatever image people have is pretty much like me. I always feel good, for instance, when I meet someone who's read the book and they end up saying, “Oh, you're just like your book.” I guess you're right, though: if you did the user research on the three of us and came up with personas, they'd be pretty different. (Although I did learn recently from one of Jakob's interviews that that we were both big fans of Donald Duck comics when we were kids. Of course, Jakob was reading them in Copenhagen and I was in suburban Long Island.) But I tend to think that all three of our public personas are just reflections of who we really are. (Jakob's really smart and opinionated and not afraid to stick to his guns, for instance, and I think Jared really enjoys being irascible.) BA: Have you considered writing another book? SK: I've had another one rattling around in my head for a long time, but given that I practically bankrupted us while writing Think, it's always been up to Melanie whether I'd do another one. A few months ago she finally said it was up to me (I guess it's a little like childbirth: the memory had finally faded enough), so I'm working on one now. Another short book. BA: About? SK: A how-to book that explains how to do low-cost/no-cost do-it-yourself usability testing. BA: But that isn't really true, is it? SK: Well, no, you're right. It was true eight months ago when I wrote that answer. But in the meantime I've had a change of heart, and decided to do an updated edition of Don't Make Me Think first, then write the how-to testing book. The second edition of Think is due out later this year. BA: How is a seminar different from a book? How is your seminar different from your book? SK: Is this a riddle? Or a wossname…a conundrum? “How is a seminar different from a book?” Like “When is a door not a door?” I guess the difference is that in the book, I tried to explain how I think about usability problems, and in the workshop I try to demonstrate how I think about them. I do a live usability test to show how you can get lots of valuable insights—usually more than you can use—in very little time, with very little skill. And I do a lot of quick (ten minute) expert reviews of URLs submitted by attendees. People seem to find them very useful. I think watching somebody do what they do and explain how they do it is a great way to learn how to do it yourself. I used to love watching Pablo Casals teaching master classes on public television back in the early sixties (I guess it was actually called “educational television” at the time), even though I had no interest in ever playing the cello. One of the things I think is most useful about the workshop is that people see that there really isn't that much to what I do (as my corporate motto says, "It's not rocket surgery^TM"), which encourages them to try it themselves. Also, almost every topic that people want me to discuss comes up in the URLs that we look at, and a lot of people get a “free” expert review out of it. BA: How has the field changed (or not) since your book was published? SK: Well, a lot of people who got dragooned into doing usability and IA by big web design shops during the tulip mania ended up marooned when it collapsed. So it's been a tough few years for a lot of people. I think all of Jakob's hard work over the years has had an enormously valuable effect: most people in the computer world are at least aware of usability. On the other hand, though, there's one thing I don't think has happened: I don't think most companies have decided that usability spending should be part of every development budget. I think there's more usability work going on than there was four years ago, but for the most part companies still don't expect to spend real time or money on it. BA: If someone wrote you (and I'll bet they do) to ask how they can break into the usability field, what advice would you give? SK: I do get a lot of email asking how to break into the glamorous, high-paying field of web usability. Since the market has been so bad, though, unless they seem to have a fair amount of experience under their belt already, I've usually tried to gently explain that this might not be the best time to enter the field, given the number of experienced people who seem to be having a hard time keeping themselves busy. But I suppose it's about time for that advice to change again, since the market seems to have thinned out the herd quite a bit. The best advice I can give is to spend a bunch of time watching people try to use stuff (i.e., do some informal usability testing). And I send them to the UPA site, which has some pretty good lists of resources, and tell them to attend the UPA conference, which tends to be excellent. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the degree programs to tell people anything useful about them. BA: I've heard a complaint that the “anyone can do it” approach to usability discredits the value that trained user researchers bring to the table, and causes over-reliance on what may be faulty data gathered badly. What's your take on this contention? SK: Hey, what happened to the softball questions? And who said that, anyway? I want names. This will probably end up being a whole chapter in the how-to testing book, but here's the Reader's Digest version:

Frequent, iterative, small-sample testing is almost always one of the most valuable things you can do to improve the quality of a design. But this happens not to be something that fits very well into the consultant model (especially the “frequent, iterative” part), and most companies don't have the budget for a full-time usability person.
On any project, there are several (or dozens) of usability-related design questions to be decided every day, so having a consultant review things occasionally just isn't enough. It's important for team members (and stakeholders) to have some basic knowledge of usability.
My experience is that the most significant problems tend to surface in even the worst-run tests, as long as you iterate a few times. (You usually almost can't help tripping over them.) And since most organizations rarely have time to fix even the most significant problems, finding more than that is often a waste of time.
I've seen very little evidence that “amateurs” make their products worse by watching people use what they're building. (I've also had some usability professionals tell me that they're sometimes horrified by the work they see some other “professionals” deliver. I haven't had that experience myself, but I don't see that many other people's work products.)

That said, I always recommend that any organization that can afford to hire a usability professional should hire one, even if it's only to train [people within the company] to do it themselves. BA: There has been a lot of buzz lately on ROI of design and usability. What's your take on that? SK: Uh, oh. In every interview, there's one question where I think, “Now I'm going to get myself in real trouble.” My personal take? “Proving” usability ROI is really hard work. There are good reasons why you don't see very many usability ROI case studies: they're very time-consuming and expensive to create, especially one that legitimately controls for confounding variables. And if a company does go to the trouble of creating one, it's probably going to be proprietary anyway. But more importantly, I think most companies that need ROI-style “proof” to convince them to “do usability” probably aren't going to do great work anyway. BA: You have attended almost every IA summit, and are now touring with Lou Rosenfeld, one of the papas of IA. How do you see IA and Usability fitting together? SK: Like a lot of people, my knowledge of IA dates back to the day when I first encountered the polar bear book. I read about two-thirds of it at one sitting, and when I was done, the pages were dripping yellow highlighter fluid (literally). Lou and Peter were talking about website design in a way that no one else had, so it was a real page-turner. For me, one of the differences between the two fields is that information architects can actually build things, whereas usability folks mostly help people tweak things they've designed. (Although I have to admit that I get annoyed sometimes when people suggest that usability is just criticism. Most of the practitioners I know are very good at helping people figure out the best design solutions.) As far as fitting together, I think there's a lot of overlap. I'd certainly trust Lou to do a usability review of any website, and I think he'd trust me to advise a client on uncomplicated IA issues. But I think I'd also recognize where the issues are over my head, where I need to suggest calling in a pro. If you put me on a desert island with a laptop for a hundred years, for instance (with solar batteries), I still couldn't construct a faceted classification scheme. BA: In your opinion, what is one of the most usable sites out there today? Why? SK: Completely predictable and boring answer, I'm afraid: Google. Someone asked me around the time of their IPO why Google is such a big deal, and I realized that I think it's because the people who created it were more interested in coming up with something useful than something they could market. They had a bright idea, and they created something that solves a real problem really well. Not perfect, but practical. And they're restrained. Like Jeff Hawkins with the Palm Pilot, they fought off feature creep really well. Microsoft seems to have brilliant people and they do great research, but they never seem to have great ideas and carry them out with restraint. They always seem to be looking for the ideal (but cumbersome and buggy) solution rather than something “good enough” and workable. A lot of companies get suckered into trying to solve a huge problem (such as creating robot cars) when what most people really want and need is an adequate solution to a lesser problem (like power steering, or a robust, non-distracting navigation system…or maybe just road maps that are easier to fold up). Plus I really like Google's corporate motto “Do no evil.” It helps for your company to be a mensch. BA: I hear you are using a new Tablet PC. What're your thoughts on its usability? SK: It's actually the first new technology I've gotten excited about in years. As my wife will tell you, I've always had a pretty serious gadget jones. But for quite a while now, I've been pretty jaded. New technology always seems to eat up far more of my time than it's worth. I've always thought Tablet PCs were a great idea, ever since I wrote the user manual for one back in the late eighties. But it was one of those technologies that always seemed like it was five to ten years away, like artificial intelligence and speech recognition. When I decided to do another book, somehow suddenly the idea of a Tablet PC seemed attractive for one reason: when I'm writing, I like to sketch lots and lots of illustrations as part of the process of figuring out what I mean. But the sketches always end up on random scraps of paper in the stacks around my office. Somehow, I felt like if I could actually sketch on the computer screen and insert the sketches right in the middle of what I was writing, it would help…somehow. Adopting the Tablet PC did end up being a lot of work (it always takes a week out of my life when I switch to a new computer), but it's really changed the way I work with the computer. As usual, though, it turns out that the most valuable part isn't what I expected (drawing) but something unanticipated. I've been trying to get speech recognition to work for me for years, through half a dozen upgrades of Dragon NaturallySpeaking and ViaVoice, and they've come a long way in increasing accuracy. But it turns out that no matter what you do speech recognition is always going to be n% inaccurate, so you're always going to be making some corrections, which eats up any time you save by dictating. But it turns out that the solution (at least for me) isn't to raise the bridge (make fewer errors) but to lower the water (make correcting them easier). Being able to select the errors with a pen makes correcting them much, much easier, to the point where it's almost fun. I dictate all my email now, and I'm trying to use it while writing book chapters. And the handwriting recognition on the Tablet PC is eerily accurate. I could go on for an hour about the Tablet PC. But I've already spent enough time on this interview to write a book chapter, so….

Check It Twice: The B&A Staff Reveals the Way They Make Lists

B&A Staff — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 06:58:25 GMT

”... putting something on a list legitimizes it and increases the likelihood that it might actually happen, whether you’re talking about getting a new job, having another baby, or buying Cheerios.”

Holiday lists, to-do lists, grocery lists. With the end of the year come the holidays, and holidays are usually a time for … that’s right … making lists. Take a look into the process (and obsessions) of list-making from our staff. Have a sparkling holiday season and may all your lists come true.

From the staff:
Holiday cookie list
Holiday music list
Palm lists
Online lists
Mantra box list
Buy-Me and open checkbox lists
Refrigerator lists

Holiday cookie list
Every Christmas, from as far back as I can remember, we’ve made Christmas Cookies for Santa (and us!).

If one kind is left out—even if most folks don’t really like them—there is an uproar. Tradition is important in our house, and more than ever now that my daughter Amelie has joined the world. This is one list I have to check twice!

Frosted sugar cookies

Almond pretzels

Pinwheel or bar shortbread cookies

Cream cheese spritz (colored animals and shapes)

Chocolate (kisses) filled bon bons

Meltaways (which resemble Mexican wedding cookies)

Bourbon balls

These last two are my favorites, and the recipes for them are here, written in my mother’s hand.

-Christina Wodtke

Holiday music list
I am a teeny bit obsessed with using iTunes to make playlists. I cannot describe how much I love music mixes. Putting together a bunch of songs in an unexpected way to set a mood or match a particular occasion just makes me all giddy. This pursuit used to take hours (when I was finding songs on record albums and taping them). Now it’s merely a matter of going through my library and dragging songs to a playlist. Such joy.

For your listening pleasure, I’ve made a new playlist in honor of the holiday season. It’s not really full of holiday songs, although there are a few–it’s more about the feelings, good and bad, that this time of year evokes.

Merry Christmas, Baby / Otis Redding

Otis just has soul. He’s one of my all time faves, so I thought I’d use his best holiday songs to bookend this list.

Money (That’s What I Want) / Barrett Strong

To get everyone presents.

In My Life / The Beatles

During the holidays I typically start thinking about the big stuff.

Turn Turn Turn / The Byrds

We sang this at my sixth grade holiday concert.

It’s Getting Better / Cass Elliot

I have to believe it too.

Baby It’s Cold Outside – Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan

It’s cold, it’s wet, it’s romantic.

December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night) / The Four Seasons

What a very special time for me.

Blue Christmas / Elvis Presley

Some of you may know I have a teeny teeny thing about The King. This tune is Elvis incarnate.

Day By Day / Godspell

More spiritual than religious. Besides, it’s groovy.

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother / The Hollies

I’m just getting all mushy now.

Little Drummer Boy/Silent Night / Jimi Hendrix

I’ve come back to my senses. Jimi tears into some holiday faves.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone / The Kingston Trio

I can’t help thinking about our soldiers overseas now.

The Morning After / Maureen McGovern

She sang this on New Years Eve just before the ship turned over and that guy crashed into the skylight.

He’s Got The Whole World In His Hands / Nina Simone

Yes He does.

Put Your Hand In The Hand / Ocean

Another groovy ‘70s happy peace and love song.

Joy To The World / Three Dog Night

I couldn’t avoid putting this one in. Kind of had to.

What a Wonderful World / Tony Bennett & K.D. Lang

At least I try to think it.

Get Together / The Youngbloods

Try to love one another now.

White Christmas / Otis Redding

I’m dreaming of it too.

Get Dorelle’s Holiday Mix at iTunes, and at Y! Music.

-Dorelle Rabinowitz

Palm lists
The best thing about holidays is traveling, and whenever you travel, it’s critical to bring the right gear along with you. So this is a time when lists come in handy, to help you make sure the right luggage is there.

I have a small application in my Palm Pilot that lets me make all sorts of checklists. I use Checklist by Handmark, which allows me to make several lists, sort the items, and even beam lists to my wife. Once you check an item, it can disappear, shortening a list until it’s done without the need to scroll down.

My longest list is for doing groceries, but I rarely use it–paper and memory are handier for daily stuff. But the lists I force myself to use are my packing lists. I have one for weekend escapes, holiday vacations, and another for camping trips.

Of course, they all include my camera gear, the difference is made by the food and cooking supplies, travel documentation, and kinds of clothes needed for the situation. Using these lists, it is safer to drive away without the feeling that you have to find out what you left home before it’s too late to turn around.

My camping list is:

Tent
Hooks for tent
Sleeping bags
Air Mattress
Flashlight
Pans
Stove
Fuel for stove
Knife and big spoon
Swiss army knife
Utensils
Matches
Cups/mugs
Dishes
Tea
Toilet paper
Cooking oil
Salt
Sugar
Pepper
Boniculars
Outdoor soap (the one that doesn’t need water)
Camera
Film
Sunblock
Chapstick
First-aid kit
Candles

-Javier Velasco

Online lists
Ta-da Lists, a free service from the good folks at 37 Signals, are a great way to create and manage lists online. (Really–it’s free). After a painless registration, you can create as many lists with as many items as you need. Just check an item and it moves to the bottom of the list, signaling it’s completed. Editing lists is effortless, but reordering items is a little clunky. You can also share lists with others, email them to yourself, and even set up an RSS feed.

I tend to use online lists for longer-term inventories of things like gift ideas, repairs around the house, and music I want to buy. Think of a great gift for someone six months before his or her birthday? Jot it down online. Or, if I read a review of a CD I eventually want to investigate, I’ll add it to my “Music” list. This way you can snowball ideas, thoughts, and catalogs of things over time.

The portability of Ta-da Lists is key. Anytime you’re online you can access your stuff. OK, it’s no Memex, but it can help you recall things. If you travel a lot or move between computers, it’s quite handy to have a single record. You get a simple URL in the format “yourusername.tadalist.com”–very easy to remember.

Daily to-do lists are better on paper, close at hand, in my opinion. So it’s a combination of old-fashion, handwritten to-do lists and online list management that helps me keep track of things.

-Jim Kalbach

Mantra box list
2005 was a challenging year for me; big changes in my life have forced me to reexamine some of my values and objectives. As part of this process, I’ve been trying to become better attuned to my inner voice—to approach important decisions in a more intuitive manner. One tool I’ve used during this time is what I call my “mantra box:” a list of phrases and words that I’ve come across in my reading, or in interactions with others, that resonate deeply with me.

Here is how it works: I keep a stack of 3” x 5” index cards and a Sharpie marker with me most of the time. When I come across a phrase that “calls” to me, I immediately write it on a single card in large block letters. It goes into my mantra box—one of those cheap card boxes you can find at drugstores.

I try to keep my “judging mind” out of the collection process; some phrases are trivial, obvious, or tacky. Others are quotes from personal heroes. Still others are somewhat mysterious at first; the full reason for their attractiveness is only revealed to me at a later time, when I’m in a more contemplative mood. All of them go into the box—the sole criteria for admission is having struck a deep chord in me.

Sometimes—when I’m feeling introspective—I review the contents of the box. If a particular mantra feels relevant to my current situation, I copy it to my day planner where I can refer to it frequently, and bring it into my daily life. (I don’t throw out mantras: it may turn out that even the stupid ones have a reason for being there.)

Here are, in no particular order, some of the phrases and words that have spoken to me—and merited a place in my mantra box—in 2005:

Simplify
He who owns little is little owned
Smaller, smaller
Do only what you love, love everything that you do
Collaborate
Underpromise, overdeliver
Embrace constraints
Less
Business is personal—not an abstraction
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee
Context
Honor your mistake as a hidden intention
Disrupt business as usual
Convert talent into code
Anchor
Yes or no?
Eat like a bird, shit like an elephant
Axis thinking
Tenacity
Style—happiness—emotional appeal
Disorganize (for renewal and innovation)
Storytelling
As simple as possible, but not simpler
Nobody knows what they really want before they get it

-Jorge Arango

Buy me and open checkbox lists
Every day, I use at least two lists:

1. The Buy-Me method
While I pretend not to be cautious about music, I do tend to try a track or two before I buy an album. About once a month, I view the handy “Buy Me” smart playlist I created in iTunes. In it, neatly sorted by Play Count, are the tracks I’ve been listening to most often. No need to think about value of the purchase or an album’s potential for pleasuring. Chances are, if I’ve listened to a track at least once every three days for three weeks (roughly), I should buy the album. The Buy-Me recommendations are often a surprise to me, which is kind of a fun by-product of the system (no pun intended).

Smart playlists do the list making for me

2. Open checkbox method
Although I’ve tried all kinds, paper-based to-do list works best for me. Even though it’s analog, a consistent visual vocabulary helps me get things done. Here’s how it works:

When I need to get something done, I create a new list item. Each list item gets an open checkbox and a name. Other variables might include:

* Checkbox and asterisk: Indicates open task that is urgent * Checkbox and “f/u:” Indicates an open task that needs additional follow-up before I can complete it. * Checkbox and circled letter: Indicates that an open task needs to be performed in a specific location. Adding the location makes the list easy to scan to chunk potential errands. (“T” below indicates that the three tasks must all be performed at Target, for example.)

When a task is complete, I put a check in the checkbox, allowing the satisfaction of crossing something out without rendering the item illegible. Oftentimes, I must refer back to completed items, so I prefer to have them available. Sometimes, a task is still unchecked after a significant period of time or several pages in the notebook. In these cases, a strikethrough is necessary, and the unchecked item gets moved to a new page. When an entire list is complete, I put a strike through the entire page.

-Liz Danzico

Refrigerator lists
I write lists for lots of things, though I wouldn’t call myself obsessive. I like the legitimacy of putting something on a list. It means a commitment of some sort—something to be bought, a task to be completed, a thoughtful intention to do something.

I have the daily-weekly-monthly lists for work, but for the rest of my life, I mainly make lists for must-dos such as groceries, Christmas gifts, and errands. There is no formality to my lists. They are as basic as can be—words on paper. Often they’re written on small scraps or Post-Its with whatever I can get my hands on, pen if I’m lucky, pencil crayon if I’m not.

The grocery list is my most formalized list. It lives under a magnet on the side of the fridge. It’s simple, accessible. Everyone in my house knows what it is, and why it’s there. And to my great annoyance, I’m the only one who uses it. That means that even after a $300 grocery bender, I can still come home to someone asking why I didn’t buy Cheerios. “Because you didn’t put it on the list!!” Big sigh.

My favorite lists are ones I do most infrequently—life goals and ambitions. The list of big dreams. I’ve done these off and on for years, and they follow a fairly strict format. Things can’t be as simple as “win the lottery.” Items on this list have a certain amount of thought behind them that address the particulars of how to make something happen. My practice has been to spend time creating these lists, and then promptly forget about them. I now tend to save them on my computer, which means I could look at them occasionally, but I never do. Since I’m rather disorganized elsewhere in my life, these lists are usually lost, then turn up accidentally while I’m going through old notebooks or papers and files. The best thing about these occasional findings is remembering what I dreamt about long ago, and what I can check off.

Much to my surprise, I seem to have had a plan for how I wanted things to be. I have the two kids, a house by the ravine, work I can do from home, a Master’s degree—all things that have appeared on my life’s grocery lists over the years. I think it comes back to the notion that putting something on a list legitimizes it and increases the likelihood that it might actually happen, whether you’re talking about getting a new job, having another baby, or buying Cheerios.

-Pat Barford

Hiding in Plain Sight: An Interview with Adam Greenfield

B&A Staff — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 08:27:44 GMT

"Broadly speaking, [everyware] is what you get when you take the information processing we associate with the personal computer and distribute it throughout the environment—embedding it in walls, floors, appliances, lampposts, even clothing."

Boxes and Arrows caught up with Adam Greenfield on the heels of finishing his first book, Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, due out in March 2006. Greenfield talks to us about how computing has moved away from the desktop into every part of our lives--from soda cans to the family pet. In this interview, he allows us to imagine what our new normal might look like. Boxes and Arrows: Congratulations on your book! What is “everyware?” Is it different from what we already know as “ubiquitous computing,” “pervasive computing,” or “invisible computing?” Adam Greenfield: “Everyware” is computing that is everywhere around us, yet is relatively hard to see, both literally and figuratively. Broadly speaking, it is what you get when you take the information processing we associate with the personal computer and distribute it throughout the environment—embedding it in walls, floors, appliances, lampposts, even clothing. I also use the word to refer to the relatively novel interface conventions everyware requires: gestural, tangible and haptic interfaces, and to some extent, voice recognition. The fact that it is so powerful—so insinuative and at the same time so hard to discern—makes it different in kind from the informatics we've grown so used to over the last twenty or twenty-five years of the PC era. "Everyware" has a lot in common with the contemporary discourses of ubiquitous computing, so why coin an entirely new term? Each of the terms already in use—"ubicomp," "pervasive computing," "tangible media," "physical computing," and so on—is contentious. They're associated with one or another viewpoint, institution, funding source, or dominant personality. I wanted people relatively new to these ideas to be able to have a rough container for them, so they could be discussed without anyone getting bogged down in internecine definitional struggles, like "such-and-such a system has a tangible interface, but isn't really ubicomp." B&A: When did you start noticing the emergence, if you will, of “everyware” as a concept? AG: My own first exposure to the idea came in early 2002, when Anne Galloway asked me if I was attending the Ubicomp conference in Goteborg. Like many people in the UX field, I was already familiar with Don Norman's arguments about the invisible computer, Philips' work with wearables, a few experiments in augmented reality, and the early manifestations of what's now being called "the digital home." But discovering Mark Weiser's work on ubicomp and "calm technology" at Xerox PARC, which dated to the late 1980s, was critical because it gave me a framework in which I could understand the interrelationship of these other, seemingly disparate developments—like being given all of the edge pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. And because I suffer from apophenia—from the tendency to discern pattern in the world whether it's "actually" there or not—once I had that framework in place almost every IT innovation I read about seemed to find a home somewhere within it. I started to see information processing, well, everywhere: plans to embed RFID tags in cargo pallets, individual soda cans, even the family cat. New wireless-networking techniques that allowed people to form "ad hoc" networks on the fly. Increasingly, service delivery via mobile phone. Together, these experiences drew what seemed to me to be a pretty clear picture of where we were going with information technology. And surprisingly enough, very few people were connecting all of the relevant dots. I figured somebody should try to articulate these connections and help people understand what was in the offing. B&A: As user experience professionals, we have been striving to create transparent systems, seamlessness. Good design is, after all, invisible. Yet, in Everyware, you maintain that knowing where the seams are may be increasingly important. What is your position on seamlessness? Is it important to respect and maintain seams? AG: You're absolutely right to point out that one of the central dogmas of UX work is that users should be insulated from the actual complexity of the systems that support them. They don't need to know about what happens on the back end, we've argued, they just want to order a book, purchase a flight, or find an address on a map. And they want to do it quickly, "intuitively," and with a minimum of effort. But the deeper I've gotten into considering everyware, the more I’ve questioned the whole notion of seamlessness. [1] In many cases, this idea deprives the user of meaningful insight into and participation in the decisions that affect their experience. Let's say that you've recently moved your elderly mother into a home specifically designed to allow her to "age in place," live as autonomously as possible and with as much dignity as possible for as long as possible. One of the provisions of this home is instrumented flooring: flooring that contains impact sensors that register when someone has fallen and automatically call for assistance. In the "seamless" version, if she should happen to fall, the floor registers the event, a signal is generated, the local first responders are called, maybe the front door is automatically unlocked, and someone is able to come and see if she's OK. It's transparent to the user, but it's not at all the same thing as good user experience. There are any number of places your elderly mother might want to configure this transaction: maybe she has a strong sense of pride, and doesn't necessarily want other people to know how often she's falling. Maybe she has a strong sense of privacy, and doesn't want strangers—even well-intentioned ones—in her intimate and private space unless it's literally a life-threatening circumstance. Seamlessness in such a system would deprive her of the autonomy that we all expect to be able to enjoy as a matter of course. While it was designed with the noblest aims to support her dignity, it would actually wind up infantilizing her. We'll see more situations like this, as we allow the tendrils of everyware into our lives. That's why I argue that seamlessness should always be an optional mode, not an inescapable one, and why I've tried to challenge the discourse of seamlessness wherever it appears unquestioned, as in the current W3C position on the "ubiquitous Web." B&A: In your book, you suggest that everyware may threaten human agency itself. Where once we had to make choices, had to sit down at a computer and start a program, going forward, the choice will be made for us. Are we seeing the death of agency as we know it? AG: In the abstract, I think we'll always retain the ability to make the ultimate refusal, which is just to shut all of these ubiquitous systems down and do without. So in that sense, the answer is clearly "no." That said, there are all sorts of easily foreseeable reasons why this freedom to choose may be the exception rather than the rule. Marshall McLuhan said that "every extension is also an amputation," and this was never truer than as it applies to everyware. Once we’re used to the array of powerful ubiquitous systems operating all but imperceptibly on our behalf, how many of us are going to have the will (let alone the wherewithal) to do without? Already, when I’m confronted with a question of factual knowledge, my reflex is to make immediate recourse to Google and Wikipedia. How much stronger will that reflex be when similar resources are literally everywhere around me and as free as the air? Everyware will lever itself into our lives on the twin fulcrums of "convenience" and "security." Once we've welcomed it in, we will have a hard time returning to an unmediated existence. I don't want to say that everyware is necessarily the "death of agency," but in its fullest development, it represents what it means to experience the world and make choices about what is experienced.

"Everyware will lever itself into our lives on the twin fulcrums of 'convenience' and 'security.' Once we've welcomed it in, we will have a hard time returning to an unmediated existence."B&A: Although we tend to think about these concepts as shiny, futuristic ideas, you talk about everyware having a profound effect on the unheroic transactions of everyday life. Do people want their everyday redefined?

AG: I guess that sort of depends on what your everyday looks like, doesn't it? Bluntly, there are a whole lot of people in the world whose everyday life sucks. I can easily imagine people in such situations choosing systems designed to "simplify" their lives over an unmediated experience, where whatever they'd be trading away might seem like a valueless abstraction. [2] So, yes, some people will want their everyday experience rebuilt on a technical model. They will want to configure their bathtub or their closet or their commute to work the way we'd now configure a new laptop, either because they'll perceive some benefit to doing so or because they won't have a full understanding of the tradeoffs involved. It's not for me to judge that desire, but I feel that it's important to point out what should be obvious: that there will be many people who do not want to remake the operations of everyday life along technical lines, and they shouldn't be forced to do so. B&A: Then let’s talk about opting out. When we are in control, we have the option to hide, to consider which face to put forward, even to manipulate. Will we still have this ability? And if not, are people ready to lose this control? AG: I'm not so sure we will retain much of this ability, which in sociology is generally referred to as "presentation of the self." With so much information about our past and current activities available to be searched, cross-referenced, and made available in real time, when we meet someone for the first time, we are likely going to lose control over the image we present to them. Imagine what this will look like in practice. Whether you are interviewing a prospective new hire, meeting a potential romantic interest for the first time, or simply sitting next to someone on a plane, you no longer have to take a person at face value. It's easy to see that this can occasionally be very useful, if you happen to be on the empowered end of the transaction. The trouble is that this ambient intelligence—facilitated by a ubiquitous deployment of informatic systems—cuts both ways. And with the ability to control how others see us, I believe that we lose also a certain protective and beneficial hypocrisy that allows us to function as a society. We all, without exception, have habits, behaviors, experiences that we don't necessarily want to share with the wider world. When you evert these experiences, and archive them, and tag them with metadata, and make them persistently accessible, it gets very difficult indeed for anyone to maintain the unimpeachable public façade our current mores require of us. This is something that people who consider ubiquitous computing from a purely instrumental or technical perspective frequently miss: it's not just a change in the way we use computers, it's an alteration in some of the very foundations of the self as it's been constructed in the West for the last few centuries. We're in for a wild ride. B&A: You know that when we’re doing something “on the record,” we tend to act and speak a bit differently, even in contrived ways at times. So how will this awareness of everyware affect how we present ourselves? AG: Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head. Anyone who's had, for one reason or another, to get used to being in front of cameras or microphones with any degree of regularity knows how hard it is to be "natural" when confronted with the prospect of being recorded, or transmitted to a large audience, or both. When artifacts like cameras and microphones (to say nothing of sensors capable of recording one's position and location, and verifying one's identity via unique biometric signatures like retinal patterns or even gait period) are embedded in the objects and surfaces of everyday life, we all potentially become subject to the most intense kind of mediation. Barring some regulatory or other intervention, we'll be forced to assume that we're at least potentially "on," just about all the time. And the sheer ubiquity of output modes offered by the robust deployment of everyware means that whatever once goes into the network can come out again just about anywhere. Among other complications, this strikes me as being very likely to give rise to many of what MIT sociology professor Gary T. Marx calls "border crossings": irruptions of personal information at an unexpected place or a time, in an unexpected context. Again, I don't think we're even remotely prepared for what this is going to do to social cohesion. B&A: There seems to be a new transparency of social value. Flickr tells us who considers us real friends versus contacts. We are on at least one person’s blocked buddy list. We know how many times we’ve been hotlisted. Are we losing anything by being so aware of our perceived social currency? AG: Sure. Or at least I surely think so. Again, we lose control; in this case, control over whether we are unintentionally causing someone else hurt or offense. Social networking software, at least here in its infancy, very often seems tone-deaf to the nuances of social concourse that every second-grader has internalized. In other words, a list of my friends, especially when it's ordered in some way, is not at all a neutral document. To put it in Flickr's terms, why do you consider her a "friend," but me only a "contact"? When people I don’t know make me a contact of theirs, isn't there at least some shred of a reciprocal obligation? Doesn't refusing such a request put me in the highly awkward position of snubbing someone I've never met, but still have no wish to insult? And so for the most part, these moments of awkwardness are mediated by the personal computer. Imagine what happens when the mediating artifact is something as omnipresent as a mobile phone or has disappeared entirely into the surrounding architectural space. How much more raw will these conflicts appear? How much more deeply will we internalize the damage to our self-image? This is why I recommend that, wherever possible, everyware be designed so that it is "conservative of face"; that it allows us to preserve a healthy amount of amour-propre. B&A: When do you disconnect? In other words, when is it valuable for you to escape everyware? AG: Me personally? Ironically enough, perhaps, I'm actually a pretty disconnected guy. I rarely carry a mobile phone, for example. But beyond that, there are plenty of areas of life that would not be improved in the slightest if they were network interconnected: having a pint of Guinness with good friends, going for a long sweaty run, spending time with my wife. I already cherish every moment of my life I spend in such pursuits, I wouldn't necessarily want to see them macerated and fed into the global mnemotechnical system. And I would imagine that there are a great many people who feel just the same way. B&A: What are you doing to ensure that the information in Everyware, the book, is itself ubiquitous? As soon as practically possible, subject to negotiations with my publishers, I'd like to make the book available as a full and free download covered by a Creative Commons license. I've also set up a discussion board for anyone who wants to find out more about ubiquitous computing in all of its aspects, or share what they've learned with others. And of course I've committed myself to touring in support of the book well into next year. Beyond that, the book offers five broad guidelines for the ethical development of ubiquitous computing (originally proposed in an article right here on Boxes and Arrows), and there's already been some discussion on how to incorporate these guidelines into something like an international standard. Clearly, there's a long, long way to go on this latter front, but it's one of the most exciting things to have come out of this work. Should it come to pass, I would find it extraordinarily gratifying. Whether it's these particular guidelines, some modification of them, or others entirely, the most important thing is the recognition that people do not have to sit passively by and accept the everyware they're offered. The stakes are too high for that. Everyone who will be affected by this class of technologies should have a voice in shaping its emergence. Endnotes [1] In 2003, Matthew Chalmers and Ian MacColl, then of the University of Glasgow, published a paper examining how and where the discourse of seamlessness appeared in the literature around ubiquitous information technology, and found it unquestioned just about everywhere they looked. [2] There are also deep cultural factors that influence decisions like these. Many Japanese people, for example, seem to find it more comfortable interacting with a technical interface in everyday transactions, where Americans in similar circumstances tend to prefer dealing with a human being. About the author Adam Greenfield is a user experience consultant and critical futurist. Before starting his current practice, Studies and Observations, Adam was lead information architect for the Tokyo office of Razorfish. He's also been a rock critic for SPIN Magazine, a medic at the Berkeley Free Clinic, and a PSYOP sergeant in the U.S. Army's Special Operations Command. Adam lives and works with his wife, artist Nurri Kim, in New York City.