Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Joe Lamantia

Joe Lamantia — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:24 GMT

looks like someone’s showing a little Moleskine :)

Joe Lamantia — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:42 GMT

Javed,

One way is to conduct several rounds of sorting exercises. In the first round, have participants define the first two sets of categories. In the next round, have participants define additional categories, using the categories from the first round of sorting exercises as a reference.

You could also use one of the other tools available for card sorting (some are mentioned here: http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/cardsorting/, and in other articles in this magazine). Several of these tools support statistical analysis for category structures with more than two levels depth, using clustering and other algorithms.

My spreadsheet is meant to be lightweight and simple, so does not offer such capability yet.

Cheers,

Joe Lamantia

Joe Lamantia — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:46 GMT

Thanks! The building blocks are useful for most tile-based design approaches, so if another type of portal better meets your needs, don’t think the blocks require thinking specifically in terms of a dashboard.

Joe Lamantia — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:46 GMT

I’ve created a suggested – and *highly* original – tag for bookmarking items related to the building blocks: ia_building_blocks.

I’ve tagged a few items on del.icio.us – my default bookmarking service – but monitor tag streams from some of the other bookmarking services.

http://del.icio.us/tag/ia_building_blocks

Joe Lamantia — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:17:00 GMT

Chris – thanks for commenting. I’m afraid the purpose of the article may not have been clearly communicated, based on what I understand your comments to refer to. This article is the first in a series that shares a system of IA buliding blocks that is meant to be support a high quality user experience for presenting *any* kind of information / content / functionality, in an easily understood structure that can grow over time.

That means that the context for this article is the consistent set of design challenges teams must face when working on any dashboard, or tile based content aggregator. This design framework is meant to be independent of other contexts, such as industry or the functional role of the users.

Keep in mind that large organizations often need several kinds of dashboards or consoles, addressing diverse needs for information about the organziation at mulitple levels, and from multiple perspectives. Perhaps the specific label ‘executive dashboards’ leads away from the underlying idea of the building blocks – that one design toolkit can help solve many problems faced in the creation of a large range of tile-based experiences. In large organizations, a suite of interlocking dashboards is not uncommon; at the true exeuctive level, these consoles may be genuienly global in scope, but at lower levels of the organizational hierarchy, they may concern only a single region, product, or business unit.

Also be aware that the examples of dashboard screens and UI components are intended to show how to use the building blocks to design this sort of flexible structure, not to show proper information design for any specific set of content. As you’ve noticed, the examples show comps (or in some cases, sanitized screenshots from some of the ~25 actual dashboards built using this system of blocks) that emphasize the structure deliberately.

All that said, your points are valid. Context is essential for the proper understanding of information, and you’ll see some specific mechanisms built in to the buliding blocks that are intended to help preserve the context of information sourced from many different places. The structure should fade into the background and allow the information to be most prominent – thus the disclaimer that the renderings and exmaples here are not meant to be taken literally as design guidelines for any sort of dashboard, or tile-based experience.

Thanks,
Joe Lamantia

Joe Lamantia — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:16:09 GMT

Linda – “the number of different cards per category” shows how many unique cards (not counting repeated cards) were placed in each category. This is different than the total number of cards (which counts repeated cards) in the category, because the same card may appear in any one category more than one time.

The ratio of total cards in a category (counting repeated cards) to unique cards (not counting repeated cards) helps make clear whether participants ‘agreed on’ the cards that belong in the category. Categories in which many participants placed the same collections of unique cards, and where there were many instances of repeated cards, are categories that you’ll want to be able to spot and (perhaps) preserve when you’re designing your structure.

Does this help?

Cheers,
Joe Lamantia

Joe Lamantia — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 19:05:39 GMT

Nice work Donna – and thanks for the acknowledgement!

Thanks also to Kate for a great set of suggestions on how to improve the maigc bit of the exercise – refining and normalizing the categories people create. I’ll roll those updates into the master template that’s linked from my site.

Joe Lamantia — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 00:23:44 GMT

Rachel said:

>>When we were developing a deep metadata system for the website of a national entertainment magazine, my >>colleague and friend, Chris Sizemore, would say, “Everything is content.” And I tend to agree.

>>Everything is content? What about design? Yes, it’s content. Structure? Content. Metadata? Also content. You >>probably expected a more incisive analysis than that. Well, how about, “Literally, everything is content.”

I’ll agree that “everything is [part of] the [user experience]”, but your – as noted – incisive analysis leaves me looking at this as a classic case of ‘expansive transposition’ (or a land grab, for the less diplomatically inclined) for the meaning of the term ‘content’.

Ordinarily, I’d let this pass unremarked, assuming that we’re all members of the big happy user experience family. But since the main point of this article was to explore the philosophy behind content strategy, I’d like to hear your thoughts on why we should adhere to such an expansive understanding of content, when we already have a useful umbrella at that level in the idea of the user experience?