Where does IA fit in the design process?

These are my notes from one of the sessions at the IA Summit.  It was a panel discussion hosted by Peter Boersma, Larisa Warnke, Peter Merholz, Livia Labate, Leisa Reichelt, Josh Seiden.

The first speaker Livia Labate possed the question “Why define a process?” > manage demand, manage quality, and to just manage..

Three methods > Discovery, Modelling, Validation

Balancing user needs and business goals to conceive solutions which enable positive experiences.

Framing the problem > architecting the solution

Waterfall is bad, washing machine is good, by Leisa Reichelt

The traditional waterfall  approach (scope design build test etc.) comes with one key assumption  that know exactly what you are doing  and that design stops at a specific point.  Then it is thrown over the fence to a development team who work work work until they throw it back for testing.  If deficiencies it goes through the process again.  The challenge with this is that the teams are not collaborating on design,  therefore unknown to the designer, their idea may be expensive, or not work well in context.  Once they realize this either the money is already spent or the work is completed and you must re-do a significant portion .

Anytime you open photoshop or start writing code, then someone contineues to make design decisions as they interpret your deliverables

Washing machine is like agile, user centred design.

AGILE

• sprints
• user stories
• pair design
• multi-discipline teams

UCD

• iterations
• personas & scenarios
• paticipatory design
• contextual research

Agile belives in progressive improvement – take back to the users early and often

Agile says you “design only as much as you have to”.  The outputs of agile >  bit of a site map, bit of a wireframe, concept maps, get a quick low-fi prototype

Why use Washing machine? 

• lowers project risk
• better outcome
• more fun

Josh Seiden describes his work based on four tracks:

(Shown below in very magic quadrant like graph)

Joost & Second Life

I’ve been tinkering for a little while with these two  – Joost, beta Internet TV and Second Life, an online virtual reality classed as a massive multi-player online game (MMOG) which has been around for sometime.

I’ll start with Joost - it is an amazing Rich Internet Application – very swooshy…. what I’m uncertain about is the content – some pretty funny stuff, but fairly limited,  I gather more programming is coming.  I just invited three friends, I’d be interested in what they have to say….  no question a great UX – maybe the real problem is I’m not a huge TV watcher at the best of times and what I do watch may or may not make it to Joost – we’ll see.  Oh, just had a brilliant idea for them – allow me to watch my videos/dvds etc. through Joost interface – I can buy, categorize my own stuff – then I’ll get all the benefits of their interface with the content I want…(they probably already thought of this but I’ll write it anyway).

Second Life is quite a different story – I think I’m a little hooked – not crazy like hours and hours a day hooked, but find myself gravitating towards it more and more.  I’m think the idea of wandering around in a seemingly infinite space draws me in – I guess I like to watch what is going on in the world, so I’ve been doing a lot of watching and wandering.  It takes me back to a time in school when I couldn’t find a summer job.   I would get up in the morning, hop on my bike and head down to the waterfront and sit on a bench for a little while watching people and stuff and then grab a hot dog and head home, 1/2 a day down, and absolutely nothing was done, but I nevertheless soaked in 1/2 a day of nothing…  I’m not quite into interacting with people yet – in fact, if other approach me I take off in the other direction (so not like me in real life).

Anyway, I see some pretty neat opportunities for B2B interaction or for recruitment (some companies are already trying this) and forget webex, let’s do a Second Life meeting - and deal with ‘people’ not slides…. 

Au Revoir IA Summit

Well, it has been a smashing good summit, loads of great sessions with very interesting topics – I’ve much to write about so stay tuned.

My highlights include 

• I have a name in the world of IA - I’m an “Innie” (inside a firm rather than a consultant) 
• Learning more about how to use the agile design process successfully
• Big A architecture goes through the same process but they have to worry about life and death stuff and I don’t
• Learning to Twitter
• Discussing the parallel between movie making and web design (Pre-production, Production, Post-Production  – Thanks Liva!)
• The acknowledgement that I take on way too many roles
  • Development Lead 
  • Information Architect & Interactive Designer
  • Visual designer (god help me, but you gotta do what you gotta do)
  • Content Editor
• Microformats rock!
• Folksonomies won’t work all on their own

Thankfully it is time to leave Vegas because I miss my family very very much and I can’t wait to see them.

Au Revoir IA Summit!

Implementing a Folksonomy on a Corporate Intranet

I’ve just attended a session called FaceTag: integrating bottom-up and top-down classification in a social tagging system.  It was about research being done by Emanuele Quintarelli, Andrea Resmini, Luca Rosati.

I had planned to write up some notes on this session but rather than just re-tell Emanuele’s story I thought I would write a story of my own and incorporate some of his findings.

Here is a link to Emanuele’s slide show

Folksonomies or “cooperative classification” are terms used to describe how people can share ideas and information by annotating keywords to their pieces of information.

The problem I am trying to solve is not uncommon in professional services firm.  It is the up hill battle when it comes to Knowledge Management.  I’ll highlight some of the major challenges:

1. Applying rich hierarchical classification is not natural to anyone who is not classically trained as a librarian (seriously I love librarians, where would we be without them?).
2. It is incredibly hard work to fill out a lot of fields of information, often requiring the submitter to go back and re-analyze the item and even still, they may not know the answers to what they are being asked
3. There is little or no incentive to contribute – this one may be coming around a bit, but you can be a complete non-contributor and be a workhorse (read: high revenue producer) and be rewarded handsomely, there is certainly no penalty for non-contribution.

Mobile Information Architecture: Designing experiences for the mobile web

Notes taken from informative talk by Christian Curmlish, Yahoo! Pattern Detective

Mobile web – now becoming affordable and escaping the limits of WAP 1.0.  Exists with mobile apps and texting.

While the common issues for IAs, the unknown device specifications (e.g. screen resolution) remains a special consideration, a more important area for analysis is that the context is different – the mobile web goes with you anywhere (come to me web).

It is perfectly acceptable (well not really -but that is what the business expects) to bombard your consumers with messaging while they ’surf’ the mobile web’s context of use is different in that when it is used you have people in a variety of states of motion.

     

   

Mobile web users are typically seeking information, looking for answers to questions – does not involve a lot of reading – targeted gives you the thing you are looking for

e.g. addresses, movie times phone numbers

Emerging Standards (not w3c more like patterns)

Thinking horizontally on web browser, but on mobile device think verticals.

Notes on Opening Plenary – Joshua Prince-Ramus

Joshua Prince-Ramus opens the main conference and discusses how he drives the design process using data visualization analysis.

He started his speech with the obvious need to tell a room full of people who call themselves ‘Architects’ the actual definition of an architect and the legal terms for describing oneself as an ‘architect’. 

	2      Restriction on use of title “Architect” (1)    Subject to the provisions of this Law, it shall not be lawful for any person to practise or carry on business under any name, style or title containing the word “architect” unless the person is a registered person: Provided that nothing in this Article ….(blah, blah blah)
	Source

After getting that out of the way Joshua took us on a journey of his design process.  From requirements to ’skin’, he shows how the visualization of the requirements translates directly into design.   How the design is self evident and that instead of an architect’s ego driving avant-garde design, and the design process starts with empirical data; the needs of the project - these evlove into a “model”.  His process includes deep and broad analysis of understanding the client, their needs, the needs of the environment, cost and the buildings’ intended users.

Joshua acknowledged the striking similarity to the processes used by information architects even admits that the practices of ‘big A’ and ’small a’ architecture are merging…

Designing with Structured Data: Data Modeling

A long but very informative day - 4 speakers cleverly built upon oneanother’s content.

Starting with Karen Loasby from the BBC.  She discussed her method for developing a data model.

She began with the initial step of researching the content, a process she termed the Content Brief.   The content brief covers the following areas:

• What is the context?
• What are the aims & objectives?
• Who is the audience?
• Who are the stakeholders?
• What constraints are there?
• What would success look like?
• Who is going to sign this off?

After gaining a clear understanding you move onto to developing the model starting with identifying common structures.  Methods you begin with include the usual suspect, the dreaded Content Inventory which she describes as admittedly exhaustive and a record of sorts however it is laborious and boring to do, impossible to maintain and ultimately quickly out of date. 

Other less exhaustive approaches includes:

Develop a new Content Strategy
Where you find that the ‘past it not important’ and you forget the content that exists and develop a new content  strategy.   This method is great for new sites or if a site is changing direction.

Surfing with a notepad
Quite literally browsing the site and taking notes
Obviously quick, easy, gives you the good gut reactions, but can be a little disorienting, and easy to miss things.

Affinity Diagrams
Organizing content phyically by putting it on post-its and visually oranizing the content
Many people can do this collaborativly, it builds consensus, some detail can be missed, needs a lot of space

Designing Collaboratively with many stakholders

Visual Designer
Must create and attractive, emotional experience and ensure visual design will help users understand the information

Designing with Structured Data: Developing and Creating Feeds for Interaction

Next up was Margaret Hanley, she discussed the mash-ups of the world and how that structured data could be used effectively in information architecture.

She describes us moving from the architecture of one site to a web of data and that these data sources could be used to build applications.

 Some examples she reviewed included:

www.mapmyrun.com

www.etsy.com

http://www.flickrmap.com/

The basic concept of Margaret’s talk is that by understanding the data we have the ability to use it in our sites.

 New skills will be required to develop the Information Architecture of the future. Namely, knowledge of the APIs, ability to represent data over the top of another interface.  This new world will no longer focus on the progession of pages, it will focus on the interaction between data and the user.

User define the final output – they will take the data and tailor it to their unique needs - as IAs we no longer have control of the output – the user controls it.

IAs are designing applications not pages.

My main takeaway is that the source of the data or rather, controlling the source of the data becomes less and less important – what we now have to contend with are dynamic displays that source their data from across the web.

Sites will be interactive and as result engaging – this challenges traditional CMS implementations — it really turns this on its head, the content is everywhere, the question is how do we harness it effectively within the interface.  And that instead of designing pages we are designing controls – essentially object oriented web design.

To make all this work there are a few things that are necessary:

1. Data is well structured
2. It is available to users either as human or machines readable formats
3. It can be used on a web page for display or combined to create a new interface or data
4. It needs a hook - the ability to map to something else

E.g. Flickrmaps, the photos must have a location tag to display on the map

Margaret went on to describe new types of intreaction:

IA Summit 2007 Day 1: Communicating Design Making Your IA Documentation Clear and Actionable

A great session with Dan Brown that specifically discussed the use of wire-frames and flows – two key elements to user experience design documentation.

Main points were fairly basic but worth repeating because we all so often forget them.  They are rooted in fundamental communication principles

• Know your message – what are you trying to convey, and what do you want your audience to do with the information 
• Know your audience – prepare a document with the audience of your document in mind
• Will you maintain the document and if so, to what level of detail
• Relinquishing control over the document – once you deliver a document to its intended audience, you no longer own it - check the ego at the door and facilitate the discussion around the document

Be reflective during and after the project by asking questions of your document

• what did you revise the most?
• what did users of the document miss?
• what generated the most clarifying questions?
• estimate value of keeping document up-to-date?
• what is the level of effort of updating the document?
• how often are legacy documents consulted in your organization?
• what role did the document play in the design process?

Dan spoke briefly about concept models – sitemap-like document showing the relationships between  difference concepts.  Which I found incredibly similar to a business object definition process I recently was shown.  It defines the object and its related data – not a tecnique I’ve used specifically but now seeing it through the IA lense I think I could use it more effectively.

Comments on Weinberger article Taxonomies out of the box

Oh, to be able to communicate as fluidly and clearly as David Weinberger – anyway, such a great read because it COMPLETELY affirms my own position on why tagging and folksonomies are really and truly the future of knowledge management,  I could drone on and on here but instead here is a quote for DW’s article and a link to it.

	“And when taxonomists found themselves making such remarks as, “That’s not really a tree. It’s really a big bush,” they took the metaphysical leap from organizing thoughts to revealing reality.”

>> Taxonomy Out of the Box,  American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), February/March Bulletin