Information Architecture

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Gene puts up a very nice honeycomb diagram for thinking about the capabilities & focus of social software.

Social Software Building Blocks

While doing research for a recent workshop, I came across a useful list of seven social software elements. These seven building blocks–identity, presence, relationships, conversations, groups, reputation and sharing–provide a good functional definition for social software. They’re also a solid foundation for thinking about how social software works.

Two colleagues in the last week or so have posted in their blogs about persona-based design.

Austin Govella gives us a nice set of links about Personas, and Antonella Pavese touches on some counterintuitive truths about personas after reading Jason Fried’s Getting Real in her post Get Real: How to design for the life of others.

Antonella in particular mentions that one way to ‘get real’ about design is to realize you can’t design for anyone but yourself. That is, you can’t read a bunch of facts and figures about your users and somehow methodically design for them; that it takes a kind of roleplaying, and how that was Alan Cooper’s approach when he initially articulated a persona-based approach.

I only recently realized how powerful persona design can really be, and even more recently realized why.

When most people talk about “personas” they’re really talking about deliverables: documents that describe particular individuals who act as stand-ins or ‘archetypes’ for other users.

The truth, however, is that personas aren’t the documents, or the method, or any of that. Personas are people! But they’re people a designer needs to “get” in a visceral, intuitive way.

I was actually fairly confused about what personas should be, how they were different from marketing segments or “user profiles,” until I read Alan Cooper’s own column about “The Origin of Personas.”

A few paragraphs of it are so important that I think they deserve quoting in full:

I was writing a critical-path project management program that I called “Plan*It.” Early in the project, I interviewed about seven or eight colleagues and acquaintances who were likely candidates to use a project management program. In particular, I spoke at length with a woman named Kathy who worked at Carlick Advertising. Kathy’s job was called “traffic,” and it was her responsibility to assure that projects were staffed and staffers fully utilized. It seemed a classic project management task. Kathy was the basis for my first, primitive, persona.

In 1983, compared to what we use today, computers were very small, slow, and weak. It was normal for a large program the size of Plan*It to take an hour or more just to compile in its entirety. I usually performed a full compilation at least once a day around lunchtime. At the time I lived in Monterey California, near the classically beautiful Old Del Monte golf course. After eating, while my computer chugged away compiling the source code, I would walk the golf course. From my home near the ninth hole, I could traverse almost the entire course without attracting much attention from the clubhouse. During those walks I designed my program.

As I walked, I would engage myself in a dialogue, play-acting a project manager, loosely based on Kathy, requesting functions and behavior from my program. I often found myself deep in those dialogues, speaking aloud, and gesturing with my arms. Some of the golfers were taken aback by my unexpected presence and unusual behavior, but that didn’t bother me because I found that this play-acting technique was remarkably effective for cutting through complex design questions of functionality and interaction, allowing me to clearly see what was necessary and unnecessary and, more importantly, to differentiate between what was used frequently and what was needed only infrequently.

There are several very important insights I had from reading this:

1. Persona design didn’t start as a ‘method’ or especially not a ‘methodology!’ It was the intuition of an empathetic software creator, someone with a personality and mental frame capable of putting himself as much as possible not only in the ‘shoes’ but in the voice, body and life of his user.

2. Persona design was this activity of enlightened empathetic roleplay, not a deliverable or procedure to produce it. This explains to me why, in so many situations, I’ve seen personas created and wondered what use they were. The answer: they’re useless on the page, unless the page is used to help tell the story.

3. Personas didn’t start as collaborative artifacts, but that’s how we almost exclusively think of them in UX circles. Cooper was working essentially alone on this: he wasn’t using his persona to explain things to an executive stakeholder — he was just designing, in the present.

4. Cooper was doing this in his ‘spare time’ while things were rendering, away from the system, away from the cubicle. I wonder if this would’ve happened if he’d had a more responsive system, like we typically do today? And yet, I’ve *never* seen in any description of a Persona method a direction to get away from the cubicle or meeting room, and breathe fresh air, and talk to yourself!!!

5. His persona was based on a real person, not a mashup of users. Typically, we make personas that cram a number of different characteristics into one person. But I think this approach may lead us astray at times — not that we have to use only a single actual person for a persona, but maybe we should *start* there, before creating a frankensteined non-existent user from the cherrypicked parts of the ones we’ve observed?

Essentially, personas aren’t a method that you follow step by step and end up, automagically, with a reference-facsimile of your user. It’s really an emotional, almost theatrical leap that takes imagination and deliberate, focused empathy.

It makes me wonder if, as designers, we should have some kind of method acting seminar, to get us out of our geeky skins?

Online Community Basics: Start with Research – The 3 questions to ask – Online Community Report

I hadn’t heard of this blog/site until a colleague pinged me about it. It has some excellent advice on issues to consider when thinking about designing for an online community, especially the idea of an “ecosystem” that’s already there to an extent, that you’re just trying to complement and enhance. Good stuff.

I recently did a presentation at the very excellent DigitalNow conference, in Orlando. It’s a conference for leaders of professional associations, who have a vested interest in virtual community building and keeping their constituents engaged, even in the splintered information-saturated “Web 2.0” world.

I combined a couple of previous years’ IASummit presentations and added a few new things to try and create an interesting picture that tries to re-frame the situation in several ways, hopefully adding some clarity and helping spark some new ideas for them.

Here’s a pdf of the deck: The Rise of Letting Go: How the Net Generation can teach us to lose control and like it. (Warning: it’s about a 20MB file!)

Vegas Lingers

This is Vegas

It’s easy to overlook them. The Skinner-box button-pushers, watching the wheels roll and roll. Surrounded by a ‘paradise’ that still leaves them wanting — and thinking they’ll find it like this.

Vegas was a mixed bag. I guess I’d always seen so many glamorous photos and film shots, even the ones that tried to be ‘gritty’ still managed to put a sort of mythic gleam over everything.

But it’s not mythic. It’s plastic. It’s the progeny of a one-night stand between the Magic Kingdom and TGI Friday’s. Inescapable throngs of flip-flopped, booze-soaked denizens, eyes bugged wide by the promise of … what? I’m not even sure. Entertainment, certainly, but another flavor invades the way saccharine crowds and leaves a film over any other flavor. Luxury, perhaps. Richness of the kind that first comes to mind when someone says “rich”: Trumpism mixed with Hollywood ersatz.

I don’t mean to be so down on it. Really. I’m a big fan of decadent, crazy, outrageous kitsch. But this somehow was so overwhelming, it wasn’t even kitsch. (Definitely not camp.) Now I understand why U2 filmed the video for “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” here so many years ago — and that was before it was injected with virtual-reality steroids.

The conference was terrific (except for having trouble escaping the waves of noise and humanity to have a decent conversation). I’m amazed the team made it come together as well as they did given the circumstances.

Fortunately, most of the time was much happier than I’m letting on here. Check out my iasummit2007 Flickr stream.

For the record: I know plenty of people enjoy Vegas a great deal, and they have fun gambling and seeing shows and everything, and I think that’s actually really great. Some of my family enjoy doing it from time to time, and they seem to always come back smiling. I think it just hit me in a strange way on this trip — but I’m always like that; if there’s a silver lining I’ll find a cloud. I just can’t help noticing the souls that seem to be a little lost, a little vacant behind the marquee-reflecting eyes. But hey, that’s just me.

I managed to finish my presentation for this year’s IA Summit, and present it in under 50 minutes. Huzzah!

As promised, I’m posting the whole thing with notes here on the blog. If you want the PDF of the presentation (16MB), go here: http://www.inkblurt.com/media/hinton_summit07.pdf

And if you want to see the “blog post of record” about the presentation — with extra reference and research information & links — then check out the post here: http://www.inkblurt.com/archives/446

Thanks to everyone who attended the presentation and asked such terrific questions!

Semapedia

Didn’t know about this til Peter Morville mentioned it in a session today.

Semapedia.org: index

Our goal is to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the right information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.

Map, meet Landscape.

Viva

iasummit2007 badge

I’m flying to Vegas tomorrow for the ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit 2007. Never been to Las Vegas before, so it’ll be a hoot.

I’m not sure if I’m going to try mad blogging of the summit here or not. We’ll see what kind of attention span and/or energy I have.

I have a feeling, really, that I’d have more fun just doing a photo blog of the trip. I’ll ponder that while I pack :-)

IAI In Second Life

I played a small role in starting the IA Institute five years (and 30 lbs) ago, but I can’t take credit for the success it’s had since. Lots of dedicated people have worked very hard on it during that time.

Recently I became a little more involved, when Stacy Surla gently prodded me into helping with an initiative around Second Life. The IAI has purchased an island there, close to a cluster of info-science/education themed islands called the “Information Archipelago.” It may seem like putting the cart before the horse, but the challenge with something as radically new as Second Life is that you don’t really know how you’re going to use it until you start using it.

At any rate, someone in the area (in the ‘game’) saw what we were up to and asked if he could interview us for a podcast. He and Stacy graciously put up with my rambling answers — I think he said initially it was to be a 15 minute podcast, but it turned out to be a half hour — and posted the finished product. Here’s a link, and the intro from the site.

Who’s On Second Podcast 17: The New Architects of Information

I first met information architects Stacy Surla and Andrew Hinton as they were hammering the first planks together for their new island for the Information Architecture Institute. The space is just offshore from Cafe Fireball, so I got curious about what was going on over on the new plot of land. What I discovered was that the IAI is keenly interested in creating real world, online and Second Life experiences that let users get work done, find there way around and find the information they need easily and sensibly.

It’s an interesting experience being interviewed about this stuff, because it creates a bit of pressure to actually formulate an articulate answer about things that you can normally fudge on in your own head or in quick conversations with others.

In a nutshell, the reason why I think Second Life is a worthy laboratory for the IAI is this: Increasingly our physical environment is going to turn into a hybrid of semantic and concrete, with the rise of ubicomp. Why not experiment, get our feet wet and learn valuable lessons, in an environment that is already a three-dimensional semantic space?

I may jot more thoughts about this later here … it’ll also be relevant for a panel Stacy Surla is planning for the IA Summit.

Hope to see you there!

Business 2.0 makes an observation I find painfully obvious, but that evidently more people need to hear:

Why commercial outfits can’t get Wikis to work – Feb. 21, 2007

By tirelessly nurturing their specific communities, not by randomly “crowdsourcing,” Wales, Butterfield, Fake and their ilk encourage responsible gardening. Wiki novels, Wiki op-eds, a Wiki Amazon: these are concepts too large, too uncontrolled, too wilderness-like – too unwalled – to be gardens. Either nothing grows at all there, or the good ideas get strangled by weeds.

The future of Web 2.0 belongs to sites that give its users directions and goals as well as total control. People need a common focus, a shared obsession, to be productive as a crowd. (My favorite recent example: the Lostpedia, a Wikipedia-like site created by fans of the ABC series Lost who are all trying to figure out what the heck is going on, and sharing their notes).

I’ve always thought web sites were more like gardens than buildings, at least in how their ‘creators’ should approach them. But Web 2.0 makes this triply so.

The technology doesn’t have an inherent value, and a wiki isn’t a handful of magic beans that you just toss onto a web server and watch them grow. It takes planning, cultivation, direction. “Tireless” is right … and “nurturing” is essential.

What we’re seeing, really, is that wikis work best when there is a shared context of need — a “Community of Practice” — which makes sense, because that’s why the first wiki was created. (Ward Cunningham whipped it up so his team could collaborate on a pattern repository.) It’s in the DNA of “wikiness” that it best serves focused effort by similarly obsessed people. While Wikipedia might cover every subject under the sun, the shared obsession is to *document* everything under the sun. And that requires a highly structured, designed environment, and lots of attention for tending and cultivation.

I’ve been kvetching for a year or more now about how crazy it is trying to keep up with various social networks online.

The truth is, many of us have stuff we do at MySpace or Yahoo, some we might do on our own blog (either self-hosted or at TypePad or Blogspot, etc), and maybe another more personal journal at Xanga or LiveJournal. Then there are dating sites, as well as professional sites like LinkedIn. Plus the bookmarks you keep up with on Ma.gnolia or del.icio.us, and your pics on Flickr and Videos on YouTube. (Or any of the other competing services.)

But what about when you want to keep up with all of it together? And what about when you make a friend in one, but you want to share something with that friend on another?

Sure there are RSS feeds for a lot of it, for keeping up with one-way content traffic. But the *interaction* which is so vital and valuable for this new Web2.0 world can only be had when you login to each one separately.

If I had more of a code/development background, I’d just jump in and try to make something. But, barring that, I’ll just keep complaining until someone either 1) partners with me on the idea and we make a few million selling it to somebody (ha!) or 2) somebody just makes it happen regardless.

I wonder if these guys at Broadband Mechanics are onto something like this?

Broadband Mechanics: Our strategies

By establishing the notion of an ‘open social network’, millions of end-users will be able to move their personal contacts, groups and ‘social capital’ wherever they wish. They’ll be able to create relationships with anybody on any network, to send these new friends messages, create or join groups or post content – anywhere. This is the way the ‘social web’ needs to evolve – not locked up in old fashioned data silos – with vendors monetizing these captured end-users.

I know I’ll be keeping an eye out. But in the meantime, why aren’t there more startups trying to do this? If somebody can make an offline client for MySpace by scraping the site under your login and reconstituting it into a better desktop interface, why can’t a website do it, and do the same with everywhere else your identity lives?

This is the version I eventually ended up with after a couple of iterations. See the original post about the talk & my plans for it down below the presentation box.
This was made before Slideshare got better with PDF slides that included notes, so you may need to bring it up in full screen or download the original.

Original (outdated) announcement post with some links to research and stuff below:
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I haven’t officially posted about this yet, so I may as well. At this year’s IA Summit, I’m going to be giving a presentation called
Architectures of Participation: What Communities of Practice Can Mean for IA

Here’s the description:

“Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.” – Cory Doctorow

How can Information Architecture address the increasing demand for collaborative work, meaningful conversation and social connection? We’ll explore how “Community of Practice” is more than just a 90s knowledge-management buzz-phrase. It’s an important model for understanding group behavior – and one that’s becoming crucial to designing in the age of Wikipedia, MySpace and YouTube.

Understanding communities of practice as a phenomenon can lend a great deal of clarity to designing frameworks for participation: creating the right conditions for particular kinds of collective effort.

We’ll gain an essential understanding of “communities of practice,” looking at “IA” as a handy example. We’ll then examine how the concept helps us design for a variety of collaborative environments – from intranets and medical forums to multiplayer games.

Any new information, notes, files, etc, I’ll be keeping in this post, using it as the presentation’s “home” on my blog.

Lots of goodies below the fold …
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