Pleasing writing on the MetaDesign site…
Information needs design.
You cannot not communicate.
It looks good and it makes sense.
MetaDesign…an international network of visual engineers, bringing a broad perspective to the complex challenges of everyday communications.
Homeless man sits and reads newspaper behind Metropolitan Museum of Art
Descriptions of beautiful day in New York.
Museum patrons don’t seem to notice.
How rear of museum borders Central Park.
A giant grid of modernist glass forms backdrop.
Just inside, figures and busts from Romans and Greeks.
A user experience idea, part of the LazyWeb
Positioning
BlogReader is a useful, everyday tool for many people. While other content tracking, reading, or ranking applications came and went, BlogReader has consistently provided the content readers wanted in an easy and flexible way, and in doing so has become an ingrained part of many people’s everyday lives.
BlogReader is essentially the Google of news readers: fast, smart, hip, leading edge, Net-savvy, in touch with the grass roots, and profitable.
Personas
Designing to user personas is a time-tested user-centered design process. Personas should be based on research that verifies our assumptions, but for now here’s a best guess of BlogReader users.
There are two main personas: The Occasional News Consumer and the Extreme Blog Aficionado:
Nancy the News Consumer
Nancy is an analyst with J.P. Morgan. She focuses on the manufacturing sector and needs to provide insightful information to her clients. She juggles numbers all day and wants to spend her time finding answers to her problems, not searching for information.
Nancy knows the big media companies suffer from groupthink – always regurgitating the same ideas. She’s hoping there’s blogs written by industry insiders who she can look to for honest, unique ideas.
She has previously set up BlogReader and visits the site in the morning during the first sips of coffee to see what’s new.
Barry the Blog Reader
Barry is a programmer at Accelerate, a small IT consultancy in Seattle. After work he enjoys developing Linux modules and conversing with other developers about open source issues. His blog community includes specific individuals whose point of view he respects, and looks to them for links to other people with innovative and trustworthy opinions.
Barry starts, like Nancy, by going to BlogReader and reading his favorite sites. Unlike Nancy, links help him find new sites that he actively adds to his list, specifying how he wants BlogReader to analyze them. Because sites can differ so widely in editorial approach, he likes to create categories to keep them organized.
Frank Lloyd Wright spent three months ‘doing nothing’ (I would imagine he was thinking) before sketching for three hours to produce the drawings for Falling Water. He could imagine the entire structure, and subsequently furnish the details. With each work he was allowed to experiment and push the boundaries. And clients came to him for his work, though of course he, as most famous architects do, relied on a staff of ‘apprentices’.
Could an information architect – or an experience strategist or systems architect for that matter – become famous in the same way? Having three months to consider the user experience and design, defining the state-of-the-art with each project, being sought out for her ideas with a staff to assist with the work?
We have gurus, but they often exist as our best critics and consultants, not designers. And we have fine design groups, but these don’t inspire the imagination like a single brilliant personality. This case study of Nathan Shedroff’s work teases me with the idea. Some foster the vision, but we’re certainly not there yet.
I don’t expect one person to imagine and build everything; even the best architects rely on (brilliant but anonymous) engineers for collaboration. But one person could conceivably imagine the entire experience and design, from an enterprise information architecture down to the detailed interaction design. It might be on the scale of, say, designing Amazon.com from scratch.
Does anyone even want this? Regardless, aspiring to this – as designers, as educators, as patrons – might change our work in countless ways.
Later…draftsmen! They had draftsmen! Jeez. Imagine having someone to make the beautiful drawings for you.
I’m designing a site for my sister’s fiance’s business, he does interior design and construction contracting. While my idea for the IA and navigation is simple and workable, it just ain’t compelling. About Us, Services, Portfolio [yawn]… I asked the designer to spruce it up and she was like, um, ok…
What do customers get from him in person? I think they get something like a story. Not told in the fashion of a story of course, but he tells them about what the company does (plot), where they do it (setting), who they are (characters), and – since he’s good at what he does – a happy ending.
I’ve attended an IBM seminar on using storytelling in design and caught the flavor of it, and thought it might work perfectly here. So, what do I need?
Some characteristics:
Dan Gruen from Lotus describes them as
Whereas he applies them as user-centered designers would use scenarios, I’m more interested in how the knowledge management people would use them, to actually convey information quickly and effectively, as well as compellingly. For example, I’ve heard that when the U.S. Secret Service needs to convey a lot of important information quickly – say, briefing the Secretary of State during a ride across town – they use a storytelling format.
I’m imagining the general storytelling format might make it more interesting and perhaps easier to digest the basic information even if the actual presentation – a few web pages in my case – don’t actually build up a whole lot of “dramatic elements”. I’ll retain the usual navigation so the visitors can bypass the story or get more details at the end.
A simple mapping resulting in four web pages:
Michael points to the article on narrative voice and I remember the advice I’m always giving others: remove that cold, corporate tone by writing in the the first person. (It’s harder to write ridiculous happy talk in the first person because it sounds ridiculous even to numb marketing types.)
“There is an assumption about meetings and gatherings that’s so old it’s almost genetic. Conferences ask people to come as passive information gatherers. We’re drawn by big name speakers and then sit and wait for information to flow downwards. Yet when you ask people where they learned and contributed the most, they’ll inevitably say it was dinner with Tom or a passionate discussion over drinks with Katie and Jack. We need to re-evaluate how we create large group events to take advantage of the way we’re beginning to see, create and connect the world today. Our old style hierarchical models just aren’t as effective anymore, and current conferences are still based on them.”
New Underground Gatherings: No More Conferences
Alternate career idea #51: Form a small team of crack Internet peeps to provide quick and simple services in the developing world. For example, imagine a SWAT team dropping into Afghanistan to set up a simple website to disseminate information within the new government, complete with no-nonsense hardware and training. Then we’re off to somewhere else. Of course, the usual we’re-here-to-build-a-website-but-first-we’ll-help-prepare-the-organization activities would happen. It’s all funded by grants, donations, etc.
I was going to call it Designers Without Borders, riffing off Médecins Sans Frontières, but they already exist, albeit in more of an educational capacity. I want a SWAT team.
You’ve probably seen the Mindset List, published each year by Beloit College. It goes like this…
Most students entering college this fall were born in 1984.
It’s always struck me as a nice little design document, grounding the instructors in the mindset of their students. What’s more, the items chosen appeal to people of different generations. For example, ‘Women have always been members of the Jaycees‘ didn’t resonate with me, but probably does for older Americans.
I’m thinking about how to use this with my clients.
Link courtesy Chris Pepper.
Cisco just posted a demo of the new Cisco.com site that will launch soon. It’s a good little overview of what customers will notice in the redesign.
I was lucky enough to spend time with some of the design team a few months ago. The site will be a fascinating study for several reasons, including semantic metadata-generated pages and navigation, navigation that allows access to any one of hundreds of thousands of pages within five clicks, and enterprise-wide GUI standards.
Cisco.com has been pounded in the past for its poor site. For such a large company that is the result of many merged companies, the redesign is a huge achievement. I look forward to seeing the final work.
Update: the site went live yesterday.
Our understanding of the world is facilitated by our ability to associate things, to compare and contrast, to categorize, and to form abstract relationships. To shape information in ways that allow others to better understand, we deliberately describe the information around us to shape it, creating new forms of knowledge. When communicating with computers, we can do this using metadata.
Metadata is simply a piece of information that describes other information. For example, let’s look at some text, a headline from nytimes.com:
Bush Continues to Push Congress for Resolution on Iraq
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 12:30 PM ET
President Bush today kept up pressure on Congress to approve action against Iraq amid new criticism from Democrats.
The data in this case is the headline and summary:
Bush Continues to Push Congress for Resolution on Iraq
President Bush today kept up pressure on Congress to approve action against Iraq amid new criticism from Democrats.
The metadata is the surrounding information that helps us understand the context or to categorize the data:
Published by: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Publish time: 12:30 PM ET
Related information:
There may also be other metadata that isn’t displayed but which helps the system display or organize the data:
Desk: National
Information Type: News
Format: Column
To allow readers to search or browse their news, the New York Times might collect one taxonomy of terms – a form of metadata – and display all these terms together. For example, the Desk taxonomy looks like this:
International
National
Politics
Business
Technology
Science
Health
Sports
New York Region
Education
Weather
Obituaries
This collection is called a metadata schema, meaning a systematic combination of elements.
Metadata can describe other things as well, such as people or places.
<--
There are several types of schemes that can be used when organizing metadata:
[ insert chart ]
adapted from “Levels of Control” from and “An Ontology Spectrum” from Deborah McGuiness
–>
Essentially, the benefits of these metadata schema are:
Here’s some basic definitions to help tell the different kinds of schema apart:
The above are often referred to as “controlled vocabularies”. If we try to go beyond formal vocabularies and formalize our knowledge of a subject this is known as “knowledge representation”.
It might help to define some related terms:
Controlled Vocabularies – a defined set of preferred terms. Types of controlled vocabularies include Synonym Rings,
Authority Files, Taxonomies, Faceted Taxonomies, and Thesauri. Ontologies are not usually considered a form of controlled vocabulary but rather a form of knowledge representation.
Attribute – an aspect of an object, such as the publisher name. Attributes are alternately called “facets” when applied to taxonomies, “slots” when applied to ontologies, or “fields” when applied to databases.
Attribute Value – a value assigned to an attribute. For example the attribute “Publisher Name” can have a value of “New York Times”.
{show examples of all these}
A note on metatags: metadata and metatags are related, but are different things. Metatags are found within markup code (like HTML pages) to identify certain attributes of that information. Metadata goes *into* metatags, but metadata has many other uses as well.
An attack on postmodern literature by Jonathan Franzen, which equates difficulty with high art. I see an analogy to design.
The original article is offline in the New Yorker, an interview is online.
‘…I think it’s kind of a natural idea. As a student, you’re handed Milton or Shakespeare, you’re told that it’s great literature, and you find it difficult to read – at least, at first. Or you’re in gym class, trying to pole vault, and the bar keeps getting raised, and you learn that the more difficult the jump the better it is. If you think of a novel as a contract between the reader and the writer, an agreement to entertain and be entertained, difficulty doesn’t make much sense…’
Notes from a talk by Bob Lord:
Ultimately, you are helping people.
Hopefully, this results in something for you too.
Research the situation ahead of time.
Look for opportunities to “reconnect” – to get back to them with something that will help them.
Respond with ATM – Answer Transition Message. Answer positively, transition away from negative ideas, state your message.
A nice list…
HerIM: …the second thing is your IA findings focus on the intranet,
which is a good suggestion…but what do you think about the Internet?
MeIM: oh, that
MeIM: that Internet thing
MeIM: i’ll do more there
HerIM: that would be cool. you can use 2 pages if you need to
MeIM: but that would hurt Mr. Tree
HerIM: what is mr tree?
MeIM: Mrs. Tree’s husband
MeIM: shattering their family
HerIM: i’m going to ignore you now
MeIM: fatherless kids
HerIM: when can you send me your updates?
MeIM: oh, the horror
MeIM: in 5 minutes
HerIM: word
As much as we write, filter, embellish, design, decorate, and publish, we rarely capture our rich human personalities on the web. The best writers I know come close, but it’s a life’s work pushing their craft to that level. And yet I’ve found simple correspondence can often push it to the next level, revealing so much more of us. Perhaps the difference is the tone we take when speaking to a friend instead of an anonymous audience, perhaps we let our guard down. Perhaps it’s the personalized message possible when we know the other’s interests. Whichever, the people I have met – both in person and through email – come across in technicolor compared to their published selves.
Such is the case with T.R., whose site was finally outed through her work with A List Apart. I’m lucky enough to claim her as a friend and neighbor. Her blog is certainly worth a read, but as usual only hints at the person within.
Do you have a neighbor on the web? The person within might be only an email away!