One Economy is an American non-profit organization working to help low-income people access technology, like high-speed Internet access.
Author: Victor
Teaching in Sound Bites
Some time ago I helped create a classification scheme for a very large company’s website. Several months into the project, when most of the coding to power this scheme was finished, some executives objected to it. Some of the objections made sense, and with some tweaks we were able to incorporate additional concerns like marketing issues without harming usability. But some requests flew in the very face of the reasoning behind how the classification worked (in usability testing, not just theoretically). And a lot of the classification wasn’t even innovative; it leveraged what had been working for sites like Yahoo for years.
Somehow this reminded me of After the Dot-Bomb: Getting Web Information Retrieval Right This Time. In it Marcia Bates argues that the rest of us were reinventing information seeking when the library and information science field had already solved many of these problems. In the light of my work’s executive manhandling, I saw Bates’ insistence that we were ‘ignoring‘ this discipline as inadvertently admitting, "We in the LIS field failed to communicate what we know and make it accessible to those who need it."
I’m not laying blame; I don’t think anyone was prepared for the Internet explosion of the 90’s in which millions of people suddenly had access to a plethora of information used in new ways. But it would be nice if the absolute basics were universally understood. In my example of the painful case above an absolute basic would be ‘Classification is complicated and particular skills are needed to do it effectively.‘ And only as much argumentation as is necessary should accompany that point to make the point.
In the pursuit of perfect information science, our basic taxonomies still suffer from arbitrary decisions. I hope the information architecture field will communicate these essential points – recognizing that the best is the enemy of the good. It’s a matter of summarizing in executive-sized bits ideas similar to what the first principles do for us.
An example of a teaching sound bite might be Enabler vs. Driver Technology: Breakthrough technology can be a driver of new products and services. Less innovative technology is an enabler of some other strategic advantage – such as design or marketing. The way you structure your projects should reflect whether technology is an enabler or a driver.
Maybe these are written as patterns? Not for the sake of compiling into a language and used, but just for reading and learning.
This idea cropped up listening to Brenda Laurel in Texas. Teenagers use SMS more than email or the phone. Lots of carefully constructed, tiny, messages. How will this generation cope with the skills needed to find a good job in the market of the 2010’s? What sort of IA education do they need?
Radio Vox Populi
IA Summit Presentations
The downloads are starting to appear on the IA Summit site (thanks Javier). Even after having attended, there’s so much I didn’t get to see, it’s like a shopping spree in a candy store.
Project Management Reality
Usually a project manager will drop into MS Project and later emerge with the project plan. I saw a nice counter example today where someone acknowledged the uncertainty of a dynamic project situation. ‘We can go off and build what we think you want for the lowest price in the shortest time and plan time to revise it. Or we can do a more conventional project and we’ll place the end date in a four-week time span.‘ Not a hard launch date, but a span of time when they’d probably be finished. Nice.
The Modified Librarian
Here we will discuss the concept and practice of body modification as it relates to librarians as persons and professionals. Those crazy college kids.
Every Brett Edifying
Brett – one smart IA – just launched his blog: every breath death defying. We’ll be reading closely.
IA Summit Stuff
When inhaling becomes an option I’ll report a bit on the IA Summit. In the meantime here’s some misc. photos and my presentation, Incorporating Navigation Research into a Design Method PDF (800K), PPT (2MB). You’ll want to view the powerpoint version in Notes View to get the story and pictures at the same time. And thanks to Lane Becker for the just-in-time equipment loan at the Summit.
IA Summit, Thurs
If you’re in Austin for the IA Summit don’t dine alone! Some of us are having dinner at Zax, 312 Barton Springs Rd at 7:30.
Recently featured at NBS…
Good explainations for something we already knew: Big companies breed small minds.
Even if Mark Hurst is over-simplifying, those pages aren’t long for this world.
Shop for a date at Yahoo! Personals.
And Nathan Shedroff sums up what’s wrong with personas.
Big companies breed small minds
Two views on the same idea:
Daniel Dennett in How The Mind Works, courtesy of Alex Wright:
A flow chart is typically the organizational chart of a committee of homunculi (investigators, librarians, accountants, executives); each box specifies a homunculus by precribing a function without saying how it is accomplished (one says, in effect: put a little man in there to do the job). If we then look closer at the individual boxes we see that the function of each is accomplished by subdividing it via another flow chart into still smaller, more stupid homunculi. Eventually this nesting of boxes within boxes lands you with homunculi so stupid (all they have to do is remember whether to say yes or no when asked) that they can be, as one says, “replaced by a machine.” One discharges fancy homunculi from one’s scheme by organizing armies of idiots to do the work.
Jim McGee, courtesy of Bill Seitz:
Years ago I worked for one of the big systems consulting firms. In a conversation on a flight from New York to Chicago, one of the partners told me, “Jim, we can’t have everybody thinking for themselves, 90% of the people here are just pulling on the oars. If everybody decides to steer we won’t get anywhere.” There’s a huge amount of industrial logic in this. You want to control risk. You want predictable results. You want control and replicability. What makes the transition to a knowledge economy so scary is that it disrupts this equation. What if one of those guys pulling on the oars figures out how to make a sail? Contemplation of these questions makes innovation and new knowledge creation feel like potential chaos. Easier to push the problem into the categories that promise continued control.
Organizations
Marketing/Usability Litmus Test
Refining my thinking about how to integrate brand and marketing into IA. My current litmus test is, ‘Do both the company and the customer benefit from the design?‘ That sounds like a statement I think my marketing people will agree with, and is more realistic than only arguing for usability (in most companies). I find that most of the decisions occur at fine levels of design, like when and how to ask for an email address. And that’s when the litmus test is invoked.
Grey Tuesday
The positioning of Grey Tuesday is interesting, but somewhat flawed. First, this ain’t a censorship issue, it’s a copyright issue. Second, censorship doesn’t work, but copyright does.
Granted, not everyone wants copyright. For those who wish something more flexible, there’s Creative Commons. For those who don’t want to respect copyright, there’s, well, stealing. Stealing is bad. I like Creative Commons, and I dislike narrow minded lawyers, but that doesn’t turn this into something other than a legal issue, so it’s a matter for the courts to rule on this grey area (pun intended) of fair-use. I’m not sure a lot of coordinated stealing is going to influence the judges.
Y! Personals & Galleries
Yahoo! has this clever campaign for their personals that I couldn’t help but follow and explore (Not that I’m in the market sorry to disappoint you :). What I saw was pretty amazing, a gallery-like view of many singles…
Very cool, because it’s just so browse-friendly. Visually scan for an attractive face, then click for a bit more info, and if he/she still holds potential then click ahead for all the juicy details. I might be shallow wanting to see what people look like first, but I would bet this is the ‘primary facet’ for many folks, especially in the privacy of their web browsers.
Unfortunately, this isn’t how Y! Personals actually works. The above is just a promotion screen. The actual search results are pretty conventional…
The problem also must balance the volume of results; while the gallery layout can squeeze in 50 results you need to consider the amount of results within the chosen geographical area. I’d probably try delivering the first 50 results closest in geography by default and let the user alter it further. I know in a dense area like New York there’s 92 results of women my age within 5 miles, which ends up being 10 results pages, pages you actually want to view, as opposed to your usually search results. I’d rather have 2 pages. Too many images per page over a modem? Nah, these are worth waiting for.