Noise Between Stations

Category: Information Architecture

Kill the Drop Downs

Zeldman beats up on drop down menus. You go brother. But why insult birdbath installers? That sounds like a nice job, working in gardens all day.

6/30/2004
Dillon critical of navigation

Andrew Dillon, in his report on the fifth annual IA Summit, gives me props but is critical of the idea of navigation….

…I really enjoyed, again, a session on navigation by Victor Lombardi, which probably appealed to my academic sensibilities more than some of the other sessions. I have been a strong critic of the whole idea of navigation as a driving force for design, but there is no doubting the allure of the concept for IAs â€“ it was standing room only at this session as Victor gave a detailed overview of the various strands of research that have emerged in this area and how best IAs might use the findings.

I’m not sure if he means navigation as in navigation bars (which Dillon has specifically questioned IA’s obsession with) or the larger practice of navigating through digital information, or something else. I’ll be sure to follow up.

6/24/2004
Rashmi on shape and memory

Rashmi riffs on my presentation of information shape recognition, relating it to implicit and explicit memory. Her analysis is only speculation but seems spot-on based on what I’ve read. Implicit and explicit memory might play similar roles as local and global schemata, respectively, that Andew Dillon describes in his work on information shape.

6/22/2004
Example of weird info shape

A few months ago I presented Incorporating Navigation Research into a Design Method (.pdf) at the IA Summit, which included an overview of using familiar information shapes. Afterwords Thom Haller approached me with this wonderful Chinese menu, a deviation from some Chinese menus I presented. He just said, ‘Look at this one. Try to figure out how much is a bowl of noodle soup costs.‘ You can see the logic in their modular approach, but when it takes 60 seconds to determine the price of noodle soup then something ain’t right.

6/10/2004
Worker-to-worker offshoring

Brett proposes the idea of worker-to-worker offshoring:

Just imagine: you get assigned to do two days of … competitive site audits for a pitch. Ugh. Why not sub-shore the work, W2W-style and take the day[s] off? It costs $15-20/hour…

I think PeterV has done this before, offshoring some personal programming work to a PHP programmer in India. I know it’d be nice to never have to do a content inventory again. Of course, we’d be training the offshore workers to do our jobs, but I think that’s inevitable. Move upstream.

(You know what I’d really like — and the socialist in me feels rather guilty about this — is a personal assistant. Boy, if I just had someone to take care of all the administrative crap in my life, I’d have time for, well, all the other crap (hopefully upstream crap). Could that possibly be offshored?)

5/29/2004
Need an IA for 2 weeks…

A friend at Deloitte Consulting needs and IA for wireframe development for 1-2 weeks in NYC. The start date is next week (6/2) or as soon as possible. Send me an email (link in the nav) if you’re interested.

5/28/2004
CMS Playground

I used to say CMS user interfaces were developing slowly because, like intranets, they were all behind the firewall. But I’m wrong, opensourceCMS has many CMS packages installed for you to try out and learn from. An excellent resource.

5/25/2004
AIfIA, WSJ, and the PDB

In today’s Wall Street Journal the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture achieved something we wished for from the beginning, notice in the mainstream press. The story, Redesiging the PDB, quotes Wodtke and Morville among others in discussing how IA could influence attention paid to the infamous Presidential Daily Brief on Bin Laden.

Unfortunately, the design community can’t agree on something as simple as Greg Storey’s one-page PDB redesign versus the undesigned original. One would think any attention paid to this document would be a good thing, but Edward Tufte disagrees, stating, ‘I think the design’s irrelevant.’ I hope that’s just the reporter screwing up his words.

Perhaps the most cogent statement came from Janice Fraser who pointed to the intentions of the document’s originators: ‘[Mr. Storey’s redesign] shifts responsibility — and, moreover, accountability — for interpretation to the analyst or advisor who prepares the brief.‘

Get more from Brett.

5/4/2004
Survey of Web Genres

Peterme points to Kevin Crowston‘s Reproduced and emergent genres of communication on the World-Wide Web which is — and I’m not exaggerating here — design gold. It really is. It relates to work by researchers such as Dillon and Toms on information shape and genre that I summarized in my navigation research paper (.pdf). The argument, put simply, is that if we format information using familiar genres, the familiar information structure of those genres can become more intuitable navigation (intuitive, of course, equals familiar).

What Crowston has done is survey and document all those genres. So the step I describe of “formatting information in familiar genres when possible” becomes easier when we have a list of common genres. Then you just need to figure out which genres your audience recognizes.

4/27/2004
Search method seeds

Over on the Asilomar email list I started exploring a method of adding search to a site that has grown to need it. The point is to get a pretty good idea of what should be done to arrive at good results in a logical way, rather than just install a search engine and improve through trial and error. With the help of Jonothan and Iwan here’s seeds of a method I’ve collected so far:

Let’s assume we’re working with conventional search engine technology, e.g. mostly relevancy-based.

We have to begin either at the point the content is going into an index or the user’s goals, and because I’m user-centered boy I’ll start with the users. We can learn about their goals, things like do they want precision or recall, what are their most popular search terms, how many queries do users submit in a session, do users repeat queries over multiple sessions, how do the queries change over time, and so on.

Using the user goals we can construct a strawman user interface.

Next we look at the content. We can ask what format is it in, how much is there, how will the volume change over time, for dynamic content will the search index rebuild anew or cumulatively grow, how clean is it (ROT), how often does it change, and so on.

With the strawman UI and a rough idea of what the index looks like we can simulate some search tasks and the result sets. We might then consider how metadata and tweaks to the ranking algorithm could help.

At some point we have to install the search engine, index the content, and try some queries. Then we might use a systematic approach to tweaking results:

Too many results? Try cleaning or otherwise reducing content, changing weighting, change the ranking algorithm, or use a more restrictive search form UI (e.g. more fields that must be selected)

Too few results? Try adding synonyms or a less restrictive search form UI. This might also be a sign that you don’t in fact need a search engine.

Is accuracy bad? Change the algorithm, change the weighting, add metadata, use best bets, improve the search form UI.

Users can’t fulfill goals even if results are good? Try improving the results UI.

I’m sure I’m missing stuff, but it’s a start.

4/7/2004
Volunteering pays

In one week the Intro to IA brochure (PDF) I created with Dan Willis has been translated into Spanish and Japanese. The latter was also printed in the Japanese journal ‘WebSite Design vol.10,’ who did a great job with the layout, not surprisingly considering its overall quality. And they paid me $65. Not a huge amount, but it’s nice to be compensated and watch the work take on new lives beyond what I imagined, all from a little piece Dan and I threw together for the hell of it.

3/29/2004
Litmus test for scent/meaning

I’ve plowed through the research on information scent, and while they seem to be learning something about how people think about links and navigation, it’s not clear if there’s anything actionable for designers to take away from it. So I continue to think about how to create scent, or really, how to make links meaningful to people. I think some of Spool’s research on link length is helpful.

Recently I’ve been playing with what I call the Litmus Test for Scent. It helps to quickly judge whether link text is effective in an appeal-to-common-sense way. Here’s the format:

“OH! I really want to see what’s in [link name]!“

So, for example, when I go to Amazon and see that little tab with my name on it, I say, “OH! I really want to see what’s on Victor’s page!“

but not

“OH! I really want to see what’s in Click here” or “OH! I really want to see what’s in [insider lingo]” etc.

3/22/2004
Shifting information goals

Peterme nicely illustrates shifting goals in the information seeking process — complete with screen shots — revealing the complexity of navigation design: ‘My original “goal” was to learn about Ann Willoughby. On reading that page about Ann, my goal shifted…. Shifting and evolving goals are not only common — they are the norm.‘

Someone at work recently pointed out that the retail theory people, like the folks at Vanderbilt’s eLab, tried pinning navigation to the measurement of flow. It’s another example of a highly dynamic environment (psychology + HCI + lots of information) that makes simplistic approaches to navigation design look, well, simplistic.

I took the first step to addressing this with my navigation design research and method. It needs a lot of work, but I think it approaches something robust enough to acknowledge the complexity of navigation design yet accessible enough to use without interfering with the design work itself.

3/21/2004
The beginning of the end of the page

Mark Hurst warns of a content-centric view in The Page Paradigm, making the point that ‘Web developers often waste time worrying about “where content should live”‘ which is so true. Designers often become hyper-focused on the content and navigation and forget about the user’s goals and the flow they go through to get there (can you say personas and scenarios?). That said, his three-step process of ‘Identify users’ goals on each page… remove any page elements that don’t help to accomplish the goal, and emphasize… elements that… take users closer to their goal… and you’re done‘ is just a wee bit easier said than done. I’m all like, Which tasks will help them accomplish their goals? In what order(s) do the tasks happen? What’s the best interface to accomplish each task? How do you present disparate interfaces in a coherent way? How do the tasks and interfaces differ according to the volume and type of content accessed? And so on. Navigation design can get fairly complicated when taken seriously. Whaddya trying to do, Mark, get my salary cut in half?!

Incidentally, in the long view, I think the page paradigm will go away. It’s an artifact of the earliest HTML spec, and once we have a platform where Flash-like capabilities are widespread we’ll all be doing interaction design (interactions designers will need to learn information architecture and vice versa). We might still think in terms of a current state, as with the currently displayed page, but the increased volatility and potential for richer interaction will be a whole new beast.

2/20/2004
CMS Seminar at IA Summit 2004

The Content Management for Information Architects seminar promises to be the best one day line up of CMS knowledge anywhere. Where else can you see Boiko, Rockley, Byrne, and Busch all on one stage, all laying it down with IA as their focus? CMS is the future, girls and boys, I really don’t believe we’ll be manually editing presentation code and content forever, let’s get together and conquer this bad boy.

1/20/2004