Noise Between Stations

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  • Amazon Gold Box

    There’s a classic Seinfeld episode where Kramer’s new phone number is one digit from Movie Fone’s, so, surrendering to the misdialed calls, he imitates the automated voice. When he can’t interpret the key presses he improvises, ‘Why don’t you just tell me the name of the movie you want to see?” Which is kinda what interfaces should let us do.

    We have a running joke at work: when a navigation design gets away from what the user wants someone says, ‘Why don’t you just tell me what you want to see?‘

    It seems like Amazon took this same approach… ‘Hey Victor, why don’t you just tell me which products you want in your Gold Box?’‘

  • Interact?

    James and I attended Why Games Matter, centered on celebrating Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, called by Warren Spector the only current book to focus on game design, as opposed to merely the mechanics of making games.

    Somewhat ironically the most interesting commentary came not from Salen or Zimmerman but from the other speakers. Spector at one point said, perhaps blasphemously, Sometimes people don’t want interaction. I think of this when I arrive at sites like Stuart Moore which gives you control or can display itself like a movie, unvieling the content in a linear story.

  • Content Management Systems

  • Design Principles for Content Management Applications

    I’m working on a content management application – the part of the content management system the authors and administrators use – and jotted down a few principles to follow. They may not be applicable in every case, but expanding along these lines might lead to some design patterns.



    • Manage content, not pages. This makes content reuse easier.


    • Reuse existing content when possible. The interface should make it easy to


      do so.


    • Content should improve the user experience. When deciding whether to reuse


      content or create new content that will facilitate a significantly better user experience, create new content.


    • Store content once: Do not create (or allow the user to create) copies.


    • Facilitate quick updating: Reduce need to update the site through less


      convinient processes, such as uploading templates outside of the CMA.


    • Content is valuable: Content takes a long time to create and update. Do


      not delete or expire content unless absolutely necessary. In general, more content is better.


    • Separate content from presentation: wherever possible, separate display


      text from HTML and other formatting information.


    • Design CMA display to resemble CDA: when possible, this helps to present


      authors with a familiar visual design


  • Experience People

    Challis Hodge has launched Experience People, a user experience search firm. I have to respect the moxie he has to launch a recruiting practice in this economy. It makes sense to pick a niche he knows – design practitioners who get it and employers who get it – and he probably doesn’t need to fill many positions to make a living, given the low overhead. Nice work!

  • Elephant, the film

    Saw Gus Van Sant and Diane Keaton on Charlie Rose yesterday discussing Elephant (trailer), their new film about a high school shooting reminiscent of Columbine. It looks awesome, telling the story as a documentary instead of what was the only viewpoint available previously, the victims’.

  • Shape of information, a summary

    Andrew Dillon’s work on digital genres, the web, and the shape of information is some of the most exciting research I’ve come across in the field of navigation. He has investigated how we can use our familiarity with genres to navigate, how navigation of information is different than navigation in physical space, and that creating navigation is essentially about creating meaning, not just road signs. And he manages to do this while retaining essentially a top-down perspective, not succumbing to a focus on merely organizing content. He doesn’t go as far as addressing larger user experience issues head on, but he positions his work in a way that acknowledges those issues.

    If you have access to JASIS past issues, a good starting point is Spatial-Semantics: How Users Derive Shape from Information Space (JASIS. 51(6):521­528, 2000). Otherwise download “It’s the journey and the destination” (PDF) where he questions the difference between navigation and content… ‘while physical navigation might be neatly divorced from the purpose of the journey, interactions with digital documents are not so easily divided. The purpose of moving though the information space is frequently the same purpose as the journey, to reach an end point of comprehension – and in this case the journey is the destination.’

    Here’s my short form raw notes, which aren’t necessarily helpful to anyone else until I do something with them…


    • Don’t misapply navigation from the physical domain to the semantic domain


    • User’s perceive “global” schemata (generally how sites work) and “instantiated” schemata (how this particular site works). This can be apply to ideas of design conventions.


    • The structure of a genre – the shape – is a global schemata. Users can predict ordering and grouping of elements. They know where a typical element belongs in the overall structure.


    • Examples of genres online might be articles, blog postings, email headers…


    • Need to leverage existing shape, and fit information into existing genres when possible.


    • Cites research (Snowberry et al) that menu navigation has (basically) bad scent. So these ideas are helpful when categories don’t work due to unfamiliarity with the domain.


    • Recognition of genre depends on experience and expertise of that genre. Integrate these attributes into user models.


    • Upon entering a new location, users will identify unique spatial configurations (Siegal and White, Mandles). Immediately after, semantic processing begins.


    • Shape is a property conveyed both by physical form and by information cotent


    • “Technology is more malleable that the user” – Amen!


    • Contrast expertise with differences in cognition (spatial ability or memory span). Also needs to be integrated into user models.


    • Disorientation occurs when short term memory (STM) is overloaded (by lack of good navigation)


    • Genre could be based on how a community uses information and varies by culture. Another attribute for user model.


  • New Books

    A new IA book, which isn’t so rare anymore, by Alan Gilchrist and crew: Information Architecture: Designing Information Environments for Purpose.

    Also, What is Web Design? by Nico McDonald. Never met him, but he seems like a smart guy. That title manages to stay short, on topic, and also target a audience with a certain expertise. It looks to be a treatise on process and organizations with several case studies.

  • Documentation

  • Poor, defenseless little wireframes

    Liz pens a great piece on simplifying wireframes. Doing so definitely requires an understanding of your audience, knowing what your audience assumes and what has to be explicitly recorded. Physical architects had settled on conventions before leaving for CAD, and we will too.

    Riffing from there, Christina asks if we still need wireframes, and gets several interesting comments in response. I’ve felt the same way at times, getting frustrated with the disparity between wireframes and visual designs. But my opinion is yes, we do still need them. First because the entire span of Internet system design activities is difficult to do alone for a system of any significant size. Wireframes signal a useful point of division of labor among a team. While I’d love us to become auteurs – having a vision, drawing something beautiful, engineering the structure, designing the interior, creating the furniture – we can’t all be Frank Lloyd Wright, and even he had his draftsmen.

    Second, we as people need a simple way to model our ideas. We instinctively sketch on paper or on whiteboards to work out an idea, and wireframes serve this role well. While they sometimes strive to answer the question, ‘What is the design?’ they are only obligated to answer, ‘What is the structure?’

    Regarding what innies and outies are capable of, having made the move from consultant to in-house, I hope my experience of transferring structured design practices is not simply an isolated case but a trend of knowledge spreading through the industry.

  • Effective View Navigation

    If I were to edit a historical collection of essays on information architecture, it would have to include George Furnas‘ Effective View Navigation (PDF). Published in 1997 and borrowing from earlier work that harks back to ’95, it is not to be read for new methods of navigation. It does however provide serious analysis of a fundamental information architecture challenge, ‘despite the vastness of an information structure, the views must be small, moving around must not take too many steps and the route to any target be must be discoverable.’ His focus is on what to do in that small view (i.e. a page, or a viewport of a page) including ideas that form the basis of information scent.

    For serious information architects, EVN is a must read. At eight ACM-style pages it’s not long but it is dense, requiring me to double-back often. His initial discussion of Efficient View Traversibility sets aside the user experience perspective in favor of graph theory and so can be a dense read to the practitioner, but it is necessary to his later arguments which are worth understanding.

    Here come the spoilers: after an interesting logical analysis of the problem he concedes that one navigation scheme – what we might call global navigation today – would be hard-pressed to provide access to a large information structure. Along the way he predicts the rise of a combination of global and local navigation.

    His ideas of efficient view traversibility provide (in my interpretation) a good mathematical explanation of creating short paths to target information and a helpful last resort after other methods fail, ‘always remember the strategy of putting a traversable infrastructure on an otherwise unruly information structure!‘ For example, as a last resort, stuff the information into a balanced tree. If we combine this with a user-centered design method, we might say, ‘If research of the users does not reveal a clear path to the information, and the users understand the domain enough to understand the meaning of a set of hierarchical categories, then stuff the information into a balanced tree.’ Other conclusions of his, combined with a design process, can yield a more systematic design method than what we have now (which is why I’m trudging through this stuff).

    His use of navigation requirements nicely frames his discussion, for example, ‘Every node must have good residue at every other node.‘ We rarely have such strict requirements in our designs, but the practice of using navigation requirements – falling somewhere between scenarios and screen designs – helps increase the likelihood of creating successful navigation.

    His setting aside of user experience considerations at times seems unworkable; the goal of efficiency can be at odds with what may be cognitively effective with users. But the thoughtful designer can factor that into the use of his ideas.

  • Move Upstream

    Bill Seitz reports on a talk by Tom Peters…White Collar jobs are going to disappear over the next decade to the same degree that Blue Collar jobs did. It’s just a matter of who gets you: cheap labor from India, or a silicon wafer.

    I keep joking to friends that I’m going to work half-time from India so I can charge highly competitive rates and live like a king. It’s sounding less and less crazy.

  • Email + Website

    We usual IA suspects don’t write much about email and web integration (or streaming video, or some other neglected topics) but it’d be helpful. This is just a reminder to myself to see who has written about it.

    Some basic delivery options:

    • Text/RTF/HTML in email
    • Enclosure
    • Link to website

    Some basic criteria for deciding on the delivery option:

    • End user’s method of access to info
    • Immediacy of message desired
    • Resources required to produce
    • Integration with other (e.g. offline) aspects of user experience

    Incidentally, I just discovered Sippey and Arthur work for Quris, an email production company.

  • Introvolothanapolana

    Can I just say how much I like the name Plan B for the morning after pill? ‘Morning after‘ carries weird associations, and I respect the company for choosing a name that 1) reinforces that this is not a Plan A method of contraception, and 2) is not some abstract, invented, psuedo-Latin word. Nice work by the Women’s Capital Corporation.