This morning I went to the Apple home page to find one of their commercials. I went to search and noticed that the behavior mimicked Apple’s own operating system and the “suggest” features available in browser search boxes. What I liked is that it not only offered suggested terms but displayed media previews along with the term. I realize this isn’t especially groundbreaking, given the amount of AJAX development in recent years. However, it reminded me that as Peter Morville analyzes search patterns, another to add to the list is the behavior of providing suggestions before a user has even executed a search. This might remedy the need to distinguish between a basic and advanced search, or the need to revise a search after seeing results. Notice the screen capture image (click image to see original) where I entered “ads” as my search term.

Tags: [Apple, search patterns, search, Peter Morville, Partial Recall]

This year your peers and industry experts will speak about how topics such as social networking, gaming, patterns, tagging, taxonomies, and a wide range of IA tools and techniques can help as users ‘experience information’.

– April 10-14, 2008 (Miami, Florida USA)” – (About the Summit)

I went to last year’s summit and found it very informative. You might consider checking it out – it’s in Miami!

(hat tip: InfoDesign)

Tags: [iasummit2008, information architecture, Partial Recall, user experience, usability, interaction design]

• Information Architecture (IA) Summit
  March 22-26, 2007, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) Conference
  May 2007, San Jose, California, USA
• Society for Technical Communication (STC) Annual Conference
  May 13-16, 2007, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• Usability Professionals Association (UPA) Annual Conference
  June 11-15, 2007, Austin, Texas, USA
• University of Maryland HCIL Open House

Here are some of the notes I had prepared:

What I Learned at the IA Summit – 2007

Resources:

• IA Summit Conference Program (with links)
• Session Slides
• Photos
• nForm User Experience Trading Cards

Opening Keynote: Joshua Prince-Ramus

http://www.iasummit.org/proceedings/2007/prince_ramus_joshua

Joshua is best known as the architect of the Seattle Central Library. In his keynote, Joshua outlined issues surrounding limitations of space, resources and differing business goals and provided a glimpse into how his firm pushes for the best solution given these constraints. He had presented a similar talk to TED in February 2006:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/view/id/49

Closing Plenary: Rashmi Sinha

http://www.iasummit.org/proceedings/2007/sinha_rashmi

Rashmi is the creator of SlideShare. She discussed how her team bucked traditional usability methods to rapidly deploy a social web site product in beta mode. Her slides can be accessed from SlideShare:

http://www.slideshare.net/rashmi/ia-summit-closing-plenery/

Creating the Adaptive Interface: Stephen Anderson

http://www.iasummit.org/proceedings/2007/the_conversation_gets_interest

Stephen offered an inspiring presentation by arguing that the desirability of an application can be related to the adaptability of the interface. “More than removing unused menu options or collaborative filtering, this would include functionality that is revealed over time as well as interface elements that change based on usage.” His slides can be accessed from SlideShare:

http://www.slideshare.net/stephenpa/the-conversation-gets-interesting-creating-the-adaptive-interface/

Best Practices for Form Design: Luke Wroblewski

http://www.iasummit.org/proceedings/2007/best_practices_for_form_design

Luke takes the seemingly insignificant “form” and argues that clearly presented information, interaction, and feedback can make all the difference when a user needs to communicate with a company (i.e., commerce, access, engagement). His slides can be accessed from SlideShare:

http://www.slideshare.net/psykoreactor/best-practices-for-form-design/

Rich mapping and soft systems: new tools for creating conceptual models: Gene Smith and Matthew Milan

http://www.iasummit.org/proceedings/2007/rich_mapping_and_soft_systems

Gene and Matthew explain that Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) is a holistic problem solving framework that can be used to design and model interactions between organizations, people, environments, products and services. Identifying the CATWOE (Customers, Actors, Transformative Process, Worldview, Owners, Environmental Constraints) helps to add context to any project by articulating the “root definitions” of the problem. Their slides can be accessed from SlideShare:

http://www.slideshare.net/gsmith/systems-thinking-rich-mapping-and-conceptual-models/

Tags: [usability, iasummit2007, CATWOE, Gene Smith, SlideShare, Rashmi Sinha, Joshua Prince-Ramis, UPA, user experience, Stephen Anderson, Partial Recall]

Rashmi is the creator of SlideShare.

[Runtime: 49 slides | Please make sure you have the latest version of Adobe Flash installed on your computer to watch this slideshow. To download it, please visit: http://www.adobe.com/ ]

Tags: [Rashmi Sinha, SlideShare, User Experience, PowerPoint, Slideshow, Partial Recall, IASummit2007]

An opening keynote: Joshua Prince-Ramus.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn how much commonality there is between “brick and mortar” architecture and information architecture. Joshua outlined issues surrounding limitations of space, resources and differing business goals and provided a glimpse into how his firm pushes for the best solution given these constraints. He had presented a similar talk to TED in February 2006, so seems best to just show you his related talk.

[Runtime: 20:09 | Please make sure you have the latest version of Adobe Flash installed on your computer to watch this video. To download it, please visit: http://www.adobe.com/ ]

Tags: [Joshua Prince-Ramus, architect, architecture, Seattle Public Library, TED, IA Summit, IA Summit 2007, Partial Recall, information architecture]

The Library of Congress has posted its webcast of Peter Morville’s July 20th talk on Ambient Findability. You can view the 45 minute webcast here.

Tags: [Ambient Findability, Peter Morville, findability, usability, information architecture, Library of Congress, video, webcast]

On Thursday July 20 (11:30 – 12:30), Peter Morville will speak at the Library of Congress about his book, “Ambient Findability,” a history of how people search for information, and how they now find their way through a world of information overload.

Although I am slammed at work, I’m hoping to attend.

Tags: [Library of Congress, Peter Morville, Ambient Findability, Washington, DC, Partial Recall]

Due to the large amount of content, I will be updating this a bit more to fill in the blanks of the later sessions of the day. Check back for more info.

Welcome

Jenny Preece opened the symposium discusssing the College of Information Science and its collaboration with the HCIL. Dr. Preece indicated that the team is very interested in social, collaborative technologies and processes.

Benjamin Bederson continued the welcome, discussing the interdisciplinary nature of the group (psychology, information science, computer science). Web 2.0, he indicated, is succeeding because there us a greater focus on issues of usability, democracy, and user-centric design.

Link to Poster Session Images

International Children’s Digital Library

• reaches 1 million users
• Now has 1000 books freely available
• www.childrenslibrary.org

Keynote: Ben Shneiderman

Creativity Support Tools: A Grand Challenge for HCI

• Software must support the creative process
• A new research direction is emerging
• Dramatically improved creativity support tools are possible
• Multi-dimensional in-depth long-term case-studies (MILCs)
• Guidelines for design are emerging

Session 1: Visual Interfaces

1. Improving the search experience by organizing Web search results with meaningful and stable categories
• Video shown to display a search engine that shows a results list but also has a left-hand column that organizes search results into meaningful category overview
• types:
  • textual
  • graphical
  • stable
  • clustering
• www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/categorizedoverview
2. Supporting Library Scholars with Data Mining and Visual Interfaces
• Data mining interfaces can be designed to be accessible to literary scholars
• Visual interface for data mining
  • Accessible
  • Provocational
• www.noraproject.org
• (Reminds me of Mood Project)
3. Network Visualization to Support Exploration of Supreme Court Decision Patterns
• Analyzed 2000+ court cases (data sets)
• Ability to visually restrict or expand district information
• www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/nvss
4. Balancing Systematic and Flexible Exploration of Social Networks
• Example: National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism (START)
• Compiled a dataset of allknown terrorist attacks (currently 70,000 over 27 years)
• “Hot” and “Cold” colors emphasize geographic locations that are either volatile or peaceful
• www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/socialaction
5. NetLens: Iterative Exploration of Content-Actor Network Data
• There are challenges to network visualization
• NetLens freely downloadable and used with any database?
• Heuristic evaluation by NIST
  • Navigation is easy and required little training
  • UI widgets are understood by most people
  • The metaphor for the visualization is understandable
• www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/netlens

Session 2: Public Access

1. When Children are Digital Librarians: Reader Response to the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL)
• Look at the role of children’s emotion, response, and book recommendations
• Fantastic search model for children (click image to sort by book jacket color, book size, etc.)
• www.childrenslibrary.org
2. Children Sharing Stories with ICDL Communities: A Pilot Study in Mexico and Maryland
• Develop communities for children to discuss books across cultures
• Identity representation was a big hit
  • Girls drew pictures of themselves
  • Boys drew pictures of things they enjoy (e.g., soccer ball, monster, etc.)
• www.childrenslibrary.org
3. Collaborative Educational Technology to Enhance Grade School Field Trips
• Tangible Flags- physical colored flag with embedded RFID tag
• Students place flags at physical locations and use tablet pcs to draw what they see near the flag
• Students use the tablet pc to read the RFID of a flag to load information that a previous student may have added
• Students can collaboratively add notes and edits to the drawing using their own tablet pc
• Although collaborative, only a few students at a time can collaborate
4. The Promise and Perils of New Voting Technologies
• Remember the Florida voting problems?
• Team reviewed the usability and accuracy of a variety of voting methods/systems
• Touch Screens proved to be the most usable and accurate
• www.cs.umd.edu/~bederson/voting

Session 3: Interaction and Devices

1. Thumb Movement: Designing for One-Handed Use of Small Devices
• Analyzed mobile devices -how easily can you interact with them using one hand?
• Looked at various cellphone styles and various PDA styles
• Created molds of these devices just to represent the shape and size of the device (removed existing buttons and controls)
• Added LED diodes to record thumb movements
• Determined that side to side movement isbest – avoid repetitive diagonal movements
• Determined that for larger devices (PDAs), strive for interaction targets toward the center of the device (e.g., Palm Treo 700w)
• www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/mobile/
2. Eye Tracking as Implicit Feedback for Improving Search Results
• Eye movement indicates visual interest
• Visual interest = cognitive interest
• Tracked users focus on paragraphs of text usinglarge cumbersome head unit
• In the future, will use an eye tracking device that is embedded in a computer monitor – Tobii
3. ModelCraft: Capturing Freehand Annotations and Edits on Physical Models
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4. A Pen-top Interface for Interactive Paper
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5. Hardware Support for Digital Document Navigation
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6. Mobile Mapping and Personal Driving History
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Tags: [Partial Recall, hci, umcp, hcil, conference, visual interfaces, social software, Ben Shneiderman, Jenny Preece, cognition]

On Saturday May 20, the local chapter of DC information architects got together to recap topics that were addressed and discussed at the 2006 IA Summit. This was a long time coming for me. I’ve been meaning to attend these local meetings, but life has, of course, gotten in the way.

Livia Labate has provided a wealth of useful material, including MP3 recordings of the local DC event, as well as links to material that was presented at the Summit.

Anyway, the following is a brief summary of my notes. Certainly these notes do not codify the entirety of the redux – just my own brain dump based on notes taken at the event. The topics to be addressed are listed below (those in bold are the ones we had time to discuss):

Overview

1. Summit Overview#
2. Tagging#
3. Wireframes#
4. New Technology#
5. Content Management
6. Business and IA
7. Theory#
8. International

Summit Overview

Dan Brown facilitated the DC-IA redux, and one of the things he discussed centered around the format of the Summit. He mentioned that in the past, there was a greater selection of things to attend and a greater variety of topics. On the other hand, he mentioned that there were better opportunities to connect with people outside of sessions this past year. He asked for input on how to create a culture that would both maximize connections outside of sessions and make good use in-session time.

Tagging

James Melzer addressed the topic of tagging, focusing primarily on using the bookmark tool del.icio.us.

Some discussion revolved around making a distinction between a group versus a crowd. A group, James indicated, is intentional, known, and planned. In contrast, a crowd is unknown and not planned. Del.icio.us embraces both, and James noted that sometimes crowds become groups in Del.icio.us because is sometimes ends up being the same people who are the forefront of tagging, and their aggregate work sets trends for other users.

Tagging::Kinds of Tags

• Description (Singular)
• Categorization (plural)
• Opinion
• Action (temporary, personal)
• Relation (for userid)
• Insider Reference (e.g., “enterprise_ia”)

Wireframes

Nathan Curtis discussed wireframes. Apparently, Nathan worked at K12 for a few months just before I arrived. I’ve heard very good things about him – in particular, how he shared some of his wireframing techniques with current K12 IAs.

Wireframes::Techniques

Nathan explained that there was a discussion of using different wireframing techniques/tools, including:

• paper prototyping
• Adobe Flash (interaction)
• iRise
• MS Visual Studio
• XHTML
• MS Visio

Wireframes::Challenges

Nathan mentioned that IAs need to struggle with representing interactions over time. With the advent of RIAs such as Flash and Ajax, IAs need to be able to communicate how information is to be presented, but how user behaviors will affect the feedback and visual representation of a web application. Nathan mentioned Bill Scott at Yahoo! and how he uses interaction storyboards, complete with interaction matrices to document all behavior changes for a given interaction type.

One technique Nathan mentioned was to segment the “modules” that comprise a wireframe. In other words, reusable widgets can be saved as components to be used over and over again. In addition, Nathan commented on Kevin Cheng’s use of comics to communicate HCI usability issues with stakeholders.

New Technology

Nathan briefly discussed how new technologies are affecting the profession. For instance, Laszlo and Adobe Flex make it easier to move from a rapid prototype to a working solution. The web metaphor is moving away from “pages” to “mashups,” so IAs need to be able to embrace change and add new skill sets to accomodate for this change.

The group also discussed game design and the use of incentives as a way to interact with the user.

Theory

Olga Howard took some more time to cover the distinction of “crowd” versus “group.” With regard to tagging in Del.icio.us, the group discussed how there may be a flurry of different tags used to classify objects, but over time, the number of tags flattens to an accepted assortment.

Next, the discussion turned to Morville’s championing of “findability.” The basic questions to ask include:

• Is it useful?
• Is it desirable?
• Is it valuable?
• Is it credible?

Conclusion

Since I have not been able to attend the IA Summit yet, I found this redux to be pretty informative. In addition to getting useful information, I enjoyed spending time with other like-minded individuals who have a passion for creating usable intuitive products.

Tags: [dc-ia, dcia, Livia Labate, Partial Recall, brownorama, James Melzer, information architecture, iasummit, wireframes]

Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA) refers to the process of making information easy to access throughout a discrete entity – in this case, an organization. According to Wikipedia, Information Architecture is, in part, defined simply as “the practice of structuring information (knowledge or data).” Note that this simplified definition makes no reference to the Web or information systems of any kind, a la Richard Saul Wurman.

This post attempts to rethink EIA and argues that information architecture need not be constrained to designing structures and managing content as it relates to the Web or for any electronic system for that matter. Instead, I argue that an enterprise information architect might also be called, as Thomas Davenport coins it, an “Information Ecologist.” In addition to the commonly defined responsibilities of the iA (little ‘i’), the EIA or IE adds the following skillsets/responsibilies to his or her repertoire:

• Information Audit/Mapping
• Business Process Engineering

The end result is that not all information finds its way into a web-based system. Some information may be best kept in other formats. However, an IE‘s responsibility is to structure information so that it is valued as a resource on par with human capital, physical capital, and the like. Although information systems are best suited for information management and information findability, the IE must map all information in order to have a comprehensive inventory.

Background

I’ve been at my new job for close to three weeks now and during the first week I was inserted into a project. Without getting into specifics, K12 develops both digital (online) and “hardcopy” products for specific educational market segments. Their current CMS is the backbone of their production efforts.

I am enjoying taking this on as my first project, in part because it forces me to understand the business of K12 and its workflows. I’ve been able to interview different stakeholders and users, thereby forcing myself out of seclusion and getting to know my colleagues. In the process, however, I’ve been faced with the dilemma: What exactly is a CMS and what is the hand-off between system processes and people processes?

Defining a CMS Means Analyzing an Organization’s Information Assets

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the Information Architecture (IA) Summit (As an aside, I hope to attend next year – although it’s hard to be participatory now that I’m a relatively new parent), and subsequently, two of the many sessions that interested me: in this case, the session on Enterprise Information Architecture, along with Dan Brown’s [slides], really got me thinking about the definition of who and what information architecture is.

Before I elaborate on EIA, let me make a bridge to the discussion by first remarking on the potential responsibility of an IA to participate in the process of gathering requirements, designing interfaces, and participating in the implementation of a CMS solution for a given organization. As Dan indicates in his slides, today’s organization is predominantly comprised of knowledge workers, yet CMS solutions tend to subscribe to the formula of “business as factory” with cookie-cutter workflows. Instead, businesses are living entities, defined by the fact that there are some skeletal business processes, but these processes are often dynamic and fluid in nature. That is, they change and are flexible – need to be flexible – as the makeup, growth, and focus of the business and its parts changes.

Many of the people I spoke with simply assumed that any new solution would replace the same business function of the current CMS – in this case, an asset repository, product staging area, and informal workflow system. However, as I spoke with different stakeholders, new needs readily emerged. We discussed needs for digital asset management (DAM), business process management (BPM) workflow, and document management. So, as I analyzed K12′s information assets, I learned that “content management” can mean many things to many people.

Little IA, Big IA

Which brings me back to the issue of rethinking EIA. Discussions abound which attempt to define where the boundaries of IA end and where [insert job function here] begins. For example, Louis Rosenfeld and Jess McMullin created the following diagram to make sense of the boundaries:

The problem I have with this diagram is that the end game is the design of a (web based) information system. I think an IA‘s vision must be greater than an information system, particularly if we take Dan’s metaphor and look at the organization as a dynamic living entity – in essense, the defining “information” system. It’s almost like distinguishing between the CIO of a company and the IA. Are the two so dissimilar? Should they be? Could this be where little iA ends and big IA begins?

Becoming Information Ecologists

The parallels between an enterprise information architect and an information ecologist are quite striking. According to Davenport & Prusak (1997, p. 29), the basic responsibilities of an information ecologist include:

1. Integrating Diverse Types of Information;
2. Recognizing Evolutionary Change;
3. Emphasizing Observation and Description; and
4. Focusing on People and Information Behavior.

Perhaps the progression of an IA‘s scope of responsibilities might look something like this:

Conclusion

So, where does this discussion leave us? Traditional information architecture concerns itself with the structure and design of information for a specific web entity or information system. Over the years, the work of an IA has moved from dealing with the information presentation (locate, find, use, etc.) of static structures (form) to interactive behaviors (function). Lou Rosenfeld fantasized about what it would take for IAs to move into more executive and strategic positions within an organization, and I hope this post reshapes our thinking. As we move into and think about EIA, let’s structure and design the information of the enterprise using the perspective of an information ecologist.

Tags: [Louis Rosenfeld, bloug, James Melzer, Brownorama, greenonions, information architecture, eia, enterprise information architecture, Thomas Davenport, Information Ecology, IA Summit, ia, ux, cio]

References:

1. Brown, D. (March, 2006). New Approaches to Managing Content (IA Summit 2006 Workshop) [Slides - 4.3MB PDF].
2. Burk, Jr., C.F. & Horton, F.W. (1991). Infomap: A Complete Guide to Discovering Corporate Information Sources. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
3. Davenport, T.H. & Prusak, L. (1997). Information Ecology : Mastering the Information and Knowledge Environment. New York: Oxford University.
4. Melzer, J. (2005). Enterprise Information Architecture in Context. jamesmelzer.com.
5. Rosenfeld, L. (2005). Updated Enterprise IA Roadmap. louisrosenfeld.com.