wake up!

At the IA Summit a week ago in Miami, I co-taught two full-day workshops (on patterns with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, and social design with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter), moderated a panel (on presence and other aspects of social web architecture with Gene Smith, Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Andrew Crow), and gave a presentation with Austin Govella from Comcast on designing with patterns. (Phew.)

I finally got my slides posted to slideshare today from the panel and the presentation. (Eventually, if and when audio becomes available, I’ll sync them up.) You’ll notice if you look at my recent talks that I am remixing a lot of the same points. I am trying to learn to be more shameless about this, since the material is usually fresh for each new audience until it’s fully distributed.

In that same vein, if you’re in SF you can find me at Ignite SF tonight doing a five minute talk (yes, covering some of the same ground as my BayCHI talk in this case) on the topic “Grasping Social Patterns.” I’m nervous as hell, not least because the lineup of other speakers is so incredible. So even if I bomb, you’ll get some pretty inspiration stuff from the likes of Kathy Sierra, Annalee Newitz, Lane Becker, and others.

For now, here are my summit talks:

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and

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If you’re interested in interaction design patterns or in the elements of social web design, then come on down to Miami in April for the IA Summit and either sign up for one of the two pre-conference workshops I’m helping teach or see my presentation or panel in the main program.

Here are the basic facts about the two workshops (more details in the title links):

• Design patterns: from interaction to design to build is a full-day workshop I’m teaching with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, colleagues of mine from the user experience design team of the Yahoo! Developer Network. Erin founded the pattern library and has captained it throughout its entire existence (going on four years) with the help of three curators, me being the third. Lucas is the lead designer on the YDN redesign project and works directly with the Yahoo! User Interface library team, so he’s intimately familiar with the development challenges and issues involved with implementing design patterns in the real world.

• Design and architecture of social web experiences is a full-day workshop I’m teaching with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter. Christina is a director of product management at LinkedIn, a co-founder of the IA Institute, founder of Boxes and Arrows (the leading online user experience design magazine), and founder of Cucina Media, the makers of PublicSquare, the publishing/community software B+A now runs on. Joshua Porter is a former associate of Jared Spool’s UIE and writes the popular Bokardo blog on social web design.

And here are the basic details about the presentation and the panel:

• Designing with Patterns in the Real World is a presentation I am giving with Austin Govella, a senior information architect at Comcast Media. We both have plenty of hands-on experience with the trials, tribulations, and occasional triumphs that stem from applying design patterns to real world interaction, information, and interface design problems and we plan to let it all hang out.

• Presence, Identity, and Attention in Social Web Architecture is a panel I’m moderating featuring a “murderer’s row” of some of the leading thinkers in user experience and social web design: Christina Wodtke of LinkedIn, Andrew Hinton of Vanguard, Gene Smith of nForm, and Brian Oberkirch of Small Good Thing. I’ve been talking to all of these folks for some time about my latest hobbyhorse (presence) and the rest of the “human OS” stack that social web applications are built on. I plan to run a tight ship and am expecting a great multi-perspective dialogue to ensue.

I’ll devote a whole blog post to each of these items as the Summit gets closer, but wanted to mention it now while there’s still time to sign up for the conference at early-bird prices.

See you in Miami?

At BarCamp Block earlier this year I led a discussion of social media design patterns. The slides I posted were really more just about patterns and how we deal with them at Yahoo! But the group exercise was to brainstorm a huge list of social media and social networking activities that could be described and documented as patterns.

These are not the patterns themselves, but at least one pattern could probably be written around each of these gestures. We found it easiest in the brainstorm to just rattle off a list of gerunds (“adding, blocking, friending,” etc.).

The list we came up is also not exhaustive or definitive. It’s one group’s idea of the various patterns that a social system could support. The initial list was posted at the BarCamp Block wiki. Then Kent Bye, one of the participants, took a stab at re-sorting it a bit and created a visualization. He also then hand-copied it into an outline format and sent me his “version two” of the list.

Since then I’ve made a few more tweaks and have produced a version 3 outline. I’ve been working on visualizing it myself, so I turned the OPML into an OmniOutliner file and then imported that into OmniGraffle. The map is so tangled that Graffle had a hard time displaying it without crossing lines, so I spent some more time dragging the various nodes and clusters around until they were each separate. The end result is that it’s huge of course, and still by no means final or exhaustive or authoritative.

In fact, it’s decidedly not the taxonomy of social media patterns we’re working on internally at Yahoo! Think of it as an open source, collaborative work in progress. The thumbnail image above links to a full-sized PDF you should feel free to grab to get a better look at the current state of play of this idea, and if you’d like the OPML file or any other format, just drop me a note and I’ll send it to you.

When I get a moment, I’ll drop by the BarCamp Block wiki and upload the file there in several formats too, at least until someone provides a better place for hosting this project.

Michael Wesch, who created the virally popular internet video called Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us (its success drew on a sort of meta-application of the very concepts it discussed), was the keynote speaker at IDEA 2007 last week. As part of his keynote, he previewed two videos he has now released to the web.

The first, Information R/evolution, examines the challenges we all face in this age of information glut and shortening attention spans:

The second, made collaboratively by one of his classes (Wesch is a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University, where he is launching a Digital Ethnography working group to “examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction”), looks carefully at how we are teaching today and how out of sync it has become with the lives of contemporary students:

In some ways, for me, the highlight of the conference was Wesch’s story about how he frightened himself one night in the communal sleeping quarters in New Guineau when he thought his own arm, which had fallen asleep, was a snake lying across his body. This story became the kernel of Wesch’s reputation with the people he was studying and living among, and helped him realize that telling stories is a big part of how we gain identities and fit ourselves (and others) into society.

I regretted not being able to attend the first-ever IDEA conference last year in Seattle and I was thrilled when the organizers decided to hold the second IDEA conference in New York City, my home town, at the legendary Parsons School of Design.

IDEA has already in one year established a reputation for bringing big-idea folks together to share their ideas about design, architecture, shared information spaces, visualization of dataa, and what it means to be human in an internetworked machine age. I expect this year’s conference program to be every bit as stimulating.

IDEA stands for Information, Design, Experience, Access, and its presented by the IA Institute, an organization on whose board I have the privilege of serving at this time. My involvement in the conference planning has been focused on getting the website up and recruiting volunteers for the technical tasks required (my portfolio, as it were, on the board of directors of the IAI is technical matters). Events director Sarah Rice, IDEA founder Peter Merholz, and volunteer event coordinator Greg Corrin deserve the credit for pulling this year’s conference together.

Technical volunteers Beck Tench, Chi-chi Oguekwe, Grace Lau, Susan Wong, and Gordon McLean have all chipped in to build and maintain the site, with very little supervision or input from me, so they deserve a great deal of credit as well.

For anyone attending (or thinking of attending) IDEA this year, consider signing up in addition at the Crowdvine social networking site. There’s still time to register (the conference runs on October 4th and 5th, with an optional pre-conference event on the 3rd), and if you do manage to come to New York, look me up at Parsons and say hi.

I am curating a series of articles at the venerable information architecture (and user experience) web magazine Boxes and Arrows, based on the panel I moderated on the same topic at this year’s IA Summit.

The first article in the series is Joe Lamantia’s It Seemed Like the Thing to Do at the Time: The Power of State Mind. Joe looks at the big picture, literally, comparing business failure ot catastrophic societal failure, using the Easter Island culture as a case study (as well as his own experience with a startup).

I’m really glad to see this article published because we had limited time on the panel and I wanted to hear more of Joe’s thoughts about these scenarios.

Fascinating stuff and more to come.

Here are my slides from my presentation, Mobile Information Architecture: Designing Experiences for the Mobile Web:

(I may update them with a 2.0 version based on some new learnings from subsequent conversations, and a different idea of how to pace the imagery.)

And here are my slides from the panel I moderated, Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs:

So I just wasted, er, spent a half hour surfing twitter pages and poaching friends of friends. I noticed that I had a strong gut sense of who I felt it was ok to befriend, most of the time, but that it doesn’t necessarily map to people who are actually my friends or whom I’ve met, although it may factor in how recently I’ve dealt with them.

For some, I added them because I’m interested in what they have to ssay or what they’re doing. I anticipate that their feed will be intereesting, or the preview of their recent thoughts is copmpelling. I’m aware that some of these people may not remember me, may not add me back (which is fine) or allow me to add them if they are twittering privately.

The etiquette is awkward. The UI at twitter sort of implies you should add people back, but that may be just in the contexts of private twitters.

I often notice odd disjunctions between my friend lists or various social services. Some people have talked about being able to bulk upload friend networks using hcards or something from one service to the next, but I wonder if that mapping really makes sense. For whatever reason, for example, Joi Ito is a contact of mine in Flickr but not on LinkedIn. At least one of us probably wants it to be that way.

The whole topics of reciprocity and social guidelines about when it’s ok to ignore a connection or a friend request and when it carries a social burden to do so is interesting too.

This has been another in a series of posts full of questions and half-baked proto-thoughts with few answers or real insights.

Speaking of twitter, I’ve dressed up my sidebar with badge bling. Been thinking hard about seriously redesigning my main blog and possibly moving it over to mediajunkie, which may be the catchiest domain name I own.

John Battelle’s Searchblog: The Blog Merchandising Problem, or, Blogs, V 2.0 (2.1? 3.0?)… (via Jay Fienberg)

The great power of blogs has always been simplicity, but are we ready to go to the next step?

Quick hit ‘n’ run linking: Joe Lamantia’s The Challenge of Dashboards and Portals at Boxes and Arrows.

Congratulations to Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville on the release of the third edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web!

At a time when people who do information architecture (please don’t call them information architects!) are having yet another one of their many identity crises, questioning the value or the future of their chosen discipline, it’s nice to see the classic Polar Bear book chugging along and updated for the post-millennial, post-dotcom-bust, post-Web 2.0 world.

Dan Brown, author of Communicating Design points us to this interesting example of a search interface for navigating a children’s library.

A recent discussion on the IA Institute mailing list revolved around selling the value of IA to executives. One reason why we address IA and other user experience concerns within the context of web strategy here at Extractable is because it helps communicate the value of the planning process in terms of aligning with business strategy and goals, something an executive can understand without having to keep up with the latest changes in Internet jargon (user interface design, content strategy, usability, information architecture, user experience, interaction design, customer experience, experience planning, and so on).

This led IAI board member Stacy Surla to point to an article by IAI board member Samantha Starmer on the topic Selling Information Architecture: Getting Executives to Say “Yes”. The whole article is worth reading, of course, but here are Samantha’s top five recommendations to sell IA:

1. Show the problem (and how you can help fix it): This point seems obvious, but lots of people forget to do it. Instead they go on and on about why information architecture is a good thing….
2. Benefit the bottom line: You wonÕt be able to define hard core ROI (return on investment) for every project, but it is important to employ the rigor to think about the benefits of IA or any user focused work from a financial perspective….
3. Play the politics: Managing politics in an organization is often critical to getting any work accomplished successfully. You will want to figure out how the politics game is played in your organization and how you can enjoy playing it. In many ways, politics is simply thinking about the best ways to get along with different types of people. A few tips:
   • Pay attention to organizational culture and how decisions are made.
   • Pick the most important battles.
   • Talk to the right people at the right time in the right order.
   • Accept help.
   • Listen, listen, listen Ð what you say will be a lot more valuable if you have made a sincere effort to understand other points of view.
4. Don’t promise a silver bullet: It is best to promise only what is realistic and under your control….
5. Pay attention to style: Tailor your style, language and presentation towards the audience you are trying to persuade…. Some people want numbers and data and facts, others prefer verbatim quotes from users, while others respond best to inspirational big-picture vision. Think about who you most need to sell in each pitch and adapt accordingly. This may mean extra preparation, but considering your audience and their needs will be well worth it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Via Scot Hacker’s foobar blog I landed on this interesting set of interface musings at Information Architects Japan, starting from the universal cheeseburger interface and meandering on through iPod and Zune.

I like the quotation Scot selected:

The cheeseburger has the easiest food interface one could think of. No forks, no knives, no spoons, no plates, no chopsticks. Like a sandwich, but softer and sweeter and above all: Standardized. No alarms and no surprises when eating a cheeseburger. Almost as simple as Òthe only intuitive interfaceÓ - the nipple. Sandwiches can be complicated at times.

For pictures of information architecture in everyday life, check out the Everyday Information Architecture group on Flickr.

Extractable’s Director of Strategic Services, Christian Crumlish, was recently named to the board of directors for the Information Architecture Institute.

The Information Architecture Institute is a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture. Founded in 2002, the Institute has over 1000 members in 60 countries.

Christian will serve on the board from 2006 through 2008. He will be the primary owner of IT and Web Operations for the group.

Digital Web has now published the second part of the Competitive Analysis chapter from Dan Brown’s book, Communicating Design.

Over the last few months I’ve posted notices here whenever Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville (the legendary authors of the first two editions of O’Reilly’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, aka the Polar Bear book) have announced another survey for their third edition.

Now the IA Institute has published all of the survey results.

In Boxes and Arrows, Stephen Turbek suggests making wireframes look as realistic as possible, and argues that the old idea of clearly distinguishing wireframes from design is actually counterproductive (Real Wireframes Get Real Results):

How many times have you been asked, “So, is the new website going to be black and white too?” after presenting your wireframes to a client or a usability test subject? This question is almost a traditional part of being an information architect. Wireframes do not clearly define what they mean to convey, leading to confusion. This is most apparent in wireframe usability tests with users who don’t know anything about the project or process. Fortunately, there are a few simple steps that will make wireframes be understood by anyone. They don’t even have to be much more work. It’s simply a matter of choosing to “get real” from the start.

Now, here at Extractable we prefer to do usability tests with prototypes, so we don’t have that specific problem, but I have tended lately toward dropping in the client’s actual logo, using their brand colors and generally making the wireframes look more realistic and my anecdotal experience so far is that clients do prefer that to utterly abstracted grayscale featureless wireframes full of lorem ipsum and x-boxes indicating where the images should go.

Amazing amounts of work going on around here, so it’s been hard to find the time to blog (I know: excuses, excuses). Here are a couple of things I’ve been meaning to post about recently:

Jared Spool’s new SpoolCast:

I go to 20+ conferences a year and while many of the conferences have excellent programs, I often find myself learning the most from the after-hours activities. Often, these activities happen in bars, with a group of like-minded, extremely bright people. No specific agenda is on the table, yet somehow, the conversation turns out to be fun, thought provoking, and interesting. Inspired by some excellent podcasts I listen to regularly, I thought we could reproduce the fascinating discourse I’ve experienced at these non-official conference events for everyone’s benefit. I contacted some folks who I thought would make great conversation and, to my surprise, they all jumped at the chance to partake in our little experiment. From this was born the first SpoolCast. It’s a 90-minute recording of fascinating conversation on topics of user experience, usability, and design. In this inaugural recording, we discuss:

• What can we learn from the new Brown University web site?
• What does it mean to be usable?
• Why is MySpace so successful?
• Which is better designed, the new Brown Web Site or Craigslist?
• How important is the design of a home page? (I think not so much. Everyone else disagrees.)
• The value of social networking
• The UPA Body of Knowledge project
• The design experience, as it applies to conference design

and Alun Machin’s Everyday Usability group on Flickr (quoting Jackie Moyes from the IxDA discussion list):

He’s collecting photographic examples of bad usability that can be used during World Usability Day on November 14th Please submit photos, and pass this link on.

There is a brief article about the growing adoption of tabbed browsing (still very few people use tabs) and how it may effect analyses of web traffic (Web Analytics: The Results of Tabbed Browsing). The article is kind of thin, but provides some useful food for thought, mostly raising questions without providing answers.

On the recommendation of Terry and Christian I played with Axure this weekend. I was amazed at how well this product worked. In just one hour I was able to download and install the app and create a semi-complex 3 page prototype with login and registration forms. This is a great tool that could definitely change the way that Extractable builds wireframes, prototypes and functional specs.

Download a free trial of Axure RP Pro.

Austin Govella writes about rich interfaces on the web (think AJAX, Flex, etc.), and Samantha Starmer explains how to sell IA to executives.

Gene Smith writes in his Atomiq blog

The genius of Digg is that it packs a simple user action with the maximum social intent. A digg is a single click - about as simple as it gets - and yet it’s the central component of the community.

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Beth Koloski, editorial assistant for the third edition of the Polar Bear book has posted an invitation to take another survey:

To gather information for the next edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville have been surveying the IA community. The third survey, Software for IA, is now open. It consists of five questions, and we estimate it will take five to ten minutes to complete. This survey closes on August 1, 2006. The first survey covers trends in the field over the past five years, and the second provides general feedback on the second edition. Future survey results will be posted on the IAI site as well. Results from the first two surveys are up on the IA Institute website.

Here are the questions:

1. Over the past 3 years, which three software products have you used *most* to perform information architecture work?
2. What software, if any, have you worked with in each of the following categories? If you’ve worked with several, please them list all. Skip those categories in which you haven’t worked with any software.
3. What additional software categories should be on the list above, and what actual software have you used for those categories?
4. Is there any other software relevant to IA you feel is important or interesting (even if you aren’t using it)?
5. How do you find out more about IA-related software and tools? Any websites, books, lists, etc. you’d recommend to others?

A recent discussion on the IAI list got onto the subject of business process modeling, and the frustrations some folks have had with Rational Rose.

Two recommendations for current tools were Processworks from Wizdom (uses the IDEF model), and IBM’s free Task Modeler (an Eclipse-based tool for modelling the user experience, (and for making DITA maps).

For more info on DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) see DITA markup, DITA map structure, and an IBM DeveloperWorks article on Design patterns for information architecture with DITA map domains.

I meant to post this a while back. In response to an ongoing blog-driven conversation about content inventories, Lou Rosenfeld wrote about the inherent limitations to a traditional content inventory, in that it represents a snapshot in time of what is, often, a moving target. Instead, he proposes the idea of a rolling content inventory:

That’s why I’m increasingly recommending pursuing a rolling content inventory. Instead of a snapshot, as all those silly IA books suggest, inventory your content on an ongoing basis. Put another way, a content inventory is an process, not a deliverable. Put yet another way, content inventory shouldn’t be something that you allocate the first two weeks of your redesign to; allocate 10% or 15% of your job to it instead.

Recently the IA Institute list was discussing faceted search interfaces and Rashmi Sinha wrote “Now you can build your very own faceted metadata navigation system based on Flamenco Download (thank Marti Hearst, not me. I have not worked on Flamenco in a little while).”

Flamenco was developed at SIMS (UC Berkeley). Sinha, who was involved with it a while back, says, “The interface is somewhat busy, but it supports more complex information finding tasks very well (we did a lot of testing with architects using an architectural image database).”

If you’re like me, “faceted metadata” is confusing enough without tying it to “navigation system,” in which case viewing a live example may help.

If you want to know more, Sinha also posted links to two articles for further reading.

A while back I posted an entry here about Uzanto’s MindCanvas, an application for doing user research. A week or so ago, Cody Burleson of IBM Global Business Services posted a link to the IA Institute members mailing list about a web-based card sorting product called Websort. I haven’t tried it out, but it looks like it could be useful when you can’t do card sorting in person.

Following up, Lou Rosenfeld points out that Donna Maurer, who is writing a book on card sorting for Rosenfeld Media, is maintaining a comprehensive list of card sorting tools.

Did you know the W3C has a standard for taxonomies and other classification schemes (Simple Knowledge Organisation System)?

Neither did I. But apparently, Jay Fienberg did, since he just mentioned it on the IA Institute mailing list. I doubt it would be of any use in communicating with clients, but I wonder if it might be useful for delivering machine-readable hierarchies to site developers?

Leisa Reichelt, a Digital Experience Architect, writes Why you shouldn’t start IA with a Content Inventory at her blog, disambiguity. This has spurred an interesting debate in blogs and mailing lists, with a response at Donna Maurer’s blog and further discussion elsewhere (read the comments on the blogs for more).

Naturally, once the rhetoric has died down the debate ends up a bit in the usual “it depends” fog, but any argument against exhaustively tedious work deserves a second look, from my perspective.

Rosenfeld and Morville have posted the results of their first two surveys toward a new edition of their seminal Polar Bear Book.

(My responses to the first survey were noted in this entry here at Extra! Extra!)

In SEO, Information Architecture and Interface Design, Shari Thurow writes:

The most important building block of SEO is the information architecture. If you want your HTML/XHTML, audio, video, and image files to generate qualified search engine traffic, the key ingredient to making these files appear relevant are the information architecture and the interface that communicates this architecture.

(Hat tip to Peter Morville.)

Todd just sent around this BBC News article discussing a US study that found thatsearch users stop at page three and that, in fact, “Most people using a search engine expect to find what they are looking for on the first page of results.” This jibes with my own personal experience. I rarely even go past the second page. I wonder if some people don’t even go below the fold.

Also: “41% of consumers changed engines or their search term if they did not find what they were searching for on the first page.”

Dan Brown is a brilliant information architect and content management strategist with a forthcoming book called Communicating Design, about producing IA deliverables for websites.

On his blog, Green Onions, he posted a few months ago about an emerging design pattern he’s identified related to managing incoming information.

He describes the object model thusly:

• The People
  • Sender
  • Recipient
  • Administrator
  • Stakeholders
• The Objects
  • The Item
  • The Inbox
  • The Archive
• The Lifecycle
  • Create
  • Submit
  • Receive
  • Act
  • Dispose
• The Interactions
  • Assigning items to people
  • Disposing an item
  • Archiving an item
  • Distinguishing content

That’s just the bare bones, though. Read his whole entry to get the details.

If we accept that it’s true that these are the “four modes of seeking information”:

1. Known-item
2. Exploratory
3. DonÕt know what you need to know
4. Re-finding

Then Donna Maurer’s recent article in Boxes and Arrows offers some excellent advice on how to accommodate each of those four modes.

(I say if only because I am inherently suspicious of all such ordinal systems - there are 12, no seven personality types, no nine, no two - but having said that, I still love any such organizing scheme, if only for the sake of argument.)

Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville are working on a third edition of the “Polar Bear” book, aka Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (O’Reilly), and in preparation for this they have posted a brief survey.

I filled it out:

Question 1: What’s obviously new in IA? Over the past five years, what major trend(s) have emerged in the