Pat’s Point of View

I’m happy to announce I’ll be running a half-day workshop entitled Research methods for information architecture at this year’s OZ-IA conference (actually the workshop is on Thursday the 18th of September).

This is an important part of successful IA, and I intend to give practical insight into some key techniques that will allow IA practitioners, or other disciplines doing some IA, to gain valuable insight into their audience. Here’s my blurb:

Information architecture (IA) is a form of user-centred design (UCD) which requires an understanding of users and their needs and designing with those needs in mind – balanced by factors such as business objectives and available or necessary content. Without a solid understanding of these inputs into the process, design is blind.

Design research is the process of uncovering and understanding those needs, whether it be direct user research or other means of gathering requirements.

Yet, many experienced web designers, developers and IA practitioners don’t feel well-equipped to take on design research in their projects.

In this half-day workshop, Patrick Kennedy will present the fundamentals of design research from the perspective of IA. Specifically, the workshop will be conducted in the context of organising and designing information systems such as websites, intranets and software applications.

This workshop will introduce design research, explain the fundamental principles and teach some simple techniques. The aim is to give the audience a heads-up on the subject and point them in the right direction so they can integrate research into their own work or just better collaborate with design researchers.

You can register for the conference at www.oz-ia.org/2008/register.shtml and don’t forget to quote the discount code PK0265!

Popularity: 10% [?]

I’m running a survey and I’d like your help.

Best practice design of websites, and other digital media, involves a set of skills known broadly as Information Architecture (IA) which generally means making designs user friendly. IA is also known to people doing this work, by such terms as User Experience (UX), User Centred Design (UCD), Interaction Design (IxD) or simply “usability”.

A significant amount of this sort of work is performed by agencies—whether they be advertising agencies, digital agencies or communication agencies. As a practitioner and educator in the field of IA, I am interested in learning how people go about practicing it, in particular how agencies “do IA”. This is to both confirm and challenge my own understanding of the way agencies work and how IA fits into their processes, who it gets done by and how it might be possible to give agencies the skills they need to perform better in this regard.

To this end, I’ve launched an online survey to get some answers straight from the people who work in agencies (or used to). The survey will take approximately 5-10 minutes to complete and I’ll give away, to one lucky person who completes the survey, a copy of the acclaimed best-selling book by Steve Krug Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition. I recommend this book for anyone considering doing anything to do with IA or usability, so it’s only fitting to offer it as an incentive.

You’ll find the survey at: http://www.gurtle.com/survey/index.php?sid=61824

If you don’t work in an agency, you can still help me out by forwarding this to your clients, peers and friends who do work in agencies. I may run a more general survey in the future, but for now I’m focused on agency folks.

The survey will run until the end of September, so there should be plenty of time for word to get around.

I’ll share the results of the survey (aggregated not raw data), either here on this blog or through conferences in and around the IA community. Stay tuned.

See what people are blogging about: IA survey, agency

Popularity: 13% [?]

What do you do when your client seems to be missing the target?

Take, for instance, the situation I recently experienced regarding a fashion-related website whose owners have—how shall I say—an aspirational view of their audience. That is, they want to target an older, more sophisticated, style conscious women. I’ll call them the ‘fashionistas’. This happens to be the audience for their parent brand, an offline publication, and also happens to be the people with whom the brand is most associated.

However, the reality is that those who use the website are younger women who primarily want to chat about gossip, fashion bargains, celebrities and the like. I’ll call them fashion ‘fans’.

I suppose there is nothing wrong with having an aspirational target audience; those people whom you would like to be your users. But research shows that the fashionistas are simply not interested in using a website; it’s too low rent, not part of their world. These are people who sip lattes in exclusive fashion boutiques. They live high fashion, they’re not chatting about it with hotThang267. Lol. Wtf?

Research was conducted into a broad cross-section of fashion-minded people and it showed this segmentation; the fans, who are less capable of actually partaking in designer fashion, were at one end and the fashionistas who read the magazine, were at the other. The latter were unlikely to use the website. Unfortunately, the client said we recruited the wrong people, because the participants didn’t match their audience. Rudimentary web analytics showed that the most used part of the website is the discussion forum, and the demographic of users of the forum matches the ‘fans’ segment. More weight to the argument that fashionistas don’t use the website.

I think there are two main reasons for this. The first is something that many designers and experience architects have to deal with: clients who design for themselves instead of who will actually be using their product. My clients are, or want to be, the fashionista. They are style conscious and do participate in the world of high fashion. Through the website design process, they’re trying to cater for themselves, either consciously or subconsciously.

The second reason, closely related to the first, is that the client won’t accept who the real audience is. It reminds me of the “serious” rock band who refuses to accept that their fan base is predominantly 14 year old girls from middle class suburbs—that just ain’t cool. I believe this issue is part and parcel with the field I work in; as people creating websites, magazines and advertising get older, wiser and wealthier, it is increasingly difficult to relate to audiences that are not in the same life-stage. Is there a point at which you can’t, or don’t want to?

Aiming for a certain target audience is one thing—stretching yourself and your product—but it would appear in this case that it’s unrealistic since the people they’re aiming for won’t use their product. Gone are the days when online properties were simple, “me too” attachments to offline brands, with typically little more to offer than a placeholder for the domain name. Now days, these websites need to stand on their own and be successful, even if that means catering for a markedly different audience.

In the future, the ‘fans’ might very well grow up to become the ‘fashionistas’ that my client wants to target, but how long is that going to take? And would they continue to use the web if this did happen? Perhaps I’m missing the point; perhaps the plan is to leverage the fact that the ‘fans’ aspire to be ‘fashionista’, and that’s part of the attraction of the brand. If we targeted the ‘fans’ in a way that reflects their actual age and socio-economic status, maybe they would no longer be attracted because that wouldn’t be “on brand”. If this is the case, it should be openly stated, which hasn’t been.

Having said all this, the website is being developed with functionality for the ‘fans’, so the issue I have is really the perception my client has of who their audience is. Yet this is still troubling, since if you don’t have a clear picture of who you’re designing for, or if the team is not in total agreement regarding this, it’s difficult to design and deliver successful solutions.

I’m not sure how this will play out, my clients are good people and excel in their respective fields, but perhaps are “too close to it”. I’m also open to suggestions, have you found an effective way of addressing a situation such as this?

Photo credit: Missed the target… by malavoda.

See what people are blogging about: fashion website, target audience

Popularity: 10% [?]

Firefox on my work laptop is experiencing somewhat of a personality crisis; whenever I visit a Yahoo! website (yahoo.com, yahoo.com.au, flickr.com) or PayPal I get the mobile version. While it has been a useful exercise in learning the ins and outs of some of the ‘biggest’ m-sites around, it’s actually really annoying. Update: I can now include WSJ.com (The Wall Street Journal) in this list since I can only see the mobile version of that site!

These sites obviously use some sort of user agent detection, but as far as I can tell my browser is reporting itself as it should be. I’ve tried several different user agent plugins to force it to report itself as Firefox for Windows, but it makes no difference. I’ve cleared all cookies, no effect.

The only other clue I have is that this all started happening after I used the .mobi emulator to test a few mobile websites. The emulator is just a Java applet, from memory, so it shouldn’t have such a lasting effect. Could it have somehow corrupted my browser?

So I hereby envoke the lazy web…does anyone know how to fix this? Please help :)

(yes I could just reinstall the browser but that’s no fun, and might not fix this issue anyway)

See what people are blogging about: firefox, mobile, user agent, m-site, browser detection

Popularity: 11% [?]

So many people have extracted lessons from Gordon Ramsay’s style, from management to consulting (for instance there’s me, Ruth, Donna, Craig and even The Australian) that it’s becoming boring. He’s obviously good value, but I’m now looking elsewhere for analogies.

Sticking to the reality TV theme, though unintentional, bears much fruit and I can’t think of any better example than Trinny and Susannah. I think they are brilliant at what they do, without having to drop the F-bomb every few seconds (don’t get me wrong I don’t mind Gordon’s profanity but it does make him less accessible).

I first happened across Trinny and Susannah (T&S) in their UK show and series of books “What Not to Wear”, where they gave ordinary people fashion tips tailored to their body-shape, lifestyle and budget. For those of you not familiar with the duo, this isn’t your typical fashionistas spouting on about “What’s hot this season, darling”, it’s honest and useful advice for real people. And it goes much deeper than vanity, most often the cause of the problems they solve are the emotional hang-ups we all have inside. They make people feel good about themselves and accept who they are.

Since then they have continued to help people across several more TV series, as well as across the globe. Theirs is an excellent model for consultants, with core traits such as:

• Working as a pair, they balance each other out
• Breaking it down into simple rules we can understand
• By exposing themselves, literally and figuratively, they foster trust and empathy
• A true desire to help others
• Ruthlessly forward, there’s no room for shyness, excuses, self-denial or apathy
• A simple process: research, understand, extract, boil down, try, validate, rollout

The process I speak of in the last point, was well documented in the more recent series “Trinny and Susannah Undress…”, where the girls showed that their approach can scale too. Doing some very ethnographic-like formative research around a particular problem, they extract insight and develop their rules, followed by application of the results to thousands of people. A series of huge publicity stunts for the BBC, no doubt, but this is consulting on a level rarely seen (and with genuine results).

I think possibly the most interesting aspect of their approach is the development of rules. This is what makes their work so accessible; anyone can get simple and straight-talking advice that suits them. What colour combinations go together? What choice of clothing hides this, or accentuates that? What colours go well with my complexion?

I’ve even done this myself, making use of the rules for guys-without-six-pack-abs and it works. In fact T&S’s work with men is probably the best of all, because if there is anyone who needs simple rules to supplement bugger-all fashion sense it’s the male population.

See what people are blogging about: Trinny and Susannah, consulting, Gordon Ramsay

Popularity: 11% [?]