Pat’s Point of View

I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be speaking at this year’s Oz-IA conference, October 6-9 in Sydney. I’m running a pre-conference workshop User Research Methods for Information Architecture and I’ll be giving a short presentation during the conference on Five user research methods you have probably never seen.

The workshop is a new version of one I’ve run a few times before, updated with new examples and activities. The presentation will give a short intro to a few research methods that are not so common in the IA field.

Hope to see you there!

I originally started writing this post when I was at UPA 2007, but for one reason or another I never published it. On several occasions, I played with the idea of combining the conference notes with some later half-written posts on generally the same topic. But alas it never made it live.

Seeing as I firmly believe that for every unpublished blog post there is one less bit of momentum keeping the interwebs spinning, I’d better put this up. And it’s interesting to look back at what I wrote two and a half years ago…

Day 1 started with a very inspiring talk by Bill Buxton. I think this was just the thing the industry needs, a bit of a reality check and a wake-up call. Firstly usability evaluation is not design and for that reason most people here don’t actually practice User-Centred Design. It’s all about data, rules, strict methodologies, large companies. They’ve even turned agile into something overly defined and bogged down (I have no strong belief either way when it comes to agile methodologies by the way). Bill’s talk about sketching as an important tool for the design process flies in the face of the artefact centric practice many Usability Professionals follow. No there’s no template for it, no there’s no software tool to do it, you have to use your brain! I mean the theme of the conference (“patterns”) says it all really.

This sounds really negative, but I don’t want to be. There are some smart and talented people here, but overall the industry is weighed down by strictness and illusions. Strictness in the sense that many people want some methodology to tell them what to do. I can understand that, but as Bill said, if you find yourself thinking that all the time (being scared of wining it) then maybe this isn’t the job for you. Illusions in terms of the discrepancy between literature and practice. A lot of the things published are not followed in practice (eg rapid, flexible approaches by clever people are replaced by limited, templated projects) and good practice is not published (eg using multiple design alternatives in usability testing). Then there’s the illusions of grandeur, like the way many practitioners think of what they do as some kind of scientific crusade and admitting there is some I-don’t-know-ness to it is an act of heresy.

For me, the best thing I saw at the conference was this talk. It’s a pity someone from outside the field (perhaps technically but really as far as I am concerned he’s slap bang in the centre of what we should strive for) had to be the one to say it. You can’t truly be doing UCD if you’re just evaluating, testing and documenting. This shouldn’t be about statistical analysis techniques.

I remember thinking that my approach to my work seemed at odds with how other attendees appeared to be working, and from the above it seems this annoyed me! Too many practitioners being more worried about following the ‘proper’ process, rather than actually thinking. And the post I did publish at the time, contains similar thoughts.

On Friday I presented with my colleague Alun Machin at the first day of Oz-IA 2009, the 4th Australian Information Architecture conference. It was a great day, with good company to keep us talking and some interesting stuff to keep us thinking. The venue was quite good too, my first time at Star City Convention Centre as it happens.

Unfortunately I couldn’t make it for the second day of the conference due to family commitments, which is a shame since the programme looked even better for the Saturday!

Our presentation on our new SuperRacing site (not yet live at the time of writing thissite is now live) went down well considering we had to cram everything we wanted to talk about into 25 minutes. The slides are shown below.

After two conference presentations in one week, it’ll be a while before I make another appearance, not to mention that I’ll be pretty brain dead for a while after the new baby arrives.

Today I gave a talk entitled Prioritising user experience at Ark Group’s Information Architecture – Designing and managing information structures for improved web access and usability conference.

I tried to make the topic a bit more interesting (read controversial) and I think it went quite well.

I covered two main topics, firstly I outlined why I think user experience (UX) should be prioritised over information architecture (IA), and then I discussed prioritising UX within the organisation.
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At this year’s Oz-IA conference I’ll be presenting a short session entitled Bringing them online: using design research to identify online opportunities with my colleague Alun Machin.

It’s all very hush hush at the moment because we’re operating under an embargo, but the general gist of it is how user research can inform the design process for a product (in this case a website) that pertains to an activity that is normally an offline experience.

We’ll talk about how we identified the audience’s “information ecosystem” and found an opportunity for our website to fit in with that in a useful way.

We’ll also talk about the very different groups within that audience and how we catered for each.

Alun will then talk about the transition into design and go through the process we followed.

And if all goes to plan we’ll be able to unveil the new website resulting from all this work!

All this in 25 minutes, including questions :)

Update: if you promise to come along and watch our preso you can use this discount code: PK0265. Use it to get $100 off when you register for OZ-IA.

Last week I took part in Full Code Press, in which the team I was part of had to design and built a website for a not-for-profit client in the space of just 24 hours, competing against a similar team from New Zealand.

It was an intriguing prospect that didn’t fail to deliver some eventful moments, as well as a lot of frenzied activity. We didn’t win but that doesn’t matter I don’t think any of us were doing it for that reason.
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I spent today at Ark Group’s Strategically Managing Intranet Developments conference, which I blogged about before.

There were some good things being said, and by real people who have done the hard yards. They’re not “industry luminaries”, but people out there in the trenches working out how to create effective intranets. Grounded and real are two words I would apply to the conference.

Then there was my presentation, a tad more abstract, but I felt it went well. Slides below.

I felt compelled to steer my presentation towards audience participation, if only because of the collective knowledge in the room; about half the room were presenting at the conference so I was learning as much, if not more, than I was dishing out. That’s the downside of being a consultant, you rarely get that rich experience that in-house staff have. Some great examples were offered by the audience, complementing my own examples.

There were one or two people twittering, you can follow the conversation on #smid.

Happy to hear your comments on my slides, either here or on slidehsare.

In my recent IA tutorial for OZCHI08, I told my students about performing low-fi usability testing on a draft information architecture. I introduced them to a technique which Donna Spencer called Card Based Classification Evaluation (CBCE) and is known to other people as tree testing or task-based information architecture testing (which really doesn’t have the same ring to it).

(Incidentally, CBCE is an evolution of closed card sorting but crucially different. I quite like Donna’s explanation for the need for such a technique from about the time she coined the term: Categorising information and finding it are two entirely different tasks, with entirely different cognitive processes. The only way to test whether a classification will allow people to find information, is to ask them to find information…You don’t learn it by asking them to place information in the classification. Hence just using closed card sorting won’t do.)

As usual, some people quickly tired of my affection for fiddly index cards and asked if you can do this electronically or even online. It reminds me of that line in Star Wars where the dude says to Vader “your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes”…and you know what happened to that guy. Rather than crush their throats with my mastery of the Force, I explain that there are some advantages to good old cards:

• Cards are quick and easy to create and modify
• Cards remove the distractions associated with ‘using a computer’
• Cards allow a greater affinity between participant and facilitator
• Cards function consistently for all participants (whereas software may not)
• Cards can be made by anyone (eg don’t require special skills or software)
• Cards are cheap

However, I must admit there are situations when something more computery might be more useful, such as:

• You need to include remote participants (eg widely dispersed target audience)
• You intend to involve a large number of users in the testing (eg more than 20)
• You want to spend less time recording results into an electronic format (ok I’m reaching now)

You can use one of the many card sorting tools—either desktop software or online—but there are also a few dedicated tools. For example, Treejack which Sam Ng from Optimal Workshop showed at OZ-IA this year. It’s quite a nice tool and would do nicely for getting that all important user feedback on your design decisions early (and possibly later) in the IA design process.

Of course, one can use something like PowerPoint or Dreamweaver if one likes, it all depends on the resources at your disposal and the capabilities of your test participants—you might be a FileMaker whizz but there’s no point sending out a test app built in it if your users can’t open it.

Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any other suggestions.

Having struggled to find the time to conduct an in-depth analysis of my IA for Agencies survey results, I have decided to do it in pieces. This installment, of which many more will follow, I’ve charted the geographic location of survey respondents.

(Sample size is 206)

It was a surprise to see the US ranked number one on the list, I was expecting Australia to be the highest with possibly the UK as second runner up. Was probably my post to several US-centric mailing lists that produced this result.

By the way, I gave up on the rubbish charts created by Excel pretty quickly, and went looking for a better option. I’ve used Widgenie.com for this chart and it seems to meet my needs quite well. Although I’d prefer not have to insert script into my posts.

This is a mere snippet, I know. As and when I get the time to release a bit more I will do so.

UPDATE: the Widgenie charts use Javascript so if you’re reading this in an RSS reader, you’ll probably have to click through to my website to view it.

My IA for Agencies survey is now closed. Thanks to everyone who took the time to fill in the survey, all 206 of you from across the globe.

I’ve also selected the winner of the prize, a copy of Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug. Congratulations!

Now comes the task of analysing the submissions and compiling the results into a useful format. I’m also compiling a list of lessons learned from the process, as there have been a few. I’ll make all of this available in due course (read as when I get some time to spend on it!).

Thanks again to everyone who filled in the survey, those who helped me with it, those who offered encouraging words and constructive feedback, and thank you even to those who felt the need to leave negative comments.

While not everyone agreed with the manner in which I conducted the survey, it’s all been very educational.