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!

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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: 8% [?]

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This afternoon I presented my session at WebDU on the topic of information architecture for designers and developers. In the particular case of WebDU, these designers and developers mostly specialise in Flex and Flash.

I’m fairly happy with how it came together in the end, hopefully I gave the audience some insight into the field of IA, and user experience in general. Apologies for the messy looking slides on SlideShare, when it was converted from Powerpoint all the embedded fonts had to be replaced with Arial!

Other than my contribution, there was of course a whole conference, and a great conference it was. My initial impressions were that it’s a great location (level 2 of the Darling Harbour Conference centre) which is nicely laid out and spacious. The over all feel is pretty slick, and they gave out some excellent swag, I know it’s quite trivial but a great t-shirt, conference bag (with good stuff inside including a selection of relevant magazines from sponsors) put the finishing touch on an event such as this. Much better than the wads of marketing crap you usually get.

The conference proceedings book is a good idea, with the slides (or at least initial summary slides in my case) from each session, and information on speakers and the conference in general. Sadly there was no agenda for quick reference to the sessions, when and where. There was an A4 sheet with this info on it, but not in the bags or proceedings book. I still think having this in the back of the name tag lanyard is the best approach.

A rather novel thing they did was have trading cards with the avatars for each conference organiser. At first I thought they might have had a card for each presenter too, which sent me into a mini panic at the thought of people trading my face around the place thinking who the heck is this guy? :) It’s a good networking idea and builds a sense of fun around the event, after all it’s not some stuffy academic conference, these are people who make cool websites and apps, it should be fun.

And of course there was the crucial, especially for this audience, free wifi. I used to roll my eyes upon hearing geeks whinging “aww man, no wireless!” but I must admit I now expect it of any conference or seminar. I hate people typing and surfing during sessions, but in between or if you need to get a bit of work done during the course of the day (like I did) then having internet access is crucial.

(At first my laptop didn’t see the free network, and this made me think that it could be a neat little business opportunity for buildings within range of conference centres that don’t offer free wifi, setup a Meraki mesh for a cheap rate…or free)

While there were some interesting topics being presented on the first day, and I was pleased to see the current state of the art in terms of RIA and interactive interface development, I had to take a bit of time out to put some finishing touches on my presentation.

So there are certainly some cool things being wheeled out of Adobe and the like, with the possibility for highly advanced and integrated web apps and desktop apps. Adobe’s AIR in particular is looking pretty good. But of course, as a user experience person, I can see there being many opportunities for all this technology to become a usability nightmare. The ball is definitely in our court, though, so far as we need to work out how we can be part of this new generation and create consistent and useful experiences across browser, desktop, device and all the different usage scenarios that that entails.

See what people are blogging about: webdu, RIA, information architecture

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In what is probably my last article for Step Two, entitled Intranet (re)design wrap-up, I summarise the vast amount of information on intranets that has been published by Step Two Designs over the years. The point is to aid intranet managers, or anyone involved in a redesign, in leveraging the useful nuggets contained throughout the many articles and get started in the right direction.

So you’re sitting at your desk and you have to redesign your intranet (or design one from scratch). Where on earth do you start? By any measure, this is no easy task. The multitude of factors that need to be taken into account can be overwhelming.

Over the years, we have published a vast amount of information on intranets, offering the benefits of our experience and giving practical advice on intranet management, information architecture and content management.

In this article, we attempt to wrap up all the activities that form part of an intranet (re)design into one concise checklist.

Along the way, references will be given to our most popular articles, giving you more detail on particular topics. The goal is to give you an excellent starting point for undertaking an intranet (re)design and also to provide support throughout the process.

Read the full intranet (re)design wrap-up article.

This article focuses on the big picture and a user-centred design methodology. I firmly believe that despite these projects becoming huge beasts, they can be successfully tackled by taking the right approach and applying simple techniques. For example, some of the more common information architecture techniques in use today are card sorting and wireframes. These are in themselves simple to master, but can prove very effective if used in the right way on a big project that has been broken down into sensible pieces. (On this note, I hope to release an article dedicated to wireframes very soon).

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My latest article has just been published, despite me being on a bit of baby leave. This latest one, Audience personas for the Macquarie University Library website, explores one of the key outcomes of a recent user research project I undertook, that is, a set of personas. Here’s a snippet of one persona:

Nicole the novice scholar

Nicole is an undergraduate student whose course requires a fair bit of research in the library. Students like Nicole, studying humanities and similar subjects, need to use a lot of academic material: books, reserve books and journals as well as media and the internet. However, Nicole is not well equipped for this kind of work when she arrives at university and is unfamiliar with information systems or research strategies.

It was interesting that the existing view of the library audience was that held by many academic institutions—I have had some exposure to other libraries and universities—and while it is fairly logical, it doesn’t really help in terms of designing a website. So the segmentation and prioritisation I recommended was quite different; rather than lumping all undergraduates together I followed the natural ‘fault lines’ in library usage to split these students into groups that make it easier to design and deliver online library services.

In contrast, I found that many ‘higher degree’ students and academic staff were very similar in terms of their library skills and information needs. Thus there is no need to distinguish between them (even though there might be 20 years of experience and respect between a senior lecturer and a masters’ student). It was all about context, we were segmenting and profiling the audience for the purpose of designing a website, and other online services.

As always, all feedback welcome.

See what people are blogging about: personas, user research, online library, audience segmentation

Popularity: 33% [?]

I am now live on the air…on the net. The latest edition of Gerry Gaffney’s UXpod, user experience podcast, features yours truly speaking on the subject of mentoring. It follows my presentation at last year’s OZCHI and OZ-IA on the same topic, based on my experiences mentoring a group of non IAs through the UCD process to create a new IA for their large website.

I hate to uphold a cliche, but I’m not much of a fan of hearing my own voice. Although listening back to recordings of user interviews, focus groups, workshops and usability testing sessions has meant I am much more used to it than I used to be.

But that said, podcasting is such a great medium for this kind of content, and I was very happy to participate. Hopefully this edition will be as useful for listeners as the previous editions have been. I know I have found it quite useful to hear a concise discussion on a UX related topic, from an expert (although I’d hardly call myself an expert on mentoring). They’re great for when you’re on the bus.

Oh and here’s a tip for you, podcasts of your own voice are great for putting baby to sleep :)

See what people are blogging about: UX podcast, IA mentoring

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I am always quite surprised, after one of my workshops, when someone remarks "I didn’t know there was so much to it! I thought IA was just about coming up with the nav".

Whilst I’ve written recently about the many faces of IA, I think there is more to such comments than just a different definition of IA being expressed. Probing a bit further, I found that these remarks were based on a rather superficial view of the work involved. It wasn’t obvious, until I ranted for a whole day, that it takes a bit of effort to whip up the navigation for a site.

There is more to it…honest. Firstly, navigation implies some kind of organisation of the site. But where do we get the labels for the navigation, how do we know what structure is best for the content and what type of navigation will work best?

IA is a UCD practice, that’s user-centred design in that you take input from the actual end-users of the website (or intranet or software) and use that in the design process. I suspect the reason why many people are surprised to hear that IA involves so much work is that they have been thinking of designing navigation as a isolated activity; an ‘expert’ creates it in a matter of minutes and you go off and build it.

That approach is doomed to fail and often results in further costly redesigns, because the end product simply doesn’t work for users. So there is a need to get input from users, both directly using research methods such as interviews, observation and focus groups, but also indirectly through web analytics for example. This builds up a picture of who your audience is, their needs, behaviour and attitudes. You can get their input into labels and content structures, using techniques such as card sorting. This gives you a good idea on how users think of the information they might be presented with, in terms of the names they use to refer to it, but also what they believe should be grouped together. And it can take quite a bit of time and effort to do this properly, especially making sense of what you find.

Then comes the tricky bit, taking what you have learnt through research to design a solution. It could be the overall IA (the site structure), the navigation or the layout of pages. Once you make any design decisions, you also need to validate or test those decisions. To do this you return to the users and seek their direct input again, using techniques such as paper prototyping, Card Based Classification Evaluation and usability testing.

So, yes, navigation is often a key output of IA, but it is just the tip of the iceberg. IA starts much earlier and goes much deeper than this. Attempting to design the navigation—or almost any aspect of a site—without going through the whole process is like working in a vacuum.

It wasn’t my intention to describe the entire UCD process, but I’ve tried to think why people outside the IA field don’t understand that there is more to it. Is it because we practitioners shroud ourselves and our methods in jargon and elitist secrecy? Or is it that so many bad practices are out there, conducted by inexperienced practitioners, that it has tainted the opinion of certain people? Or something else.

It’s not all dire of course, I meet lots of people who are not IAs and don’t have a comprehensive understanding of all the techniques involved, but they do appreciate that to achieve good results you need to invest time in things like research and testing. Yet I’m still intrigued by what people think IA is all about, and possibly more importantly, why they are turning up to my workshop if they think it’s dead easy? :)

(The significance of the picture? Well, these disentanglement puzzles, or ‘blacksmith puzzles’, are often harder than you think. Just like IA might be to the uninitiated. And it was less of a cliché than a ‘tip of the iceberg’ image.)

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My dance card has been filled for the first half of this year, with two iterations of my newly updated Information Architecture Essentials workshop series. The dates and locations are:

• 9 April 2008 – Mercure Hotel, Sydney
• 18 June 2008 – Rydges South Bank, Brisbane

Here’s the blurb:

In this one-day workshop, Patrick Kennedy will present the fundamentals of information architecture (IA), the core methodology for organising and designing websites and intranets.

Key skills such as card sorting will be taught, and this workshop is designed to build in-house information architecture skills. A must for all web or intranet teams.

Since the last public workshop, I was invited to run essentially the same workshop for IBM Global Services at their annual 'Summer School' in Melbourne. This was a fantastic event to be a part of, even if the Melbourne weather in January was intolerably hot! I’ve made a few improvements to the workshop since then.

Whilst the workshop has been refreshed, it still aims to introduce the fundamentals of IA and user-centred design, and get people ready to go off and explore topics further. If you’ve attended one of the previous workshops, there’s no need to attend the new version.

See what people are blogging about: information architecture, workshop, training, step two designs

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Hot off the press is my latest article The Many Faces of Information Architecture. Here’s a taste:

A lot of confusion and misunderstanding surrounds the term ‘information architecture’. The multitude of activities that can be labelled with these two words span a vast variety of people, skills and situations. [...] A precise definition of each term would be difficult, as there is still much debate even among the professionals who practice in this field, and that is not the objective here.

What is needed is a primer to help ordinary humans weave their way through the various labels that might be used to describe work related to information architecture.

To engage consultants or contractors, it is useful to understand the variety of terminology and be able to identify the area (or areas) in which you need assistance.

I wrote this article because I found myself explaining to my clients, the different flavours of work that come under the banner of IA. Most people have either a highly specialised view—whereby I couldn’t do XYZ because my business card said ABC—or they took a very wide view that ignored any specialisation, assuming that an IA-ish person could do everything.

It was a fine line to tread, because on one hand I didn’t want to split hairs, for example if I design the way in which users interact with a web form it might be best described as Interaction Design but is it really a crime to call it Information Architecture instead? On the other hand, people do get into all sorts of trouble by using one term when they really mean something else. Which is why the article includes a bit of a cop out:

While this paper attempts to explain the different labels being used for areas of speciality in information architecture, the key to success will always involve explaining exactly what it is you expect to get from a potential information architecture professional.

It really is the best solution; spell out exactly what you want done (or what you do if you are a practitioner) so there is no misunderstanding. By all means you can use a label such as Information Architecture but make sure you back this up with a plain English description.

The other thing I wanted to explore was the overlapping nature of these terms and the activity they represent. Even if you could distinctly define Information Architecture, Information Design and User Experience Design, there would definitely be overlap. My attempt to illustrate this is the lovely circular orange diagram you see in the article :)

I am expecting this will be a fairly controversial, which really serves to highlight the ambiguity surrounding these terms, and the difficulty people have when they try to use these terms. But that’s OK. If you disagree with anything I’ve said in the article, please write a comment below. Hopefully this discussion will help educate non-practitioners, if nothing else.

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On more than a few occasions recently, I’ve been quite surprised by the level of knowledge—and apathy—surrounding tracking website usage.

Then I read Karl Groves’ recent article The Limitations of Server Log Files for Usability Analysis on Boxes and Arrows. Here’s a snippet:

Server log files are inappropriate for gathering usability data. They are meant to provide server administrators with data about the behavior of the server, not the behavior of the user. The log file is a flat file containing technical information about requests for files on the server. Log file analysis tools merely assemble them in a conjecture-based format aimed at providing insight into user behavior.

When speaking with the owners and managers of websites and intranets, I’m often told that they have ‘tracking’ on their website, but probing deeper I find they are referring to simple web statistics (read “hits”). Looking at the kind of information they are getting from their reports, I am usually disappointed. This old style web stats is just not sufficient these days, and I thought we had got past this.

I’m no expert in web analytics (might I suggest Hurol Inan for someone who is) but I don’t need to be, since most people I’m working with are still struggling with the basics. Like getting any sort of reporting at all. If you don’t know how people are using your website, you’re flying blind.

Don’t get me wrong, no matter how good your web analytics are, it’s still at most, only half the picture. To understand why your audience is doing what they’re doing you’ll need to brush off those ’soft skills’ and meet your users; user testing, observation and other ethnographic techniques can give you all the data you’d ever need in this regard. But, as with all things, you need a balance. Especially since they can be so easy to gather, web analytics are a good nominee for ‘quick win’ status. It should be a “no brainer” to know what users are doing on your site, even if you don’t yet know why.

The main culprit for this situation, beyond ignorance of anything better, seems to be IT administrators refusing to play ball. I’m never that surprised to hear that no better information about site usage is possible, because some guy in IT said so. However, there is a simple solution to this: build a business case for better analytics and use business to trump technology! It’s not that hard, look for ways in which good web analytics can empower decisions regarding the website. No other part of the organisation (I hope) is operating without some meaningful form of measurement, so if your website is a key channel for your organisation—be it sales, marketing or another objectives—you can’t keep flying blind.

I have started to become quite an advocate for Google Analytics. Not because I think it’s the best thing out there, but because it works well and the value for money on offer is phenomenal. Particularly if you’re generating uninformative ‘reports’ using Analog or something similar, that honestly tell you nothing useful. So I’m amazed that some people haven’t heard of Google Analytics. Like I said, I’m not expert in this field, but if I was shopping around for a web analytics package, I might not choose Google for this purpose (there are good reasons why one might not) but it would surely be my benchmark.

I particularly like the ability to establish goals and track conversion rates along paths that feed that goal. So if you have a website which sells products, you setup the sale of each product as a goal, then identify the paths people might take to get to the point where they actually buy the product. The reports will then tell you not only how many people achieve that goal, but where they fall off the path along the way. This would be very handy for evaluating potential usability problems with shopping cart processes etc. This is the most obvious use; the more complex your website is the more goals and paths you could monitor.

Hopefully, this will help some of you gain better intelligence, in that CIA kinda way, regarding what is happening with your website (or intranet for that matter). And this is just the tip of the iceberg, there are many more sources of data which you can use to find out what’s going on, and why. Web analytics just happen to be a good place to start.

See what people are blogging about: web analytics, web stats, traffic stats, usage tracking

Popularity: 17% [?]