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By rphillippi, February 4, 2010 11:38 pm

I have gotten asked a lot in interviews lately. “So what are you? Do you consider yourself IA or IxD?” And I find myself asking, “Does it matter?”

I have to ask all UX professionals everywhere, “Why the divide?” Aren’t we as professionals in User Experience supposed to be about the design of that experience no matter the medium?

You could argue, much like Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message!” After all a content rich site is going to need a good IA to wrangle all that content but then that IA needs to also create the interface for the user to interact with all that content. Isn’t the interaction design?

On the flip side, you may have an interaction designer working on a content rich site such as CBS News is going to need to know how to wrangle all that content in order to increase find-ability. Isn’t that Information Architecture?

How much are we really different from each other? And does it really matter? In the end isn’t it all about the user and their experience anyway?

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By rphillippi, February 19, 2009 10:27 pm

This is a great article defining IA Principles:

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Information architects still struggle to define the design principles that operate in their environment. Today I would like to give a set of design principles that was developed with an Information Architect a while ago. Design principles are not necessarily right or wrong but should be an accurate reflection of the fundamentals that guide decision making in an enterprise. The following should therefore not be seen as design principles fixed in concrete but rather as examples of business principles. Best practice is to define the design principle in terms of its Benefits and rationale as well as the implication to the enterprise and the counter argument expressing the potential negative impact of the design principle.

Design principle 1: Central management information

Description

All management information and business intelligence will be sourced from a single consolidated source of information

Benefits
• A central source of management information will provide the enterprise with a wide breath of reporting and analysis without being constraint by the organisations functional structuring.
• Users will become used to a single interface to management information allowing managers to become familiar with the infrastructure and extracting maximum benefit from all information available in the organisation.
• The central information will eliminate contradicting information sources and ensure accurate reporting of current affairs and identification of issues and opportunities.
• Increase the flexibility and manageability of providing information rapidly and effectively to support business decisions.
• Use best of breed analytic functionality to support management decision making
• Increased security in managing access to The enterprise’s management information

Implications
• Information must be sourced to the central information infrastructure from all the various operational applications as close to real time as possible
• No additional analytical modules are required for transactional applications.
• The interface to management information and training should be rolled out to all decision makers to effectively access information.

Counter argument
• The central management information might not be adequate in situations where real time analytics of transactional information is needed
• Information in the central information source might not be structured for a specific requirement and the development time might be too long to provide the information in time for a once off request.
• The assumption cannot be made that a single tool will satisfy all the information requirements. The information infrastructure will therefore consist of a variety of integrated tools.

Continue reading “Information Architecture Principles” »

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By rphillippi, October 12, 2008 3:31 pm

I am thinking of writing a paper for the IA Summit around change management, customer service, and user experience, “Rethinking customer service through the eyes of user experience”.  In initial research I am finding I am not the only one that’s starting to think about this.  I found Brandon Schauer of Adaptive Path is also talking about it as well many who spoke at MX 2007.

I first got introduced to the idea when I was working on a project for a large broadband provider in the UK. They wanted to update and make some changes to their broadband CD.  Unlike the US, providers in the UK do not send people out to help you set up your broadband, instead you are sent all the tools and expected to sort it out for yourself.  This CD is very successful amongst it’s users so we needed to be careful about how we changed the process.  The business wanted more people to sign up for an account with the company for various business goals. The current process requires the user to watch all the 3D videos which illustrate the entire process and once they get through it all (including some software installs) they then are told they are connected. Then they can sign up for a company account.

Now I don’t know about you but if I were told I was connected I wouldn’t be bothering with a form.  I’d be off to wander the internet. Thus I suggested that the process be changed so that as someone is installing the software then they are also able to sign up for an account. However, I needed to check with tech and with the company to make sure that the infrastructure was in place to support this. The PM felt this would potentially destroy the user experience but as you can see by Jesse James Garrett’s graph below the continuous experience which allows another process to start as you are waiting for another one to finish is a better and happier user experience:

This allows the user to keep working while waiting for something else to finish.  Also, in this case, it keeps the user there at the computer, as a captive audience. If they really were not interested they could also click the “not interested” button and go get a cup of tea.

This case demonstrates how the system / user experience can affect the view of the brand and the experience a user has with said brand. In this case, users love this CD and really like the products of this company.  If we as the designers of the experience create a negative experience for the user than we can also negatively impact the business.

This is what I have been thinking about lately and the reasons for wanting to write the paper and branding my thinking about this as “Customer Experience”.

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By rphillippi, August 20, 2008 12:18 pm

Claudia points out the advantages and disadvantages of Flexible Content Models in this presentation.

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By rphillippi, September 6, 2007 3:00 pm

I get that question a lot so in hopes to answer that question the following is taken from O’Reilly Press’s “Information Architecture for the Web, 2nd Edition”:

in·for·ma·tion ar·chi·tec·ture n.

1. The combination of organization, labeling, and navigation schemes within an information system.
2. The structural design of an information space to facilitate task completion and intuitive access to content.
3. The art and science of structuring and classifying web sites and intranets to help people find and manage information.
4. An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

—————————- More Definitions ————————————

Information

We use the term information to distinguish information architecture from data and knowledge management. Data is facts and figures. Relational databases are highly structured and produce specific answers to specific questions. Knowledge is the stuff in people’s heads. Knowledge managers develop tools, processes, and incentives to encourage people to share that stuff. Information exists in the messy middle. With information systems, there’s often no single “right” answer to a given question. We’re concerned with information of all shapes and sizes: web sites, documents, software applications, images, and more. We’re also concerned with metadata: terms used to describe and represent content objects such as documents, people, processes, and organizations.

Structuring, Organizing, and Labeling

It’s what information architects do best. Structuring involves determining the appropriate levels of granularity[2] for the information “atoms” in your site, and deciding how to relate them to one another. Organizing involves grouping those components into meaningful and distinctive categories. Labeling means figuring out what to call those categories and the series of navigation links that lead to them.

[2] Granularity refers to the relative size or coarseness of information chunks. Varying levels of granularity might include: journal issue, article, paragraph, sentence.

Finding and Managing

Findability is a critical success factor for overall usability. If users can’t find what they need through some combination of browsing, searching, and asking, then the site fails. But user-centered design isn’t enough. The organizations and people who manage information are important too. An information architecture must balance the needs of users with the goals of the business. Efficient content management and clear policies and procedures are essential.

Art and Science

Disciplines such as usability engineering and ethnography are helping to bring the rigor of the scientific method to the analysis of users’ needs and information seeking behaviors. We’re increasingly able to study patterns of usage and subsequently make improvements to our web sites. But the practice of information architecture will never be reduced to numbers; there’s too much ambiguity and complexity. Information architects must rely on experience, intuition, and creativity. We must be willing to take risks and trust our intuition. This is the “art” of information architecture.

—————————- My Commentary ————————————

In summary, we, Information Architects, are the ones behind the scenes who lay out the content and information to be found in any web site. We are the ones who make it easier for all of you the users to find what you are looking for. Our work is seen in the layout (where the navigation, images, etc, is located on a page) of a web site or system.

What’s interesting about this is that library sciences is coming back in full force because of the amount of information at our fingertips and our need to categorize and organize it all into usable chunks. Librarians were doing this long before there was a web to be concerned about.

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By rphillippi, September 5, 2007 10:40 am

“On the Web, if a site is difficult to use, most people will leave. On an intranet, if employees perform their tasks more slowly due to difficult design, the company bears the cost of the reduced productivity. In fact, I estimate that low intranet usability costs the world economy $100 billion per year in lost employee productivity. This may not be the most important problem facing the planet, but it’s not a trifling issue either.

Usability is an important, though not the only, determinant for the success of a web site or an intranet. Information architecture is an important, though not the only, determinant for the usability of a design. There are other issues, but you ignore information architecture at your peril.

Critics may say that users don’t care about information architecture. They don’t want to learn how a web site is structured; they just want to get in, get their task done, and get out. Users focus on tasks, not on structure. But it’s because users don’t care about the structure of a web site that it is so important to get the information architecture right in the design. If users did bother to study our web sites, they could surely learn how an obscure or illogical structure works and utilize that knowledge to improve their task performance. Humans are flexible creatures and can adapt to hostile environments if they choose to do so.

But since we know that users won’t spend time learning our information architecture, we have to spend resources to design the best information architecture we can. Allow users to focus on their tasks, and let information architects be the ones to spend time worrying about the structure of the web site or intranet. This is a good division of labor, and the pay-off from good information architecture is immense. The more that answers are located in the places you look for them, the easier the design will feel to users, and the more successful the project. There will be more sales (for e-commerce sites), better reputation for good service (for marketing sites), and less loss of productivity (for intranets).

I am a great believer in having professional information architects design the structure of professional information projects such as corporate web sites and intranets. But I also think there will be an increasing role for personal information architecture in the future. It will soon be time to teach a simplified version of the discipline to high school students, and possibly even to bring it into elementary schools as well.

The modern world is one of information overload; we are constantly bombarded by an inflow of messages, and we ought to read much more information than we have time for. Keeping yourself from drowning in this morass of information will require personal information architecture skills for problems like structuring email folders and computer files as well as the ability to manage advanced search features.

In the long run, personal information architecture may turn out to be even more important than corporate information architecture. For now, though, read this second edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and get your web site and intranet in shape to support your customers and employees. Good information architecture makes users less alienated and suppressed by technology. It simultaneously increases human satisfaction and your company’s profits. Very few jobs allow you to do both at the same time, so enjoy.”

Spoken by Jakob Nielsen
Quoted in “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition”