Day two of EuroIA had speakers hailing from Italy (actually they were pretty well represented) to South Africa. And amongst the talks we had not one but two different rounds of IA bingo. Who said IA was boring?

People coming in to the second day of talks were greeted with what were called “BS Bingo” cards. While it wasn’t quite a drinking game (yes, there’s an app for that), it did have a prize — a free ticket to EuroIA 2012, won by Jeroen Grit

BS Bingo (top left to bottom right): Google, Social Media, Behaviour, User Research, Information Architecture, Online Marketing, Innovation, Brainstorming, Content Strategy, Gamification, Multi-Channel, Communication Channel, Joker, Funnel, Behaviour Change, Evidence, Joy of Use, User Experience, Persuasive Technology, Persuasion, Usability, Next Best Action, Interaction Design , iPhone, Conversion.

Extending the Storytelling, Boon Sheridan

It takes a great talk to drag people out of bed and been in a conference room at 9am on the second day of a conference, but Boon Sheridan did that, with a packed room to hear his talk on blending IA and content strategy.

He’s noticed that the word ‘deliverables’ have become a dirty word in IA and UX (“don’t worry about deliverables, just do the work”). However, he feels that there are many good elements of deliverables that are useful for a project. Therefore, he proposes using blended deliverables.

Their benefits are:

1. Strategic approach: they’re not throwaway documents as they’re meant to encapsulate the big picture
2. Tactical focus: they help you get sign off!
3. Perfect brainstorming The documents are open for deliberation and easy to make.
4. Ideal for collaboration

He suggests implementing them through the following forms

• Audience personas: What comes before personas: Who are we speaking to? Key messages? What content do they need? Where? This is were audience personas come in. They’re your widest audience that you want to reach, and help you keep perspective
• Content flows: Where is your content going to come from? How are you going to host it? What functionality is needed? These are a great way to identify problems up front/periodically
• Building on it: the key concept behind blended deliverables is that they’re finished but changeable. You should be able to sign off your documents as done, but then be able to review them at a later point and amend them if the system has changed. They give the clarity and aligning nature of deliverables without the pressure of them to be ‘finished’.

The other key concept that Sheridan brought up was the idea of designing for disagreement. (Apparently it was an aside in a speech by Kevin Cheng about Twitter’s design process, even though he doesn’t even remember saying it). The idea behind it is that many of the problems in a design process happen because stakeholders think they’re all agreeing to the same thing when in fact they all have different ideas. Creating deliverables that actively cause people to disagree can help bring up any ambiguity between stakeholders and get them all on the same page.

Pervasive IA for the Sentient City, Andre Resmini & Luca Rosati

Storify curation

Resmini and Rosati gave a talk on the IA of cities based on their recent book Pervasive Information Architecture. Above all, they suggested that we need to consider an information layer in the physical environment, and as a living, resiliant ecosystem.

Rosati (one of many at this conference) referenced Marcia Bates’ methods for information seeking as an important way of understanding a structure for a city:

Marcia Bates's Information Seeking Model

One thing we need to do is change our thinking from top-down strategies to bottom-up ones.

• Top-down is ‘traditional IA’. Examples of this in cities are map and wayfinding systems,
• Bottom-up is a basic system that is adapted. Twitter is one such example:  a ‘stupid’ technology that has been adapted over time. In the physical world, these can be found as desire paths: a result of least effort and time.

Places are used as wax. Places are the site of a mnemonic palimpset

Resmini believes that a lot of the architecture/town planning research was done in the 60s/70s and hasn’t advanced much since then. (He’s also not that much of a fan of Christopher Alexander’s design patterns).

In terms of resiliance and the physical world, this is explored well in Stuart Brand’s How Buildings Learn. Here, it’s shown how change in building happens at different speeds (the outsides slowly decay, which you may redo your kitchen once a decade, your decor every few years and move around your furniture every few months).

Given that neither Resmini and Rosati are town planners (they are an architect and linguist respectively) someone from the audience did ask the inevitable question: isn’t that their job? The work of the IA isn’t seen as being one that takes over from a town planner, but instead collaborates with them to ensure that various offerings such as signage and communication systems are appropriate.

Designing Interactions that Help Customers in Decision Making, Stefano Bussolo

Storify curation

Bussolo’s talk was a breakneck (if beautifully cadenced) tour of the world of neuroscience and its relation to decision-making. His key point was that we should be thinking about chooseability rather than findability, and that different types of users deal with choice in different ways.

When choosing a product, consumers fall into one of three categories:

1. they know exactly what they want,
2. know their preferences for a product,
3. or only know the attributes.

More interestingly, while those two types who don’t know exactly what they want don’t like too many options (decision paralysis or fatigue), those who do like seeing all the others.

So, how do we understand and deal with this? Bussolo explained that it all comes down to heuristics. While we would like to always make decisions logically as it’s highly accurate, it also takes a lot of cognitive effort. Heuristics gives us more bang for our buck by being relatively accurate as well for far less effort.

The heuristic strategies he suggested:

• Elimination by Aspects (EBA): cut out what you don’t want.
• Majority of Confirming Dimensions (MCD) — e.g. opening up browser tabs of all the options for a car and comparing them
• Satisfying Heuristics (SAT): take the first satisfactory alternative e.g. finding a carpark or searching on Google
• Lexicographical Heuristics (LEX): sorting via terms.
• Equal Weight Mean: aggregating set of scores into a whole e.g. Trip Advisor ratings for cleanliness etc and the total score.
• Faceted Information: letting people drill down. Suggests looking at Peter Boersma’s EuroIA 2010 talk on this topic.

In summary:

• Facilitate both rational and heuristic decision strategies
• Divide the processes of decision making
• Design for different users (those who are decided, and those thinking of preferences and attributes)
• Give users some external aid (external cognition, suggestions)
• Categorise

Understanding the Nature of Resistance, Alla Zollers

Welcome to therapy. That was how Zollers introduced her session, and it was all about feelings: namely now to identify and deal with resistance from clients. As she paraphrased from Star Trek, resistance is not futile, but natural and a result of emotional processes that we can’t ignore.

Resistance is … well, you get the picture

Her steps:

1. Acknowledge it: if you have a feeling somethings wrong, you’re probably right (and it’s probably something far bigger than you know about).
2. Identify it: you need to talk this through with your client, in a non-threatening (i.e. therapy-talk) kind of way e.g. “you seem… I feel…” (One person in the audience pointed out that “you seem…” could still be considered aggressive, but as Zollers pointed out, if it helps bring to light the underlying problem).
3. Wait: silence is golden for bringing out the truth if you’re prepared to not fill up the space with chat.

Teaching Design Thinking, Jason Hobbs & Terrence Fenn

Storify curation

Based of their research (a project that was funded by the IA Institute) Fenn and Hobbs talked about how design education needs to change to accommodate the changes in design, with a specifically South African perspective.

Fenn asked: as design educators, are we applying the rules of UCD to design education? If Don Norman says that if someone can’t use a product, it’s most likely the product’s fault, then that suggests that failures in design education is the design education system’s fault.

Their project is specifically focused around the idea of indeterminacy. These days, designers are more than ever expected to be able to do a range of things. But if you send your interaction design students out to investigate transport, and they find that the problem is signage, do you let them do graphic design or force them to do a website? How do you train — and encourage — them to be able to work in areas where they don’t have core skills?

Complexities of Design Education

Fen pointed out that while design thinking is promoted by IDEO etc, it’s locked behind copyright and thus difficult to use in education.

So how do we teach these design wicked problems? As it turns out, IA could be a useful model.

• IAs deal with wicked problems (complex problems, multiple users, huge amount of data) every day.
• It’s very normal for us as IAs to start unpacking all of these aspects “scuplting with the data”, and use qualitative research
• IA problems are usually informational and especially digital, but our exploring problems usually leads to solutions beyond this context.

What was particularly fascinating about this talk was also it’s unique cultural perspective. South Africa’s liberation from apartheid in the 90s had some obvious repercussions, but also others that outsiders might not think about. Fenn and Hobbs highlighted how it has affected the local transport system : a formerly highly structured and thus easy to manage system (different races travelled on different buses and at designated times) has struggled to cope with the change in the overarching system around it. Similarly, when they used examples about designing out crime, it was easy to realise the complexities that they have to deal with ranging from the police to communication.

Fill in the IA Gap, Mags Hanley

Storify page

Industry veteran (and inspiration to many, including fellow speakers) Mags Hanley finished the day both ruminating on the mood of the conference, and the changes to the industry she’d noted since recently coming back.

I’m proud to call myself an information architect. Not an interaction designer, not a user experience designer … an IA.

Hanley still feels a lot of pride for and in the industry, but feels that IA had both narrowed and forgotten to teach a lot of its fundamentals. She told us that Louis Rosenfeld had confessed that he had workshop slides that were over a decade old … but she realised he needed them as people didn’t know what many core concepts of IA were.

And to test us all on whether we did actually know all our fundamentals, she got us to play IA Bingo (not related to the earlier BS Bingo from earlier today):

IA Bingo (top left to bottom right): Audience, Site map, product index, indices, price, subject, format, task, geographical, A-Z index, chronological, theme, topic guide, popularity, TOC, recommendations

(Eric Reiss may or may not have won).

She suggests all IAs should be able to do the following four things:

1. List organisation structures & be able to consciously choose “ya can’t defend it unless ya can choose”
2. Create models of the structures — navigation model, app model, data model — without information in it and be able to show content moving back/forth. One of the key phrases from this conference was around domain models. It’s clear that you need to be able to understand these completely when proposing a solution.
3. Understand deep IA — content objects, CVs and semantic web — at least enough to hire the right person. Deep IA may be a strange and specialised area of IA (like typography?) it’s one you can’t afford to not understand at least a little.
4. Understand how people seek out info (this is different from usability/UX). There is a whole field of research devoted to information seeking in the real world (for example, how women look for information in doctor’s offices). Look for it and draw out skills.

She urged us to tell our stories — junior IAs know methods, but IA provides value around methods — and shared her own from the BBC. She admits that the IA team back in 2002 “lived in their own little bubble”, and she learnt the hard way that your users may not always use your meticulously designed prototypes (BBC music reporters shunned the complicated music content type and just hacked the general one as its output was more pretty) unless there’s a reason (provincial rugby reporters started inputting their game results into the until-then neglected sporting post types as it automatically promoted their page on the website).

We also need to keep doing IA user research (which is more than just card sorting). Other ways of doing research include information seeking (look at search log etc.), hierarchy of infomation, facets, and task flows.

Conversely, be broad in our profession. We need to understand domains such as UX and cognitive psychology to do our job properly.

Be the glue with editors, business, stakeholders, and designers. We’re the people that understand what it’s supposed to be.

Much like the night before, the talks finished up with a call to action:

• Get IA equal standing as a UX field of practice. There’s too much talk about IA disappearing or being a part of UX. It is different.
• Data visualisation: we need to know how to do data visualisations for interaction (and getting decisions made).
• Make IA cool again. As Hanley admitted: “I was going to be a medical librarian … then I found out I could work with computers.”
• Find our voice — blog, talk, tweet, and take away — read, review projects, practice IA, and above all speak about it.

So ended an incredibly diverse (and unbelievably well documented) EuroIA. Next year’s “friendlier than IA Summit” will take place in lovely Rome on September 27-29.

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Image CC by Pedros

Nestled between ornate medieval and stark modernist architecture, EuroIA opened to a sold out crowd from twenty-seven different countries ranging from Japan to New Zealand. And of course, a lot of Europeans.

We’ve also done our first experiment in using Storify for curating conference streams. Love it? Hate it? Prefer it to these reports? Check it out and let us know in the comments. (Also check out the conference Lanyrd or Martin Belums “all your EuroIA slides are belong to us“).

Luke Wroblewski, Today’s Web

Wroblewski (who, organiser Eric Reiss was quick to point out, is in fact a Polish-born European, despite the American accent) kicked off the conference.

In short, tomorrow’s web is social, and mobile.

Social is big

Wroblewski showed how Britekite has changed from using the dreaded webform (after 20 years, you’d think that it would remember my name), to Facebook Connect, which both eases the transition of logging into a new app, but also encourages activity through people you know.

Wroblewski also decribed the 0-1-2 model: you’re twice as more likely to engage in something if two friends are doing it already than if only one is).

Facebook Connect boasts not only an 800m userbase from Facebook, but also that 500m of them will be logged in at any one time.

It’s also had huge pickup in use in 3rd party apps: ( 60m/17% in 2008, 100m/22% in 2009, 250m/30% in 2010).

all software will become social, because everything humans do is social.

The nature of social is also changing how people behave on the web. Mark Zuckerberg is quoted as saying “the best check on bad behaviour is identity”, and has been shown in Quora, which has only had to ban one person in their 250 million userbase.

Mobile

The mobile field is also increasing exponentially. For example,  Amazon has done >$1bn on it in the last 12 months and Best Buy doubles sales through it each year (now at 30m).

Wroblewski pointed out that while we hear about mobile first in developing countries (50% of primary access in Africa/Asia, and 45% in India), the developed world is not far behind: A… but developed countries too: 22% of  people in the UK are predominantly mobile, and the US is predicted to reach 50% by 2015.

This brings up interesting challenges: using a travel website on a desktop not only involves a different screen size, but usually a different context (the mobile may be checking in at the airport).

80% of the crap you design for desktop has to be killed off for mobile

Mobile first philosophies:
Growth = opportunity
Constraint = focus
Capabilities = innovation

The Future:

It’s going to be a zombie apocolypse. Seriously, it won’t be about a few devices, but a plethora of them. Because of this, Woblewski is part of a movement known as Future Friendly investigating how we think about devices in the future.

Today’s web is exciting and scary.

Beyond The Polar Bear, Michael Atherton

Who knew domain modelling could be so interesting? Perhaps when you have arguably one of the richest, and thus most complicated, datasets around to deal with. Atherton explained the process the BBC has gone through to clean up and standardise their vast web offerings, while still allowing for the customisation formerly done with microsites.

He used the concept of Disneyland’s domain system (everything, from theme parks to hotel food, is linked together in rich and non-hierarchical ways) as a great analogy, and one that can be reflected in some of hteir projects.

A Web of Connected Things

• The BBC Programming System paid a lot of attention to URIs. While Tim Berners-Lee tells us that they should be hackable, permanent, and persistent , the impermanence of the Beeb’s media (a series may change numbering when it moves overseas, have a mini-series extended to a full one, and may jump channel or even medium), means that they have have had to sacrifice hackability for the other two (for example, BBC1 programme Sherlock has the URI http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t4pgh ).
• BBC Food challenged what audience and medium you design for. The site wasn’t doing as well in Google as might be expected, because there was a lot of churn of content: chefs retain copyright of their recipes, so they tended to come and go, thus confusing Google (or as Atherton amusingly calls it, “splitting the Google juice”). However, they realised that people are more interested in finding a type of dish (entering via Google) rather than ‘the dish’, so came up with the idea of dish as canonical work — while recipes may come and go, the page stays. This, in combination to paying a lot of attention to mobile display (as might be expected, most pageviews were on a mobile device, presumably as people were in the kitchen) led to traffic doubling from 650 thousand to 1.3m, and much higher ratings on Google.
• BBC Nature is about unlocking and exploring, but also about finding way to managed vast arrays of content. Rather than have to create thousands of pages that might never be seen, the BBC team pulled information on animals from Wikipedia — and had their wildlife experts edit the Wikipedia articles if they weren’t up to par, thus improving the quality of the BBC site and the general information available on the web.

The overall takeaway was the importance of domain modelling (he called Domain Driven Design by Eric Evans “his new bible”):

You need to be able to define the thing to be able to point at it!

and that a shared model + shared language + shared understanding = consistent UX. In other words, the model should be consistent enough that anyone in your team can draw it.

And the web is changing:

design for a world where Google is your homepage, Wikipedia is your CMS, and robots are your users.

Users, Experience, and Beyond, Eric Reiss

Eric Reiss led the audience through a behaviour-centred framework that his team at FatDUX use.

The need matrix is a way to consider the different attributes to any experience (Attitude, Expectation, Schedule, Environment, Origin). Your behaviour when booking a trip is very different from calling the tax office!

Reiss stepped us through how to use the framework:

1. Do customer research
2. Create mental models (ala Indy Young)
3. Write scenarios
4. Tag the interactions throughout the process
5. Create snapshots
6. Do quantitative analysis. Reiss suggests weighting using 1-3 for primary, secondary, and passive interactions, and then coding responses from -3 to +3. The negative answers are important as they can be used to easily show problems.

He urged us to:

• Understand the ergonomics of need for key scenarios
• Consider user experience as the sum of a series of interactions
• Write and chart a scenario to identify, quantify, and prioritse key interactions (snapshots)
• Go out and make the world a better place.

The Information Architecture of Culture, Martin Belam

EuroIA veteran (we reported on his previous years’ talk) and conference reporter Martin Belam gave a refreshingly frank discussions of the bumpy road to implementing APIs at the Guardian.

One of the key ares the Guardian is looking at is how to move discussions beyond a small hallowed circle of critics and reporters. They’re keen to help “mutualise” the relationship between newspaper and their arts audience (as in with mutual funds, find a way for both audience and paper to be supported, a bit concern these days in the eras of paper closures and paywalls)

When you have a bigger audience, where do you hang these conversations?

They had some success with pulling in external content with a music project that pulled information from MusicBrains, and so decided to create a larger system with books. However, it wasn’t quite so simple.

Mistakes:

• Didn’t get API right first time up. The domain model for books is difficult, as ISBNs can change for editions, and are added to CDs, calendars, and even card displays.
• Ignored previous experience Person with library experience said that tried tagging with ISBNs in the past and found it difficult as they’re physical. It turned out that that was still true.
• Too few devs in too big a team. “Fifteen people can change their minds far more quickly than three people can build”
• Got obsessed with design details (45 minute discussions about start rating details!)
• Went for ‘big bang launch’. As there were still a few bugs to be ironed out, this damped a lot of interest in the product.

However, they did have some successes:

• Used an Objects/Properties/Actions Map. This also helped with later mobile first strategy.
• Giving the developers a chance to be creative again. The team was sent to SXSW11, and the developers made an app that scraped information on band members and made a site.  However, the big issue this brought up was the content’s quality and uniqueness (or lack of in both cases). Guardian readers balked at the content often not being up to the site’s usual standards … and Google penalised the entire site as it had a huge number of pages that was scraped rather than original content. They had to deindex the pages, emphasise the site wasn’t usual Guardian content, and create site specific ways to search it.)

He have the following tips:

1. Know what is important. What is the goal you’re trying to attain? And is new technology the answer?
2. ISBNs are evil. ["F**king evil . Worse than mini-bars, which are evil as they put terribly overpriced alcohol in your hotel room"].
3. Trust good developers. Engaged developers can be the most valuable asset on a project. “Coding is actually really creative. Don’t ruin your developers with boring and uninspired briefs.”
4. Listen to all of the team. Job titles and age don’t matter if they have the right answers or knowledge.
5. Get the model right. Lists (rather than ‘pages’ or ‘fronts’) were the key to success. The Guardian got everyone together to create a really strong framework. A good model makes the rest easy.

And a bit of fun: the Guardian was established in 1821. The developers used the API to serve up the news as it would have looked on the original broadsheet. “The developers were particularly proud of ‘Entweet this’”

Out of the Echo Chamber, into the Fire Jason Mesut

The day came to an impassioned end as Jason Mesut played truth or dare with the UX industry. Having been in the field for over a decade, he’s worried with a lot of the precedents and dogmas around.

The Dogmas:

• Mobile first: is confused as an always use strategy. He poined out that Luke’s view is balanced in calling it ‘a way’, but that others (such as clients) quote it as gospel without the nuance.
• The open web: open source and open web are not the only way. While our developer friends care about it, to be honest those in business don’t, so we need to maintain a critical distance. Sometimes proprietary is better!
• Agile: There is more to Agile UX than Sprint OS and Sprints ahead, this is only one aspect, doesn’t always work
• Service Design: most service design and design is a lot of talk and corporate entertainment. “All fart and no shit”.
• Responsive design: an old argument in new clothes (fixed vs fluid, separate access etc). Technology changes rapidly.
• Breaking down silos: this is naive. Organisations are complex, people better in small  groups, change takes too long. “You can’t reorganise people because the website is crap”

One of his most powerful statements is that UX is eating itself with its insular, rockstar centred culture. The picture (for those who’ve seen or at least know of the movie) is priceless:

The Human Centipede of UX Dogma

That said, it wasn’t all fire and brimstone. He challenged IA and UX people to map what they are and where they want to go, and provided a very useful way to show it:

Map Your Own Adventure: What Type of UXers Are You/Want to Be?

His some of his key truths and dares:

Truths

• There is no universal truth in UX. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar
• Sometimes the quietest people have the best things to say. As someone commented on a post by Andy Budd “the people doing the best work are people we’ve never heard of”. They’re not on the conference circuit or hawking a book, they’re just doing their job, and doing it well.
• There are no silver bullets in UX. Repeating them can weakens us. We need multiple weapons, and to know when and how to use them.
• Most UX people don”t articulate what they do and how they are different from others. If we don’t know, how will others? Already we have business and marketing taking on design thinking since no one is saying otherwise.
• Our bubble will burst unless we stamp out the greedy pretenders. There are too many freelancers with scant experience getting too much money and not hanging around. How about paying permanent staff more, and calling out the people who don’t know what they’re talking about?
• There are more non-UCD success stories than UCD success stories. Many business people are successful without UCD, so don’t push it.
• Most UX people are not built for strategy. UX people are nice. Do you really want to be like Jobs, Trump, or Sugar?

Dares

• Don’t tweet soundbites. Or in other words, don’t take comments out of context.
• Critique conference talks.
• Call bullshit on celebrity UX rockstars. Just because they’re charismatic and entertaining doesn’t mean they know what they’re talking about.
• Map your UX shape and focus your future. Designer, know thyself.
• Get into the heads of others
• Try more designing, less researching. UX can get obsessed with research to the detriment of the actual product (just as marketing will focus on the marketing of it). The devil is in the design details, or in other words, execution.
• Commit to strategy, or focus on UX. You can’t do both.
• Share opinions & be prepared to change. Be passionate, but flexible. Don Norman has changed his opinion several times, but at least he has one to change

—
Image CC by George M. Groutas

Not an Englishman in New York but an American in Denmark, Eric Reiss has been a leading figure in both developing and evangeling information architecture, but promoting European voices in IA through the EuroIA conference. In the lead up to its sixth event, this time taking place in Prague, Vicky Teinaki had a quick chat with Reiss about UX in Europe, IA back in the age of WAP, and his threatened Wikipedia page.

Given your Wikipedia page appears to be at risk of being taken down*, how would you describe yourself new to the world of IA and UX?

Happily, my career doesn’t depend on a mention on the Wikipedia, although it is flattering that so many people took the time to contribute to the page. Basically, though, I am simply someone who spends a lot of time thinking about how to make things better. Generally, if something doesn’t work well or a procedure is difficult, people just shrug their shoulders, sigh, and accept things. I don’t. I never did, even as a small child.

IA seems to always be under attack from other more interesting sounding terms, be it UX (with nods to Jesse James Garret’s “it’s all UX” back in 2008) or more recently content strategy. Where does IA sit these days?

The individual terms are unimportant. But UX is a good umbrella for a lot of skills, including information architecture, service design, etc. And the term is gaining a lot of attention; Scott Berkun calls this “The Golden Age of User Experience”. The problem is not so much the terms we use as those who promote them. But you can’t build a career by putting old wine in new bottles.

You’ve been organising EuroIA since 2005. Right from the outset that EuroIA has been very strong about its regionality (and specifically not being American). What are the challenges (and rewards) involved with catering for such a wide audience as all of Europe?

The challenge is that Europe is incredibly diverse. The cultures are unique, as are the languages. We have some countries that simply refuse to integrate for a variety of political reasons. But helping to build EuroIA, along with a fabulously talented programme committee, local ambassadors in over 20 countries, and the unswerving support of the American Society for Information Science and Technology has been incredibly rewarding.

When we started seven years ago, there were no IA or UX conferences in Europe. We realized the need to build pan-European relationships and respect the cultural diversity that makes us unique. For several years, we didn’t allow Americans to speak simply because they already had good conferences; we needed to bring unknown local talent to the forefront. And we did! Last year, about 25% of the European programme was reprised at the North American IA Summit in Denver. I am tremendously proud that we have been able to stand on our own feet.

Today, there are local conferences throughout Europe. There is a growing professional network.
We have played an important role in bringing this about.  Conversely, our conference perhaps less about information architecture than one might think. Our scope gets broader each year.

I notice you have country ambassadors (very Eurovision!). Can you give us any more information about how that works?

It’s very simple; we need people who know their local communities and can promote the conference in their local language. This is the primary role of the country ambassador. For the most part, people have simply written to me and asked to do the job. And I let them do it. Of course, we bring in new blood from time to time if we don’t feel the CA is pulling his or her weight.

I recently revisited your book on Practical Information Architecture. While a lot of things have changed since 2000 (I’d completely forgotten about the fuss about WAP!) a lot haven’t.

I’m currently working on a revision, along with a good friend and colleague in Budapest, Judit Ponya. We, too, were surprised at how much was still relevant so many years later. But then again, when I wrote the original book, I tried to focus on the generic aspects of the subject and not get bogged down in technologies. The WAP section to which you refer, was in the very last chapter, which dealt with future perspectives of the industry. Curiously, although WAP never caught on, my predictions regarding the rise of apps and such have proven remarkably accurate.

In your keynote for EuroIA “Users, Experience, and Beyond”, you’re promising to give us a framework for looking into experiences. Without giving the game away, can you give us any hints about what you’re going to be talking about?

Well, at my company, FatDUX, we’ve experimented with various tools to help define and quantify user experience. I’ve already blogged about this, but I thought it was high time to actually do a step-by-step run-through of some of our techniques. There’s no obligation for anyone to adopt these, but they work for us and ought to work for others, too.

Eric Reiss is a keynote for EuroIA, taking place in Prague, Czech Republic from September 22-25 2011.

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*Editor’s note: as of going to print, Eric’s article appears to be safe.

EuroIA is about community, and about learning and sharing knowledge. So it wasn’t a surprise that attendees showed up energetic and ready for the second day of EuroIA after a long, fun night in the city of good food and wine. Again, the balance between practical talks about core IA topics, and inspirational reflections on opening up our design process, the role of UX, and how we work with data worked well. Excellent lunches, the IA Jam, the treasure hunt and enough breaks created opportunities to get to know fellow attendees. And the talks were great, so read on.

Lean IA: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business – Jeff Gothelf

In the beginning, we needed deliverables to define the practice of information architecture. A lot of value has been placed on the deliverable itself – practitioners have become experts for wireframes, the go-to person when you needed a comp or diagram. Put beautiful deliverables are worthless if the good design they describe is not carried through to the live experience. Additionally, static deliverables are not doing interactive, multi-platform experiences justice.

Lean IA is inspired by Lean Product and Agile development theories. It’s a transformative practice of bringing the true nature of our work to light faster, with an emphasis on experiences rather than deliverables.

This is what the Lean IA process looks like

Concept > Prototype > Validate internally > Test externally > Learn from user behaviour > Iterate
(this is just the UX design process)
Get your designs out there quickly, in public, for everybody in your organisation to see and comment on.

What Lean IA is:

Control: The design team drives the design, and opens it up for feedback and input. It’s important that the decision how feedback is incorporated remains in the hands of the designers. The UX designer is the keeper of the vision – the greater goal of the design is your responsibility.

Momentum: Everyone on the team is engaged and motivated, and everyone is moving forward. Don’t design in a silo, share what you’re doing and show your progress.

Quality: Don’t race for the third place, but champion the best experience that you possible can create for your customers and your business.

Alignment: As you move forward with the design, show it to others, to get their buy-in and to ensure everybody is on the same page. It’s not your design or my design, it’s something we created together. Make sure the stakeholder team sees their ideas in your design, helping you advocate your solutions.

Feasibility: Lean IA allows you to ensure the experience can be built well – at the core of this is prototyping the core flow. Demo prototypes to the development team, discuss and iterate. The prototype is documenting the most important functionalities.

Fill in the gaps: There’s always something you didn’t think about. By talking about your design, you stand a chance of getting all pieces of the puzzle together.

So, can it be done?
After defining his concept of Lean IA, Jeff took some time to talk about culture.

If you’re working in a software/web design shop, with a multi-disciplinary teams, you can implement Lean IA very easily. You are in the problem-solving business, so you don’t solve problems with design documentation, but with working software.

If you’re in an interactive agency, it’s a tougher sell. Agencies are in the deliverables business, this is how they make money. Deliverables are handed over to clients or development shops, deliverables are specified in the statements of work. Adopting a Lean IA process is a fundamental change in the agency business model:
Concept > Validate with client > Iterate > Validate with client > Prototype > Learn from user behaviours.
Show rough ideas and concepts to your clients, at least every two days. Get your client’s buy-in. Show confidence you have in your work and your approach.

Is this good for every project?
Use this approach where it makes sense. Lean IA works well for functional, task-oriented projects, eg experiences with a core purchase flow. Highly experiential marketing projects, such as very interactive websites with brand interaction and exploration as a goal, will struggle.

How to get started with Lean IA?
Jeff shares his experience from implementing this way of working at The Ladders. To kick things off, everybody gets together in a collaborative design session – the core execution team of the project sketches ideas together. Designers, developers and product managers engage in a design-and-critique workshop. This facilitates early team alignment, collaboration, and a sense of ownership.

Lean IA isn’t a revolution, it’s an evolution, taking us back to the experience design business. Collaboration is the smarter way to do good work. If you liked Jeff‘s talk, get it here and have a look at his blog.

Agile and UX: Stories from the Trenches – Matt Roadnight & Jane Austin

(This talk took place on day 1, but in the context of Jeff’s session, this experience report on agile UX fits better in here.)

Jane is head of UX at IG Index, where she and her team tackle the challenge of doing agile UX. Matt is an agile consultant, who was called in to help Jane’s team to get things working. In their talk, they shared both their experience of working at and with IG Index, but also their personal perspectives on agile UX.

For Jane, agile is more an attitude than a canonical set of processes you have to follow. For Matt, agile is all about communication and collaboration, with Scrum as a framework to facilitate this collaboration. Every agile team has to agree not only on a ‘definition of done’, but also on a ‘definition of ready’ that works for their product and context. For Jane, this is more important than sticking dogmatically to the notion of ‘working one sprint ahead’. Don’t rush into agile development, it’s possible to start too soon. If you need more time to set a vision for a complex project, take time for it. Jane’s team works in the financial space, so up front research to communicate what the product is about was valuable. Experience wheels visualised the client lifecycle, personas created empathy.

Matt helped the team to move from these materials to a product backlog. In collaborative planning workshops, the UX, business and tech team got together to create an overview structured by features and contents. Everybody discussed the upcoming work, and voted on high-risk or high-priority areas.

An important concept of agile is to create flow, to ensure stories are ready for development. When it took the team longer to get the navigation right, other elements moved up in the backlog more quickly than expected. This ended in fragmentation of interactions – to mitigate the risk of an inconsistent, incoherent design, Jane had to change how she did her work. She stepped back to adopt more of a leadership and creative director role, and the team put together patterns.

Additionally, Matt encouraged Jane and her colleagues at IG Index to work as a product team.The product owner isn’t a role, but a set of responsibilities and skills. There’s rarely one person who has all information about user and business needs, and is available to questions from the team. A good product owner team has a member from the product, the tech and the UX/design team. Jane found it challenging to wear both the UX lead and the PO team member hat. Tools such as collaborative product discovery workshops and retrospectives facilitate creating the team spirit.

Matt has published a whitepaper with several case studies of agile ux teams, available for download here.

Start Anywhere – What Faceted Navigation Is (Not) Good For – Peter Boersma

Peter started his talk by defining faceted navigation:

• Facets are attributes of your content items;
• Navigation is finding your way in an (information) space;
• Faceted navigation is about selecting attributes of content items to navigate an information space.

A typical design has facets on the left, with content that matches the selected facets being displayed to the right of the navigation.

So when does it make sense to use faceted navigation?
Your content items have to be tagged appropriately. It’s useful when your facets and values actually distinguish content items, facilitating choice. The comparison website Kayak uses facets to provide more information about search results.

When should you not use faceted navigation?
Faceted navigation can make an unclear design and navigation even worse. If your users prefer search to browsing, faceted navigation doesn’t fit their needs. Amazon has facets in place, but search is the easy option of choice.
Don’t use faceted navigation if your content items have additional features. On the Dell website, a user goes through selecting up to 6 different facets, only to discover more additional options. A wizard could be a better solution at this point.
If you only have a small collection of content, faceted navigation isn’t for you either. Apple has a limited number of products, so they can just list them on their homepage.

If your users are in non-selection phases of the purchase process, faceted navigation is of no use to them.
Finally, faceted navigation isn’t suitable if you want to introduce serendipity and chance discoveries of content.

What are the alternatives to faceted navigation?

• Search
• Directory listing
• Product tables and comparison charts (for an overview of a small selection of products)
• Product configurators, wizards, advisors to select the right product (eg Audi car selector)
• Top X lists (to highlight popular content, eg on news websites)
• Fewer products to begin with

Tips & tricks

1. make sure that if you select one facet, the ones that aren’t relevant anymore disappear.
2. at some point, comparison charts may be easier.
3. for products that appear in many categories, it can make sense to group them uner a ‘general’ category
4. the order of facets determines how they will be used. if price is most important to your users, put it first.
5. Faceted navigation is hardly ever the only solution, but needs to combined with other navigation types.
6. ‘view all designs’ is not a filter
7. ask yourself: should we use faceted navigation for all content types?

Whispering in the Giant’s Ear: Designing Social Media Interaction for Samsung Electronics -Hendrik Sommerfeldt

Hendrik shared a case study of a project with Samsung. 9 out of 10 kids in the UK can identify Daleks and tell you a story about them – but if you show a photo of Daleks in the rest of Europe, only few people know what they are. If it’s hard to bridge the cultural gap within Europe, imagine how hard it is to design ‘something social’ in Europe for a South Korean brand.
To set the context, Hendrik explored the similarities between Korea and Germany, and explained the DNA of Samsung, a large company owned by one family. The Samsung Anycall Dreamer was a social campaign successful in Asia, targeting a young segment, promoting Samsung as an employer. Thousands of young people registered to get a chance for a placement as an intern at Samsung.

What did it take to adapt this campaign for Germany? The target audience was completely different, the project brief and KPIs had to be redefined. Samsung is perceived differently in Germany, and not known for listening to people, so the solution was a ‘voice of the customer’ programme. Applying the SUCCESS model from ‘Made to stick’, the campaign recruited young technologists to collaborate with them and advocate Samsung through buzz-marketing.

Hendrik reflected on his main insights from managing this project.
Firstly, communication was a challenge – the local Samsung offices had little power, it was necessary to communicate directly with the decision-makers in the South Korean headquarters.
Secondly, the client was keen to feel in control of the process, so daily reporting was necessary to establish a working relationship Samsung were comfortable with. Basecamp’s to-do lists and milestones were the tools of choice to facilitate this collaboration. Other useful tools to work together rapidly across time zones were Ning, Dropbox or Google docs.
Thirdly, South Koreans don’t consider contracts as set in stone, but as an adaptable agreement that vaguely describes the project. To handle this, Hendrik’s team set specific milestones, but allowed for flexibility and change.
Finally, Samsung was keen to see happy German customers experiencing their products. Instead of setting up costly events, the German project team took their ideas to barcamps and events such as Mobile Monday, reporting people’s feedback back to Samsung.

Take-aways
To identify the right participants for the campaign, careful selection, including face-to-face interviews, was necessary. Set up tools to support collaboration. Make milestones and progress visible through checklists. Ask questions and strip the project down to the core KPIs. Get Asian clients over to Europe and establish a relationship, otherwise it will be hard to establish trust, and engage in follow-up projects.

Keynote: Paul Kahn – Structured data: none / some / all

Paul started his keynote with a historical reflection. Between 1995 and 2010, gazillions of websites changed reading behaviour. Our design problem was an evolution of visual literacy. Readers were trained to find information in print publications, digital publications lacked physical context, and their location and scope were invisible. The main design task was to connect readers to content by adapting the graphic language – type, colour, image – from the page to the screen; to create navigation systems that helped users understand what they could find on a website; and to communicate the structure of the content in flexible repeatable units.

Now, in 2010, we live in a world of massive undifferentiated data. TeleGeography’s 2010 Global Internet Map captures in a visual form the amount of bandwidth between different continents, and the percentage of bandwidth that’s being used.
In 2010, users are

• convinced that they can find what they want on the internet;
• producing and managing dematerialised content: photos, videos, music, email, compound documents;
• creators and consumers with storage/creation and retrieval/consumption needs;
• looking for something all the time.

In 2010, users want to

• record, share, publish;
• be convinced, amused, in control;
• find, sort, shift, copy;
• mix, reorder, rearrange.

Users now have the experience of solving problems by manipulating metadata (even if they don’t know what that is).

As information architects, we work with data. So what is data like, in 2010?
Today, every IA/UX problem is a data continuum. Data has:

1. no structure | vacuum | raw
2. some structure | marsh | eatable
3. complete structure | field | cooked

Unstructured data
Data vacuum: no metadata has been added to items. Even data vacuums include content and context. There’s a trade-off between precision (finding only what you’re looking for) and recall (finding everything that might contain what you’re looking for). Information retrieval algorithms struggled to get the balance.

Take the name as an example of data. People have many names (legal names, professional names, etc), places and things have many names in different languages. As data, a name presents a major problem: it’s not unique. Finding the person you’re looking for on Google requires work-arounds, we add additional strings for context.

To retrieve information, we use implicit metadata, eg to find a file on your computer, you can look for document type, file name or the time/date stamp.
Google has made certain editorial decisions, eg showing you images corresponding with your search term.

Five ways to organise information for understanding and ease of use are on location, alphabet, time, category and hierarchy (LATCH (+) by Richard Wurman (in Information Anxiety 2)). But it’s also possible to organise on common focus.

Semi-structured data
Data marsh: some metadata without predefined language or requirements
Tagging: ad hoc uncontrolled keywords
Time/location stamps: where and when
each metadata dimension is flat (no hierarchy) and independent
Many kinds of relationships can be inferred

Structured data
data fields: where metadata has been explicitly added to items according to an agreed-upon structure
the content is made to fit a pre-defined structure
the required parts of the structure are complete
each metadata dimension qualifies and reinforces the meaning of content

Paul is known for visualising information beautifully, so he finished his keynote with examples of (interactive) visualisations of structured data.

The Alaska Nativce Collections catalogue is a great example for fitting content into an explicit structure to present a lot of information effectively.
Map of the Market
Newsmap.jp
NY Times Immigration Explorer
NPR Patchwork Nation
US Holocaust Memorial Museum Timeline visualisation
Pivot: tool released by Microsoft Live Labs

Without (an understanding of) structured data, these visualisations wouldn’t be possible.
Would the world be a better place if everything had a unique ID? If every digital object with a unique ID contained strutured data?
How does structured data affect quality of life questions?
This is the food for thought Paul left us with to ponder over.

For Europe’s sixth IA Summit, an international crowd gathered in Paris for three days of talks, workshops and networking. With a good mix of inspirational and practical talks, the recurring topics of the first day for me were service design,  what IA is all about and the relationships with business, development and marketing.

Keynote – Oliver Reichenstein: iA on IA

Oliver Reichenstein

Building upon ideas discussed over at his blog, Oliver started his keynote by sharing why he chose to be @iA and how his understanding of information architecture evolved. Oliver liked the sound and notion of ‘Information Architect’, but when he first encountered IAs on a project, he was ‘traumatised’ by jargon, dogma and self-importance. It didn’t match what he saw in the term:

• IA can be related to philosophy – philosophers are mind architects (Nietzsche), IAs are philosophical engineers;
• IA is about communication;
• IA is about seeing what works and how it looks, about (re)building until your initial vision has found its shape (this is fun – play Lego);
• IA is the recipe for cooking good user experience.

But, can information be architected?
Oliver addressed this question by sharing how things are done at iA. An information architecture evolves and refines itself throughout the product development process. It’s the first concrete result of user and client research that the iA strategy team molds into initial wireframes. Information architecture becomes tangible in the design sketches, and Oliver presents wires and information architecture next to each other to his clients.

IA is what programmers at iA do, moving from the flat lands of Fireworks into prototyping. It’s optimised through prototyping, A/B testing, studying user behaviour, fixing mistakes watching and evaluating user behaviour live. Everybody at iA contributes from their perspective – designers, product managers, developers.

Often at conferences, the Q&A at the end of a talk turn into boring comments everybody is forced to listen to. However after Oliver’s keynote, the topics triggered by questions from the audience where almost more interesting than his session:

On creating beautiful things
Beauty in interaction design happens through use, through experiencing. Writer doesn’t look spectacular, but it’s functional and beautifully useful. Die Zeit hired iA not only because they knew the outcome would look good, but because they wanted to make it functional.

On how he was influenced by his studies of philosophy
Philosophy is about understanding the development and organisation of motions. Studying philosophy teaches you to understand different perspectives, hence it’s a good training for understanding how a design is being looked at, and developed from different points of view.

On Japanese web design and business culture
To the western world, Japanese websites look cluttered – but we don’t grasp just how much content they contain, with each Kanji carrying a high density of information. Consider the different reading and information processing behaviour, but also the different notion of beauty. As a designer, it can be challenging to work with clients in a business culture that holds agreement from all parties dear. IA is a science, but to a certain point also art; IAs take directions that not everybody agrees with, and then test if these work. An approach that’s hard to sell to Japanese clients.

If all of this sounds interesting to you, take a look at Jeroen’s interview with Oliver.

Design beyond the ‘glowing rectangle’: user experience design and research implications of the internet of things – Claire Rowland and Chris Browne

(by Franco Papeschi)

Claire and Chris shared their considerations about the impact of connected smart objects on design and user experience. The ‘Internet of things’ is a promise yet to be realised, but there are examples that begin to show the potential, a potential that could bring between 22 and 50 billion of connected objects by 2020. Connected bicycles, umbrellas or prescription bottles, are already there. As part of SmarcoS, a multi-company R&D project, Claire and Chris have identified some key challenges for designers:

• Services and UI design need to scale and work across devices;
• Interoperability of data and objects;
• Privacy management of all the data generated can get complex;
• New research and prototyping methods to iterate and evaluate the internet of things (eg bodystorming, paratyping, wizard of oz prototyping, drama methods, and ethnography) to understand;
• New mental models and metaphors.

Examples and solutions for these challenges were one of the most important takeaways, including a story from a connected city in Korea, where one smart card gives you access to public transport, libraries and other services . Claire and Chris promised to publish their talk online soon, and material will also be available on the SmarcoS website. In the meantime, if you want to find out more, we recommend having a look at Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino’s work.

Confusion and Clarity in IA – D. Grant Campbell

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful.

Information architecture strives to make complex information spaces clear to users by anticipating user needs and selecting or suppressing details. Beck’s map of the London Underground is a pioneering example of information visualisation and IA: it serves a specific purpose, navigating the tube network, extremely well by showing you only what’s related to this purpose.
The web is no longer a place we make excursions to with an objective, but omnipresent. We can no longer rely on designing clarity by focussing on users’ purpose, as information needs are now often temporary moments in a longer process. Problematic information situations, eg when you’re bankrupt, unemployed, or have learned about a chronic illness, can be confusing and perplexing. How can we create oases of clarity?

Grant related this challenge to cities – places of seeming confusion, but when you look carefully the complexity turns into patterns. He argued that IAs need to develop their vocabulary to talk about patterns emerging from chaos. Using Charles Dickens’ Bleak House as an example, Grant discussed how descriptions of cities in literature could inform designing complex information environments.

IA is an oscillation between articulations of perplexity and the creation of coherence, trying to create oases of clarity. To do this, we have to acknowledge the confusion that’s there, and find ways to articulate the resemblance, the relationship between perplexity and coherence.

Sounds complex? 45 mins were too short to explore Grant’s ideas for new metaphors, so I shall read Bleak House and wait for Grant’s next publication on the topic to follow up.

The New, Smart Customers. How they really buy and how we can address this – Carmen Fehrenbach & Axel Roesgen

Carmen and Axel started their talk on designing for retail by reminding us that buying decisions are very individual, depending on the customer’s personality and attitude, the product, the circumstances and the culture. Pulling together research by Forrester, Sapient Nitro and the Consumer Commerce Barometer, the talk focussed not on spontaneous, but considered purchases.

Consider the purchase path:
Idea > Research > Decision > Purchase > after-purchase experience and opinion-building

For considered purchases, the idea is triggered intrinsically – the challenge is to make customers stay, and buy. Understand your users and design for relevance.

How people research depends on the product. While online reviews are a main information source when buying electronics, people like to look at clothes in store. But often research takes place both in the online and offline space. Have you ever taken a print-out of your online research to the shop, to make sure you find the right product and have all information to hand to make a decision? Have you ever looked up online reviews via your smartphone while in a shop? People go as far as taking photos of themselves wearing clothes in the shop, only to take home to get feedback and ponder over their buying decision. Make sure you understand, and address, customers’ information needs for different products.

How we can design for the cross-channel retail experience? While we often only get the chance to design one part of the retail experience, bear your customer’s journey in mind, and look at all the information on buying behaviour that’s out there.

Organisations often underestimate what it takes – it’s hard to align content, taxonomies, backend behaviour and billing processes. Service blueprints, touchpoint matrixes, visualisations of mental models and experience maps are tools to communicate the purchase flow and all of its touchpoints.

Besides the challenge to tackle the system that is the retail experience, it can be difficult to track conversion and get data how customers move between different channels.

Alignment diagrams: strategic ux deliverables – James Kalbach

Other talks touched on UX deliverables that visualise the complexity of a service or system, so it was great that James Kalbach put together a comprehensive overview of the tools to hand.

Referencing Jess McMullin (if you’re interested in UX and business, Jess’ work is a must), James introduced value-centered design, and defined alignment diagrams as diagnostic tools that allow us to identify how we can create value for our users, and for the business. It’s crucial to make value explicit to your design, business and tech teams through visualisation.

1. Service blueprint
   Check out this example of a service blueprint by Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer
2. Customer journey map
   At the top: phases of interaction a person has with a company, brand, product or service over time
   Each phase has different facets of information (interaction, paint points, ‘moments of truth’).
   The map describes customer experience and the business touchpoints.
   At the bottom: business SWOT analysis for each phase.
3. Workflow diagrams
   Map what a customer is doing against what business is doing. The diagram can be aoverlaid with painpoints and other information. It’s similar to the journey map, but a different visualisation.
4. Mental models
   An example from Indie Young’s book groups tasks into goal spaces. The model shows how the business can address these goal spaces, but also how it can benefit from the customers’ goals. Mental models are not about a strict chronology as the flow, diagrams, but visualisation based on hierarchies.
   “A mental model helps you visualise how your business strategy looks compared to the existing user experience.” – Indie Young
5. Behaviour matrix
   Using an example from his book, an behaviour matrix is a table consisting of: phase / actions / thoughts / feelings / features / business
6. Isometric map
   Take a look at Paul Kahn’s work

Benefits: Alignment diagrams create common understanding, show the big picture, provide a common language, create value, support continuity in vision (prototyping the end-to-end service design) and facilitate enterprise IA (visualise how needs to talk to whom to make the service happen).

Arguments: If you take these deliverables to non-UX folks, to business people, have good arguments ready. Alignment diagrams visualise business complexity (diagrams can bring an array of clarity), cross-channel experiences and help to find opportunities for differentiation, innovation and growth.

Business literature talks about service design, so there’s vocabulary we can use. Recommended:

• 1984 article in Harvard business review: G. Lynn Shostack: Design Services that Deliver. Pioneered service blueprints;
• 1992 Karl Albrech:t The only thing that matters. Value at the core of things;
• 2007 Ram Charan: What the customer wants you to know. Value chain.

Why is this relevant for IAs?
We can bring our skills to the table: research, analyse abstract concepts, organise information, create visual representations and communicate across teams.

Marketing departments and consultancies are taking over the service mapping space, but there’s opportunities for solving business problems through design.

What do to now?
Check out James’ Customer journey mapping resources on web
Read Indi Young’s book, Harvard Business Review, Ram Charan
Try diagramming

On why we should NOT focus on user experience – Koen Claes

(by Franco Papeschi)

Starting from Daniel Kanhemann’s consideration that “we actually donʼt choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences.”, Koen suggests designers should change their approach – decisions are made by the ‘remembering self’, rather than the ‘experiencing self’. Koen shared a series of design principles (and examples) for how to make something memorable. His recipe for designing SUCCESS:

• Simple;
• Unexpected;
• Concrete;
• Credible.
• Emotional;
• Stories.

Make sure your experience finishes strong. Endings are the most important part of a journey, as they have the bigges impact on your memory of an experience.

Implementing identity on guardian.co.uk . Challenges, deliverables and ethics – Martin Belam

The Guardian has 2.1 m unique users daily, 1.2m pieces of content in the database, tagged with 7000+ keywords, displayed in 150+ templates and just one IA.

This sole IA is Martin Belam , who shared an insightful story of a six month project tackling users’ digital identity on the Guardian website with us. While the Guardian knows a lot about content, there’s little knowledge about the site’s users. An identity platform would give people a personality on the site and help understand who is part of the Guardian reader community.

Martin started the project by making ‘an explainer’ – a presentation for pitching internally why the problem of users’ identities needed addressing. While users create public content, such as comments on articles, there’s also a need for a private dashboard, eg for information posted on the job part of the website. Besides recording and distributing his explainer, Martin visualised the problem using wireframes and sketches, carrying a ‘portable IA kit’ and collaborating closely with the design and development team. As he puts it:

Lots of my work isn’t deliverables designing the system, but deliverables to get the system built in the first place.

A key issue Martin addressed was reusing existing digital identities vs creating a new one on yet another website or service. Lanyrd is a clever example of a service built around an existing identity, in this case Twitter. Should the Guardian pull in rich data about their readers from eg Facebook? OAuth raises concerns: what happens if the service your customers used to register closes down? The recent OAuth implementation by Twitter isn’t acceptable, as the Guardian can’t control the information. Due to these considerations, the Guardian decided to get their own registration right, and then see where integration would make sense.

We see many websites integrating 3rd party services – be careful and only integrate social elements that make sense in the context of your site. Consider the Facebook ‘Like’ button next to sad or controversial news. Sharing would be more appropriate, but with ‘liking’ likely to replace sharing, this feature doesn’t fit the context of a news website.

Finally, Martin talked about his guiding principles for designing for privacy. It’s all about trust, and ideally you should tell your users what data you collect and how it’s being used. This can be a challenge to push for, as telling your users what’s going on can scare them, seem like too much information, and conflict with business objectives. Dark Patterns around privacy and sharing are emerging (take a look at Harry Brignull’s worrying collection ) – these patterns lead to mistrust, and won’t be accepted by users in the long run. Services like Webfinger or RapLeaf show were things might be heading.

To get now comments on a Guardian article, you have to write about geeky tech and IA stuff. Comments are often what makes articles most interesting. Martin shared a story about ‘gherkingirl’, who added a real-life story to an article about rape by sharing her own experience as a comment. Taking her anonymity away by connecting her Guardian profile to her identity on a 3rd party service would have made this impossible. Every user has an identity on the Guardian site – we need to allow people to define their identities in the context of each service, and don’t enforce one web identity.

Today on Radio Johnny, Jeff Parks talks with Paul Kahn, 2010 Keynote for the EuroIA Summit taking place September 24th and 25th in Paris, France at Les Salons de l’Aveyron. Paul shares his experiences working in the field of Information Architecture over the years, how users access and understand information, as well as the many challenges and opportunities for the future of the discipline.

Quotes

The concept of Information Architecture…came out of the fact that…when we would work with clients who asked us to design banners for their websites…we often found that we would draw these overview diagrams and try and explain to them how things are organized. It wasn’t really what was on the banner it was the path that people would have to follow through the hypertext network.

We have a mixed generation, it’s not just people who are in their 20s or 30s or people in their 50s or 60s, we have sort of a mixed set of generation who have simply become convinced that they can find what they want on the Internet…and that’s a great opportunity.

I think one of the real areas for creativity in the field is being able to recognize what part of the structure can be exploited to make the information more useful.

Summary

Paul talks about his experiences in working on the web from its inception, as well as current opportunities for those in the field of Information Architecture to provide greater context for the conversations happening online and around the world.

Paul also shares the five ways to organize information for understanding and ease of use through the acronym, L.A.T.C.H.: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, and Hierarchy.

This understanding is critical in being able to address the paradox of doing business and communicating online today – almost no one wants to create structured data even though, for most, meaning is only provided through said structure.

Show Notes

Kahn and Associates
Speakers at 2010 EuroIA Summit
Paul’s contribution to new magazine with references to his other publications.
Interview and podcast PAUL KAHN : Designer d’architecture de l’information

Recently I got a chance to interview none other than Oliver Reichenstein. For those of you who don’t know him: he is the designer of the Web Trend Maps, owner of iA and the voice behind many provoking articles. In September he will be speaking at EuroIA 2010, Paris.

In the past you studied philosophy. How did you end up in the design business?

Oliver Reichenstein

I studied philosophy because I fell in love with a girl and to be next to her I went to philosophy class. In order to impress her I started studying Plato, Aristotle and Kant. That didn’t really work out, but a second woman I was impressed with, my French teacher, told me that in order to start making sense my chaotic brain needed some structure and logic. She was right.

Of course, I was not aware at the time that dealing with abstract notions was the ideal preparation for what would be known later as “information architecture.” At a time when I started working, the title “IA” was mostly a sales trick for people that sold overpriced card sorting sessions to naive customers. Still, what defines information architecture as I understand it today (concept, structure, interaction design), was sort of my first job.

As for surface design… Since there were no good screen designers around back in 1999, I decided to learn Photoshop and do the realization of my concepts myself. The rest came naturally.

What drives you to wanting to create the best designs?

Often it’s because I get angry about wrong standards or superficial bullshit that is commonly accepted as a standard. The more I ramble about bullshit and broken design standards, the higher the pressure for me to fix it.

What defines you as a designer?

Only recently I started call myself as a designer. I always felt that what I do is not fancy or slick or innovative enough for me to deserve that title. I now call myself a designer because the job titles in our field are all messed up (is it “screen designer,” “interaction designer,” “interface designer,” “web designer,” “interaction designer,” “UX designer”?) and it’s the easiest way to answer. It’s also a great conversation starter.

Over the years you’ve come up with many redesigns. From Facebook to the Mozilla browser. How do you approach these challenges?

ZEIT ONLINE

The two examples you’ve cited were design studies that were never realized. So is the somewhat famous paper redesign of Tages-Anzeiger. I think that the best designs we’ve done so far were too courageous for our clients. Literally too courageous. The courage to do what needs to be done, no matter how politically realistic the concept might be is what drives us. Sometimes we get through with our unconditional thinking (as in the case of ZEIT ONLINE), sometimes we don’t. Luckily, we are now in a situation where we do not need to do free work anymore, so whether our designs get realized or not, we now get paid for being courageous. How cool is that?

Our goal: The articles, the brand concepts, the strategy, the surface design—in everything iA does, we try to improve the quality of information. I believe that the best way to change things for the good is to clarify information. With the advent of digital communication things are getting better, but there is too much bullshit, too much bluff, too many lies in corporate communications. As naive as it sounds, I believe that by focussing on the essence, that is improving the reading and writing experience, we can actually change how things work in this world.

Some years ago you decided that your design future was in Japan. What made you move to this country?

First the absence of noise, then meeting my wife. Japan is a very noisy place, but as long as I didn’t speak Japanese, Tokyo was the calmest place I’ve ever seen—since I speak Japanese that calm is gone; but the memory of it remains. In spite of the noise, Tokyo is still the ideal place for me. The city is so big that it lets everybody be and become who they are. As much as I still love my home country, and in particular my home town (Basel), letting people be and become who they are is not given in Switzerland.

Could you share with us some of the highlights of Japanese interaction design?

The Toilets. The Metro system. The Service at Japanese Restaurants.—Japanese Web design, application design, mobile design is horribly overloaded and dated. Have a look at the Alexa top ten if you don’t believe me.

Here in the west we are constantly shifting from interaction design to UX, experience design and service design. How is our field developing in Japan?

Not much going on here. I can see three main reasons:

1. Web design is engineering. In general, Japanese are good at engineering because they’re diligent, cautious and disciplined. That’s why they produce good cars. But car and screen design have a different half life. Screen design is much more short lived and much more test oriented. Release-soon-release-often, A/B-testing or decisions taken by a UX expert against the general opinion of the CEO or the group the UX expert belongs to are against Japanese business culture where decisions are taken unanimously.

2. The lingua franca in our field is English. Japanese web designers just can’t keep up with the fast paste of screen design because most of them don’t speak the language well enough to follow the silicon valley madness.

3. The standard for Japanese web design is still: dense, granular, info overload. Much like our websites around 2003/2004. It’s mostly pre Web2.0 aesthetic (and logic) that dominates. Also, useless silly shiny flash micro sites are still common practice. And the really bad news is that nobody here one cares as long as everybody follows the same trend. Maybe things will change after we got our first big Japanese client to finally innovate.

What can we learn from Japanese (interaction) design culture?

Interaction designers should learn from product designers. And in that sense Japan is a little paradise. As much trouble as the Japanese economy is facing, Japanese product design is in many ways still a paradigm of craftsmanship, consideration and care.

What can the Japanese designers learn from western  (interaction) design culture?

The value of user testing. The value of taking strong decisions . The value of feature reduction (!).

With iA you own one of the smallest and most succesful design agencies in the world. What’s the secret?

Hire few. Hire only people that are better than yourself at what they are doing.  Pay them fairly. Never be late paying salaries. Never be scared of big corporations (most of them suck exactly *because* they’re too big).

You’ll be speaking at EuroIA 2010 in Paris. What will you be talking about?

Not sure. We’ve invested a lot of time into our first application (a word processor). If everything goes as planned, it should come out at the end of July. So I might talk about our first experiences or the “making of” (it has been a long long way). But we already have another internal news project lined up that might be more interesting from an IA point of view.

Thanks for your time.

For some the second day of EuroIA 09 started with a hangover, for others with interesting talks. But all of us had a great time at EuroIA 09 day 2. I am going to bed now, but I hope you enjoy this writeup.

Jason Hobbs: From Enterprise IA to Enterprise UX – Creating a User Experience Framework for a (big) Bank

How to you get an organisation to adopt UX in an effective, sustainable way? Jason Hobbs shared his experience of trying to do this for a large bank.

The objective of the project was to create a unified set of design artefacts to govern, standardise and optimise UX and interface design across multiple channels. The framework was based on stakeholder workshops, research, and a huge amount of relevant information from across the business. The result were UX principles, which informed guidelines, IA documents, and design templates. Jason stressed that principles are an important tool to measure success and allow traceability back to the business objectives.

To ensure the sustainability of the principles and the usage of the framework, UCD needs to be institutionalised in an organisation. A way to achieve this could be a core UX team, supported by decentralised, strategically placed allies. Jason’s team involved and trained the bank’s business analysts – a nice example of opening up the boundaries of our discipline and enabling others to be more user-centric.

Jason’s recommendations:

• Don’t get lost in detail. Version 0 of a UX framework should be a strong container, broad and shallow, but robust;
• It’s hard, so throw your best people at it;
• It won’t work without an executive championing the UCD approach;
• Make sure to integrate all parties and stakeholders;
• Be prepared for iterations, it’s not a quick shot;
• Focus on the users’ mental models.

Jason pointed out that they were lucky to come in at the right time, a time of change. The bank tried to overcome silos, stakeholders started talking to each other, and different projects supported and complemented the UX framework. The whole organisation was ready to take a leap, and UX was a small part of this.

Organisational change is hard, and Don Norman said it’s often impossible. Frameworks are important groundwork – championing them takes passion, patience and persistence.

(the above piece is written by Johanna Kollman)

Panel: A Thin White Line

In this panel the discussion focused on the challenges UX professionals face in Europe. What’s the current situation in the different parts of Europe? And are the differences as big as everybody thinks? The panel consists of four people, coming from all parts of Europe. Leisa Reichelt (United Kingdom), Hubert Anyzewski (Poland), Mark Kassteen (The Netherlands) and Luca Mascaro (Switzerland)

The first question they got was: “How is UX Perceived in your country?” Anyzewski answered that a few years ago it was pretty hard in his country. Clients had never heard about usability testing let alone user experience design. Four years ago he did the very first usability test in Poland… These days it is much better. According to Luca the Swiss and North-Italian areas are both very ‘creative’ markets. Clients used to trust mainly on marketing and didn’t really trust methodologies such as user centered design. But what Luca did was sell more hours of graphic design and creativity which he internally split up between design and research. These days it is much better. On the other side Mark says that UX has had a solid ground in the Netherlands for some years, even though it is still a struggle to get budget for proper research. Last but not least Leisa shared her thoughts about the UK. She said that it is a huge market, where a lot of organizations never heard of UX. But she also said that it really depends on the context. When you work in a mature organization like Flow you’ll attract mature clients, while as a freelancer you will see all sorts of clients.

After this there was a lot of debate about the problem that clients don’t understand what we can do for their business. Some said that it was really important that they understand the deliverables. Andreas Resmini, who moderated the talk, asked whether this was really interesting for a client… and Leisa jumped in by statingthat this is totally not interesting for a client. They don’t care for our deliverables, but they do care what we can do for their business. I think we need to learn to speak the clients language and translate our value into their business vision.

Reinoud Bosman & Joe Lamantia – The Architecture of Fun: Emotion, Interaction & Design for Massively Social Games

figure 3. Four Kinds of Fun

Reinoud and our own Joe gave this very interesting talk. They kicked off by saying: “All games have one thing in common: they are fun.” But there is more to this than you think, which Joe explained to us. Nicole Lazarro, a game developer, designed a model in which she divided fun into four different types (see graphic on the right). And by understanding these types of fun you can design better experiences. What Lazarro did was compare Massive Multiplayer Online Games to Facebook and what she found out was that Facebook had a lot more social benefits than MMO (a.o. the messaging is more open and cross-platform + it is easy to add friends). So she came with the idea of Massively Social Online Games: games connected to social platforms. By doing so she touched two types of fun: hard fun and social fun. And by combining these two you create a game that can have a long lasting value, that goes on beyond the time you actually play. This is where Killzone 2 comes in.

Killzone 2

Killzone 2 is a very popular Playstation 3 game developed in the Netherlands. The team focused mainly on creating a hard fun game, a hardcore 3D shooter. But what they wanted was to combine this with a huge social network (people fun). This resulted in the creation of Killzone.com, a website that was (and is) completely integrated with the game.

Here are a couple of things the team created for the website:

• The right to brag: make it easy to show that you are good at something, that you won and achieved personal goals;
• Integrate the ability to communicate cross-platform. So you are able to chat with in-game players via the website and vice-versa;
• Translate numbers in appealing graphics;
• Motivate everybody, even the lowest on the list, by chopping up the context depending on your position;
• Show a small part you are good at when somebody is low, and give a huge overview when you are the best.

It really sounded like a very good approach to a game. And I really believe that this way of looking at fun can be used in different types of projects, not just games. It is all about touchpoints.

Leisa Reichelt – Bare Naked Design

Our own Leisa shared her experience on the D7UX project with the EuroIA audience. She started by stating that not the product, but the community was the biggest challenge in this project. At the start she was already a bit aware of the fact that it would be a massive experiment, but it really turned out to be a tough job.

Almost all open source projects that are completely run by the community have a sub-optimal user experience and good graphic design, it just doesn’t go hand in hand with the way the proces goes. The only open source projects that are able to manage this have very strong direction on the collaborative proces. This strong direction requires dedicated resources with a lot of authority. Succesful examples are Firefox and WordPress. An open process means transparency and involvement, but it doesnt mean democracy. That would make the process endless and frustrating.

It was difficult for Leisa to bring the user centered design message across in the Drupal community. It began with the developers not understanding that there were any other users beside themselves. And explaining what the strategy of the D7UX project was going to be proved a failure, it wasn’t understandable and felt irrelevant for the community. This made Leisa and her design partner come up with pencil personas, simple but clear. With these personas and a couple of project principles the community started to understand what the goal was: make Drupal usable for a wide variety of people, not just developers. But this caused another problem. How do you bring the message across that we design for the 80% and make it great for them, while this will make it less usable for the developers themselves? And that was something that became very difficult to overcome. Especially since there was a core group of developers in the Drupal community that didn’t want these changes. So did the D7UX project end in failure? Partly… but it also created a series of good learnings:

• Its not Designers vs Developers thats the problem: its Framework vs Product;
• Designing in the open is a great thing to do for your peers. We don’t get to see each other work very often;
• It is possible to survive sporadic personal attacks for up to 6 months without going completely bonkers.

The end

And so ends EuroIA 09, an intimate conference with a lot of energetic people. Until next year, in Paris.

About 150 UX professionals are gathered in the center of Copenhagen to talk, listen and at EuroIA 09. Johnny was invited to the party to cover the event and bring the good stuff to you. So enjoy the show.

Scott Thomas – The Power of Design

Obama Presidential Campaign website

The opening keynote was given by Scott Thomas, aka SimpleScott. He was the design director for the Obama Presidential Campaign, which was one of the graphical highlights of the past years. Thisis such an interesting case because of the strong graphical style that was created throughout the entire campaign. One style, one message.

Scott kicked off by saying that this great end result was reached by a lot of nights and very hard work. When listening to him I figured there were two main reasons why it worked out so well:

1. First of all there was a strong creative team that understood the power of good design and branding: bringing a clear consistent message across. This consistency created a good organized and balanced feeling, which was new… previous campaigns used multiple slogans, graphics styles and didn’t understand the concept of branding.
2. The other point is: listening to the users. By constantly adapting to what the public was thinking, saying and doing they could create empathy. But more concrete: they checked out analytics… and this helped them find the best balance: should the button be red or blue? Will the copy ‘Own a piece of this historic campaign’ lead to more donations or ‘Last chance to make an impact’?

By combining these two forces: design expertise and user centered design they managed to make a very powerful campaign. And by constantly changing the website they created a story and sparked human emotions and intellect.

Wireframes don’t sell

A good lesson Scott tried to bring across was the power (or lack of it) of wireframes. When working with executives, or in his case politicians, you have to understand their vocabulary…. and wireframes aren’t in it. Where we can visualize an entire website when looking at a wireframe, they see a boring set of boxes. It just doesn’t help to sell the story, they are the floorplanes of UX.

When Scott clicked through his wireframes I noticed an interesting difference between them. In one you saw the functionalities being described, containing stuff like: ‘main feature’ and maybe ‘sign in’. This is a functional wireframe most interaction designers use. But in another wireframe he hit an interesting spot, showing boxes that contained the following words: ‘persuade’, ‘localize’, ‘represent’, ‘educate’ and ‘activate’. What he did in that wireframe is break the page up in different messages and seeing the website as a story. This is a really good approach, showing the strategy of the page.

Cennydd Bowles – The Future of Wayfinding

Wayfinding is one of the most fundamental skills people have. When it fails we are in deep trouble, imagine ambulances getting lost and people arriving late at important meetings. The way we navigate is done in several ways, done with different knowledge. That’s what Cennydd’s talk is all about and a lot of this he explains in his article ‘Wayfinding Through Technology‘.

Beside the topics he addresses in the article he also talks about other interesting stuff:

Cennydd describes the different types of signage around us. He explains how important it is to design these based upon rules, in order to create a consistent use of them. This is so important for the user experience… there are just too many different wayfinding systems and rules to follow.

The different signage types:

• Identification (‘This is a crossroad’)
• Directional (‘Go to the left’)
• Orientional (‘You are here’)
• Regulatory (‘Stay out’)
• Vernacular (‘Please use the other door’)

One of the challenges in wayfinding we face is the control of user generated wayfinding: people designing their own maps, with their own logic and rules. There is a beauty in this, but it also creates too much diversity that doesn’t help users.

At the end of the talk Leisa Reichelt made a very interesting comment. She stated that all the modern wayfinding systems focus on the destination, while forgetting the beauty and enjoyable aspect of the journey itself.

Andrea Resmini & Luca Rosati – Bridging Media

In this talk Andrea and Luca started of by showing us a customer journey in 1999, where a guy buys tickets in a store and travels to Copenhagen. His journey isn’t fluid, because of several bad experiences with having to go to a shop for a ticket and having to sort all of his photos. After that they show the same journey, but in 2009. Here you see a more digital approach, where the person buys tickets online and has digital photos. Unfortunately a lot of frustrations remain, with bad functioning touchpoints (mainly digital services)…

And then 2019 through the Sixth Sense concept: a fluid experience with constant feedback. This is the future we are trying to reach. But who designed this? The future is not being designed by UX people. Why aren’t we innovating and creating these kinds of concepts? What’s going wrong? In order to reach this goal Andrea and Luca state that we should become “the connector between different media and different contexts and provides experiential continuity to products and services.” And in order to make that possible they created a manifesto (starting at slide 32):

The Sixth Sense concept

Sabrina Mach, James Page – Effective Ethnography Techniques for Low Budget Projects

Sabrina and James held an interesting talk about etnography. They explained the power of ethnography and especially the fact that you need to do it for a long time, in order to get it right. You really need to immerse yourself with the culture in such a way that it becomes part of you.

One of the biggest problems of etnography is that it takes a lot of time and budget before it generates interesting results. With Webnographer Sabrina and James are trying to set up a tool that can change all this. It basically helps the researcher do research from a central position. He can collect all the data via the web, collecting it directly from the source. It has four important aspects:

• Digital: self running test run from a central point
• Conventional: there are meetups where the team gets together
• Team: the entire team can easily access the incoming research data and make direct changes to the process
• Concurrent: it’s an ongoing process

But the biggest advantage seams to be the possibility to directly use the incoming data for the design process. And when you have a healthy agile design process you can adept the design when new data comes in.

The main question that the audience had was: is this really low budget? And the answer to that wasn’t necessarily yes. The main advantage of this method is that you spread the cost over a longer period, while you have feedback in between. Which is definitely interesting.

Utopians & Idealists

Another of the presentation was about the different customers you have to design for, who can be utopians or idealists. This basically means they are open for change or prefer stability. If you want to know more about that, I recommend the article Sabrina and James wrote: Utopians & Idealists: Who Can Handle Innovation?

Sylvie Daumal – In the Field: IA Survival Guide in a Hostile Context

How do you sell UX in an organization that doesn’t know anything about it and feels that it is already successful? That was the main question Sylvie had to solve at the company she works for: Razorfish. Here is a list of the main ideas she proposed:

• Focus on user experience – you will be the only one;
• In projects you should focus on user journeys, they need your main attention;
• Explain the user centered approach in your organization. Help people understand the benefits;
• Organize formal presentations to explain what you do. Split this up in a general presentation with a big group and smaller ones with specific audiences (like account managers);
• Teach your discipline whenever it’s relevant;
• The client can be your best friend, meet them as much as possible;
• The user is one of your most valuable allies, embrace this;
• Limited budget and time are manageable; zero isn’t;
• Keep delivering high quality: staying professional with limited means is probably the main challenge.

James Kalbach – Human Factors in Innovation

This talk is about the core of innovation. James starts off by explaining what an innovation is. It basically originates from an invention, which originated from an idea:

1. Idea: a concept, thought or vision
2. Invention: physical, proof of concept or hardware
3. Innovation: social information or software

When looking at Thomas Edison. He came up with the idea of creating better light and invented a light bulb. But his true result was the innovation: bringing electricity into people homes.

Innovation in business contexts is ultimately about the adoption of an invention. A lot of technology driven innovations fail because they never meet a social need. Innovations must be embraced in order to succeed… but who’ll embrace it?

Perceived attributes

When you want to create a true innovation you need to touch certain points:

• Relative advantage: is it better?
• Compatibility: is it appropriate? Does it align with what the user wants?
• Complexity: does it feel good and usable?
• Triability: can you try before you buy?
• Observability: is it understandable?

When these are all met you have the potential of achieving innovation, but it still needs to be adopted. And for that James comes up with another list of points that need to be met.

Phases in adoption

• Knowledge about it
• Persuasion
• Decision
• Implementation
• Confirmation

Innovation in UX

At the end of the presentation James hits the same spot that Andrea and Luca touched earlier on the day: where are the innovations in the UX world? We are fundamentally about innovation, but we aren’t doing it. Let’s change that.

See you tomorrow

It was a long but rewarding day. I am going to bed.

We are relying ever more on technology to help us out. In this article I am discussing how people form mental models of urban environments, and how technology can augment and even replace our wayfinding skills.

This article is an extract from my upcoming talk at EuroIA 09, The Future of Wayfinding.

Mental Models

Faced with any complex system, we form a mental model. Cities are no exception. Our models (known in the wayfinding domain as cognitive maps) combine cues from across our environment. Some cues are implicit, woven into the fabric of our surroundings: urban density, landmarks, or even the flow of traffic. Others are explicitly designed to describe the structure of a city, such as maps, signs and street naming conventions.

As with any designed system, some cities are more learnable than others. Contrast the regular grid, tall landmarks and self-explanatory street names of New York with the organic sprawl of London:

Maps of New York and London at the same scale (from OpenStreetMap.org) demonstrate the difference in structure of the two cities.

New York has information architecture baked in; London does not. Kevin Lynch named this quality ‘legibility’ – an apt term implying, as does its typographic equivalent, a deep relationship with the identity and DNA of a system.

Survey Knowledge

Good cognitive maps make use of survey knowledge, an understanding of the topological structure of an environment. Centuries of designers have built survey knowledge by printing maps. Some are, of course, more successful than others. The famous London Underground map is so long-standing and ubiquitous that it acts as an ersatz cognitive map for many Londoners. Unfortunately, being designed to show connections below ground, it doesn’t correspond well with London’s surface geography. The map, as they say, is not the territory, and ironically the Tube map hinders effective wayfinding, as people take Underground journeys they would be better off walking.

Survey knowledge gleaned from maps is orientation-specific (this is why maps favour the principle of forward-up equivalence – ‘up’ on the map means ‘straight ahead’). However, we learn areas better by exploring them, which gives us survey knowledge that isn’t based any particular direction. This means that cognitive maps are fluid, changing with context and time to form more coherent wholes.

Different wayfinding tasks

• naive, or exhaustive, search – where the user doesn’t know where the destination is (eg. finding a postbox in a city he doesn’t know)
• primed search – where the user knows the destination’s location (eg. driving to his parents’ house)
• exploratory – where there is no set destination (eg. going for a walk)

User experience folk will no doubt notice parallels to digital information retrieval, including the understanding that most wayfinding tasks will mix these modes. For example we may use a primed search to navigate to a shop found on a shopping mall directory, followed by an exhaustive search for the right aisle within the shop. We can also recognise other concepts from the digital world: the concepts of information scent and berrypicking are both entirely relevant to real-world wayfinding.

Complementing survey knowledge is procedural knowledge: the means of getting from A to B, via C. Sometimes this can be sufficient alone. Plan a route in advance or get directions from a passer-by and you may well find your destination, but if the instructions are flawed or there’s a change in conditions (roadworks, for instance), procedural knowledge collapses quickly and you’re left to improvise or retrace your steps.

Knowledge

Screenshot from the Trails iPhone app

Good wayfinding takes survey knowledge, procedural knowledge and also landmark knowledge, an appreciation of the locations of notable points of interest. Building these three platforms has traditionally been the domain of wayfinding designers, architects and town planners, but now the technologists are getting their turn. Online maps and route planning software have revolutionised the wayfinding business, and computer scientists are attempting to standardise the language of geography through systems such as KML.

While it’s important to know the environment, the user must also know where she is. Technology can be a great help here, with GPS today’s crown jewel. However, although it’s tempting to think that this solves the location problem, GPS is only accurate to 3 metres and, being a line-of-sight technology, doesn’t work indoors or in heavily built up areas. We also need another layer of codification and processing to turn longitude and latitude into human vernacular such as “Junction 12 of the M1″ or “tenth floor of the Empire State Building”.

Mobiles are of course well suited to act as the vehicle for GPS and this codification layer, and have been an understandable vehicle for wayfinding technology. The typical limitations of screen size and user context apply, but the advent of GPS and compass technology in mobiles has led to a sudden commercial interest in ‘augmented reality’, already well on its way to becoming the next misappropriated buzzword.

Nearest Tube iPhone app from Acrossair

Beyond mobile devices, wayfinding provides an excellent stepping stone into the world of ubiquitous computing. Unlike many other ubicomp applications, wayfinding is highly task-driven, meaning many of today’s UCD approaches could be relevant. Imagining a world of ambient informatics, we see thousands of potential output devices. Public LCD displays, signage, buildings, even the street beneath our feet can be our canvas.

The ideal system

The ideal wayfinding system dissolves into behaviour. It requires no inputs, and automatically knows our location and destination. Its feedback to us can take the form of subtle visual, audible or tactile cues – highlighting the path ahead on some display, or even providing a gentle tap on the shoulder when we move in the wrong direction. However, it’s not easy for systems to truly anticipate our wayfinding needs. Although early adopters are habitually advertising both location and destination via services such as Dopplr, FireEagle and Latitude, systems aren’t particularly good at inferring intent. We often don’t navigate rationally – we take scenic routes, stop to pick up lunch, or become distracted by window shopping.

Ubiquitous Computing

We can consider some technologies (such as QR codes, RFID and GPS) as bridging points between the digital world and the real world. At these touchpoints, we are effectively designing an API that allows both worlds to interact. The information architecture must be harmonised, and the correspondences should be carefully aligned. As a prosaic example, labelling and signage used in digital systems must correspond to those used in the real world. It’s clear that the roles of the UX designer and wayfinding designer will start to blur.

Bringing wayfinding into the ubicomp domain might also allow the dimension of time to affect our wayfinding choices. Spimes could help us navigate by highlighting the past actions of others. It’s helpful to know that 95% of all previous travellers to the stadium turned left at a particular turning (of course, this is nothing new to the animal kingdom). Collapsing the past into the present also opens up exciting opportunities to reintroduce our favourite digital mechanisms into the real world. Collaborative filtering, recommendations and other ‘wisdom of crowds’ phenomena could mean wayfinding is no longer a solo pursuit. The notion of anthropocentric wayfinding has impact far beyond technology. It causes flashmobs, football riots and even political revolution. It mobilises us as a combined unit and could even be said to demonstrate emergent hive intelligence.

As with any dream of the future, this picture is utopian and perhaps unrealistic. Much of the world doesn’t yet have running water, let alone a broadband mobile network. Even when these systems are in place, the interaction between people, places and technology will inevitably prove both overly rigid and frustratingly sloppy in various contexts. And isn’t there some joy in getting lost in a new city and stumbling across something beautiful? The advertisers certainly think so:

Finally, in the words of McLuhan, “every extension is also an amputation”. It is conceivable that we will find ourselves relying on technology to such an extent that in the event of its inevitable failure we will struggle at even the most basic wayfinding tasks.

There are clearly challenges ahead. However, getting lost and getting found is an inherent part of human life, and therefore wayfinding is well within the domain of future user experience work. With skill and empathy, we can bring a layer of humanity and usefulness to wayfinding technology.

Interested in more? I will be presenting a session on ‘The Future of Wayfinding’ at EuroIA.