- contentsense – content on a web site that reorganizes itself around your declared intent — a search refer, behavioral
- cookies — they can do it faster and cheaper.
SEO is a lot bigger than we are. Their business is findability. Our business is findability. SEO is usurping IA?
issues that we are dealing with:
- social design
- massive ia
- user-generated ia
- automation/automated ia
- creating tools
- evolution
why do we think IA is stuck?
- perceptions on the part of industry.
- certain organizations/practitioners have locked ia down(?) into a box (sitemaps and wireframes) — the people who are really doing IA don’t come here.
- IAs (individuals) are not stuck, but the practice is stuck
The people who are in the IA box really fetishize their deliverables.
Russ Unger: If an ordinary person can understand what you do, you’re on your way to being a commodity.
commodity – something that is in demand but something that can be acquired anywhere in equal quality.
“Little IA”
Being a “big IA” encompasses a huge list of things… entire life cycle of a project: business requirements, consumer research, interaction design, IA, brand design, visual design, QA,
Big IA = UX… it’s really not the U… it’s really Experience Design
The polar bear book is not where to start.
Advice: get out of our comfort zone as much as possible.
Contributing to the commodification and diluting the practice? Jobs have been going overseas for years. How many people own furniture made in america? how many of us can afford to? good enough wins sometimes.
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Josh Porter
We are all designers here. We’re all on the same team, but we find things to fight about all the time.
Advice: the problem should always trump the process
A lot of the focus at places like this is about “doing things the ‘right’ way” The fact that you use or don’t use a particular tool or technique shouldn’t matter. It’s about solving the problem.
the deliverable that matters is the final product. Our wireframes/prototypes are not the final product. Our designs will change before they are release and/or immediately after.
behavior first, design second…. we justify by process. we’re doing this, because we’re using this technique. not because this is what we’re seing about how our stuff or the client’s stuff is being used.
Information Architecture as a term –
-the term information has a negative quality about. (read The Social Life of Information) — the way you frame something, the way you think about something, changes the way you act on it (info-prefixation).
For example, my Republican friends say that the problem with government is government itself. This means that i can’t talk to them about what an efficient government would look like.
We really need to focus on the architecture part of information architecture.
“every type of architecture elicits a different type of participation” -mwesch in the keynote
In NYC they said, if you build a plaza you can build a taller building. Lots of plazas were built. Lots of them were not very good. This is because no one ever talked about what makes a good plaza.
In the same way that we have an information problem. To solve the plaza problem — give people places to sit, realize that the primary activity of the plaza is people watching so place the plaza near places where people are walking/moving/acting.
Architects know this: the space defines the behavior.
Space defining behavior is easier to see in the physical world, but it is every bit as true in the digital world.
Designers create environments, structures, in which things happen.
Examples:
facebook has symmetric relationships – must reciprocate friendship
private profiles
lossy activity streams (until last week)Twitter has asymmetric relationships – followees don’t have to follow followers.
public profiles
non-lossy stream
structure allows behavior, (elicits, determines, controls, restricts, influences, etc.)
this is what IA is.
Moral:
If IA continue to approach their challenges as information or content-based problems the field will become increasingly irrelevant. BUT if they can approach their work tas designing environments/structures that influence behavior, I think it has a chance.
There are 2 different types of behaviors:
-directed behavior – measurable outcomes
-undirected behavior – immeasurable outcomes
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Christina Wodtke
what if we became more IA-y?
you are not your title.
I’m tired of being an IA. We’re outgrowing our titles. It’s not actually what i do: I’m a product manager. I’m a content strategist …
my kid eats snails. Her favorite book is But I am an Alligator.
She’s at the point where she tries everything; she has not determined who she is yet.
so what do you do?
- content inventories — I’ve done one of these once. it took a very long time. I can get mechanical turk to do it, much more cheaply. i love knitting, but i can’t make a living knitting. it takes too long for me to make a sweater and i can get the one at the gap for almost nothing.
- A thesaurus is not a dinosaur [there might have been a time when this statement wasn't true...]
- Navigation. we do “wayfinding.” nobody uses the navigation bar, we just use it as a method to show people the type of things that they will find on our site. they use it as a scope note to guide their
98-2 rule: we spend 98 percent of our time on the nav and the users spend 2 percent of their time there.
- Google spell check… it’s not actually spell check, it’s a recommendation system, it’s pattern recognition. it’s data analysis. it’s very satisfying and it really seems to work.
- wireframes… the reason we do wireframes is because we didn’t trust our designers to understand visual hierarchy. new solution: smarter designers
“people don’t still do that, do they?”
prototyping… let’s create prototypes (interactive) instead.
Are Rosenfeld & Morville IA’s? No, they are search experts. If data is your thing, why not do algorithm design? Go deep. Work on recommendation systems. True recommendation systems are based on analyzing human behavior.
what can YOU do?
- design rules for systems (dan brown’s talk)
- create social spaces
- design algorithms
- tackle privacy vs. engagement issues
- select technology platforms
- work on recommendation systems.
if we’re moving on, is IA itself evolving?
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discussion.
Q. is there a career path for IA?
how many senior/juniors are doign the same thing?
job description for senior ia — the things listed there are not included in what is listed in the definition of IAs – we haven’t defined what IA is well enough for those that hire us. Questions we need to ask our clients: what would make you happy? what outcome do you want to get from this??? what will make you go home feeling like we had a good day. what will make you smile when you write the check??
Q. “i’m very happy being a tool”
the problem with becoming a commodity is that your price drops.
the danger is trying to continue to sell wireframes when no one is buying them. the process is good as long as it is not the end in itself. if the wireframe is an illustration of a point to help everyone get an understanding, then it’s good. but what ELSE could we be doing? where are their opportunities to get it better?
who is teaching their clients to wireframe? i don’t want them 3 years from now. i’m doing it for them and teaching them to do it for themselves.
Q. (a. hinton) – we get tied up in orthodoxy. orthodoxies can come up pretty quickly.
a wireframe is just a polished sketching. at some point, sketching got hardened into wireframing.
preciousness is the problem, not wireframes.
Q. It’s a myth that smart designers do not need wireframes. i have really smart designers and they do require wireframes (e.g. jeffrey zellman)
what do you mean by quality — the interface has to be down on paper. there is a weaving that has to be done to translate between the user research and the design. the translation piece doesn’t have to be a wireframe, but there has to be some translation.
ebay’s business argument – a/b testing. if you let us a/b test, we’ll increase the business.
it’s outcomes that matter. it’s moving the numbers.
trying to sell to really bored middle managers.
Q. For businesses, commoditization is good. and we’re working for businesses.
It’s okay to outsource your design, it’s just not okay to outsource your design strategy. You can replace product, it’s the thinking that you can’t replace. The issue is: how do we differentiate ourselves?
