Keith Instone

On June 24th, I was honored to be part of the TorCHI program and talk about information architecture on ibm.com. The talk was entitled There is a story behind every link:

Ever wonder how a large corporate web site navigation system is designed, and how it evolves over time? How certain links find their way to the corporate home page, while other ones do not? How major changes in the corporation's business affect the web site navigation? And how the IA of the corporate web site can give clues about how well the business is doing?

If so, then join Keith Instone as he tells stories about the information architecture of ibm.com. Example stories may include:

• The evolution of sitewide navigation categories like "solutions" and "services"
• Worldwide information architecture challenges
• The cultural shifts required to do something as (theoretically) simple as adding a "sign in" link to the masthead
• Tracking the evolution of a single web page as it signals fundamental shifts in how the business is operating "behind the scenes"
• The effect of selling off a key division of the company on the navigation system
• Balancing the strategic goals while handling day-to-day requests for changes to the navigation
• Techniques for dealing with executive home page link requests

The stories Keith tells will be in part determined by what you want to hear. Come prepared to select some high level links on ibm.com and see if Keith has any interesting stories to tell about them.

I prepared about 100 slides of possible things we could talk about, but, by design, the session was driven by what the audience wanted to talk about. Here is my (incomplete) list of what we covered:

• Sign in / register, country location in the masthead today (logic for placement today, and in the future)
• Who owns what, how to manage the millions of pages
• Solutions, services, products and corporate strategy over the years
• Masthead sign in challenges and compromises
• My IBM: use as anonymous user, gateway to various applications
• Who does the 3 prongs of user feedback: User research studies, analytics, qualitative user feedback
• Search challenges: technology/budget, tagging, UI (easiest of the 3)
• User-generated content (silos likely initially, integrated over time)
• Accessibility challenges overall, why the link in the footer
• Role based navigation (home page Learn about tab), task based navigation
• Standards for page design ("what we offer" module as an example)
• Content management, sharing, the "4th tab owners" of a solution page
• Tactical, medium-term, long-term planning for changes (add 1 link now, work with groups for better tactical changes later, save some things for a big, strategic redesign)

As it happens with these things, you really had to be there to get any value out of my artifacts from the talk. For those of you who were there, you can download (below) a PDF of screen grabs from some of the parts of ibm.com that we talked about. And I included some of the text slides that I prepared ahead of time that were relevant to what we discussed. I included the "history of the ibm.com masthead categories" slide that several people have asked for.

There are lots more stories to tell: I will have to save them for some other talk.

When I first read Getting to "we" in the April 2008 Communications of the ACM, I really liked two things about the article:

• The 4 categories of Information sharing, Coordination, Cooperation, and Collaboration, with technology examples for each. Good framework: I will throw those terms around more carefully now.
• The mention of whole system change methods like Appreciative inquiry and Charrettes to get to collaboration. The Change Handbook includes a lot more methods. Over the past 2 years, I have found the Nexus for Change conference a great way to learn more about these methods.

(You can download the article from ACM above. It is also available at The Profession of IT series from Peter J. Denning.)

A few other folks thought this article was also worth mentioning:

• Thomas Vander Wal points out that "most of the tools and services...do not even come close" to what we need for collaboration.
• Jack Vinson expands on "collaboration and community" and ties in another CACM article about social ties.
• Mark Lindsey summarizes the punchline of the article: "collaboration comes by failure of other plans".

Weeks later after first reading it, I am still finding it useful (I have gone back to it several times lately), so I decided to mention it here. This article is another nice data point on the "IT systems" meets "social change" landscape for me.

I am lucky. I am off to visit the Almaden Research Center next week for the Almaden Institute 2008 conference.

I did a little research about some of the (non-IBM) speakers to help me get the most out of the program. Here are a few links in case you want to learn more, too.

• Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, UC Berkeley ischool prof.
• Kristofer Pister, also UC Berkeley EECS prof.
• Christopher Meyer, Monitor Networks, FutureMonitor blog. I enjoyed the video from his recap of Day 2 of the 2007 Institute of Design Strategy Conference.
• Greg Niemeyer.
• Andreas Weigend.
• Robert Merges, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.
• Cynthia Dwork, Microsoft Research.

I managed to also plan 1 day of "extra time" to hang out with area IBMers that I do not get to see often enough, like Fred Sampson, Andrea Ames and Thyra Rauch. And do "real ibm.com work" with Rob Johnson. Finally, it will be nice to see EWHCI colleague Allen Cypher while I am there.

This could be a first: three Toledo-area job openings in web user experience, at the same time.

#1 is with the Toledo Zoo as a Web Project Coordinator: "...create a website experience that engages audiences..." is mentioned in the description (in today's Toledo Blade). I do not see an online description of the job to link to, however. Contact the zoo for more information, I guess.

#2 is Web Interface Designer with TolTest, a construction management firm. "...Design web interfaces for TolTest’s next generation of internal and external applications" with "solid understanding of user-centered design principles and methodologies, information and interaction design".

#3 is Web Development Specialist/Designer at BGSU (PDF). "...Continuously improve navigation, accessibility, usability and brand image" based on a "knowledge of designing and implementing site architecture, functionality, data flow, user interfaces and intuitive navigation".

(There could be more - these are 3 that I found completely by accident. Let me know if you know of any other web user experience jobs in the area - I am happy to promote them.)

Perhaps there is something to the idea that customer experience is recession proof.

These 3 jobs are small potatoes compared to the big economic development news in the area, of course. Xunlight getting more funding and hiring. First Solar continuing to hire.

Brief and rough notes from the Saturday IA Summit sessions.

Jared Spool, UCD "rocks" but not in the way that you think

• Good but quite different from the usual Jared talk; definitely more pontification, less on practicality and not as hilarious. If Jared keeps this up, he will start to rival Jakob for making over-simplistic statements that are partly true but can be really misinterpreted if not looked at with a critical eye.
• I do agree with Jared that the world we work in has changed a lot since the IBM/360 (which I programmed in high school). "User-centered" was needed to combat the other forces "in the good old days" (that were not that good). If you were blindly following a UCD methodology in the past, you were doing bad UCD to begin with. If you are blindly following any methodology you are doing bad work to begin with.
• I think what we do today is more about collaboration than the "put my discipline in the center of the process" battles from the old days. Collaboration with other professionals in the UX realm, collaboration with business, collaboration with development. And so on.
• Human bar charts: stroke of genius.
• Informing design is important but do not forget about another value of focusing on the user experience: the more strategic impacts of determining what to design in the first place.

Gene Smith, Tagging trends

• General trend: adding more structure to user-driven tagging. Sub trends: Automanual tagging, community-driven structuring.
• User + resource + tags model needs to be expanded now. Tags are being applied to the resource as a whole but also parts of the resource.
• "Innovative" systems being built upon tagging. IBM Dogear referenced.

Tingting Jiang, Exploratory search and folksonomy

• An entry in the mythical "research track".
• Compared hierarchical classification, faceted classification, dynamic clusters, folksonomy.
• Four user activities: Browse, search, being aware, monitoring.
• User + resource + tags model with lines showing what the systems are doing. Resource-to-resource is a dotted line (no one doing it, apparently).

Bryce Glass, Reputation systems

• Patterns: Levels, points, Top, Trophies, Ranking, Awards, Stats, Testinomials. Coming soon to Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.
• More interesting (to me): The questions to ask the business to see what reputation system aspects are right for them.
• Business goals? Community spirit? Member motivation? Measuring reputation? Inputs to the reputation? Etc.

Jess McMullin, Experience impact framework

• How to work with your stakeholders better.
• Know who they are (e.g., 8 types of people).
• Know what motivates them.
• Know what they do, their activities.
• "Do what we do" in collaboration with them. Understand, solve and evaluate with them.
• Get commitment to action.

Brandon Schauer, Wow factor

• Business goal is customer loyalty: accomplish with "wow factors" within the experience.
• People remember the high, the low and the end of the experience. "Total sum" that can stress the "average" not as important.
• Build experience roadmaps to show how it all fits together, evolves over time, crosses channels.
• Planning the experience and staging the experience, not just designing the experience.