Keith Instone

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.

I just reviewed the IA Summit 2008 sessions and updated the list of what I want to attend. I am sure what I attend will be different for several reasons: getting caught up in a great conversation in the hall and missing a session, doing the "divide and conquer" with my ibm.com colleagues, or just changing my mind at the last minute.

A few trends / hi-lites / random thoughts:

• Both keynotes are by "insiders" - Jared Spool and Andrew Hinton. Usually one of the keynotes is an "outsider" - and thus usually one of my favorite sessions. I am sure both keynotes will be awesome anyway.
• This morning: back to back sessions on tagging (by Gene Smith, probably based on his new book) / tag clouds (by Garrick Schmitt).
• Two chances to hear Peter Morville on Search patterns. I may alter my schedule to make sure I catch him the second time - there should be fewer people there and he will have the kinks worked out (but he may be grumpier).
• Definitely not going to miss Jess McMullin and business + experience.
• Sunday morning at 9am is a real downer: I need/want to go to all 3 sessions. Game experience vs. Taxonomy/UX vs. Placemaking.
• Good to see a service design session, by Aaron Martlage (who I met at Emergence 2007). We need more service design / UX cross-over.
• I may miss half of the sessions on Monday because of meetings. The sessions on Monday look good, but fortunately my "must attends" are all on the weekend.
• In the past there has been a "research track" even if it was not called out as such. Is there one this time?

And start planning for next year - Memphis, February 18-22, 2009 - only 10 short months away.....

Matthew Clarke has a new article on Boxes and Arrows about The Information Architect as Change Agent. I have not read it carefully yet (too early in the morning), but I added a comment about how I have come to many of the same conclusions through my "innovation and change" investigation.

I do not regularly read Alertbox any more, but this one was too good to pass up.

• Breadcrumb Navigation Increasingly Useful

People often think that when I defined different types of breadcrumbs that I automatically thought "path breadcrumbs" were a good idea or that I was advocating that breadcrumbs as a whole were mandatory. Not so - I simply wanted to define the various types so that information architects (and others) could talk about breadcrumbs intelligently.

Jakob, of course, goes farther, saying location breadcrumbs are the way to go and they are worth doing.

"NextD takes a slash at "Findability Information Architecture" is a hot topic on the IA Institute member mailing list. Excerpts from IA’s Unidentical Twins (Revisited) [PDF - only long-term direct link that is available, ack] is the trigger. By GK VanPatter. The response has ranged from:

• "#$%@ him, he is a moron."
• Agreement on the basic points (since others with the IA community have been saying the same thing).
• The tone and the inflammatory nature gets in the way of the message - there are some valid points but it is hard to address them because of the way it is written. Not exactly an invitation for conversation.
• Where are these other "twins" like "Design 3.0" and "Human-Centered Innovation" and "Strategic Information Architecture" - e.g., show me the books to buy to learn about them.

My reaction: NextD represents a view on IA I am not familiar with (I know about RSW of course but I do not recognize this "NextDesign Leadership Institute"). I try really hard to stay up on the broad touch points of the field, but this is a group / set of writings I am not familiar with. Most likely, I stumbled across NextD a long time ago but have forgotten that I ever saw it ("old fart's disease"). But now that I have found it, I am obligated to learn about it, understand what this NextD thing is about, find connections to my professional background, and become a better IA as a result.

Here are the things I am doing in my spare time to learn about NextD:

1. Read some of the other writings at nextd.org - hopefully they are more helpful and educational than the trigger article. The Journal has some interesting articles at first glance. Design 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 [again, only as PDF, ack] caught my eye.
2. Find connection points to people I am familiar with: the interviews with Peter Merholz and Patrick Whitney look promising. Rethinking Wicked Problems [PDF, ack] is also interesting, since I just re-discovered Jeff Conklin (one of the fathers of the hypertext field) on my own.
3. Scanning the blogosphere for posts that reference nextd.org.
4. Like Richard Dalton has done, look into some of these "twins" that were mentioned. Not having much luck either - which I think speaks volumes. But I am not giving up. I have been trying to poke around in as much "Innovation" literature that I can - at least the part that connects with the human experience side of it. So I am probing my personal "Innovation network" to see where NextD fits in.

All of this learning will take time. I will let others continue the conversation until I digest it all more.

I would recommend 1 thing for the IA Community to consider: invite someone from the NextDesign Leadership Institute to speak at the 2008 IA Summit (Miami, Florida, USA, April 10-14). We have a history of giving our biggest critics a voice at our main event - Mark Hurst and Mark Bernstein are just 2 examples. Time to find our long-lost twins.

Did not have any energy to blog during the IA Summit. Have lots of notes to go thru and share. But I want to do 1 quick posting on the one part of the conference that matters most.

The people who are more than just colleagues and professional contacts.

My highlights:

• Argus family (the bonds are as strong as ever)
• Being mentioned in Jess's emotional 5-minute madness. I am a very proud "older brother."
• Being there to help Lou with his UX Zeitgeist demo and discussion. Worked together seemlessly like old times.

• Kent State crew
• Brian and Lincoln, two IBMers who hunted me down to introduce themselves
• The folks who brought their kids, reminding us what matters more than work

And of course, seeing folks I had not seen in a year. And meeting new people.

I will report on the less important stuff later - what was presented, what I learned.

I had to leave the Nexus for change conference early today so that I could rest a little before my trip to Vegas for the IA Summit - need some energy to travel. Nexus was a great event. As a fellow IT person said at lunch - "I have learned a lot but I have no idea what it is yet." It will take a while for this intensive 2-days with the leading change methods experts to sink in.

"Get everyone in the same space at the same time" is my over-simplification of what these professionals do every day. The conference was about getting them all in the same physical space, of course, but the conference web site served as that virtual place before and it will support the community afterwards.

Although only a handful of attendees were into the "Web 2.0" thing as an enabler for getting everybody into the same virtual space for conversations, I was excited that most saw the need for better technology adoption by the group as a whole. Unfortunately, there was a missed opportunity for Nexus to hook up with a Web 2.0 talk that was happening on the BGSU campus at the same time:

Technology Trends and Web 2.0, Erick Schonfeld, Business 2.0.

I dipped my toe into the field of organization development last year when I attended a workshop on Management by discovery. Despite being a total outsider (I was among people who had advanced degrees in this), people seemed interested in my stories of how large organizations were adapting to the challenges triggered by the web. It only takes a few examples for people to see how designing a user-centered web site can expose gaps in how the business is organized. And how businesses are changing in order to survive. It is sorta a corollary to Conway's Law:

Organizations which build web sites are constrained to produce information architectures which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations

(Thanks to Steve Portigal for helping me find that Conway article from 1968. I started looking for it 6 months ago. Our local library has it stashed away somewhere, but would not send me a copy - who has time to go visit a library?)

I am going to dip a larger body part into "organization development" in two months. I will be attending Nexus for change, March 22-23, at BGSU. "An unprecedented conference bringing together practitioners, researchers, leaders, activists, and educators to advance participative change methods."

I won't be the only user experience person there. Peter Jones of Redesign Research and fellow UXnet local ambassador in Ohio is presenting.

A few hours after this event is over, I will be getting on a plane for the IA Summit in Las Vegas, so I am hoping I will be able to synthesize something from these worlds.

[Technorati tag nexusforchange to track other blog postings about this conference]

Related to the IA research agenda from the IA Summit, now comes the Web Science Research Initiative with its plans for "web science" and a web research agenda:

There is...a growing realization among many researchers that a clear research agenda aimed at understanding the current, evolving, and potential Web is needed. ...The Web is an engineered space created through formally specified languages and protocols. However, because humans are the creators of Web pages and links between them, their interactions form emergent patterns in the Web at a macroscopic scale. These human interactions are, in turn, governed by social conventions and laws. Web science, therefore, must be inherently interdisciplinary; its goal is to both understand the growth of the Web and to create approaches that allow new powerful and more beneficial patterns to occur.

I know, the web is not IA and IA is not the web, but I see many similarities. For example, from Creating a Science of the Web, I see topics that interest me as an information architect:

• moving from text documents to data resources
• reuse of information
• "policy aware" systems

The Framework for Web Science has more about this research agenda. Where would an IA research agenda overlap, where would it differ?

(Josh has more excerpts, links, and his social web design angle.)