The Eye That Blinks

Information Architect

2010-12-14T19:13:00.001-08:00

I am doing what I was meant to be doing. I am an Information Architect.

A Victory for Metrics

2010-12-11T15:59:00.000-08:00

How do you persuade resistant business stakeholders to consider UX redesign? Show 'em the numbers!

Stakeholders might think they are Web designers, but, of course, we know otherwise. Inelegant page designs, strange navigation schemes, meaningless displays of data—they are all the product of stakeholder design. I see it with my own eyes. I am working with it all now. For phase one of a current project, I lost the UX battle. We are relaunching with poor design.

But I have won the war! I showed the stakeholders the fallout numbers, page by page, for the website they designed. There's a terrible enrollment rate. Users don't even click the Enroll button. And I convinced them that, with proper information architecture and usability, we could improve the numbers. They agreed, for phase two of the project, we would redesign and do two rounds of usability testing.

I look forward to a victory for UX and metrics!

For the Bookshelf: Prototyping

2010-04-11T09:43:00.000-07:00

Prototyping, by Todd Zaki Warfel
Five out of five stars on Amazon.com. "With this book, Warfel shows how prototypes are more than just a design tool by demonstrating how they can help you market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team."

For the Bookshelf: User Research

2010-04-11T09:21:00.000-07:00

Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research, by Mike Kuniavsky

Four and one-half stars out of five on Amazon.com. "You'll like Mike Kuniavsky's broad selection of practical user research methods—presented clearly and usably. And you'll like his timing too: while recent books focus on the whys of user experience, many are now ready for the hows. Observing the User Experience does just that: It demonstrates how to discover what is in users' heads, and suggests how we might balance those considerations with business objectives."

The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, by John Pruitt

Four and one-half stars out of five on Amazon.com. "Personas are powerful design tools, which are that much more dangerous if they are grounded in weak methodology. Pruitt and Adlin show you how to do personas right and how to base them on real user data. Follow their advice or risk disaster."

Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior, by Indi Young

Four stars out of five on Amazon.com. "There is no single methodology for creating the perfect product—buy you can increase your odds. One of the best ways is to understand users' reasons for doing things. Mental Models gives you the tools to help you grasp, and design for, those reasons. Adaptive Path co-founder Indi Young has written a roll-up-your-sleeves book for designers, managers, and anyone else interested in making design strategic, and successful."

So Far, My Hero

2010-04-10T07:18:00.000-07:00

In Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson puts into writing many of my own long-held beliefs and methods. Here's another passage that makes her a girl after my own heart:

"Information architecture and content strategy are really two sides of the same coin. To design successful content-driven user experiences, one role simply cannot succeed without the other.

"Responsibilities do overlap. In fact, on small Web projects, one person can play both roles. However, regardless of project size, it's usually most effective if a separate IA and content strategist work side-by-side.

"Web professionals love to argue about which role owns what, where and when different roles should have decision-making authority, and so on. This kind of discussion makes me crazy. Arguing over who owns what is a waste of time. Decide what's necessary, agree who will drive the effort, and get the work done.

"No matter what, just make sure someone owns the content. While structure, taxonomy (content categorization), and nomenclature (menu labels) are critical to designing a successful website, without clear direction around the 'meat' of the site—the content that will exist in every nook and cranny—these solutions will fall short, every time."

Where Were You When I Needed You?

2010-04-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

I started reading Kristina Halvorson's Content Strategy for the Web. It's new this year, copyright 2010.

Professionally, I spent my youth in the world of print publishing. I recognized right away that the Web was another way of publishing. I learned how to create websites so I could self-publish. I assumed, wrongly, that the publishing process for the Web would be pretty much the way it was for print.

Halvorson's cry that Web content should be treated like print content—with a respected process and an editor-in-chief—is the one voice I've ever heard that supports my own instincts—instincts that kicked in as soon as I saw Web pages with words on them all those years ago.

A few years back, I was a content developer building a practice within a user-centered design team. The team served as an in-house consulting and creative group for the ecommerce portion of a very large business. I've witnessed the disrespect content has suffered in Web era. And, for the first time, someone feels the same pain.

I read the second chapter, "Problem: Why Does Web Content Mostly Suck?," thinking, "Where was this book when I really needed it?" Everything from poor understanding about content on the part of user experience coworkers to having to rewrite four-dollar Web content that managers thought would save time and money. It's all there in Halvorson's second chapter.

For the Bookshelf: Web Analytics

2010-04-08T17:17:00.000-07:00

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity, by Avinash Kaushik
Five out of five stars on Amazon.com. "Adeptly address today’s business challenges with this powerful new book from web analytics thought leader Avinash Kaushik. Web Analytics 2.0 presents a new framework that will permanently change how you think about analytics. It provides specific recommendations for creating an actionable strategy, applying analytical techniques correctly, solving challenges such as measuring social media and multichannel campaigns, achieving optimal success by leveraging experimentation, and employing tactics for truly listening to your customers. The book will help your organization become more data driven while you become a super analysis ninja!"

Web Analytics Demystified: A Marketer's Guide to Understanding How Your Web Site Affects Your Business, by Eric Peterson
Four and one-half stars out of five on Amazon.com. "What I especially like is the way each approach to analytics is thoroughly examined, and the strengths and weaknesses objectively discussed. Some books are dogmatic in their approach, locking the reader into the author's view of analytics. This one differs by giving readers enough information with examples, clearly articulated factors, and other identified best practices to accept compromise solutions based on budget, level of in-house expertise and other considerations."

For the Bookshelf: Design Patterns

2010-04-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

Web Application Design Patterns, by Pawan Vora

Four and one-half stars out of five on Amazon.com.

"Web Application Design Patterns covers design patterns as they are used in forms, user authentication, main page, navigation, searching and filtering, and lists. The rest of the book covers Rich Internet Applications, social applications, internationalization, accessibility, visual design, and how to create pattern libraries with just the right amount of detail and examples.

Each of the one hundred and twenty-two design patterns covered in this book are presented by name, the design problem(s) the pattern solves, the solution to the problem, the rationale for the design solution's effectiveness, a list of best practices describing the application of the solution and possible variations, and related design patterns."

For the Bookshelf: Enterprise IA

2010-04-05T17:00:00.000-07:00

The Art of Enterprise Information Architecture: A Systems-Based Approach for Unlocking Business Insight, by Mario Godinez, Eberhard Hechler, Klaus Koenig, Steve Lockwood, Martin Oberhofer, Michael Schroeck

New, not rated yet. "Drawing on their extensive experience working with enterprise clients, the authors present a new, information-centric approach to architecture and powerful new models that will benefit any organization. Using these strategies and models, companies can systematically unlock the business value of information by delivering actionable, real-time information in context to enable better decision-making throughout the enterprise—from the 'shop floor' to the 'top floor.'"

For the Bookshelf: Mobile Apps

2010-04-05T16:46:00.000-07:00

Designing the Mobile User Experience, by Barbara Ballard

Four out of five stars on Amazon.com. "Gain the knowledge and tools to deliver compelling mobile phone applications."

Mobile Design and Development: Practical Concepts and Techniques for Creating Mobile Sites and Web Apps, by Brian Fling

Four and one-half stars out of five on Amazon.com. "If you're a web designer, web developer, information architect, product manager, usability professional, content publisher, or an entrepreneur new to the mobile web, Mobile Design and Development provides you with the knowledge you need to work with this rapidly developing technology. "

Apple iPad Hits the Market

2010-04-04T17:05:00.000-07:00

Lines stretched around blocks in major cities across the United States this morning as Apple devotees congregated to pick up the first iPads.

"Many of the people waiting for the iPad had a vague sense that they were involved in yet another big Apple moment, although they could not precisely say how they would use the tablet computer, which shares features of both laptops and mobile phones."

The introduction "says more about the role Apple is playing in our culture and little about the ultimate success of the iPad."

"By all accounts, the lines were shorter and more subdued than those three years ago for the iPhone."

From the New York Times, April 4, 2010

The Rule of Goals

2010-04-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

"All Web interactions begin with goals. Each user visits a site in order to do something—even 'just browsing' has user goals behind it."

From The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web, by Steve Mulder with Ziv Yaar

Marketing vs. Usability

2010-04-01T08:14:00.000-07:00

"When marketing groups segment users, they do so in order to sell to people, and so traditional demographics (age, income, gender, and so on) make sense, because these attributes often correlate to market acceptance or likelihood of purchase.

"But in creating a website, we're not just selling something to people—we're building something that they will actually use. Thus, we want to focus on attributes that reveal how people will actually use the site: goals (what users want to do), behaviors (how they do it), and attitudes (how they perceive the experience or themselves)."

From The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web, by Steve Mulder with Ziv Yaar

Social Media Statistics

2010-03-30T11:22:00.000-07:00

Traffic by Genre, based on 287,090 impressions across the Chitika advertising network

Digg
Celeb/Entertainment: 18%
How to/DIY: 9%
Other: 26%
News: 18%
Tech: 12%
Video Games: 17%

Facebook
Celeb/Entertainment: 9%
Community: 17%
How to/DIY: 13%
Other: 17%
News: 28%
Shopping: 9%
Tech: 7%

MySpace
Business/Law: 10%
Celeb/Entertainment: 23%
Community: 8%
Other: 23%
Tech: 8%
Video Games: 28%

Twitter
Celeb/Entertainment: 10%
How to/DIY: 4%
Movies: 6%
News: 47%
Other: 23%
Tech: 10%

For the Bookshelf: Interaction Design

2010-03-30T08:15:00.000-07:00

Designing for Interaction, by Dan Saffer, August, 2009

Four of out five stars on Amazon.com. Recommended by Jared Spool, stalwart in the field of user experience and CEO of User Interface Engineering.

Thoughts about Previous Two Posts

2010-03-25T09:28:00.000-07:00

So why did I so carefully pore over and transcribe Michiko Kakutani's article in last Sunday's New York Times?

Because, first of all, it reflects serious thought by serious thinkers. She's a book critic for the Times, and the books she notes are written by real heavyweights. It's so interesting to hear the voice of Jaron Lanier, especially, one of the creators of virtual reality.

But most of all, the article sums up the state of the audience for which we, as content strategists and information architects, need to design and write. Kakutani's words might already be familiar to us, but they represent truth in a real way.

They are words we can point to, words that validate, user research that rings true for all of us, no matter the job title or project.

More from Michiko Kakutani

2010-03-25T08:51:00.000-07:00

Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and email, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter.

More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they're increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show, or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite—never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it's our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven't been properly vetted and sourced.

People tweet and text one another during plays and movies, forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work. Online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.

Technology is turning us into a water-cooler culture, with millions of people sending each other (via email, text messages, tweets, YouTube links) gossip, rumors, and the sort of amusing-weird-entertaining anecdotes and photographs they might once have shared with pals over a coffee break.

And, in an effort to collect valuable eyeballs and clicks, media outlets are increasingly pandering to that impulse—often at the expense of hard news.

"I have the theory that news is not driven not by editors who know anything," the comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently observed. "I think it's driven by people who are" slacking off at work and "surfing the Internet." He added, "It's like a county run by 'America's Funniest Home Videos.'"

For the Bookshelf: Current Thought on Digital Media

2010-03-23T11:04:00.000-07:00

These books share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels, and record albums are broken down into bit and bytes; the growing immediacy of real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political websites place on subjectivity.

The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby
"Reading in the traditional sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet. What we are engaged in—like birds of prey looking for their next meal—is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information."

The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen, a technology entrepreneur

Argues that Web 2.0 is creating a "digital forest of mediocrity" and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise.

Cyberselfish, by Paulina Borsook
Notes the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Describes tech-heads as having "an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent."
Contends that even older digerati want to think of themselves as "having an Inner Bike Messenger."

Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide, by Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
The Internet makes "cyberbalkanization" possible. Individuals can design feeds and alerts from their favorite websites so that they get only the news they want, and with more and more opinion sites and specialized sites, it becomes easier and easier for people "to avoid general-interest newspapers and magazines and to make choices that reflect their own predispositions."

Serendipitous encounters with personal and ideas different from one's own tend to grow less frequent, while "views that would ordinarily dissolve, simply because of an absence of social support, cam be found in large number on the Internet, even if they are understood to be exotic, indefensible, or bizarre in most communities." Studies of group polarization show that when like-minded people deliberate, they tend to reinforce one another and become more extreme in their views.

Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, by Cass R. Sunstein, a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs
Explores the effects of the Internet on public discourse.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr
Suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.

True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, by Farhad Manjoo, Slate's technology columnist
Examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact.

The way in which "information now moves through society on—currents of loosely linked online groups and niche media outlets, pushed along by experts and journalists of dubious character and bolstered by documents that are no longer considered proof of reality"—has fostered deception and propaganda and also created a world where "the very idea of objective reality is under attack."

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality
What becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes "metaness" and regards mash-ups as "more important that the sources who were mashed?"

Because the Internet is a kind of "pseudo-world" without the qualities of a physical world, it encourages the Peter Pan fantasy of being an entitled child forever, without the responsibilities of adulthood. While this has the virtues of playfulness and optimism, it can also devolve into a "Lord of the Flies"-like nastiness, with lots of "bullying, voracious irritability, and selfishness"—qualities enhanced by the anonymity, peer pressure, and mob rule that thrive online.

"Digital culture is comprised of [sic] wave after wave of juvenilia, with rooms of M.I.T. Ph.D. engineers not seeking cancer cures or sources of safe drinking water for the underdeveloped world but schemes to send little digital pictures of teddy bears and dragons between adult members of social networks."

Thanks to Michiko Kakutani and The New York Times for this mash-up

Welcome to The Eye That Blinks

2010-03-22T13:44:00.000-07:00

Welcome to The Eye That Blinks, a blog about information architecture, content strategy, and the land where the two mingle.

Why does the eye blink? Because it needs to constantly focus and refocus, look and look again, consider and reconsider. It's the process that creates and recreates, refining ideas and possibilities for the best possible solutions.

Information architecture and content strategy are closely aligned. Don't believe me? Then blink, and consider that the Illinois Institute of Technology's Master of Science in Information Architecture "enhances a technical communication core" and offers specialization in technical communication.

Blink again, and look hard at the first word in the term "information architecture." It doesn't say "cool graphics architecture." It doesn't even say "marketing jargon architecture." The word "information" implies meaning, meaning that comes from, well, words.

It always used to get my goat when people said, "Oh, no one reads on the Web." What is it, exactly, that they do, then (aside from watch video, look at images, and listen to music)? Some of us spend most of our waking hours on the Internet...reading (and writing) words.

This blog is about information strategy and content architecture. Made you blink.