Experiencing Information

I’d like to post some thoughts about presentations I saw at the Euro IA 2007 Conference. Already mentioned Are’s presentation.

Here’s a summary of mine, which is essentially the last slide in my presentation (available on SlideShare) that sums everything up:

• The cost of adding more information is noise. Don’t forget this when people talk about “unlimited shelf space” online.
• There are different types of sources of metadata to consider: user-generated metadata (e.g., tagging), technically generated metadata (e.g., entity extraction), and owner-created metadata (e.g., controlled vocabularies).
• There are also different types of structures of organization to give meaning and context to the metadata when you represent it: user-created structures (e.g., filtering tags for special interest groups), technically created structure (e.g., Google News page), and owner-created structures (e.g., a thesaurus).
• In the Long Tail, any and all types of metadata and types of structure are needed. Forget about the silly arguments that one will replace the other. Think of it as matrix with the types of metadata on the side and the types of structures on the top.
• Further, since niche markets fit the description of a bounded domain, and since traditional taxonomies and classification are often good strategies for organizing information in bounded domains, as Clay Shirky points out, AND as we move to a culture of niche markets, as Chris Anderson predicts, traditional IA and taxonomy will become more important.
• Additionally, niche markets are defined by the categories you create. Online, a “pile of information”–as David Weinberger says in Everything is Miscellaneous--begins and ends with the IA and organization you develop.
• IA in the Long Tail will be about second order design. You may not be able to customize each page or local navigation scheme. Instead, you need to provide people with the tools they need to make sense of information.
• This means a shift for IA to look at abstract, broader patterns of human information behavior and of information structures in a domain. Card sorting is great, but we need to go well beyond this. We need to look at users much more closely, as well as the inherent patterns of information in a domain.

Not the most practical talk I’ve given, but many people thanked for the talk and said it got them thinking. So it seemed to have been well-received.

Euro IA 2007 was really great this year. Fantastic presenters and talks. Euro IA is maturing into a real quality event in all respects.

My favorite presentation was Are Halland’s Cores and Paths talk, which he also gave in Las Vegas at the IA Summit in N. America. Here are the slides for Cores and Paths on SlideShare.

The idea is brilliantly simple: First, you have a core. This could be content, a feature, functionality, or even a work flow. Find what that is and design it first. Note that in doing this you necessarily have to get clarity from stakeholders and from the project team as to what it is that you should focus on.

Don’t start with the homepage, Are reminds us. This is also something I discuss in Designing Web Navigation too. To quote myself:

“Very often, a site’s navigation is created from the top down. The designer starts with the home page and determines all the ways to reach various parts of the site level by level. By the time the content pages are reached further down in the site, the system is more or less fleshed out, and the routes to those pages are already locked into place.

From a user’s standpoint, however, the home page may be the least interesting page on the site. It’s usually a mere stop on their way to where they are going. They care much more about the information and services your site has to offer. Of course, the home page often plays a key role in giving an overview, such as with Intranets and news sites, but it’s usually not the target page visitors are seeking.

Further, people may not enter the site on the home page. They may follow a link from a search engine, an online advertisement, or from another site. They may not have the chance to re-trace those top-down routes to content pages you’ve carefully planned out. Therefore you also need consider how people will get to your content from locations other than the home page. This leads a simple but important piece of advice:

Don’t start by designing the navigation on the home page“

Then you have to design the paths into that core and out of the core. The inward paths are about findability. Think of all the ways people can get to your core. The outward paths add value to the business. They expose related content or additional products.

As I commented at this session during the Q&A period, the best models are a.) simple and b.) obvious. All too often we think that if it’s not earth shattering, it’s not worth saying. But sometimes stating the obvious is a Very Good Thing. Try it.

And in terms of design models, the simplest are the best. People remenber them and can use them. Heck, I wrote this post pretty much without relying on the presentation or any of my notes. Stravinsky once said something to effect that there is a still all of good music to be written in the key of C. Web design still has long way to develop and continue maturing.

Just back from the successful Euro IA 2007 conference in Barcelona and coming down from the buzz you get at events like that. Lots to think about and to tell.

In a conversation with some folks about privacy and distributing personal information–prompted by Mags Hanley’s talk at the conference–I was reminded or Benjamin Brunk’s concept of exoinformation. This takes the perspective of the individual in discussion of privacy:

“Exoinformation is the informational byproduct of an individual’s information-seeking activities. This byproduct, or “data exhaust” as Olsen calls it, has become more and more important to people building profiles about consumers. An entire industry devoted to collecting and making sense of exoinformation already thrives.

Specifically, exoinformation consists of the tidbits of information that are unconsciously or unwittingly disseminated by people’s everyday actions. All life processes produce exoinformation. Observing that someone is breathing will reveal that he or she is alive. We already have a pretty good understanding of these subtleties in the physical world, but the cyber realm offers new challenges for individuals to understand and manage information leakage. Examples of exoinformation include a preference or a behavior captured and recorded as the result of posing a search query, selecting a song to listen to, checking on a stock quote or just clicking through a website.”

He believes we can still have privacy on the Internet. Instead of trying to keep people out of our personal information, we may have to worry more about what we can keep in. This is an important distinction in designing privacy in the digital world. Interestingly enough, Brunk sees interface design as a place where privacy can be better managed.

“User interface design practices emphasize removing cognitive load burdens from users and shifting them to the interface. A byproduct of this approach, and in software customization/personalization in general, is that it can often increase the amount of exoinformation available for broadcast.”

It doesn’t appear that Brunk or anyone else has taken up this concept since the original article appeared in the ASIST Bulletin. Googling “exoinformation” pretty much points back to that publication. Given the level of interest in discussions at the Euro IA conference this past weekend (Sept 21-22, 2007) about privacy and personal information, it would be great to see more on this subject.

Yahoo! has a new service called Map Mixer. You can upload an image of a map of just about anything and overlay this onto a Yahoo! map. There is then an opacity control to show more or less of the uploaded map. This ultimately allows people to tie their local areas and local mapping needs into a broader context.

For example, see the map of University of Southern California. This has far more detail of the campus than a normal Yahoo! map would ever show, but now you can also see how to get to the campus and where it’s located geographically.

You can also show a satellite image for the background map. This is particularly interesting, and it could be great for hiking maps and such. Very simple idea, but also very cool.

So far, everyone is commenting on the appearance of DWN: the layout, the font, the images, the scannability, etc. Guess the content reviews come later.

But I did get some feedback on the content recently. In particular, some folks from the University College of London Interaction Centre wrote to O’Reilly.

First, here’s what I wrote in DWN:
“The University College of London Interaction Centre hosts a research project that explores the possibility of making all online text interactive—right down to the individual words. Instead of hypertext, the researchers refer to this as Hyperwords. The basic idea is that when a word is clicked, an option menu appears. You can then conduct a search, link to related documents, define the term, translate it, and so on. As they put it, the goal is to put an ‘end to the tyranny of links.’ This would also mean an end to navigation design.”

And they wrote in an email:
“We are very happy to be included in this book, but Hyperwords in no way tries to end navigation design.

Quite the contrary.

Information management and the work of knowledge workers is to continually refine information and re-present it as usefully as possible. Links are fantastic. But they are even more powerful when augmented by other modes of navigation and information work.”

Not sure how I could have misinterpreted putting an “end to the tyranny of links,” but it looks like I did. I mean, how can links be both a tyranny and fantastic at the same time? I guess it’s a fantastic tyranny.

But, enough quibbling with semantics. The example in the book is part of a hypothetical exploration of what navigation is. To show this, I simply wanted to present other models of getting from one piece of information to another, and Hyperwords inspired a whole new way to do that. And, I mention that web navigation is really a system of multiple means of getting around a body of information. So, I think we’re on the same page there.

Thanks for your comment, UCLIC. I’ll be sure to address this correctly in the future.

Here is an impressive collections of photos from amazing libraries around the world. I’ve only been to a few of them, sadly. Gotta make a point of getting to more of them (particularly the ones in Germany).

BTW, I can recommend visiting libraries while travelling. Most have free internet connections, for starters. But you also get to see great buildings, and many have interesting exhibits and even museums.

What’s the online equivalent? Will anything we create now in the digital world still be around in 50 years? 25? 5? We were pondering this recently while standing in front of the 2000 year-old amphitheater in Nimes: the thing isn’t just still standing, it’s in use. We just don’t build things for longevity anymore or have long term thinking as a whole.

Maybe people will be showing pictures of places on Second Life to future generations and saying, “Wow, they really knew how to build things back then.”

Liz gave a talk at An Event Apart in Chicago recently called The Seven Lies of IA. Don’t have the presentation, but I bet it was a good talk. Here are the seven lies:

1. Navigation must be consistent.
2. There is a magic number (plus or minus two).
3. Users must get to all parts of the site all of the time.
4. Users must know where they are at all times.
5. The user experience must be seamless.
6. Shorter is better.
7. Information architects must do information architecture.

She and I spoke briefly about a few of these prior to the talk. Glad to see that they were well received.

I wrote a rather superficial article about #2 a while ago (see The Myth of “Seven, Plus or Minus 2″). Interesting that Liz had exactly seven lies…maybe ironic even? Still, that has nothing to do with web navigation: users can take in a lot more than seven options at a time.

I’m not sure about the difference between #1 and #5, but would like to know more. #7 is also intriguing to me. People have bashed IA for being too myopic recently, but I’ve never felt that IAs only do IA. Would like to hear more about that one too.

Nice job, Liz.

So, the first review of DWN has come in on Amazon: 5 stars! Not a bad way to start off the Amazon.com listing for customer reviews of the book. I know I’m often very influenced by the first rating I see on Amazon.

It’s a short review and doesn’t really go into much depth or detail. The reviewer seems to like the layout and organization of the book. I’m glad she likes the fact that I cite others, something that wasn’t easy to juggle.

She also likes the abundance of screenshots, which was quite a lot of work–more than I planned for. I spent hours looking for appropriate examples on the web. And I didn’t want to keep using the same sites, so I ran out of ideas sometimes. Then, once you find a good example there are all kinds of other considerations, like how wide the page should be, what should be shown, and what portion of the screen should be used. And the images had to named and tracked properly for production. For some chapters, I spent as much time getting the screenshots together as writing the text. That doesn’t really show through, however, when you’re just flipping pages quickly, so it’s good to hear that someone appreciates the results of that work.

The reviewer cautions that the book isn’t for programmers. I mention this quite clearly in the preface as well. My first editor warned me that people might think it’s a book for developers. With a title like Designing Web Navigation I can’t imagine why. Coding a web page isn’t Design, now is it? How did it ever come to be that “web design” got equated with programming?

Anyway, thanks for to Ms Prosser for her favorable review on Amazon.com

What if user-contributed content on the web really isn’t a good thing. I mean, isn’t there a good reason why we have edited newspaper and books and such? Maybe everyone and his brother shouldn’t just be spewing whatever they want over blogs and Twitter. Maybe the egalitarianism and democracy of the web will lead us to anarchy…both online and offline. Maybe Web 2.0 is the beginning of the end.

Sometimes you come across the most vile, wretched crud online and think “This person shouldn’t be allowed to pollute the web with this filth.” It’s just noise, and we have too much of it. Or maybe it’s just me.

Of course, the irony of this thought is that I’m blogging it.

OK, I give in–I’m actually all for user-created content, but I still highly value editorial and peer-review processes. Can the two co-exist?

Over at atomiq, Gene has some interesting thoughts about why tagging isn’t stuck. I agree with him, and commented as such on his blog. Social bookmarking might be stuck, but tagging is just taking off, if you ask me. We’re really just starting to understand the potential of tagging. As long as sites like LibraryThing can keep coming up with cool features like the tag mirror, it’s got a bright future.

At the same time, let’s also keep in mind that tagging is really just more metadata. Where it comes from and why it’s there is different than owner-applied metadata or even technically generated metadata, but it’s still just metadata. In some cases, like on flickr, technorati, or LibraryThing, it wildly abundant metadata. And free. That’s what’s really different. If we can figure out how to really leverage those aspects, tagging may indeed become a disruptive technology.

Gene’s got a lot to say about the topic–so much so that he’s writing a book on the subject. Can’t wait for that one. I was fortunate to have Gene read and comment on an early draft of Chapter 12 of Designing Web Navigation, which is about tagging. Thanks, Gene.

Smashing magazine is giving away copies of its recommended design reading list. To enter, post your answer to ‘What is the best thing to start a perfect day with?’ at the bottom of the page, along with the book you would like.

#38 looks familiar. Seems about 4 out of the 1000+ entrants would like to have it.