A-Z Index Examples

Here’s a collection of A-Z index examples on UX Refresh.

Generally, I’m a fan of A-Z indexes. But at the same time I realize they are really difficult to create and maintain, particular in dynamic online settings. So the real value of them remains elusive to me. I don’t think I’d really try too hard to convince someone they need an A-Z index to organize information in a digital space.

That said, I did make a point in my presentation at the Euro IA Summit 2008 in Barcelona that things like indexes and taxonomies make sense within bounded domains–more so than in open domain contexts. (See also a summary in the ASIST Bulletin: “Navigating the Long Tail.”) Even Clay Shirky agrees with that. Here’s my point:

As we collectively move down the long tail, bounded domains–or niche markets, as Chris Anderson calls them–will increase and solidify, and so we will also see an increase in the need for indexes, taxonomies, and ontologies to help organize these domains.

So maybe there’s hope for A-Z indexes after all. In fact, I recently came across an excellent implementation of an A-Z index not included in the collection summarized on UX Refresh: EMBASE, a bibliographic database from Elsevier. From the Embase website:

EMBASE.com is a biomedical and pharmacological bibliographic database, which provides access to the most up-to-date citations and abstracts from biomedical and drug literature via EMBASE and Medline. It contains over 19 million indexed records from 7,000+ peer reviewed journals, covering 1947 to date, with more than 600,000 additions annually.

EMBASE is indexed using the Elsevier life science thesaurus, EMTREE and Medline records are mapped to EMBASE before adding to EMBASE.com.

The interesting part about it is that the index is integrated into the auto-complete suggested terms feature from the main search field–with “use:” references and all:

Auto-complete suggestions are most often alphabetical anyway, so this makes a lot of sense. And since biomedicists become familiar with the standard terms in their bounded domain, their understanding of the index should be fairly high. I’d even predict that people would expect to have access to standard index terms in this context.

Siftables – New Interaction Model

Check out this fascinating demo of Siftables at the TED conference from David Merrill. There’s more on the Siftables project website at MIT.

I’m not sure how you’d do something like compose a document or check emails on them. At a time when computer monitors and resolutions are growing, it does seem odd to have tiny bits of information again–smaller than a cell phone, really.

The interesting thing about them, though, is the usability and the apparent user experience. It’s very “natural” and “intuitive” (whatever those terms may really mean).

New Gapminder Video

Hans Rosling has a new video over at Gapminder called “Yes they can!” It never ceases to amaze how much a few well-created visualizations can really explain.

IA Summit Program

The IA Summit 2009 program looks to be stellar once again:

I’m particularly excited about the keynote speaker: Michael Wesch–a real live anthropologist and forerunner in the field of digital ethnography. In my talk on ethnography at the Euro IA conference in Amsterdam, I made the point that IAs need to be doing more ethnography. I wonder if he’ll make a similar point.

In this light, the “Evolve or Die” panel looks interesting to me too. So does “Strategies for Enabling UX to Play a More Strategic Role.” I can’t decide which presentation to go to for most of the other time slots–typical for the IA Summit.

Unfortunately, I have to miss Jesse James Garrett’s closing keynote speech. Arrgh. That may change, but I don’t think so.

Be there or be square.

Fake Ethnography v. Real Ethnography – Aviva Rosenstein

I finally got around to watching and summarizing Dr. Aviva Rosenstein’ presentation “Fake Ethnography vs Real Ethnography“. It’s a good talk. Here are my notes and thoughts on what she has to say.

Aviva at first focuses on what the trendiness and buzz around the word “ethnography.” One example she gives is the Forrester case study on how Wells Fargo used ethnography to innovate its business. But she points out Wells Fargo isn’t really doing ethnography at all. I’m glad she used this example, but I read the same report and though the same thing: it’s not ethnography at all.

She then asks, What does it really mean to do ethnography? Ethnography came from cultural anthropology and ethnology around the turn of 20th century. Ethnographers then spent a long time in the field–sometimes a year. The idea is that you participate with the culture you are studying. Ethnographers talk about becoming a “participant observer.”

This generates a ton of data in the form of field notes. From this, they have to understand the perspective of the culture and then communicate that to others who weren’t there. They make other cultures visible.

Ethnographers aren’t in lab coats watching people in labs. That’s actually the opposite of ethnography. But they’re also not Indian Jones-like, with wild adventures in the field. As design researchers, we don’t have to live up to those myths of grueling field work and suffering. We don’t even have to publish books and have wide recognition as ethnographers. And we can still being doing ethnography.

But how far do you have to go to say you’re doing ethnography? How “other” do the other people you’re looking at have to be? Ethnography is a lot of things: a method, a process, a discipline, a genre of writing. It’s hard to define. Even ethnographers argue amongst themselves as to how far you have to go to be doing ethnography.

So does that mean we’re doing “fake” ethnography? No. Fake ethnography is writing about something that never happened or about something you didn’t observe. In business contexts we may be doing bad ethnography, though. Or at least, perhaps we don’t do deep ethnography.

And there are tons of terms to describe the type of design research methods that resemble ethnography:

• Contextual inquiry
• Naturalistic inquiry
• Field work
• Site visits
• Customer visits
• “Deep hanging out”

and so forth.

But all of these share some of the principles of “true” ethnography: listening and conversing with the people we are studying, and trying to understand them on their own terms.

The goal of ethnography, in general, is to improve human communication. The goal of design ethnography is to gain insight to be able to create a product or service that enhances peoples lives.  It’s about creativity and innovation: building empathy for our users and getting those “come to Jesus” moments for our internal teams. This is different than the goals of academic anthologists, but it shares some of the same principles.

The semantics of the terminology–whether it’s real ethnography or not–doesn’t matter, she says. It’s more about doing good research: collect data, don’t report assumptions, look for patterns, and deliver value to your business. Be brave and be your own hero within your organization with good research.

One thing she gets wrong, I think, is that she at one time limits ethnography in business contexts to studying how people use the products and services we design. I don’t believe this has to be the case. In fact, I make a distinction between product research and user research–ethnography being closer to the latter. These means we can study a narrow target group in a business context to understand what they do and how they act even before we’ve created a product for them. And we can do design ethnography outside of a specific development project.

It’s a good talk. Watch it.

Carousel Navigation (was rotating navigation)

I previously blogged on what I was calling rotating navigation–for lack of a better term. Mia Nothrop, from Razorfish, thankfully corrected me on the label. It’s widely referred to as a carousel or carousel navigation. See the Yahoo design pattern on carousel navigation.

Thanks, Mia.