Experiencing Information

Subject To Change, by Peter Merholz, Brandon Schauer, David Verba, and Todd Wilkens (Adaptive Paths), O’Reilly, 2008

In 1999, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger formulated their 95 theses into what became the Cluetrain Manifesto, which was then published as a book in 2000. This pointed to new world marketplace, where markets are seen as conversations. To sum up this paradigm shift in the authors’ own words:

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.”

Perhaps we’ve already seen this shift starting to take place. Old-economy models of management and customer relationships have been replaced by fast-moving, transparent ways of doing business. The authors of Subject To Change recognize this change as well:

“We’re sitting at the crux of a fundamental shift in the ways in which businesses engage with their customers. There are many reasons for this shift—globalization, containerization, digitization—and these emerging forces are causing consternation for businesses that don’t quite know how to react. The old tools at their disposal, such as efficiency, optimization, just-in-time manufacturing, blitz marketing, and outsourcing no longer provide the gains or competitive advantages they once did.” (p. 3).

Subject To Change guides us through this new environment from a user experience perspective, making a compelling overall case for experience design. And it does so with a sense of urgency: experience design and experience strategy aren’t things you should slowly start getting into. They are crucial to your business. You need to fundamentally transform your relationship with your customers and how you create products. Now.

A key message in Subject To Change is that “the experience is the product,” which is also the title of Chapter 1. Technology and richer feature sets alone are no longer sufficient to stay ahead in a competitive marketplace. Instead, you must create meaningful, engaging experiences to bring value to your business. And ultimately, from a user’s standpoint, there is no difference between the product and the experience.

An experience strategy, the topic of Chapter 2, is a critical step towards good experience design. The authors show that differentiation is of primary importance here, directly recalling Michael Porter’s perspective on strategy outlined in his landmark article “What Is Strategy” (HBR, 1996). A strategy based on parity is destined to fail. Instead, the goal is to find where you are different from competitors and highlight that value proposition in everything you do, including in the product design. Design and strategy, then, are not mutually exclusive; in fact, you could say that the former is the embodiment of the latter. Great product experiences demand a solid experience strategy.

What’s more, having an experience strategy is critical for dealing with change and uncertainty. Your product design may fail here and there, or you may have to change it often, but if the strategy is well-defined the user experience will still be consistent. Having a clearly articulated and explicit strategy, then, is central to being able to react and accommodate change:

“You have to recognize that a system will degrade, and make it such that such entropy doesn’t shatter the entire experience. The true success of experience design isn’t how well it works when everything is operating as planned, but how well it works when thing start going wrong.” (p. 99).

Unfortunately, many organizations overlook the value of a creating a clear vision of the intended user experience. The authors point out:

“All too often, product teams have no central vision to work toward. At best, there is a list of requirements to meet; more typically, they simply have a set of features to develop. Designing and developing to requirement and feature list leads to unsatisfactory experiences, because those lists aren’t oriented to the perspective of the user. As they make decisions along the way, teams’ concerns for features, data, and technology trumps [sic] serving the customer. This is in large part because they have requirement and feature lists in front of them, but nothing to represent the user’s ultimate experience.” (p. 26)

One tactic to clarify a product vision is through prototypes. Vision prototypes make a common experience goal tangible and visible to others on the development team. What’s more, this type of exploration is important for the general design process. The overall take-away: make the vision of the user’s experience explicit early on.

But where does experience vision come from? In part, it comes from empathy for users. Building empathy for users, the authors advise us, is the first step on your way to transformative experience design—preceding and directly informing the experience strategy.

Traditional marketing techniques, however, don’t create empathy. People are not the gregarious consumers marketing data often portraits them as:

“To cultivate empathy for customers and users, it’s vital that an organization have a realistic view of those people’s lives. We must understand people as they are rather than as market segments or demographics.” (p. 43)

Even some traditional user-centered research methods don’t necessarily build empathy. Many approaches view people as rational actors or goal-driven buyers. Though methods like GOMS have a place in user research programs, they often miss the bigger picture. Alternatively, the authors advocate seeing “user experience” as a holistic phenomenon, taking emotions, culture, and context into account. In other words, don’t oversimplify the user’s experience, and instead embrace its complexity and vagueness.

Luckily, there are methods and approaches for capturing a holistic view of users. These often contrast traditional marketing techniques. Ethnography, for one, currently leads the pack of such holistic techniques and is on the lips of many experience designers these days. It’s curious, however, that although very effective, ethnography is still not widespread. A recent study on methods clearly demonstrates this: of the 20 methods compared, ethnography emerged as the most effective for creativity and innovation, but was one of the least commonly used techniques. (See “Ideation for product innovation: What are the best methods?” by Robert Cooper and Scott Edgett).

A central point in gaining empathy is that user research must go far beyond just listening to what people say. Looking at verbatim customer comments from questionnaires, for instance, can be flawed and skewed. It assumes that users are capable of expressing the real issues they are having in words, and that you—the reader of their comments—can draw the right conclusions from those comments.

But even if users could formulate their issues clearly and you could interpret them accurately, they won’t tell you want to do or how to design a product. They can’t. People don’t know more than what they’ve already experienced when it comes to product design, and they won’t be able to see beyond what they know. As Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”

Or, consider the now-famous collaborative filtering navigation mechanism for book recommendations on Amazon.com. Maryam Mohit, responsible for the online customer experience at Amazon, explains in an interview that the idea for that feature was inspired by users, but didn’t come directly from their comments:

“It’s a combination of listening really hard to customers, and innovating on their behalf. For example, quite awhile ago we developed the “similarities” feature - the one that says “people who bought this also bought that.” In focus groups, no customer ever specifically requested that feature. But if you listened to customers talk about how they buy things, they’d say, my friend bought this, and I like what they like. In other words, they get recommendations from people they trust. There was a cognitive leap, based on those comments, to realizing that we could create something like that based on the data we had. That’s an example where there was a need expressed by customers, but the innovation was taking that general need and making the leap to a technology that meets that need in a new way.”

To be able to design for an innovative experience on the user’s behalf, you first have to build empathy. To do so, go beyond just listening to customers, and observe what they do as well.

The authors Subject To Change therefore urge businesses to make user research a core competency. This doesn’t mean throwing a few extra dollars at consultants to perform a few more usability tests each year. Instead, everyone in the organization must have an implicit empathy for the users of your products and services. First-hand contact with users helps greatly.

All of these recommendations in Subject To Change are not just idealistic talk without regard of project constraints. Thankfully, the authors have a very realistic perspective on product development. They recognize that having a primary focus on the user experience doesn’t mean you should ignore technology or business constraints. Of course these things matter, and they are huge challenges to solve in their own right. But the approach advocated in Subject To Change suggests that the user experience must be the centripetal force pushing downward on traditional technology- and feature-centered perspectives of product developement, rather than having those aspects act as a centrifugal force outward on the user experience.

Tim O’Reilly makes a similar observation in his blog posting “Designing from the Outside In.” He writes:

“Isn’t it curious how many of the applications and ideas getting the most buzz right now are coming from fertile collaborations between designers and developers? In addition to basecamp, there’s Flickr, conceived by designers Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. And who put their finger on AJAX, the meme of the moment, but web design firm Adaptive Path. Are designers the new heroes of the computer industry?”

O’Reily also quotes from Christopher Alexander’s landmark book A Pattern Language, which is about user-centered patterns of building architecture. Alexander writes:

“To lay out paths, first place goals at natural points of interest. Then connect the goals to one another to form the paths.”

This suggests that to create the optimal footpaths in a public space, it’s best to first put in the lawn and see where people walk. Then lay down the pavement to accommodate their natural walking patterns.

However, designing from “outside in” is often opposed to the organization and culture of many companies. Recognizing this, the authors of Subject To Change devote considerable space to discussions on how companies are organized and how organizational structures affect experience design. They point out that aligning an entire organization towards experience design represents a fundamentally different approach to how the company is run. Despite these challenges, the recommendation is to also make Design (with a capital D) a core competency—along with user research.

”Most companies are absolutely capable of creating the necessary processes. It’s just that this capability has languished because design activities have been discouraged in standard business practice. The ability to design and create new experiences is diffused and scattered throughout every technical and creative discipline. In addition, it’s typically relegated to lowest levels of an organization, given the least thought and analysis, and, not surprisingly, products results that are well beneath its potential.” (p. 111).

Bill Buxton, a notable author and speaker on human-computer interaction, corroborates this notion in an article “Innovation vs. Invention,” taking a perhaps more hard-core position. He writes:

“Is design leadership an executive level position? Do you have a Chief Design Officer reporting to the president? My view is that if you do not, you are not serious about design or innovation. Furthermore, you are telegraphing this fact to all of your employees, along with a clear message that they need not be either. As a result, you might as well fire all of your creative people, since you are setting them up to fail anyhow.”

It seems that good experience design—and innovation for that matter—must come from the top down within an organization, as well as from the bottom up. With out broad, high-level support for transformative design, good product experience won’t happen.

Why should businesses care? Well, the benefits of experience design to are many. Chief among these is customer loyalty. The authors describe in some length what they call The Long “Wow!,” or a continued series of offerings that “wow” users. This means reaching beyond typcial measurements of customer satisfaction or creating things like loyalty programs. Instead, look deep into the lives of your users for opportunities to amaze and delight them through design. Make experience design a strategic advantage for your organization to bring value to your business. Win over your customers’ hearts.

On a more tactical level, the authors also propose agile developments methods as an important way to deal with fast changing projects. But it’s not just the process or steps that formal agile methods offer which are important. For sure, agile methods aren’t really structured to accommodate user experience design: they tend to focus on implementation. Still, there are aspects of agile methods than experience design can directly benefit from. You should therefore focus on the agile ideals: iterative design, open communication, and experimentation are all critical in melding agile development and experience design.

Overall, three themes emerge as the key elements in experience design throughout the book: strategy, empathy for users, and organizational transformation. This mirrors the main points made in Jared Spool’s recent keynote speech at the 2008 IA Summit in Miami entitled “Journey to the Center of Design.” His company, User Interface Engineering (UIE), investigated what development teams that create great experiences do differently than those that don’t. Their evidence shows three distinguishing elements: vision, feedback, and culture. In other words, teams that consistently create great user experiences have a clear vision of the final experience, they have proper channels of input from users that build empathy, and they have a company culture that truly supports Design. Teams that are not so successful lack these traits.

Subject To Change repeats many common themes found in the user-centered design literature from the last three or so decades. User research? Of course. Task analysis? Yes. Personas? Also good. But this book goes beyond the tenants of user-centered design to present a framework for understanding experience design. Start with a vision of the experience, gain empathy for users, and work in a culture that supports creativity and innovation. And above all, let your paths naturally adapt as needed.

The real value of this book is that present a case for experience design that makes good business sense. In fact, Subject To Change shows why experience design is critical for businesses in today’s market. The user-centered design community has come up short on this point: for all of user-centered dogma and research studies out there, we’ve failed to tell businesses how to get value from their products or to tell engineers how to build products. As a result, Subject To Change is not just for designers and should appeal to managers and developers alike.

Subject To Change paints a broad picture of user experience, but it also goes beyond that. It’s really about how to enable an organization to engage in Design Thinking, which isn’t only for designers. To effectively and consistently innovate and create compelling user experiences, everyone in an organization needs to be involved in Design in different ways. So, at its core, this is also a book about innovation and the mindset needed to create a culture of innovation.

This is a slim volume with eight short chapters over about 170 pages of text. The writing is compact and clear. And there is no mincing of words. Some may actually find it too emphatic at times, with very direct imperatives. But given today’s heavy engineering-oriented or feature-oriented product development approaches, such a tone is needed.

Subject To Change is a much-needed wake-up call for businesses looking to stay competitive in the 21^st century. This is an excellent, well-written book packed with great advice from veterans in the field. It’s highly recommended and essential for anyone currently trying to innovate products and services in just about any field.

Quotes from the book:

“The key to succeeding in the contemporary marketplace is to fundamentally change your relationship with customers. Once you stop thinking of your customers as consumers and begin approaching them as people, you’ll find a whole new world of opportunities to meeting their needs and desires.” (p. 3)

“We live in an increasingly uncertain world, where the tools that served us well for so long no longer do. Technology isn’t sufficient; we can’t simply add features to attract an audience. There is no more efficiency to squeeze out of our operations, nor defects to remove from our products.” (p. 14)

“The experience is the product.” (p. 14)

“Strategies of parity are low value and short-lived. Strategies of delivering new offerings for novelty’s sake won’t survive much further than the infomercial. These approaches center on features and technologies rather than focusing on the one thing that really matters—the experience. But even though experience matters to everyone, we almost always lose sight of it in product development.” (p. 25)

“If earlier reductionist models offered ways of avoiding or reducing the complexity in people’s lives, these new approaches are our attempts to acknowledge and embrace that complexity. By doing so, we are able to understand people more honestly and completely. We gain the potential for greater insights because we see and account for things left out of the old models. We build empathy that gives us the ability to provide a truly great product or service experience. This greater understanding also allows organizations to handle uncertainty and reduce risk.” (p. 58)

“Stop Designing ‘Products’” (title of Chapter 5, p. 79)

“So there you have it: the secret sauce is to focus on experiences by delving into the complexities of people’s lives, and then to create elegant systems to support them.” (p. 105)

“Anything elevated to level of an organizational competency has to align with both the organization’s strategy and its system for doing business. Without this business perspective, design fails. Strategy, systems, and design are all innately about tradeoffs.” (p. 116)

“Design can and will fail when it’s practiced outside the context of systems and strategy. […] When applied well, strategy provide useful boundaries to the design activity.[…] Sam Lucente, head of design at HP, has also shared his take on the effectiveness of such constraints: ‘For the longest time, ideation was about throwing out as many ideas as you can. We’ve realized pretty quickly it’s really not about a bunch of ideas; it’s about really good strategy, alignment with business, diagnostics, and deep customer understanding. And when you’re ready to talk about ideas, bringing people to the table who are informed is what it’s all about’.” (p. 118-119)

“As markets, people’s lives, and the world are becoming more complex, many of the old, easy answers to business problems are insufficient. Developing creative, agile, and experience-focused approaches will be a key business practice for small and large companies alike.” (p. 176)

Gene Smith announced the release of his book on his blog (Atomiq). Unfortunately, it’s about twice as expensive if I buy it here in Germany than on the Amazon.com site. So I’m going to wait until I’m back in the US to get it…probably in May.

Check out Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web by Gene Smith.

Congratulations, Gene.

Looks like libraries are putting Designing Web Navigation under the LC Classification of TK5105.888. This is roughly:

• Technology
  • Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering
    • Telecommunication, including telegraphy, telephone, radio, radar, television.

The full call number in a given library might be something like TK5105.888 .K35 2007.

LC Subject Headings from several libraries include:

• Electronic texts
• Web site development
• Web sites–Design.
• World Wide Web
• User interfaces (Computer systems)
• Internet searching

Amazon has these subjects:

• Books > Computers & Internet > Microsoft > Web Browsers
• Books > Computers & Internet > Home Computing > Internet > Web Browsers
• Books > Computers & Internet > Graphic Design > Website Architecture & Usability

O’Reilly has it under on their site

• Web > Web Design

Libri.de has the subjects:

• User Interfaces
• Internet - Browsers
• Internet / Programmierung
• Internet - Web Site Design

Compare these to the tags on LibraryThing:

• $ Köp (1)
• Collib (1)
• computers (1)
• currently reading (1)
• design (1)
• faceted browse (1)
• information (1)
• iacanberra (1)
• information (1)
• information architecture (3)
• information seeking (1)
• labels (1)
• layout (1)
• library2 (1)
• navigation (3)
• non-fiction (2)
• organization (1)
• rias (1)
• rich web applications (1)
• search (1)
• tagging (1)
• to catalogue (1)
• to read (1)
• usability (2)
• user research (1)
• ux (2)
• visual design (1)
• web (2)
• web design

What does this tell us? Not 100% sure. Some of the controlled subject headings are off, like “Electronic texts” from LCSH and “Web browsers” from Amazon. So it’s hard to make a case that those are better access points.

The tags seem better to me, but perhaps too numerous. (Of course, I tagged the heck out of Designing Web Navigation on LibraryThing, so I’m contradicting myself). And except for a few personal tags, I actually find they are more descriptive of the book. There is information on tagging and facetted browse interfaces in the book, and that’s hard to show in most library subject headings.

So from this sample, the tags win out in for me.

Just came across a new book on text mining: Tapping into Unstructured Data: Integrating Unstructured Data and Textual Analytics into Business Intelligence, by William H. Inmon and Anthony Nesavich. I previewed it on Safari and downloaded a few chapters.

The book is not technical in the sense of showing programmers how to code, but it does focus on database architectures and the like. And when they talk about structured vs unstructured, they are really referring to database structures, not necessarily information architectures.

There is a chapter on visualization, but this is disappointing: it’s more about the process of creating visualizations than about whether the visualizations will be meaning to any human being. In fact, one of the examples used is a bar graph, where the bars themselves are blocks and they are stacked in a three-dimensional arrangement—two no-no’s.

One key point they make—a point I made in my presentation at the Euro IA Summit this year in Barcelona—is that for unstructured data to be useful, it often makes sense to bring it into a structured environment. This makes possible analysis and understanding that would otherwise not be possible.

The penultimate chapter is a brief case study on creating a corporate taxonomy. This company in question created one to help them tie together disparate IT systems and to allow analytics to take place at all. Taxonomies still have a place in the unstructured world.

The writing style is dry and not very engaging. And the summaries for each chapter (which I hoped to give me a better overview of the content) are very thin. So, I’m not sure I’d recommend you run out and buy the book, but since I have a Safari account it was certainly worthwhile to go over the content quickly. I plan to read a few key chapters in full later.

Chris Anderson, of Long Tail fame, has this post on his blog about free chapters from a new book called Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s Top Bloggers by Mike Banks.

The idea from the publisher (Wiley)  is that each of the 30 interviewees gets to give away his or her chapter. Interesting marketing scheme. Sure, the entire book is now available for free on the web, but you’d have to do some scavagering to it all. And along the way you’d be exposed to messages from the authors about their work and about the book. So there may be a powerful marketing effect here.

Others who are promoting their own chapter include Mark Frauenfelder at BoingBoing, David Rothman at TeleBlog and Steve Garfield.

Not sure if I’m going to buy the book. It’s only $17 on Amazon.com, but €26 on Amazon.de.

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.

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

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.

My favorite tagging site, Librarything, turned two today. Congrats to Tim and all the others involved.

Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing, has come up with something new that’s quite interesting. It’s called the tag mirror. Essentially, you get to see other people’s tags for your books. Great idea.

Here’s my tag mirror (I’m Pivo1 on LibraryThing). No real surprises, but there are some interesting connections. Not sure where “Christmas”came from. The “Geek” tag might also say something about my book collection–at least those that I have on LibraryThing.

I suspect there are loads of such filters and ways of structuring tags that have yet to be explored. We’re really only just beginning. With 22 million tags and inventive tagging mechanisms like the tag mirror, LibraryThing is a clear leader in this area. Keep your eye on Tim in the future.

So, after one year and three months of working and waiting, my book finally arrived on my doorstep this morning. What a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting it until later. But there it was in hard copy. Relieved, proud, happy–I’m not quite sure how to feel about it. And I’m not sure what to expect next.

Thanks to everyone who helped with the book.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I received an author advanced copy. It’s still not available on Amazon as of August 19. O’Reilly has a told me that is should be available for to buy at the end of August 2007–just a few weeks off.

Here’s a really good video of Bill Buxton talking about sketching:
http://www.brightcove.com/title.jsp?title=323680309&channel=324389485.
It’s long–about 90 minutes. The contents correspond to his recent book, Sketching User Experiences, which I don’t have yet.

He covers a lot more great deal more than just actual sketching. The talk–and presumably the book–is ultimately about design, innovation, and the overall user’s experience. He also covers things like product development processes, touching on the notion of getting the right design versus getting the design right.

One thing that struck me was this quote:
“If you have the best designers in the world working for you and you don’t have an executive who is at the power of the CTO directly reporting to the president…who is called the Chief Design Officer, then you should fire all of your usability people and all of you industrial design people, because you are telegraphing to your entire organization that you don’t take this seriously, so why should they.”

Ouch.

But he’s right. At most companies, Design (with a capital D) is about getting the design right and not getting the right design. Also, Design isn’t integrated into all other parts of the business, and so has little chance of succeding. You need the C-level support. Punkt. Whether or not the Design Team should pack up and go home is questionable, though.

Buxton notes that sketching is different from prototyping. Sketches are disposable, unfinished, and ask questions. Prototypes answer questions and suggest a concrete design. And since ideas are a dime a dozen, you need at least 5 sketch alternatives to get the right design. This is what Design is all about. It’s not about the designer, but about exploration, throughing things out, and making mistakes.

In sketching information experiences, I’m wondering what the tools are. Wireframes, of course, are a staple of information architecture. But how do taxonomists and librarians sketch organization systems?

Sure, there are tools to help develop and manage abstract information structures, but is this really sketching? Is this really design? Maybe not. Maybe IA isn’t a design discipline. If alternatives aren’t explored, then it is not.

So what are the sketching tools for information experiences? Post-Its? Card Sorting? Sitemaps? Anything else?

After pointing out a few contentious points in Everything is Miscellaneous in previous posts (see: June 13, 2007, June 2, 2007, and May 28, 2007), I wanted to review some of the book’s strengths. And there are many. This is perhaps one of the most interesting books about information and its order that I’ve read. Though I disagree with Weinberger on many points, the book got me thinking, and I found it quite engaging overall.

Order in the Court
A central concept Weinberger proposes is that of three orders of order:

• First order - This is the organization of physical objects: “We put silverware into drawers, books on shelves, photos into albums.”
• Second order - This refers to creating a surrogate record that is derived from the item to be organized. This record itself has a physical manifestation. The classic example used throughout the book is the card catalogue.
• Third order - Here, there is no limitation for the type and amount of metadata that links to an item. Instead, an object can be classified, tagged, and organized by any number of means–essentailly without limit. What’s more, documents themselves become metadata. So this order is really more like disorder, and it is where the book gets its title.

I’m not sure the division between the second and third orders is entirely clear, but it rings true for the most part. It’s probably more of a continuum than true buckets of order.

Interestingly enough, Weinberger–a philospher himself–doesn’t refer to Karl Popper’s theory of reality. In the Popperian cosmology there are three worlds:
World 1: the world of physical objects
World 2: the world of mental objects and events
World 3: the world of the products of the human mind

I’m seeing these map roughly to Weinberger’ order like this:
World 1 = first order
World 2 = third order
World 3 = second order

These mappings aren’t 1:1, but the causation is different with Popper’s worlds. Perhaps the third order of order as Weinberger proposes it isn’t the next step forward, but a step back to something that more closely resembles human thought, knowledge, and understanding. OK, I’m probably getting in over my head, so I’ll just leave it at that and let you decide or comment further.

Lumping and Spliting
Another recurring concept is that of lumping and splitting. This refers to either grouping or dividing a topic in order to manage, use, or understand it better. “Nesting is a fundamental technique of human understanding. It may even be the fundamental technique, at least in its most primitive form: lumping and splitting” (p. 68). For example, dividing patterns of order into three orders (see above) helps us talk about and understand those concepts better.

But lumping and splitting inherently bring bias to the table. In the third order, however, this bias is removed–or at least lessened. Rather than one person or one group of people deciding how to lump and split information, we all do it. And we do it to fit our needs–without suffering from someone else’s biases. In the end, Weinberger argues that a big pile of metadata-rich information is better than top-down control of it. You then let users and machines sort it as needed from the bottom up.

Small Pieces Loosely Joined
The phrase Web 2.0 has a certain buzzability these days. Some times you’ll hear people define Web 2.0 as the use of technologies like AJAX, or worse the use of 3-D buttons with a reflection. Even talk about communities and user participation sometimes misses the deeper meaning of Web 2.0. It’s the miscellanization of information that enables Web 2.0 activity–along with the connectivity only the Web can offer, of course.

At its core, then, Everything is Miscellaneous is really about Web 2.0, or at least about the underpinnings thereof. It’s about the theory and consequences of the atomization and re-connecting of information in the digital world.

Even broader, Everything is Miscellaneous is, in part, a philosophy of information, covering wide range of classification-related topics from a historical perspective. The author reviews the origins of taxonomy and alphabetical ordering, and even Aristoltle’s notion of hierarchies and understanding. But at the same time the book is thoroughly steeped in the modern, digital world of information.

Quotes
Here are some of my favorite quotes I highlighted while reading it:
page 82: “Reality is multifaceted. There are lots of ways to slice it. How we choose to slice it up depends on why we’re slicing it up.”

page 88: “The basic fact that order often hides more than it reveals has sometimes itself been hidden within the art and science of organizing our world.”

page 105: “The power of the miscellaneous comes directly from the fact that in the third order, everyhing is connected and therefore everything is metadata.”

page 168: “So Peter Morville may have it backwards: Tags may become more useful, meaningful, relevant, and clearer the more there are.”

page 189: “There is no dorm room, divorce, or political scandal as messy as the World Wide Web. There’s an excellent reason for this: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, in his wisdom made sure that the Web is a permission-free zone. Anyone can post anything she wants, and anyone can link to anything else, all without altering a central registry, without having to get approval, and without anyone saying exaclty where to shelve the new material. So, the Web has grown without plan, which is exactly why it has grown like crazy.”

Interesting side note: Amazon suggests to purchase Everything is Miscellaneous with my book, Designing Web Navigation. This is an interesting contrast thematically: One is about controlling and ordering information from the top down, the other about messiness as a virtue. The thing that joins these two books, however, is the potential audience. So it’s actually a good example of why making a big messy pile and then using algorithms to find new and interesting connections just might work.

Everything is Miscellaneous is well researched. But unfortunately the book uses end notes (does any one really skip back to them while in the middle of a chapter?). And the text lacked numbered references to the points in the notes, so it is extra hard to follow the notes. It’s impressive, though, the Weinberger has talked with many people first hand and actually gone to location to investigate topics, and it’s welcomed that he shares this with us.

The author takes on some deep topics in a fairly accessible style. Everything is Miscellaneous is well written, but not light reading. But at just over 250 pages, you really have no excuse for not picking it up. Throughout, the discussions are thought-provoking and, at times, simply mesmerizing. I highly recommend this to anyone in the information business or doing web design.

After 9 months of writing and 3 months of production, Designing Web Navigation–my first book–is at the printer. There were a few very rough spots with the production, but I think we have most of the kinks worked out.

You can already pre-order it on Amazon.

About The Book:
Since web navigation design touches most other aspects of web site development in some way, the book necessarily paints a broad picture touching on many areas, including things like user research and visual design. But as much as possible the focus throughout remains clearly on creating an effective navigation system. I always try to bring it back home to web navigation whenever the conversation touches other areas.

Thank You:
It’s quite amazing to me how many people contributed to the completion of this book. Here’s a shout out to you all:
- -The primary technical reviewers: Dr. Mark Edwards and Aaron Gustafson.
- -Contributors of the sidebars: Ariane Kempken, my first real mentor in user-centered design, Misha Vaughan, Eric Reiss, Donna Maurer, Victor Lombardi, Andrea Resmini, Emanuele Quintarelli, Luca Rosati, and Mark Edwards.
- -Others who read chapters for me in advance and helped out in other ways: Peter Boersma, Liz Danzico, Jochen Fassbender, Margaret Hanley, Michael Hatscher, Andrea Hill, Theba Islam, Jeff Lash, Victor Lombardi, Ariane Kempken, Michael Kopcsak, Eric Mahleb, Kathryn McDonnell, Donna Maurer, Wolf Nöding Andrew Otwell, Tanya Raybourn, Eric Reiss, Andrea Resmini, Steffen Schilb, Gene Smith, and Joseph Veehoff.