Experiencing Information

I’m giving two all-day workshops on IA and Navigation here in Hamburg in May. The workshops are being organized and sponsored by Karen Lindemann of Netflow. See the details on Netflow’s site (in German only).

Registration is now open. The workshops will be held in German. Dates: 6.-7. May, 2008.

Finally got around to watching Alex Wright’s Google Tech Talk entitled The Web That Wasn’t. Alex is the author of GLUT: Mastering Information Through the Ages, a book I don’t own yet but will be getting soon. The talk is based on the book and gives a tour of philosophical and direct precursors to the web. Fascinating stuff. He discusses Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, Eugene Garfield, Ted Nelson, and other. The talk is one hour long, but worth it.

Some of the lessons from looking at the history of early notions of networked systems:

• Top down and bottom up organization of information can work in concert with each other
• Two-way linking provides more information than one-way. (Of course, to this point I’d say that the web wouldn’t have taken off if two-way linking was mandatory.)
• Showing pathways and usage patterns is important information about information.
• Users can be authors and contributors
• The nature of interaction is more from the “oral” tradition

We can see some of these things on the web today, but looking at alternative systems (theoretical or real) still provides inspiration. It also reminds us that the “new” ideas and concepts–even things like Web 2.0–aren’t necessarily new. Overall, he points things in a broad perspective.

One point he makes quickly in the Q&A session: things like controlled vocabularies may have a place in bounded domains. The example he gives is MeSH. He mentions maybe there is a way to automate this, but the point is that we can learn from all the work done on developing controlled vocabularies to date. This mirrors a point I made in my presentation in Barcelona the Euro IA Summit and in an article for the ASIST Bulletin of the same title: Navigating the Long Tail.

Not sure if anyone has ever made this connection before, but I’m going to give a try. Let me know if you’ve heard this already. Here goes:

If we consider all published information in the world, we can assume it takes on a long tail curve. The most people sources are read by only a small percentage of people. Librarianship is really about organizing information in the head of the long tail curve. Sure, there are special libraries, like science libraries and music libraries, but even those are concerned with organizing the hits.

After the advent of the web, IA arose out the need to organize information in the long tail. At some point the long tail of information spaces got so fat, someone realized that we need special, dedicated people to take care of our informatoin problems. IA is about finding custom solutions in a niche market for a particular business or client.

My point is that attacks on things like the Dewey Decimal System by people like Clay Shirky and David Weinberger are irrelevant to IA. IAs aren’t concerned about organizing all of human knowledge. We tend to work in niche markets. And it’s in niche markets that things like taxonomy and controlled vocabularies make most sense because they are bounded domains. Even Mr Shirky admits that himself in his polemic article on ontology:

“Ontological classification works well in some places, of course. You need a card catalog if you are managing a physical library. You need a hierarchy to manage a file system. So what you want to know, when thinking about how to organize anything, is whether that kind of classification is a good strategy.”

Of course.

On the other side of the coin, things like tagging might be better when organizing the hits. There you’ll get a critical mass of tags to make them worthwhile. But tagging in niche markets might have holes. You might not even get all of your content tag if the user population is too small. And users in a niche market tend to have a common terminology and structure of the inforamtion space, so a controlled vocabularly could actually help them find, use, and make sense of information.

OK, the above is really a half baked idea and had lots of problems. But blogs let anybody say anything they want anytime, so there you have it.

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.

Just came across Jumpchart. Looks like a very handy tool for planning websites. Doesn’t look like it can handle designing serious interaction for an RIA, though. I’m also not sure how well it scales up. If you have a 10,000 page site, you might not want to plan it out with this program.

Still, if anyone has used this, I’d like to know. Or better yet, invite me to use it.

Information Architects, a design agency in Tokyo, created this Web Trend Map.

It’s not all that useful, but fun to look at. I have a large poster of the London tube on my office wall–as a sort of homage to early environmental information design.

The Web Trend Map is an interesting metaphor based on a subway map. They put some thought into the relationships between entities, even though it’s impossible to represent them on a 2-D map. It’s also interesting how they integrated weather symbols to show forecasts, something you don’t get (and don’t need) with subway map. It’s a mixed metaphor but works nonetheless.

Optimal Usability, a usability consulting company in New Zealand, has a beta version of their new card sort program called Optimal Sort.

On the surface of things it looks to be quite good. I only tried out the online demo so far–the participant’s view of a sorting exercise–and it was very smooth. It’s Flash based with drag-and-drop interaction. Easy to move items around and label boxes and stuff like that.

Once the screen started getting full, however, some of the categories were cut off towards the bottom (on my computer at 1024×768), and it became difficult to move items in and out of those boxes. Otherwise, it’s simple enough for any participant to get the hang of in a matter of seconds. Both open and closed sorts are possible.

In general, one of the advantages of card sort programs is that they can help with analysis. Yet, most of the programs available overcomplicate results with dendograms and clustering and not-so intuitive statistical formats. Though I didn’t see the results from Optimal Sort in the demo, it looks to be cleaner and more straight forward from the screenshots and descriptions.

I particularly liked this claim on their site: “use common sense and experience to spot patterns.” Imagine that: you have to use your intuition as a designer to interpret the results.

The process of administering tests seems to be easy as well. In a SurveyMonkey-like fashion, you can send a link out to participants, and they can then complete the sort on the web. Of course, this leaves out what I consider an important part of card sorts: talking to people about why they grouped things together and observing where they have difficulty grouping things. But the ease of getting people to take part and efficiency this tool offers makes it valuable.

Sam Ng from Optimal Usability tipped me off to this. Thanks, Sam.

They’re still offering free sign registration with the beta version until August. Check it out.