Archive for the 'Information Architecture' Category

Off to Oz-IA

Published at 30 August, 2007 in Information Architecture. 0 Comments

Oz-IA is Australia’s Information Architecture conference.

I got to present at Oz-IA last year with my colleague and friend Stephen Hall. It was great to meet a lot of other Information Architects, Knowledge Managers and interested people from Australia and around the world.

Oz-IA is on again on 21-22 September. Eric Scheid, the coordinator, has asked participants to spread the good word with the following link:
Oz-IA/2007 - Sydney, September 22nd/23rd 2007

If you would like to spread the word as well, please use this code:

<a href=”http://www.oz-ia.org/2007/” title=”Oz-IA/2007 - Sydney, September 22nd/23rd 2007″><img src=”http://www.oz-ia.org/2007/images/logo_ozia2007.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”Oz-IA/2007 - Sydney, September 22nd/23rd 2007″ width=”150″ height=”150″ /></a> 

Apart from the warm and fuzzy feeling you will get in spreading the word, Eric is giving away a free pass to someone who promotes the conference.

Axure 4.6 released

Published at 3 July, 2007 in Information Architecture. 2 Comments

 Axure is one of the prototyping tools that I use in my day-to-day information architecture engagements.

Axure has a production release of version 4.6 available. The cool new stuff is contained on these notes that were released with the beta version:

Part 1: Conditional Logic and Widget Values covers creating conditional logic based on values entered in form widgets, the new KeyUp event, and setting values on widgets.

Part 2: Variables and New Masters Features covers using variables to store and pass data from page to page, using OnPageLoad in masters, and using the new Raise Events action that enables masters to have different interactions on each instance.

Part 3: Menus & Styles  introduces the new Menu widgets, rollover styles, line patterns, and text on connectors.

NOTE: the scary bit is that version 4.6 is not backwards-compatible with 4.4. This is something to watch out for if you are working in a team and have to share prototype files.

HumaneIA relaunched

Published at 10 June, 2007 in Blogging and Information Architecture. 0 Comments

I’ve relaunched the Humane Information Architecture blog so that I can put IA-specific articles onto it.

This leaves Facibus Reviews to be more about general life-comment stuff. It’s hard to know whether this is a good idea or not, but I am promoting niche blogging as a useful thing so I thought I’d better practice what I preach! :)

Writing the five minute persona

Published at 9 June, 2007 in Information Architecture. 0 Comments

Lisa Reichelt puts a good case forward for the use of personas. Like Lisa, I find them an excellent tool for communicating design concepts and validating requirements - to developers as well as end users. Personas, like any other deliverable, can be done in light- and heavy-weight ways.

Personas tell a story - generally, the story of a representative business client performing a task that is enabled/provided by the new system/methodology/job description under design. At their simplest, they are a paragraph of text that uses storytelling to highlight a particular point. Oversimplification is dangerous, but I maintain that:

  1. if you have domain knowledge, you can do a lot with a paragraph dashed off in five minutes, and
  2. any personas so produced will be better than no personas at all.

Now let me qualify those two points.

If you have the domain knowledge…
This is an important point. If you don’t know the environment (the as-is state) and the proposed change (the to-be state) backwards, your five minute personas will look bad and create distrust (and this is one danger of five minute personas, see “When is it inappropriate to write a five minute persona?” below). But if you know the audience and something of their hopes/fears/ways of doing business, you can judge not only what they need to see in the persona, but whether they will be receptive to it in this form.

Any personas so produced will be better than no personas at all
OK, so based on qualifier one (if you have the domain knowledge), why is any persona so produced better than no persona at all? Because they are a simple way of synchronising the understanding that you have with both the system developers/integrators and business clients. If they can’t see themselves either providing what you describe or undertaking it, then there is a miscommunication somewhere. So either the persona is wrong, the business analyst got the requirements wrong, or there is a breakdown in the change management process.

How do you write the five minute persona?
This is the easy bit. There are three key parts to any five minute persona:

  • Environment: Where is it happening?
  • The actor: Who is performing the action? What else do they do that is related to this action within this system? Please note that I’m using “system” here in the holistic sense - like I said above, it could as easily be a methodology.
  • The action: this is where scope comes into it- whether the persona is high level (related to the whole system under change) or at a low task-centric or even step-centric level. My suggestion is that you have scope very firmly in mind before you start writing, and then work with it.

And if you really want it to be a five minute persona:

  • keep it atomic: one paragraph is all you get for one main point, one key concept, one idea to be conveyed. One.
  • keep it brief: any idea that takes more than 2-300 words to convey to people with domain knowledge is not just one idea - break it down.
  • keep it to the point: five minutes does not allow for any piffle, fancy three-dollar words, or any other form of literary tomfoolery. Write to inform, not impress.

When is it inappropriate to write a five minute persona?
There are times when it is inappropriate to write five minute personas. They include:

  • When you don’t have the trust of the audience: this is vaguely covered above, but I will reiterate it - if you don’t think that your audience will respond positively to the concept of a five minute persona, don’t use them.
  • When you don’t have domain knowledge
  • When you can’t adequately convey the temporary nature of the persona: if you will have to explain to your boss why your quick piece of work is being used as an example of slipshod work by a senior client manager because it is all that they can find six months after the engagement has finished, you have a problem - maybe the client site document management system is not up to scratch, maybe you didn’t get to follow up in person with key stakeholders, or maybe you didn’t adequately explain the design process to everyone. If you can’t get people to understand that the five minute persona is a snapshot in time that centres on one key message, then do it the long way.

And lastly, a riddle: When is a persona not a persona?
Easy - when it is a story you tell around a prototype. The power of storytelling cannot be understated - spend a couple of minutes delivering a verbal persona to set the scene for a prototype and you will get better value from both the prototype and the persona. I learnt this powerful technique from my SMS mentor Stephen Hall. It works.

In a later posting I’ll cover writing detailed personas - for now, if in doubt, give five minute personas a try if you think they might help. The results may surprise you.

Where metaphor fails

Published at 3 June, 2007 in Consulting and Information Architecture. 0 Comments

We use storytelling and metaphor to convey abstract concepts as both consultants and Information Architects - the power of storytelling as a means of communication is well known and becoming an accepted part of corporate life.

Where metaphor fails is when it is used badly - here are some examples from one of the endlessly circling net.jokes collections:

  • Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressedby a Thigh Master.
  • His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
  • He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
  • She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
  • She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
  • Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
  • He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
  • The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
  • The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
  • McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
  • From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. Instead of 7:30.
  • Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
  • The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
  • Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m., traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
  • They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.
  • John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
  • He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
  • Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
  • Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.
  • The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
  • The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
  • He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
  • The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
  • It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.
  • He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

Have a laugh by all means - and then think about why these examples fail. I put it down to:

  • tactless comparison: do not use metaphors that compare women with dogs - or love to death. I’ve caught myself  in the past saying words to the effect of “she’s a terrier for work” - not a good mental image whichever way you look at it.
  • beggaring the point: “they had never met like two hummingbirds that had never met” - it could have been anything that had never met - and there are better ones about to paint this particular mental picture.
  • tautology: not used above per se, but “dead as only a corpse can be” is an old favourite.

While these examples are extreme, it is important to remember that your own metaphors can seem ridiculous to other people if they fail in similar ways. Like fire, you should use metaphor carefully and thoughtfully - if you do, like fire, it will be your friend.

Sematic Analysis at PharmBiz

Published at 29 May, 2007 in Information Architecture. 2 Comments

My colleague and friend Matt Hodgson has written a good article on his semantic analysis work at the PharmBiz project, currently undertaken within the Australian Department of Health and Ageing. It is interesting work and he has performed it well :)

World Exclusive: Donna’s New Hair launched at Canberra IA Cocktail Hour!

Published at 25 May, 2007 in Information Architecture. 5 Comments

Facibus Reviews is proud to bring you a world exclusive: it’s official, Donna Maurer has a new haircut/style, and everybody loves it!

Donna’s New Haircut

Donna revealed her new do to a gathering of her peers at the Canberra IA Cocktail Hour last night. Comments from onlookers included “You look great!”, “Wow!” and “You look different, but a good way”.

Donna and friends enjoyed a glass of pre-discussion wine at the famous SMS Canberra Back Bar area:

Canberra IA Cocktail Hour 2007-05-24

Shown (from the left) are Ruth Ellison and her partner Alistair, Caronne Carruthers-Taylor, Donna Maurer, Matthew Hodgson, and Steve Collins. Caronne’s partner Nigel joined us shortly thereafter.

After drinks and nibbles, the group discussed Matthew Hodgson’s fascinating Grand Unified Theory of information sharing, an update on his ongoing semantic analysis work at the Department of Health and Ageing, and Steve Collins‘ slideshow-in-progress on Knowledge Worker 2.0.

It is fair to say that a fun time was had by all: if you are interested in joining this group, or hearing about future activities, please join the Canberra IA Community mailing list at http://au.groups.yahoo.com/group/canberra_ia_community.  When we get our collective acts together, the presentations will be available via the Canberra IA blog (no link, connection seems to be down).

PS: I’ll put the images up on Flickr soon, they are only exclusive here for a little while :)

The Permaculture Approach to Information

Published at 21 May, 2007 in Knowledge Worker 2.0 and Information Architecture. 2 Comments

Permaculture is a system of sustainable agriculture. My late father was a big fan of it, and I’ve designed my own gardens along permaculture principles in the past. Two of the principles that apply themselves nicely to information architecture and information management are:

  • Rarely use one thing for one purpose alone
  • Think holistically: look at everything as part of the system

Imagine a fence dividing your chook (chicken) pen from your orchard in a suburban back yard. You grow beans and other edible creepers along the fence. The creepers get a little overgrown so that the chooks can use them for shelter. You eat the chooks and the eggs they produce. You eat the beans. You use the manure they produce in the compost that feeds the next generation of beans. The chooks go into different yards that contain the vegetable beds lying fallow for next year. You supply the chook-feeding and -watering labor. Everything feeds everything else. Everything contributes, and everything benefits. It is one big holistic system, and fractally expands in scope to include every energy transaction on the whole planet.

How does this apply to information and to Information Architecture? Think of a small closed information system, like an spreadsheet sitting on a thumbdrive. It is perfect, and wonderful, and there are hundreds of millions of such little spreadsheets like it on thumbdrives all over the world. To be of any use to more than just the originator (even to the originator in the longer term), it needs to be shared - that is, it needs to be part of a system.

To form a useful part of that system, the spreadsheet needs to be updateable, mergeable and findable. Without access to the data, and the attachment of meaningful context, it will never make the jump to being information, and beyond it, knowledge.

Dan Saffer wrote:

The biggest leap forward in computing came when the designers and engineers at Xerox PARC stopped thinking about the computer in this way and instead started thinking about it instead as a communication device. And we’ve seen what this led to: email, networks, the internet. The network is the computer now, and if you don’t believe me, do what I did a few weeks ago and unplug from the internet for a few days and watch yourself squirm.

I agree. Without effective sharing, whatever is created is lost.

So what do we do about it? At CeBIT Australia’s eGovernment conference I learnt that the Queensland government has done an information audit and determined that 85% of government documents can be covered by Creative Commons licensing - in effect they are saying that a large proportion of their information is publicly releasable. For a government to admit this is pretty remarkable - they are shifting from a “tell ‘em nothing unless they plead for it” paradigm to a “unless there are security/privacy/commercial sensitivity reasons, let’s give them everything” mindview.

Sounds very new-age, but I believe that Information Management is changing, slowly but surely, to concentrate more on effective dissemination than control. Time will tell.

MyGADS: Possibilities of natural language processing made simple

Published at 11 May, 2007 in Knowledge Worker 2.0, Recommendation and Information Architecture. 0 Comments

MyGADS is a natural language information storage and retrieval engine - it is free - take the tour.

The illustrated example uses are impressive - plain language input and retrieval on information snippets such as:

  • recommended restaurant
  • lunch appointment
  • capital of China (accesses CIA Factbook)
  • population of Australia (accesses CIA Factbook and Wikipedia)

Where it starts to get really cool is in domain-specific information. At the moment I’m working with Matthew Hodgson on a nasty information management problem - a large body of complicated medical information needs to be made available to a variety of audiences in a way that makes sense to all of them. I’ve punched some example information into MyGADS and come up with some reliable answers. It isn’t a total solution by any means - it can be confused (cost equalling price, for example) and is very North American-centric (weather information and SMS access to the MyGADS query engine) - but the developers, Teragram, have a specialised solution called Direct Answers. That said, as much as MyGADS is able to provide, it provides nicely via the web and Google Chat.

My suggestion is that you get a free account and play with it - it is one more way to capture and present information.

Meta-Thinking and the Thinking Information Architect

Published at 11 May, 2007 in Life, Marketing and Information Architecture. 3 Comments

Yaro Starak got me thinking about meta-thinking. While he writes from the perspective of a web entrepreneur, there are a lot of points in common between the way he thinks about things and good information architecture/consulting practice.

Yaro thinks about the way people think - and this is a good thing. He says:

The entrepreneurs reading this will no doubt relate to the way of thinking I am talking about. I often look at a restaurant I’m having dinner or lunch in, or a retail outlet I’m shopping in or any business whatsoever, whether it’s a service provider or product producer and ask - I wonder how profitable this business is? Or I wonder where they source this product from and what the wholesale price is? Or I wonder whether this business model has been applied to another industry? I wonder why the business owner decided to put this here or price this much or offer this now? etc, etc.

I don’t know much about entrepreneurs, but I know that this is how I think. When see a poorly trained waiter in a restaurant, I don’t think “you idiot”, I think “what management process failure allowed you to be put in a position that you are not able to handle?”. I look behind the issue to not just the answer, but the potential solution. That was why my rant about EzyDVD didn’t attack the employees who were present at the time of the debacles mentioned, but questioned the motives of the business system that allowed the failure.

I think that meta-thinking is essential to practitioners of my trade - information architecture - look behind and beyond the obvious so as not to fall into the sin of best practices. More than this, whatever field of human endevour we follow, meta-thinking is essential for self-examination, which I believe is a necessary part of a life worth living.