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The future of UCD with attraction

Another snippet from Tanya from SXSW, this time from "Future of UCD" panel. Tanya picked out "users will not use item alone, but in a federation of devices", which is at the heart of the Model of Attraction (being presented at The IA Summit on Saturday March 22, 2003 right after the keynote). The future, which we are seeing pieces of now, gives more control to the user as to what they will do with the information and how the user wants to or will access the information. The body of research for Internet development has focussed too much time and effort on navigation (browsing is more encompassing or a term and more literal). Users not only browser for information, but search. The user is no longer constrained to a desk or building when they try to attract information they need to themselves and this difference greatly changes how we must think about providing solutions. It is long past time to retire navigations as a limiting metaphor and start working with a model that more closely represents what is literally happening. The navigation metaphor fails us as we try to encompass the future of information access, information use, and information reuse that has already begun to take hold around us.

One benefit of the Model of Attraction is that is provides a framework that includes information reuse. Many times an information application is built upon the perception that the output of the information form will be its only form. I have seen time and time again large organizations that have bought applications or built applications that only consider the initial output of information. That information form may be in a Flash movie, Acrobat PDF, PowerPoint presentation, Word document, dynamic Web site, or static HTML page (to name just a few options). What information creators do not consider is how the information will be reused. A PDF is great for printing or just reading, but pretty much fails for extracting information easily or having external pointers direct others to one piece of micro-content (a scentance, paragraph, or other delineated section). Each method of presentation of information has its own benefits and detractors. The one with the most legs is (X)HTML as is can be used on nearly all devices (desktop PCs, mobile handhelds, etc.) with little or no modifications, it is not the best medium for printing information, but if built to standards it can be easily converted and stored as the user desires. XML has the same promise, but one needs to work with a standard schema so that the information is widely useable and reusable.

Keep in mind the future is now. Our future needs metal models to help us build information applications and services for univeral usage.

Boxes and Arrows Birthday

Happy Birthday Boxes and Arrows. It is Boxes and Arrows one year anniversary. It seems like so much longer, but to some of us it has been a little longer. There have been a flood of great articles that have shared knowledge and experiences to help us all get better at what we do. I am looking foreward to the next anniversaries and looking back too.

Favorite IA Books

The NY IA Salon offers their favorite books, as captured by Mike Lee. Most of my favorites were captured, but I would have to add John Cato's User-Centered Web Design, Jesse James Garrett's The Elements of User Experience, the Second edition of the Polar Bear, and possibly Accessing and Browsing Information and Communication (on of my current reads that I am in the midst of) upon my completion of the book I may add it to my permenant IA favorites list.

There are two books I hand out to novices in the IA realm The Elements of User Experience and Christina Wodtke's Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web. These two are easy to jump into and have a very good idea where things will be goind and why. This greatly eases the communication and understanding

Mike Lee points to a great snippet concerning dumb people with too much energy, which is from Mike's favorite Make it Bigger.

Information Accessing and Browsing book

I am really enjoying Accessing and Browsing Information and Communication by Rice, McReadie, and Chang from MIT Press. I am less than 100 pages into this academic review and assessment of how people approach, find, assess, and retain information. The book is wonderful as it takes an cross section of academic disciplines and the research from them on browsing information and information use. The book is uncovering new pools of information in the library sciences, organizational communication, and knowledge management fields that help one better understand how people find and process information. There is a lot of information that is echoing the Model of Attraction approach to user and information relationships as well as helping to better refine the approach (there are some updates to the MoA that I have clarified in the last three weeks, and this reading is helping gell).

I may write a full review when I finish the book. I am reading the book on the train to and from work at the moment. I may need to read at home so I can check information that is being referenced.

WaSP Buzzing

The current Buzz is that the Web Standards Project is growing and offering a new perspective and as is noted in the WaSP press release I am now a member of the WaSP clan. This takes advantage of what I already do in my free time, try to build a better Web and work on structuring information for use and reuse. This is smart group dovetails very nicely with the smart group of information architects that absorb another chunk of my free time.

Understanding Referrer Systems

Rashmi Sinha's Recommender Systems overview on Sig-IA is a great overview of the tools used to bring information closer to those that may have an interest in that information. Essentially this gets to the heart of the Model of Attraction. Recommender Systems can provide tools that group information through links that are based on others similar interests. Finding information is what many spend much time doing. Lessening this time and providing methods to predict interests are helpful. This of course takes patterns. Patterns need a breadth of data to be useable.

In particular you may be interested in Rashmi Sinha's "Interaction Design for Recommender Systems". [hat tip Matt]

Information Design the meta discipline for business

Information Design: the meta discipline for business. [hat tip InfoDesign]

Build your ideal creative team and other articles

Boxes and Arrows serves up three great articles right now. George Olsen shares his R&D (Relevant & Desirable article discussing the need for vision driven design in user-centered design. Scott McDaniel offers up What's Your Idea of a Mental Model?. My favorite of this current bunch is Erin Malone's Modeling the Creative Organization in which Erin walks through how to put together her idea of an ideal creative team. Her discussion is provides insight into a great approach.

Content management interview with Bob Bioko

Elearningpost interviews CMS wiz Bob Bioko. The article has an e-learning bent to it, but it is a great interview discussing content management. I really enjoy Bob's approach as it separates information from technology and stresses the importance of understanding the information and its needs prior to digging into the technology. This is brought out in this quote from the interview:

Firstly, technology changes a lot and focusing on technology is not the right thing to do. What's really important to me is figuring out what exactly you want from your learning system or information system. From my point of view, I have certain information resources that I would like to deliver to certain people in a certain way. That's not a technology question. That's not about what system I have. Rather its about what information do I have, who wants it and how do I deliver that information in the best possible way. Now obviously I would need a system to do that, but the infrastructure follows from the need I have, not the other way around.

When someone makes the decision the other way around, focusing on the platform, the software, the features etc., they limit and constrain themselves to what the system allows them to do. This is not to say that technology wont be a determining factor in what you actually have to, its just that technology should be a response to the problem not a definer of the problem.

Two other bon mots in this article include discussions of "context management" and the perenial question of "build versus buy".

Moblogging and Joe Average persona

The Online Journalism review offers up Moblogging the next big thing, which brings "Joe Average" into play. I am not sure Joe Average would want a Hiptop or find a use for a Hiptop. I do like the idea of the Smartmobs, but it is not for everybody.

In a discussion at the DC IA book reading group (this time it was The Tipping Point) we ventured on the topic of using mavens as a persona candidate. The person said they were looking for somebody less adept at finding information, like a "Joe Average". This is often how many of us build personas we go for the less adept, or make sure they are represented across our personas. The discussion later came to how to keep the mavens intrigued, which is also a valid discussion.

Fusebox FLiP's for user centered design approach

While going through the Fusebox application development site (a coding framework for ColdFusion, J2EE, PHP, and ASP that helps separate coding from presenation by building reusable components and templates) I stumbled upon FLiP. The Fusebox Lifecycle Process (FLiP) section focusses on application development and project management "best practices". FLiP the steps are Personas and Goals, Wireframe, Prototype / Front-End Development, Application Architecting, FuseCoding, Unit Testing, Application Integration, and Deployment.

I was so happy to see personas, wireframing, prototyping, and application architecting as well as the suggested order. This is the path I have found to provide the best path for success. I was introduced to this process in the very early 1990s when working on a project to replace a mainframe application and moving it to the PC. The approach seemed solid and achieved some quick results with few hiccups. That approach has stayed with me and the focus on the user being the extremely important. Application developers often want to jump right into the coding and interface designers want to start crafting the visual design. Doing either with out proper understanding can easily lead to complications that are costly to correct.

The field of information architecture structures its approach to development on these tasks and roles. A great overview for application development is wonderfully laid out in Jesse James Garrett's The Elements of User Experience. Many that build applications have become familiar with these steps. Those wanting to learn programming and application development have found this the user-centered design approach is a great preparation. Why? Once the users are defined, the information structure defined, the interaction elements outlined, the interface outlined, and the framework for the application decided upon the coding becomes easy to focus upon. The coding portion of development becomes much easier because the interactions for the users are defined and the coding solutions are largely pre-defined.

Apple Word Replacement Rumor and Information Structure Dreams

Rumor has it Apple is working on MS Word replacement. This would be a great thing if it would read native Word files seemlessly, but even better would be turning out valid HTML/XHTML. MS Word has always made a huge mess of our information with its conversion to something it "calls" HTML, it is not even passable HTML. One could not get a job using what Microsoft outputs as HTML as a work sample, heck, it would not even pass the laugh test and it may get somebody fired.

One of the downsides of MS Office products is that they are created for styling of information not marking up information with structure, to which style can hang. MS Word allows people (if the turn on or keep the options turned on) to create information sculptures with structure and formatting of the information. What Word outputs to non-Word formats is an information blob that has lost nearly all of its structure and functionality in any other format. It does not really have the format the Word document to begin with. What Web developers do is put the structure back into the information blob to recreate an information sculpture again.

You ask why is structure important? Structure provides the insight to know what is a header and sub-header. Structure provides the ability to discern bulleted lists and outlines. Structure makes it script-kiddie easy to create a table of contents. Structure makes micro-content accessible and easier to find with search. Structure provides better context. Structure provides the ability to know what is a quote from an external document and point to it easily. Structure provides ease of information portability and mobile access easier. These just name a few uses of structure.

Does MS Word have this structure capability? Yes, do people use it? No really. If people use it does MS Word keep the structure? Rarely, as it usually turns the structure into style. This is much like a somebody who spent months in the gym to build a well defined physique only to have the muscles removed to stuff their own shirt with tissue paper to give it the look of being in shape. Does the person with the tissue paper muscles have the ability to perform the same as the person who is really in shape? Not even close.

Structure is important not only for the attributes listed above, but also for those people that have disabilities and depend on the information being structured to get the same understanding as a person with out disabilities. You say MS Word is an accessible application, you are mostly correct. Does it create accessible information documents? Barely at best. The best format for information structure lay in HTML/XHTML/XML not in styles.

One current place that structure is greatly valuable is Internet search. Google is the top search engine on the Internet. Google uses the text in hyperlinks, the information in title tags, and information in the heading tags to improve the findability of a Web page. What are these tagged elements? Structure.

One of the nice things about a valid HTML/XHTML Web document is I can see it aqnd use it on my cell phone or other mobile devices. You can navigate without buttons and read the page in chunks. Some systems preparse the pages and offer the ability to jump between headings to more quickly get to the information desired.

These are just a few reasons I am intrigued with the Apple rumor. There is hope for well structured documents that can output information in a structured form that can validate to the W3C standards, which browsers now use to properly render the information on the page. I have very little hope in the stories that MS is working toward an XML storage capability for Office documents, because we have heard this same story with the last few Office releases and all were functional lies.

Running a Design Critique

How to run a design critique from Scott Berkun at UIWEB. This not only includes who should be in the room, how often, but a list of items to cover with heuristics on it. This is looks to be worth digging back in and reading every word.

Perl site scraper

Screen scraping with Perl www::mechanize will come in handy for many tasks. The information reuse possibilities are wonderful. This does seem to require somewhat valid HTML/XHTML to function properly.

Facets made usable with XFML

Introduction to XFML by Peter Van Dijck is a great first step to understanding the eXtreme Football Markup Language eXchangeable Faceted Metadata Language. This article lays out facets, topics, metadata, taxonomy, and provides a framework based on these understandings to build a usable structure to describe objects.