vanderwal.net

Jesse offers part 3 of the ia/recon discussing the over reliance on user testing for everything. This may be my favorite of the three components Jesse has posted so far. User testing offers a great step up and helps to understand the users better. Understanding graphic design, application development, and information architecture will help to construct solutions to information structure and interface and interaction design problems that user testing offers little insight. User testing in these areas can help let us know we are on the right track, but it will not point us in the right direction as we have not offered the user these choices if we don't have the experience.

I have added two pages to help provide a guide for metadata usage. One page sorts categories by number of times the metadata definition has been used. The other page is an alphabetical listing of categories with their count. These two page builds took very little time to knock together (half an hour or so) and the value to me is much greater than that half hour used.

John Udell looks in to perl to create topic maps and bottom up taxonomy. Making taxonomy and topic maps easier is a great endeavor and quite useful.

CommArts features the Herman Miller Red site design, which includes User Experience and Information Architecture work of Nathan Shedroff (on of the Vivid Studio founders). I went to a session at last year's SXSW where Nathan presented an over view that is essentially the same as this, I am glad this is now on line as I can share it. This article provides a solid insight into decision making, workflow, and the purpose of wireframes.

Jesse explains the role of Information Architecture. There have been many debates over the issue of the Big IA and the small IA. Jesse does a nice job of tying up the camps on these views. I am agreeing with Jesse to a great degree at the moment. The discipline of information architecture is definately needed on any information application (remember this includes Web development too) development project. There must be a person that knows and understands IA and can implement those needed skills, as are propper in the discipline. There must be a person that has the job of protecting Information Architecture on every project. The more people on a team that have some understanding of IA, in addition to the person that has full understanding of IA and is charged with its implimentation, the better the project will be in its final state.

Peter Morville provides Innovative Architecture that looks at the future of IA, which incorporates collaborative IA. The users of many sites create or hone the IA through many components, such as Amazon's "people who bought this item also bought." I like the breadth of this piece and how it encompasses applications and community driving IA.

Content Management Systems Surrounding Me

Content management is back at the forefront of every aspect of my digital life again. Content management revolves around keeping information current, accurate, and reusable (there are many more elements, but these cut to the core of many issues). Maintaining Websites and providing information resources on the broader Internet have revolved around static Web pages or information stored in MS Word, PDF files, etc. Content management has been a painful task of keeping this information current and accurate across all these various input and output platforms. This brings us to content management systems (CMS).

As I pointed to earlier, there are good resources for getting and understanding CMS and how our roles change when we implement a CMS. Important to understanding is the separation of content (data and information), from the presentation (layout and style), and from the application (PDF, Web page, MS Word document, etc.). This requires an input mechanism, usually a form that captures the information and places it in is data/information store, which may be a database, XML document, or a combination of these. This also provides for a workflow process that involved proofing and editing the information along with versioning the information.

Key to the CMS is separation of content, which means there needs to be a way to be a method of keeping links aside from the input flow. Mark Baker provides a great article, What Does Your Content Management System Call This Guy about how to handle links. Links are an element that separates the CMS-lite tools (Blogger, Movable Type, etc.) from more robust CMS (other elements of difference are more expansive workflow, metadata capturing, and content type handling (images, PDF, etc. and their related metadata needs)). Links in many older systems, often used for newspaper and magazine publications (New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle) placed their links outside of the body of the article. The external linking provided an easy method of providing link management that helps ensure there are no broken links (if an external site changes the location (URL) it there really should only be one place that we have to modify that link, searching every page looking for links to replace). The method in the Baker article outlines how many current systems provide this same service, which is similar to Wiki Wiki's approach. The Baker outlined method also will benefit greatly from all of the Information Architecture work you have done to capture classifications of information and metadata types (IA is a needed and required part of nearly every development process).

What this gets us is content that we can easily output to a Web site in HTML/XHTML in a template that meets all accessibility requirements, ensures quality assurance has been performed, and provides a consistent presentation of information. The same information can be output in a more simple presentation template for handheld devices (AvantGo for example) or WML for WAP. The same information can be provided in an XML document, such as RSS, which provides others access to information more easily. The same information can be output to a template that is stored in PDF that is then sent to a printer to output in a newsletter or the PDF distributed for the users to print out on their own. The technologies for information presentation are ever changing and CMS allows us to easily keep up with these changes and output the information in the "latest and greatest", while still being able to provide information to those using older technologies.

I am very happy that Lou finally has permalinks. Not only this, but he has comments and they are attracting some of the thinkers and doers of information architecture. This may become an incredible resource. Wahoo!!

Peter provides great insights on receptivity and modular presentation components in the eNarrative interview with Peter Merholz.

The New Breed Librarian is out with a new issues, which includes an article on an Information Architecture support group. This group is at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and is founded by Michael Whang. [hat tip Carrie]

In digging through the v/d wal net access logs I found a pull quote at Cognitive Architects from my brain dumps on Information Architecture. This is an interesting way to parse information and ideas from one's own head.

I promise I will not make a habit of pointing to others quoting me. Although I may point to outside sources where I am posting my braindumps, as this site is my method of culling information of interest and tracking my own thoughts along with a resource to track other ideas of interest to myself.

Web Designers should stop relying on search to cover for poor IA and design, to paraphrase PC World's presentation of User Interface Engineering's (UIE) latest research. This states 77 percent of the users do not find what they are looking for through search. The article does list some pitfalls that the user can fall into (poor spelling on the site, etc.), but with great depth of information and users often looking for specific information search could be a solid option, but this takes some work.

One navigation method that I find less and less is offering similar links based on what the user has clicked to. Often I would like to read the archives of a regular columnist in a magazine. I should not have to search to find the archives as that method often provide chaff with the goal of my search. Storage and metadata can greatly assist the navigation approach.

I personally find navigation and search combinations on a site create a higher probability that I will find the information that I am searching for.

Argus interviews Bonnie Nardi, who is co-author of Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart. She is an ethnographer by training, which offers a nice foundation for her work.

One of the reasons that I love the Internet is its ability to be a conduit for exchanging ideas and discussion of topics. Not that this is not is new, it isn't. The comment tools in use on Web pages provides the ability to not only share ideas, but capture them for further use. Discussions are not lost in the ether as they can be at conferences, but they are stored for later reference.

This has been going on the past few days at Peter's site in a discussion about the term of use, Information Architect. The discussion has somewhat turned to the use of spatial metaphors to describe the Web and its use. None of the participants are really with in a short drive of each other. We are all sharpening our knowledge and ideas and changing perspectives to some degree. The Internet provides an amazing resource for life learners and bringing people of similar mind together to interact.

The University of Texas has an Information Architecture Curiculum that is a joint program with LIS. The program has nice breadth and seems to cover the broad understanding of IA.