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By Helen Lippell
 Miami is a young, optimistic and fast-expanding city. The Downtown area is full of cranes, building sites and condominium blocks rising up to the Florida sun. It seemed appropriate that the ninth Information Architecture (IA) Summit should take place here, as the world of Information Architecture continues to grow in confidence and cement its place in the foundations of User Experience (UX).
Context and Connections
Andrew Hinton's rousing keynote with its cryptic title ‘Linkosophy' captured the sentiment perfectly. He laid out an agenda that showed how IA could (must?) evolve to take a key role in the design of context and connections. Context includes the things, signs and places that give meaning and differentiation to information. For example, grocery stores can charge higher prices for small bottles of orange juice in the chiller cabinet than for long-life juice in a carton on the shelf. Connections are simply the means by which people get from place to place. Thus, context and connection are crucial to enabling people to navigate and mediate their experiences.
A key facet is conversation. As the web and other digital systems move from information then interaction to participation, the interfaces and hardware people use become the conduits. These conduits do not exist in isolation; increasingly, users expect to access services across multiple channels (e.g. web, mobile, email, instant messenger). The design of these channels is fundamental to their success. Information must be managed consistently across diverse touchpoints in order for it to be found.
Conversation happens in space. Information architecture creates representations of a system that are different from their reality or instantiation. Metro and Tube maps illustrate this point - they often bear no relation to topography or geography of the city. They are stylised and simplified in order to support people finding their way around the system. Good information design will provide an appropriate level of detail for a map, sitemap or the like. The map is not the territory - and this holds true whether the system is a rail network, a website or a piece of service design.
Structure is what supports flows of conversation in space. Hinton drew on examples from the world of physical architecture to show common metaphors. The Roman author and engineer Vitruvius wrote that one of the three essential qualities of a structure was ‘Utilitas', or usefulness. That's not so different to websites 2,000 years later - how they are structured shapes how they can be used.
However, the last few years on the Web have seen a movement against information structures defined by professionals, in favour of Web 2.0 paradigms or user-generated content. I agree with Hinton that some of the conflicts miss the point - tagging hasn't killed controlled vocabularies, for one. Flickr is the fruit of its users' labours, but it has a structure - structure that facilitates the viewing, sharing and retrieval of photos (and now videos). Facebook has an information architecture - it's an architecture that allows people to do almost anything with their pages. The plain, basic page layout on Facebook has contributed to its wide adoption, especially among users who might not previously have bothered with personal homepages or MySpace pages.
Search and Discoverability
No aspect of information is more closely connected to discoverability and context than search. It is a rich area of innovation and design, and the fact that Live and Yahoo! are investing heavily in it points to an interesting future that won't just be about the ubiquitous Google box. Peter Morville (co-author of the legendary Polar Bear book talked through his Search Patterns photo sets on Flickr. The presentation itself is at .
Peter offered an array of design patterns in Search, demonstrating that the context provided by environment (where searches are done) and presentation (how results are displayed) are key to fulfilling information needs in complex online environments. This is especially true when building search for non-HTML content such as audio, video or Slideshare presentations. When you can index the full texts of libraries of books, the line between content and metadata is blurred and discoverability should become more powerful.
For example, faceted navigation performs an educative role in showing ‘what's here' (and also, I would venture ‘what else is here'). For this reason many e-commerce sites use facets to expose as many options as possible, but ideally without overwhelming the interface. Faceted systems allow more sophisticated queries to be built up than most users would or could ever construct using say, Boolean operators.
Another pattern that caught my attention was social search, that is, search systems that make use of people in some way. This could be in community-built search engines (e.g. Mahalo and Wikia), or in leveraging the content and attributes supplied by users to drive functionality. An example of the latter is Flickr's Interestingness algorithm which assesses things like the number of users who rate a photo as being a favourite, how many comments the photo attracts etc. In this way a subjective measure of value can be applied to the vast, diverse repository of images.
Many of these experiences, along with the others Peter described, would be all the poorer without behind the scenes work by those managing the collections or websites. Two of the most powerful methodologies are search log analysis and search engine optimisation (SEO). Search logs are a priceless resource for gaining insight into what users actually want from a service. The insight itself could be used to aid ongoing improvement - for example, to better signpost popular content, or to inform design enhancements to the search results interface itself.
As well as helping promote sites in web search engines, SEO done well also improves the quality of user experience in the kind of search contexts that Peter described. For instance, the effectiveness of a faceted search within a site or collection will be increased if the information displayed in search results, and the facet labels themselves, are optimised to users' language.
Connecting the Physical and the Digital
Michael Magoolaghan's talk very early on the Sunday of the conference was well worth missing a lie-in for. He described an ongoing volunteer project to improve his local library and its website. The team did extensive user research, and one of the key insights was that many user tasks cut across both the digital and physical worlds (e.g. trying to locate a specific DVD, either by using the online catalogue or rummaging through the racks at the library). The experience design process produced thoughtful solutions to enable people to find what they need, regardless of whether they start in the library or on the website:
- Putting a map of the library on the website, to help people find resources or activitie
- Decluttering the library entrance to be more like a ‘home page', that is, a welcoming introduction point
- Standardising labelling both on shelves and online, and making language more user-friendly
- Displaying the online events calendar on a big screen in the library
Experiencing the Conference
There were so many great talks besides the ones I had space to reference here. Most are available on Slideshare, some with synced audio. Highlights for me included: Dave Cooksey on taxonomy, Stephen Anderson on alternative interfaces, Lucas Pattinati on improving user registrations forms and Martin Belam on widgets. Martin reckons 2009 will be the Year of the Widget - I wondered if this was the start of a new astrology for geeks?
This conference, more than any other in the field, I think, offers many opportunities for participation. Breaks between many sessions were long enough to refuel and have a meaningful conversation with old and new friends. It's true to say that you get out what you put in - you could keep yourself under the radar like the manatees at the bottom of the Miami River near the conference hotel, but it's more fun not to.
For the second year running, every attendee got a deck of trading cards depicting a UX technique such as Taxonomy, and was encouraged to swap them with others to complete the set of sixteen. This was a great icebreaker. Many new friendships must have been forged from this typical start:
‘Hi, would you like to trade? I've got lots of ‘Ecosystem Visualization'
‘Great, do you need a Backcasting?'
And so on, as long as you remembered to introduce yourself after getting that precious card. There are now 32 cards in the set, and there may not be another sixteen UX methods for another year's set. So, is the next logical progression some kind of IA Hall of Fame Top Trumps? Perhaps next year Summit attendees will be heard crowing that ‘my Peter Morville beats your Jared Spool, nyah nyah!'
By Helen Lippell
Helen is a freelance information architect. She has worked in the
information field ever since realising a degree in Latin and Economics
didn't open up an obvious career path. She started working life as an
indexer for the Financial Times, and developed automatic categorisation
systems for ft.com. She worked in metadata management and information
architecture for bbc.co.uk, and is currently building taxonomies in
central government. She lives in London and enjoys reading, cycling and
following hopeless football teams.
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