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Written by Martin Belam.
 This year's fourth annual EuroIA Summit (http://www.euroia.org) took place in Amsterdam in the impressive art deco surroundings of the Tuschinski Theatre (http://www.pathe.nl/tuschinski). Once again the organisation was ably assisted by ASIS&T, and the event seems to be getting more and more popular. Chair Eric Reiss explained that this year amongst the nearly 250 delegates there were representatives from 20 countries, and not just from Europe but also from the US and Asia.
The theme for the summit was 'Redrawing the Map'. Europe has some traditional fault-lines - the geo-political boundaries of the old Iron Curtain, and the perennial conflict between the Germanic and Latin language influenced countries. The potential for shared and structured information and services to cross those borders is one that lies more in the power of the people who design those services, rather than in traditional forces like politicians.
Challenging information architects to reach their potential
Adam Greenfield (http://speedbird.wordpress.com/) from Nokia opened proceedings with a provocative keynote. He felt that the electric potential of the Information Architecture community to transform the relationship between consumers and software at the turn of the century had dissipated into an insular group of people obsessing over spreadsheets and wireframes.
Greenfield argues that when a sci-fi writer and futurist like Bruce Sterling (http://blog.wired.com/sterling/) talks about ‘Information Architects', he envisages intercessionaries who helps people 'wrestle with the monstrosity of poorly designed technical systems'. This seems like a much more noble and heroic aim than redesigning yet another corporate intranet navigation schema.
In her brilliant talk (http://www.slideshare.net/urschbac/what-semantic-web-means-for-information-architecture-by-claudia-urschbach-presentation/), Claudia Urschbach from the BBC identified some of the key personality traits that had perhaps prevented IAs from achieving Adam Greenfield's lofty ambitions. For example, the kind of attention to detail that leads the average Information Architect to enjoy nothing more than ‘hiding in a room for 4 weeks in order to produce a 120 page document with 15,000 annotations' often precludes being a visionary leader. Claudia helpfully identified the trends of the social and semantic web that web-based information professionals needed to keep an eye on in the Web 2.0 era, and some areas where they could seize the initiative.
Another excellent talk on day one was from Ruud Ruissaard (http://www.slideshare.net/guest5d7c1c/euro-ia-in-the-kitchen-presentation/) . He coupled notoriously swearing celebrity chef Gordon Ramsey with content management systems. One of the statistics Ruud produced, stating that only 37% of businesses in a survey of leading companies were satisfied with their CMS solutions, suggested that the average CMS generates plenty of swearing itself.
Ruud's chief concern was that the investment and information management expertise that goes into building or deploying the average CMS is usually a fraction of that which goes into the customer facing front end. However, the efficiency and user experience of the backstage directly impact on how good the user experience at the front end can be. He identified the principle cause as CMS projects generally being identified as an IT solution that focused on platforms and features, rather than a project that looked at business processes and people.
I was presenting at the conference on the second day myself, giving a talk on ‘Taking the "Ooh" out of Google - Getting site search right for news' (http://www.slideshare.net/currybet/taking-the-ooh-out-of-google-getting-site-search-right-for-news-presentation/). My main message was that in an era where Internet search is dominated by Google, a site search needs to distinguish itself by not only offering great results, but also by offering a distinctive user experience and enhanced functionality. And it was also turned out to be a great excuse to put giant pictures of Tintin onto the Tuschinski Theatre's cinema screen.
Personalisation and intuitiveness count
Bogo Vatovec gave a really intriguing presentation on the 'personalisation' of web sites (http://www.slideshare.net/bogov/modelling-personalization-presentation/). He was keen to stress that every single member of a project team will have a different understanding of what personalisation will mean for a business. For example, the marketing team will be thinking with glee about carefully targeted emails, whilst the technical team will be filled with despair at the idea of having to design and maintain a giant 'database of everything'. Bogo had some great strategies for how Information Architects could go about documenting systems and designing rule-sets so that personalisation worked for the business
There were four great-sounding presentations that I didn't get to see due to schedule clashes in the programme. Peter van Dijck was talking about taking the social global (http://www.slideshare.net/petervandijck/social-networks-going-global-presentation/).
He was pointing out that just translating the words on a website is not always enough - citing examples like Facebook where American concepts like ‘Met at Summer Camp' are still made available in the German language version, despite having little relevance.
Deanna Marbeck and Silver Oliver were talking about their work designing URLs for the BBC's sites (http://www.slideshare.net/deanna.marbeck/url-design-for-information-architects-presentation). It is an area of site design that is often left to ‘the techies' or the accidents of the CMS, but they explained why it was an important thing to think about in order to make content easy to remember and to find for users. And I only felt mildly rebuked that during it they cited some bad URL design on my own blog (http://www.currybet.net) whilst I was busy doing a presentation in the room next door and couldn't defend my honour!
The other two sessions I would have liked to have attended were James Kalbach on ‘Commercial ethnography and innovating information experiences' (http://www.slideshare.net/Kalbach/commercial-ethnography-euro-ia-2008-kalbach-presentation/), and John Ferrara giving a session on what we can learn from game user interfaces (http://www.slideshare.net/ferrarajc/video-game-experience-printable/).
Many of the presentations can now be found on SlideShare at http://www.slideshare.net/tag/euroia2008 .
The final formal presentation of the conference was from Victor Lombardi (http://www.digital-web.com/articles/concept_design_tools/). He was talking about what he has learnt from the process of industrial design, and was sharing some tools and tips for people building product 'concepts'. He challenged the audience to think more widely around the projects they were carrying out, to question their assumptions, question the nature of the brief, and be prepared to explore and try out more possibilities before settling on the final design.
Connecting in Copenhagen in 2009
IA Summits traditionally end with an 'open mic' session for anyone to stand up and say anything. It is always entertaining to hear so many people wanting to thank the audience and the new friends they've made for the great time they've had, to invite delegates to parties, and to boast about how much beer they had or hadn't drunk whilst attending the summit. We also found out that next year's summit will be held in Copenhagen in September 2009 - and one open mic contributer warned us:
‘You may have heard about Copenhagen that it is expensive. That the beer is bad. And that we hate all foreigners. I am here to tell you that all of this is true.'
There is always a strong feeling amongst European IAs that somehow we should ‘do more' to network, connect, share experiences, and exchange jobs throughout Europe. One panel on Saturday morning was dedicated to just this subject, and, despite the promised expense, bad beer and xenophobia, I look forward to seeing in Copenhagen how far we have come along the proposed road-map for a stronger User Experience and IA network in Europe. (http://www.slideshare.net/wolf_noeding/euro-ia-roadmap-08-presentation).
Martin Belam is an independent internet consultant and author, ad the Contributing Editor for FUMSI Share, with eight years' experience working with global brands including Sony, Vodafone The Guardian and the BBC. Martin specialised in search analytics at the BBC, and has since worked in areas such as online news, personalised email broadcast solutions, and the user experience definition for online and mobile retail services. Having spent three years living on the Greek island of Crete, Martin has recently returned to London in the UK. Martin blogs at http://www.currybet.net
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