May 2005 Archives

After weeks of reading wise words on information architecture, usability, designing with web standards and other esoterica, I have finally started on some practical stuff. It is a lot easier reading about all this stuff than it is putting it into practice. My plan was to follow a strict ground up plan based more or less on the the Elements of User Experience. To some extent I did this, and forcing myself to go through at least part of the exercise was both useful and educational. It is all very well using these theories in a relatively abstract context working as a small part of a large machine, but applying them to my site, where I am the client, the designer, the developer, the content provider, not to mention approximately 98% of the audience.

The pressure I felt to just "get on with some real work" was quite high, especially as I knew that the Movable Type part of the site was in a real mess. Also I have very little time available for this, mainly 40 minutes or so of commute time every day. To make best use of this time I tried to find design tools I could use on my Palm. I'll talk about these in a seperate post.

I had (and still have) many ambitious plans in my head for both the visual and non visual design, but putting them into practice is another matter. Inspiration which flows freely on the tram or in the shower seems to dry up when I sit down in front of the screen and realise that in fact I have no idea how to do a particular trick in CSS. Practical problems intrude as well: StyleMaster from Westciv is a great tool, but v.4.0 is very buggy which means that time spent learning new features was largely wasted (v4.0.2, now released, seems much better).

Finally I decided to attempt a full overhaul of the Movable Type templates, to rationalise and slim down the stylesheets, and to attempt some stopgap cosmetic improvements. I also wanted to make some usability improvements in link styles and navigation. I had about 4 hours to do this.

Although it was all done in far less than ideal circumstances, some of the planning I did whilslt commuting helped a lot. For example, analysing my business requirements led me to understanding that a prime objective of this site is self promotion, and there are two aspects to this: Photography and Other Stuff. This led to the further realisation that my so far unintegrated blogs provide two ready made pillars for the site architecture, and that I should seek to take advantage of this.

part of a high level site information outline

It also occured to me that I might be able to use Movable Type for more than weblog publishing, but also as a CMS (Content Management System). A quick Google revealed that I was far from the first to think of this. I think a full blown MT driven site is beyond my resources for now, especially as I would have to integrate the photo publishing part, but it is tempting. For now I've settled on a quick fix, using mt-rssfeed plugin to add topic titles to the home page, providing some semblance of integration.

I think that the experience so far is positive, but there is a way to go yet!

[Posted from the scene with hblogger 2.0]

This is so funny...I wish I could have expressed it so well.

"I mean why is it that so much usability material is presented more like the Boeing Flight Planning Performance Manual than an airline safety card? Seriously, what's with all the damn text? How can anyone possibly write about design and not provide a visual aid or two?"

From a brilliant article at Design by Fire.

I started reading John Cato's User Centered Web Design this morning on the train. Something in the first pages triggered a thought. It used to be very common, and probably still is, to hear people claiming that some administrative or other disaster was "the computer's fault". I always treated such whingeing with quite some scorn: "the computer does just what you tell it to". I guess I've changed my mind now! John Cato puts it very well: "usability is being able to do the things you want to do and not the things you have to do". The computer does indeed do what it is told to do, but it is being told by a combination of developers, managers, managers' managers, beancounters and many others before the end user gets a say in things. Many of the victims of my superior scorn would probably have been far less inclined to blame the computer if the software they were using had been designed with their needs in mind rather than some budget holder's.

Of course there are exceptions. These usually concern vastly overpaid and breathtakingly incompetent managers of massively overbudget IT disasters blaming "the computer". I was right about them!

ps: whilst John Cato's book seems good, one thing annoys me. His book's website is useful, but all pages titles are: "Untitled Document". Ok, so it's a minor point, but still... practice what you preach ?

[Posted from the scene with hblogger 2.0]

Just a quick one - here is a comment on blogging which is well worth reading. Bob Baxley seems to share the impression that I get, even of the more "serious" of weblogs, that the signal to noise ratio is very low. Blogging seems to encourage an urge to write at all costs, even if you have nothing to say. The content becomes the content. The medium is indeed the message and the message is mostly echoes and static.

And that is my soundbite ping for today.

I'm a little further down the "what am I doing here" road now. It involves a huge amount of reading and information ingestion, as well as feedback and valuable insights from friends and colleagues (like for example "enough talking, let's DO something" :-) ). But I'm still perplexed. I'm trying, essentially, to find a core concept which i'm happy with, which (IT) management is happy with, and which my colleagues are happy with, AND which expresses the basic idea of "a process which describes a design methodology focussed on making things easier for customers". In the field of User Centered Design, we can identify a whole legion of sub topics. For example, some common ones:

• Information Architecture


• Interaction Design


• Interface Design


• Usability Engineering


• Functional Testing

and some I would add from my perspective:

• Solution Architecture


• Requirements Management


• Functional Testing

But when you try to focus down on these they go all blurry and try to wriggle away. Each one tries to encompass the other, tries to be top dog (whilst desperately trying to appear not to). An exmple - in "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld, surely a recognised reference, towards the end of the book they start to advocate all sorts of world domination schemes where Enterprise Information Architecture teams are implanted in major organisations. Earlier, they discuss deep IA topics such as taxonomies, classification and labelling without breaking out of the context they themselves define. But in Chapter 19 we find them tabulating proposed responsibilities for an EIA team such as Link checking, HTML validation, Content Development Poilcy alongside the more expected stuff. The idea of improving a company's products or services seems to be subsumed to the urgency to create a highly political guerilla unit. And whilst the IA undercover unit is secretly plotting to take over the world, the Usability team lurks in dark corridors pursuing their own secret mission, and the central commitee of the solution architects soviet is preparing the master plan they will unleash on an unsuspecting boardroom.

Peter Van Dijck, in "Information Architecture for Designers", manages to create a highly visual book that by & large restricts itself to IA. References to other disciplines are clearly just that - references, not takeover bids. I don't have a problem with Morfeld & Rosenfeld's book - I'd be pretty stupid to not acknowledge that it practically defined IA, and is a thought provoking and enjoyable read. But I rather like this from Van Dijck's Final word: "There is a problem with the way websites are built. Succesful websites combine the best of visual design, business strategy, programming, content writing, marketing and branding, usability, and information architecture". This really helps to understand a concept of what IA is, what its boundaries are, and what it collaborates with. I know many, many people are fed up with this eternal requestioning of terminology, but finally if you can't explain what something is (as well as the much easier what it isn't), how can you even understand it, let alone persuade a company to adopt it as a core strategy ?

Why why why why why. Why am I writing this stuff ? The few people who actually read it would probably be far more interested if I picked up the phone to talk to them about things instead. What is this weblogging stuff for ? The vast majority of blogs I subscribe too are full of short post that boil down to one-liner musings which offer little in the way of deep discussion or debate. Some blogs are published with a "professional" slant - I read quite a lot on usability and information architecture, but these are all too often recycled, inter-referential, or just plain dull. And no shortage of one-liners there either.

Another strange example is given by my former acquaintances John & Jan, with their ultra personal diary blog - see for example london: No Telly. I read their blog every morning on the train (thanks to Stand Alone Software's rather good Quick News), and am always pleased to get a new helping of voyeuristic thrills. But (a) do they spend time on this stuff, and why (b) do I read it ? Again, I could just pick up the phone to ask them how they're doing (they may have a few sharp words for me, but that's another story).

Are we (ok, "we" is stretching a point) really approaching the point where our online personas are all that matters, or even all that exists, for any practical purpose ? I'm getting to the point where as soon as I have an idea about something, I immediately think of blogging it. The point of developing the idea a bit then becomes essentially to make a good posting, not a good idea.

Anyway, this weekend we saw two films - "The Reporter" - very, very good, and "Spanglish" - very good. We ate pizza at Santa Lucia and I had my favourite (the world's best pizza in fact) ... spinaci e gamberoni. And now it's raining.

BBC News online has a typically muddled article today which talks about mobile phone user interface complexity.

For those of us watching at home, Auntie Beeb has decided that "user interface" is an "awkward term" and can explain to you that, "simply put, (this means) the way a device presents its wares and functions, and how to get to them, to people."

Much clearer then. I'm glad they've explained it so well.

By the way "simply put" is a complicated way of saying that using 19 words where 2 are perfectly sufficient is a jolly fine idea.

McDonald's finally found us (and we're folklore in Turin) - well ok, not McDo, but close enough... iTunes finally landed in Switzerland. About time too, because iPod mania is reaching epidemic levels here in Zuerich. They're everywhere, and anybody who is anybody has at least two (like me of course).

iPod=cool in these parts, and everybody is deseperate to be cool by association, including my bank UBS who have thrown all financial caution to the wind and are giving one whole song free to everybody who signs up by May 30th. Everybody, that is, who can work out how to claim it, which I haven't yet. Never mind, I marked the occasion by buying the album "Weather" by the excellent Lunik, the best thing to come out of Switzerland since Movenpick chocolate ice cream. Lunik remind me a lot of the legendary English group, The Sundays, especially on their latest "unplugged" CD, "Life is on our side". It's a long time since I've really felt enthusiastic about a new band or singer... if I were still a 20something I think I could get quite fanatical about Lunik.

[Posted from the scene with hblogger 2.0]

What am I doing here ? It sounds like a Big Question. This bit of existential hand-wringing is to do with my professional identity. I'm not really sure What I Do. I tell people I work in "software", because it is an easy get out and I'm often not terribly interested in getting into lengthy explanations. However, I can't really write code – at least not these days, since there's not much call for sequential programs written in Fortran or C in my line of work – I'm not really a specialist in system architecture, and I'm not the world's greatest project manager. What I believe I can say is that I can make things happen. I can come up with reasonably good ideas and I can turn them into succesful projects or products, for example Multimed (others such as Fantastic Replicast or Vilkas Waypoint are sadly sunk beneath the frozen lava of the dotcom meltdown. I used to say, sort of semi-seriously, that I was a "conceptualist". Probably if it wasn't for my unfortunate tendency towards self-deprecation and self-parody, I would call myself that and I'd have written "Conceptual Design for the World Wide Web" for O'Really. But I'd never be able to promote myself like this.

All this isn't just academic. I urgently need to define my role within my new team. I work in the User Interface Solutions team of a Large Swiss Company (it has three initials), which in itself is suffering a severe identity crisis as it is mainly staffed by usability or interaction design experts who are not happy with having to take on broader tasks. I'm perfectly happy to be a jack of all trades (providing I can choose which trades I like most) but I'm not happy on being typecast as a project manager (because I'm the only one who can be bothered to RTFmicrosoft projectM) or a Requirements Manager (because I'm the only one who took the time to understand UML notation before using it), but I need a label. I was allocated the HR label of "Application Engineer" which I'm actually quite happy with – it is so overloaded that it has lost any specific meaning, which suits me just fine, but it doesn't really fit in the team ethos.

So I thought, ok, what do I actually do ? Well, I look at user needs, I look at market conditions, I consider business requirements, and I design products…and document them, market them, and sometimes code them. So am I a Product Manager ? Possibly, but then again I devote an LOT of attention to logical organisation, workflow, user experience and pragmatic usability. So, looking through my unrealistically vast collection of books on all this stuff, I start to believe that maybe I'm an Information Architect. And that is where the really trouble starts.

It seems that Information Architecture (IA) has a mega identity crisis of its own. One leading exponent of IA, Christina Wodtke, says that the role of the information architect: “(is) to create a design that balances the users’ desires with the business’s needs". This seems to fit with my philosophy. In an interview recently published at Boxes and Arrows, Steve Krug says "...For me, one of the differences between the two fields is that information architects can actually build things, whereas usability folks mostly help people tweak things they’ve designed", which also pretty much sets out where I think I stand.

Another leading light, Peter Van Dijck, certainly goes well into the holistic design process in his excellent book "Information Architecture for Designers", although his definition of the role of an IA stops a little short of full involvement in the construction. Again, Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld, in their seminal "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web", seem to present IA as a fairly holistic process, perhaps even going to the level of overall "User Experience Design", taking a co-ordinating role for other specialists. However, in that book they spend a lot of time talking about "Structuring, Organizing, and Labeling" and "Finding and Managing", and whilst a distinction is drawn between "information" and "data", there does seem to be a trend in IA which is to define the role as somewhow data-centric, especially on the IAWiki. The problems of taxonomies, classifications, labelling etc existed before the Web, and I'm pretty sure they had (and still have) their own specialist practioners (Document Engineering maybe ?).

The other thing about all this stuff is it is so totally focused on the Web. The web is big but it doesn't cover the whole IT world, let alone the world in general. There seems to be too much fixation on the web, as if if you don't mention "web", you won't sell your book. Talk about letting implementation dominate the design - here we have a mega implementation decision - a web based solution - way up front. Sometimes the web is not the best, or the only way to deliver an application.

Having said all this, when you take away the debate about what IA is, and just actually read what the practioners write about it, it is pretty fascinating stuff, and an area I feel I want to get engaged in. Or more accurately, an area I've come to realise I'm at least partially active in. I have the possibilty to work on this stuff in a corporate environment that most certainly needs it, will benefit directly from it, and sort of realises this fact...sometimes anyway.

I'm not sure I'm ready to call myself an Information Architect yet. I'm still pretty sold on "Concept Designer" (actually in my job description), or better "Conceptualist". Or of course user experience samurai. That sounds pretty good :-)