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Hazelnut Tech Talk is a collaboration between Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo

This episode features Troy Harlan, wherein we talked about information gathering, filtering and consuming (naturally,) human factors, trilobites, reading at 2,000 words per minute, INTP’s, striving for objectivity, The Black Swan, hunches, and why it’s better to “have no map at all than have the wrong map”—all recorded on the road from St. Johns to downtown Portland.

IA Summit: Linkosophy
04.14.2008 by LukeW

Andrew Hinton’s closing plenary at the 2008 IA Summit detailed why the central concerns of information architecture may be best served by a community of practice.

* In the past, computer systems were centralized, closed and directed by hierarchy. The Web allowed you to link amongst hierarchies and enabled an explosion of content.
* Computers are conduits for communication. Content is something to talk about. Information is there for our need for conversation.
* The Internet sped up conversations by allowing them to move more quickly. The Web is a culture acceleration device.
* There are cognitive limits to what we can consume. Information & conversation need to be managed and shaped so people can find what they want.
* This is the central concern of information architecture: how can we shape context and connections in information spaces.
* Community of Practice: is a group with a shared concern or passion for something. They do it better as they interact regularly. A practice is a shared history of learning. It is conversational.
* Tendency to think of communities of practice as silos. In user experience design there are no silos. User Experience has multiple facets and they are integrated.
* We experience semantic context & connection as space. Information represented as bits not atoms. Shaping context & connection is an act of architecture.
* Information architects shape structures of context & connection for info spaces.
* How to make sense of the mess of content online so people can get to conversations they need? Library Science was a great place to start making sense of this challenge.
* First order is physical, second order is metadata (signifiers of physical thing), third order (non-centralized, messy order of how individuals organize all their stuff)
* Some people think the third order of organization will consume first & second. But just because people can move things around does that negate the need for architecture.
* Just because inventory can be arranged by users does not mean there is no architecture going on. Only focusing on inventory is a red herring.
* Have to know the kind of conversation you are designing for. Do you need structure or order –if so how much?
* Possibility spaces – create frameworks in which people create meaning. We are there to create structure within which people can create their own meaning. Links, Categories, and Rules.
* Rules: access permissions, algorithmic context/architectures
* IA is not only about getting people to a piece of information
* Information is a conduit for context and connection. It’s about useful context & connections in a new kind of space.
* Each of us tends to identify with a practice – we want to be part of a group: homes for identities.
* Thing: the designed stuff. Activity: the act of working on the thing (hands on action) Role: the “hat” for the person working on this activity. Practice: shared history of learning among people who affiliate strongly with a role
* Title: a label one is called does not influence what practice you are a member of.

Websites generally annoy me. I tend to keep them out of the way by using RSS readers and other objects that strip important data while leaving messy interfaces behind. The fields of Usability, User Interaction, Experience and Interface Design and Information Architecture host a bunch of battlebots out to eviscerate design travesties wherever possible.

The only problem is that many clients have a fog of war when it comes to understanding website design beyond the fact that a site “must be pretty”, or “must have flash”. Some do not understand that users are coming to the site and have only seconds to vote. A poorly designed site will have most people voting with the Back, Stumble, or Ctrl+W commands.

Enter Luke Wroblewski of Functioning Form. He’s an internationally recognized Web thought leader who has designed or contributed to software used by more than 600 million people. He is currently Senior Director of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. where he leads the design of Yahoo.com and other popular products including My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Buzz.

Luke Wroblewski says:

In today’s social, distributed, search-driven Web, customers are finding their way to Web content through an increasing number of distinct experiences. Yet when people arrive at most Web pages, the experience they get isn’t optimized for this context. Instead, the vast majority of content pages online remain more concerned with their own context than the context of their users: where did a user arrive from and where are they likely to go next? These pages remain designed as if they were primarily accessed from a Web site’s home page or a carefully thought-out selection from the site’s information architecture.”

“To address these issues and more, this talk outlines a set of best practices for Web content page design that focuses on appropriate presentations of content, context, and calls to action. Specifically: how can content be optimized to meet user expectations as they arrive from a diverse number of access points; what is the minimum amount of context required to frame content appropriately; how can the most relevant calls to action be presented to maximize user engagement? Applying these considerations enables information architects to deliver content experiences that take full advantage of emerging opportunities online and the existing assets within their Web sites.”

Resources

Download the Audio of Luke’s IA Summit 2008 Talk (Thanks to Boxes and Arrows for hosting).

Download the Slides of Luke’s IA Summit 2008 Talk

More about Luke Wroblewski:

Luke is the author of two popular Web design books: Web Form Design (2008) and Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability (2002). He also publishes Functioning Form, a leading online publication for interaction designers. Luke is consistently a top-rated speaker at conferences and companies around the world, and is a co-founder and former Board member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA).

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who lives in Portland, Oregon. You can contact her by E-mail or @caseorganic on Twitter.