| Sections |
| 1. |
Intro
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| 2. |
Trends
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|
- Bottom-up
- It's The Content, Stupid
- Models in Design
- Working with Clients, Not
At Them |
| 3. |
Future
of Information Architecture |
| |
- The Spread of "Good
IA"
- Data Analysis
- IA Playing Nice in the Sandbox
- Library Science Impacts Agency Information Architecture
- Data-Driven Information Architecture
- Professional Affiliations for Information Architecture
- Further Specialization
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| 4.
|
Pain |
| |
- Business Savvy
- Ill-defined Roles and Responsibilities |
|
|
| Trends |
| Bottom-Up |
| Spreading like wildfire
throughout the community is the idea of developing systems from
the bottom-up, designing bits and pieces to work together in
myriad ways. The word "modularity" recurs in people's
discussions, whether it was Karen McGrane (from Razorfish)
at ASIS 2000 Summit, or Phil Oye (Sapient)
and Alex Wright (Liquid
Thinking) at this year's summit. Also at this summit, Bob
Boiko discussed a "component" approach to content
management systems. Out in the world, Jeffrey
Veen promotes design patterns in his latest
Web design book, and even the New York Times has published
articles
on self-organized sites.
The problem is
clear--the systems we're tasked to design and work with
are overwhelmingly complex. Whereas top-down solutions
were feasible in the "early," more static, days
of the Web, the dynamic database-driven sites of today require
a flexible design architecture.
For design modularity,
the analogy most often used is "Legos." A design
Holy Grail is to create an interlocking set of interface
modules that you can cobble together as needed to solve
particular problems. We attempted this at Epinions
(and partly succeeded), and it's become a goal at Walmart.com.
Less prevalent,
but growing in awareness, is applying bottom-up strategies
for managing information, particularly using people's
actions as a way to sort content to ensure the most relevant
and worthwhile documents are featured. Epinions, Plastic,
Slashdot, and a few
others use this model.
|
| |
| It's
The Content, Stupid |
|
The phrase "Content
is king" has been applied to the Web since its public
reception. This typically meant that the Web was a content-based
medium like newspapers, magazine, or television--that people
were using the Web to find out information.
A trend in recent
thinking has been to acknowledge that content isn't the end,
but the means. This is particularly true with transactional
sites, like online stores. Content isn't important in and
of itself, but it serves as impetus for action. Jared
Spool addressed this in his keynote, "It's
All About Content," discussing the findings of his
extensive user researching. Peter
Morville talked about it in his learner-centered design
presentation, holding up REI
and Wine.com as exemplars
of actionable information. Research at Epinions showed that
testing the interface was misguided--it was the content, the
reviews, that people acted on, and we needed to figure out
how to make it useful.
|
| |
| Models
in Design |
|
This trend is less
well-established, but I think we're seeing the beginnings
of a movement in the importance of developing conceptual models
in design. Only one person discussed them at the Summit--Alex
Wright showed user models and system models that were
developed in the design of Spotlife.com.
The premiere issue of Gain, a journal on experience design
published by the AIGA, features a long
article on Hugh Dubberly (.PDF) and how his design work
has moved away from designing artifacts towards designing
process and explanation models. (Hugh's work is also featured
in Richard Saul Wurman's Information Anxiety 2.)
My experience is
that such models are the unsung heroes of systems design.
When we were redesigning the Epinions site, we started with
a very bottom-up approach. We knew all the little problems
we wanted to solve, the features we wanted to offer. But we
didn't have a Big Picture view of the site experience--we
were getting lost in the weeds. My manager (the VP of Product
Development) encouraged me to "come up with the metaphor."
Poking around a bit, I
did some research into developing conceptual models, and
came up with some drawings to model user behavior, and the
user's "view" of the site. Though quite high-level
and abstract, they were remarkably helpful in cohering our
approach to the design.
|
| |
| Working
With Clients, Not At Them |
| A refreshing trend
that came up again and again was how agencies were moving towards
a "one team" approach with their clients, working
with them side-by-side on solving problems. When I worked at
Studio Archetype, that company's graphic design roots definitely
led to an "us-and-them" approach with clients, where
we'd hear requirements, run back to the office, make stuff,
present that to the client, get their feedback, iterate, etc.
While that approach works fine for graphic design, the communication
loop is abysmally slow when dealing with the complexities of
building web sites. If you're agency continues to approach problems
in that outmoded fashion, you'll produce sub-par work and take
more time to do it. |
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