IA Summit 2007 Posters

After EIA: Post-Methodology IA

Scott Rummler

Posits that IA is at a crossroads, needing theoretical grounding without relying on methodology. Compares and contrasts IA, EIA, and IRM. Suggests that combining them is the solution. Summaries, comparisons, a diagram, and a timeline are given to suggest a way forward for IA which moves away from methodology and toward conceptual grounding. Most of the buzz about Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA) actually appears to be watered-down IRM. Most attempts today at EIA are concerned with computer architectures or ad-hoc projects designed to manage specific problems, usually those relating to findability and quantity and efficiency. To the extent that EIA is an effort at rearranging the deck chairs, or a near-zero sum game it's headed in the wrong direction.

An Exploratory Study Examining Intra-site Advertising and Its Effect on the Online User Experience

Laura Bright

Websites have become a standard advertising device used by companies to promote their goods and services as well as provide information to both current and potential customers (Macias 2003). However, to date, little attention has been paid to how websites can improve information flow within themselves using advertising persuasion as a tool. The type of website design element that was the focus of this study is "intra-site advertising", or an advertising tool that promotes a company's own information and product offerings within their website (Lash 2002).

A survey design using a website evaluation scenario was developed for this exploratory research. A total of 300 undergraduate students participated in this survey research. For those study participants who indicated viewing the intra-site advertising (41.4% / n=109) during the website navigation procedure, the majority found it to be worthwhile in terms of helping find website information in a non-intrusive manner. Online self-efficacy, perceived intra-site ad relevance and congruence, and intra-site ad attitude were found to be successful predictors of overall website attitude; however, these same predictors did not influence the perceived flow experienced when navigating the website. Building on these results, future research in this area should investigate the effects of interactivity, location, and congruency of intra-site advertising on online consumer behavior.

Enriching Interactive Experience in a Chinese Context

Pai-Ling Chang

This design research explores the phenomenon of interactivity in digital media design. Interactivity is generally seen as the user's ability to access information. For certain writers and designers, however, interactivity extends to users' capacity to shape content and meaning, extending the experience of digital media. Through the combination of design experimentation and theoretical discussion the research proposes a model of interactivity that supports users' capacities for reflexivity and invention. In the wake of poststructuralism, computer and digitally networked technologies are seen to challenge traditions of stable, a priori authorship by allowing users to construct meaning from the range of available content. Anthony Giddens's writings support the idea of the "knowledgeability" of human agents, that is, their capacity to understand their circumstances and to act upon them. Theories of postcolonial identity argue that visualities created by diasporic individuals reveal critical awareness and productivity in the mixing of cultural meanings and materials. The basis for synthesizing these ideas is the overarching research question of how users might experience autonomy, agency and self-determination in digital media contexts through the practice of interaction and interface design.

Central to the research is an experimental multimedia program that allows users to imaginatively manipulate aspects of the work of the Chinese poet Li Po (701-762CE). While it mobilizes the cultural capital of contemporary Chinese audiences, it accepts that the diverse forces at play on these audiences distance them from the plane of meaning as it operated for Li Po. Using the program gives Chinese audiences access to a cultural heritage rapidly being displaced by Western-style media and consumer culture. The design prototype allows users to exert an influence over subject matter through the reconfiguration of Li Pos work, suggesting the capacity to critically negotiate culture and identity while identifying design strategies that create new modalities of richness and complexity in the use of digital media products. The design prototype provides fresh perspectives on some fundamental questions in multimedia design, namely, what is interactivity and how can designers harness it to create more stimulating and empowering experiences for users?

Getting from Tasks to Experiences: What's Next in Interface Design

Stephen Anderson

If we look to established fields such as product or environmental design, we can draw some interesting parallels to the still maturing field of UI design. An initial focus on function gives way to better performance, usability testing and eventually differentiation on more visceral and reflective attributes. Of course, this latter focus is far less tangible and certainly subjective—it's easier to perform a heuristic evaluation than it is to measure a product's emotional appeal.

As a consultant, I found that Usability, Information Architecture—disciplines that help people accomplish their tasks—were relatively easy to justify. But how do business owners justify desirable experiences, especially where the application is an internal application, a portal for example?

To communicate that this is a critical next step in interface design—and not a luxury to be marginalized—I'm developing two, complementary models:

Hide and Seek: the Information Architecture & Design for Working with Filtered Content in the OpenChoice Filtering Project

Don Turnbull

This poster will display and review a series of information architecture and design decisions for OpenChoice, an open source filtering service that would improve upon the utility of currently available Web content filters. Featured will be information architectures and interfaces for adminstering the OpenChoice system including using webs of trust and open source statistical modeling software. Administrators and users require easy to understand interfaces for data analysis results be they in the form of graphs, charts, lists or thumbnails of potentially filtered content. Other design examples provided will be for the visual display of a content taxonomy.

The goal of this poster is to show the current designs and overall information architecture for the system and to solicit feedback from the IA community for methods and ideas to improve the OpenChoice system.

How do people describe programmes?

Sandra Green

The BBC intend to deliver TV and Radio programmes over the internet in the near future. In order to watch the programmes, the public first need to be able to find them. In a timeshifted, on demand universe, the schedule becomes less important as a way of finding programmes. So how do people want to browse programmes if not in a schedule? What are the ways they like to describe programmes if not by title or broadcast time? We conducted some research to try to find out.

This poster will present analysis of survey data obtained through interviews undertaken with 167 members of the general public in London. The purpose of the interviews was to aid understanding of how people would search and browse for programmes, specifically looking at the types of keywords they use, with an overall aim of informing work to establish the primary navigation method for the "Player" interface.

The poster will show how the way programmes are described depends on the type of programme. Some of the ways are by genre, audience, programme format, element or contributors to the programme. Some of the types of programme are soap, chat show, quiz or game show, childrens shows, factual shows or documentaries. The poster will show what people find important for each programme type.

IA One-Sheeters

Leah Buley

To educate people about information architecture and how it can help solve business problems in a large financial services company, in-house architects developed a collection of one-page documents to describe their deliverables. The resulting "IA One-Sheeters" are quick to produce and easy for anyone to understand.

IA One-Sheeters have a number of attractive benefits:

IA One-Sheeters are a catchy, easy-to-digest introduction to specific IA deliverables. Showing a business person a One-Sheeter is a good starting point for a lengthier conversation about how a particular methodology can address a particular business problem.
By directly calling out who uses a particular deliverable and how, IA One-Sheeters help business people understand how IA deliverables can be used to improve their own work.
Multiple One-Sheeters together can help to illustrate the difference between individual deliverables and the unique value that each brings (e.g., how wireframes are different from visual design).
Because theyre easy to pass around and post in different places (electronically and physically), One-Sheeters take the discussion of IA outside of the context of a particular project. This has the ultimate effect of distinguishing IA from IT (a particular challenge for this in-house team, which falls under the IT umbrella).

This poster shows how to make an IA One-Sheeter, and includes some examples of the IA One-Sheeters developed by the team at Barclays Global Investors.

Follow-up: Leah has created a website for her IA one sheeters.

IA for Complex Situations: Working with Goal Spaces and Information Relationships

Michael Albers

This poster describes a current work in progress which is working to understand and to develop methods of analyzing a user's goal space and developing means of creating an information architecture which supports achieving the individual goals within that goal space. Rather than building an information architecture based on information or concepts, it builds an architecture based on user goals.

A person operating in a complex information situation requires dynamic information which fits their current goals and information needs. The task and audience analysis provides a set of goals and information which, based on a multi-dimensional analysis, gives a directed graph which defines the full range of knowledge and detail level of information which the audience may require. The connections within the directed graph result from how a person understands the relationships between information elements. The content of the directed graph is then processed through three sieves in order to dynamically prepare the potential information to customize it for the specific individual.

Nucleus: The Authoritative Resource for Scientific and Technical Nuclear Information

Anthony Jay Bull

In 1989, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) undertook a project to map its information architecture. Seventeen years later, one might think that the information model is out-of-date after changes in the world's political situation, the advent of distributed computing, and advances in the world of nuclear information. Contrary to expectations, the model is still fairly accurate but an internal fragmentation of the IAEA's most valuable resource— information—exists and is made evident thanks to the Internet.

To improve the information seeking experience amongst organizational resources, Senior Management at the IAEA accepted a proposal to create a portal for scientific and technical nuclear information. The challenge: provide an integrated web-based information landscape with a single search across 200+ information resources on different platforms across three separate IT operational entities with different registration procedures for each resource.

This Case Study provides a glance into the information and business processes at the organization often referred to as the "UN's nuclear watchdog." In addition, it highlights the lessons learned from creating a web-based repository for the world's scientific and technical nuclear information as they benefit the IA community.

Out of the waterfall, creating RIPLs: Creating a R&D lab approach for retained clients

Jason Mesut

With all the talk of agile methodologies, the continual scape-goating of the waterfall approach to software development, and our own experiences with one of our clients where we nearly lost a long term account with our client due to the approaches we used, we knew we needed to do something radical.

We needed a fresh approach. One that was transparent, agile, encouraged innovation, encouraged customer engagement and got things done.

We had already flexed some of our interaction design and rapid innovation muscles when we prototyped, user tested and refined the specification of a Mobile (PDA, mobile phone, tablet) version of the product within 6 weeks.

We took on some of the learnings of the mobile development process and our own experiences with different design processes before creating the Rapid Innovation and Prototyping Lab, or RIPL, approach.

Pet (Project Evolution Tracking) Cemetery - Capturing, tracking, storing and retrieving design decisions

Susan Webber

In the lifecycle of a project we come up with many design ideas, some of which we run with, and others which we discard. In the design industry all kinds of schemes and notions get their shot at realisation but not all are destined for success. Technical impediments, client preferences, budgetary constraints and a host of other factors mean that in the commercial world lots of ideas must be rejected for reasons that later reviewers or new members of the team find difficult to rationalise. Any project in reality boils down to a series of decisions but a decision that makes sense in November can seem poorly thought through or just wrong by March, especially when the problem is viewed by newcomers with a new perspective on things or the criteria on which the decision was made has become obscure. Should an idea live or die? Nobody really knows for sure. What we should be able to know is why the decision was made at the time and what were the factors informing the evaluation. Designers need to be open to revisiting ideas and revising with an open mind. What we are proposing is a method to ensure that costly and future repetition of effort can be avoided while facilitating ongoing re-assessment.

The proposal is to present a framework to systematically and clearly track the decision making process, recording rationale for each step in the evolution of an idea in a way that is accessible to newcomers and long standing members of a project. The Pet Cemetery will become the integral part of the lifecycle of a project.

Rhetorical Analysis as an IA Deliverable

Dimitri Lundquist

Rhetoric is usually defined as "the art of persuasion through the use of language," but what rhetoric also offers is a methodical way of looking at texts (in the broad sense of the word, as any communicative vehicle) in order to understand how they function. Both information architecture and rhetoric are very scrupulous with language, and both are aware of the subtleties and perils inherent in using words to represent concepts. Additionally, in order to do either well, it is necessary to possess an acute understanding of one's users/audience. Information architects work to ensure that all language used is clear and structured in such a way that facilitates the users' productive engagement with an information system. Rhetorical critics are interested in crafting language to convey an effective message to a particular audience.

In "Information Ecologies," Bonnie Nardi offers an interesting set of metaphors for talking about technology, two of which are "tool" and "text" (27-33). When people talk about technology-as-tool, they are talking about how people interact with and use a technology. Information architects are most familiar with this kind of dialogue; when we talk about usability and empathy for the user this is the metaphor we are employing. Talking about technology-as-text means talking about the ways in which a technology can be understood as a medium of communication. Here the focus is on how audiences relate to and understand a technology, and conversely how the technology itself shapes an audience's understanding. Rhetorical analysis is concerned with this second way of talking about technology. Having a vocabulary for this kind of conversation gives an information architect a new way of understanding the web site they're working on.

My poster will demonstrate how rhetorical analysis can be applied to information architecture practice as a concrete deliverable. Rhetorical analysis gives an information architect the tools to formally understand a web site's message. This understanding confers two concrete benefits. First, it gives information architects another paradigm for understanding their users. Second, it provides another means of communicating with other stakeholders in the development process who may be more used to thinking in terms of message and impact.

Sowing the seeds of innovation in a large company

Mike Macadaan, Bill Wetherell, Rob Metzgar, Wendy Perlson and Susan Sipich

This poster, divided in four main parts, describes the innovation process for designing a new consumer-facing content recommendation product. The real innovation is that it took place in a large company, not generally known for innovation.

It is broken up into 4 basic areas that will be further defined in hand-outs. The goal of the poster and handouts is to educate and inspire designers in other large, lumbering companies and anecdotally describe our experience.

The Race for Swift Customer Testing -> Get It Out There!

anna simmons

In today's competitive corporate markets, companies need to produce innovative customer products fast and consistently in order to stay ahead of the curve. In order to do that successfully, you need to incorporate customer viewpoints and perspectives. My poster will illustrate how the Intuit Innovation Lab includes customers all along our rapid development process.

Usability testing does not have to take place in labs with 2-way mirrors and video recordings with special eyeball tracking. In my world, we are the designated group to get things out swiftly and get customer feedback along the way in order to improve and grow the product, (whether it is a web site, desktop application, or widget).

Clickable Excel wire frames, $20 DunkinDonut gift certificates, healthy doses of team brainstorming, and a lot of quality time spent at the customer's home and/or office will give you more than enough data to make those product enhancements to have a successful end-result.

The Task Analysis Grid

Todd Warfel and Bill Bulman

This poster discusses a model we have been successfully using to marry user needs and business requirements. Our approach simplifies this process by visualizing a 60-page requirements document on one page. This single artifact effectively marries user needs with business objectives, prioritizes features, and creates a simple single page visualization of the entire project scope, including phased approaches.

The advantages of this model include:

Offers a model to visualize user needs and their connections, or disconnections to business objectives or requirements
Offers a model that allows IAs to be more engaged in development of a project's requirements
Simplify the requirements review process from days to a few hours
Incorporates personas into the decision-making process

UCLA Informatics Wiki: Extreme Makeover Wiki Edition

Alessandra Brophy, Jill Detrick, Monique Escamilla, Grace Lau and Jean-François Blanchette.

Defining "informatics" proves challenging. In general, informatics definitions are broad and do not incur specific meaning until applied by particular informatics communities. These broad definitions can complicate how the value of informatics is promoted both within informatics communities and to the "outside" world.

Blogs, wikis, and other forms of online social networking act as valuable information channels as well as virtual "places" to interact with like-minded individuals. In particular, a wiki can promote self-definition through community discussion because all members can add and edit content. Four UCLA Masters of Library and Information Studies students grappled with defining "informatics" with the intent of clarifying the definition for themselves and fellow students. Under the guidance of Professor Jean-François Blanchette, we developed an informatics wiki to facilitate collaboration, democratic contribution, and interactivity. We came to realize that the wiki had the potential to extend beyond our physical community to become a resource for the global informatics community similar to how the STS Wiki functions as a resource for the global science and technology community.

We conducted a usability study made up of student and professional members of the IA community to assess the navigational methods employed in our wiki.

Understanding Requirements at the CORE: Cognitive Organization for Requirements Elicitation

Joanna Wiebe, Scott Confer

Using a case study drawn from the Orbitz.com information architecture environment, the poster uses visuals and text to describe a rules-based soft systems methodology for collaborative decision-making, Cognitive Organization for Requirements Elicitation (CORE). For this project, the information architect was faced with a need to rapidly develop specifications for the new features. Produced in the absence of use cases, functional requirements, or business requirements, these new specifications had to be both culturally and technically acceptable, and meet changing business and user needs. The poster describes the seven-step structure-definition process which was followed by the Orbitz information architect.

User Experience Design Work Flow Diagram

Jay Morgan

I sketched a progress chart to help project managers & business owners visualize user experience design work flow. The business teams were not familiar with UX methods. The UX team proposed work items (functional analysis, vision prototype, prototype tests) that were foreign to the business team managers. It was more humane to illustrate how we would meet their objectives in context, rather than forcing our dogma and documents on them.

I first used this at fiscal-year planning meetings to get the business groups familiar with our methods by breaking them down into digestible steps in terms of progress over time. My goal was to show them how and where UX team members would get involved, so that we could be included from the beginning. It worked. We had a few early conversations to build understanding with business managers. As we got underway on a project, we would bring this to a kick-off meeting to give a forecast, then update it as we proceeded. At the end of each project, I created a final version showing what we had completed on each project. When we proposed a new or unique method, we had a context in which to describe our proposed work, the desired outcome, and to develop an understanding of its relevance and value.

Using site maps to communicate vision and change

Austin Govella

Basic site maps communicate site architecture and broad relationships between content areas. By adding additional layers of information, site maps can also communicate design vision, change, and frame discussions to focus on project goals or user needs.

This poster shows two real-world examples of how site maps can move beyond communicating structure, and reframe discussions to look at a project's broader, strategic implications.

Wireframes as Art

Chiara Fox

Information architecture has many definitions, and IAs enjoy trying to find a definition that adequately describes what it is that we do. I am partial to the definition put forth by Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, which is that IA is "the art and science of structuring, organizing, and labeling information to help people fine and manage information." Information architecture is more that just a series of methods or deliverables. It is more than simply performing the correct actions to get a good result. There is an element of art, of craft. It is this aspect of what we do that I am exploring with this poster.

This poster will take the most fundamental of all deliverables that information architects create, the wireframe, and explore the wireframe as an art form. I plan on designing and creating ireframes by knitting, quilting, and counted cross-stitching these deliverables. I believe that by looking at these products of our process in materials other than paper or on a screen will bring a unique perspective to how with interact with them. I also believe that it will be a heck of a lot of fun to use these unconventional materials to create wireframes.