User Pathways

Luke Wroblewski - Content Page Design Best Practices

One of the talks at the IA Summit was by Luke Wroblewski, author of two books and various resources published on his site. If you can see/hear the presentation at this location, I would urge you to do so. There will be something in there I have missed!

The content he shared, was an insightful window into how we design pages and how the business requirements of a page may actually work against it. It really reminded me about the mechanics of persuasion, and he highlighted some insights explicitly. The following observations were made by Wroblewski.

The web ecosystem

Conceptually, although we illustrate site maps as tree-structures, we know the pages exist with specific unique relationships to other web content.

We also know that the paths to content are becoming more fluid and not just about search. They are becoming more about authority recommendations from trusted sources or conversations around subjects with peers.

Wroblewski breaks this ecosystem down into;

• Communication – Instant Messenger, Twitter, Email

• Display Surfaces – Facebook, Netvibes

• Content Creators – Blogs, websites

• Content Aggregators – Digg, Slashdot

• Search – Google, Yahoo, MSN etc

This ecosystem will be different for every site, and every user has their own network (whether its explicitly or tacitly known).

Presenting the user with clear CTAs

Calls to action are often ignored and yet it’s the reason for a user’s site visit. On news websites, users want to read content   and yet commercial pressure tends to crowd the content area.

This slide highlights the NY Times content area

Wroblewski showed some examples of where advertising and irrelevant page content took up 76% percent of screen real estate leaving 24% for content. He compared that to the New York Times which had a 90% focus on content.

Surely a no-brainer as to what we need to do? Obviously the business context needs to be considered here but a few charts made me think about the rationale used in designs.

This slide outlines the access areas that a page needs to display, note that it must be adaptive and that the technology of the site doesn’t prescribe a treatment for the interface.

Instead of showing everything available on the site on every page, we need to be more targeted about what we present to the user. Wroblewski backed up his observation by urging us to do some thinking for our users.

Why do they bounce

He cited the book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz. The upshot is that when confronted with too much choice, a user will use the back button, the most simple choice – and bounce rates are inevitably increased unnecessarily. More bad news is that the peak value for a user conversion was between 2 and 3 seconds.

This slide states the attention deficiency of users in general  

The idea of giving the user a tailored experience, and not making the user think is exactly what helps define a good design and fulfil its business objectives.

Design principles for engagement

From what Wroblewski said about good content page design , I took his comments and also added some of my own to form some overarching principles.

1. Content – build for focus, deliver on what you offer, short, concise and easy to scan, forms the best platform for engagement. Build bespoke channels for visitor flow but ensure they are flexible. Flexibility, or adaptable user paths are key to an engaging and versatile site that can accommodate changes in site structure and user needs.
2. Calls to action – think about CTAs and their presentation, give clear choices and make sure they are not too numerous. CTAs (and even the necessary evil of advertising) will be welcome if relevant.
3. Context – Maximise credibility through visual design, this helps build trust. Build credibility through visual hierarchy in the minimum space possible and an appreciation of a user’s situation (where they came from, the origins of the traffic). Make sure the user gets easily grounded on arrival  and can orientate themselves.

I think Luke Wroblewski deserves great credit for crystallizing the thoughts of many designers and getting the statistics together to back up his common sense approach to the problems designers face.

By stating methods to enable engagement, Wroblewski has furthered my thoughts behind the arts of persuasion and conversion. For this reason I have bought his latest book, Web Form Design and will be posting a review on the site, later in the year. Form design is a major hurdle where so many users fail to convert, and I believe this book will be invaluable in addressing that.

Leah Buley - How to be a UX team of one

If there was an award for the most enthusiastic and passionate speaker I think Leah Buley would take it.Her presentation, How to be a UX team of one was a real hit, at the recent IA Summit in Miami. Anything with cartoons immediately gets my vote.

It was engaging and inspirational with the hand drawn elements serving to convey the speaker’s personality and it was a refreshing change to the usual slides.

I urge you to look at the presentation itself alongside the podcast of it that you can download here or listen online.

What the main thrust of the presentation gave me, was just how highly sensitive design professionals have to be to the immense variety of tools, methods and disciplines when designing a solution.

The slide above really captures this and is a great aide memoir to you if you are a UX team of one. Even if you are not, to be aware of the elements is really important.

This table doesn’t include design and so Buley proceeded on outlining a three step process, or method, of how she comes up with the designs. She covered off a variety of ways to brainstorm effectively, then the advantages of working with an ad hoc team and finally ways to pick the best ideas. Ways of generating and refining, but no mention of concept models - one day their moment will come!

Gathering peers unconnected with UX is still a valuable exercise that we should all do more of. Its real collaboration and also serves to break down barriers between teams that can help and not hinder. Different perspectives from different disciplines gives new insights and also stops the misplaced thoughts of designers being precious prima donnas.

Design principles were outlined, transpiring to be the  alignment of business goals and user needs. They helped in refining ideas that were generated through the design process, but importantly were also to help defend those ideas. Contextual elements were not talked about here but perhaps that was a given?

The last slide felt like a call to arms for all those long-suffering designers out there who have to be a UX team of one. Buley states that this approach will build confidence, establish your authority and shows that you care.

Now all you need do is grab a sketch pad, some colleagues  and imagination and go and make something great. This was a talk that was brilliantly delivered with a message of real clarity.

Andrew Hinton (Inkblurt) - Linkosophy

Ok a bizarre word to start off with. That grabbed the attention and yes, the talk covered links. But it was more about an explanation of IA, and as Hinton stated, ‘moving the conversation about it forward’.

From the start Hinton mentions emergent theory and I think that’s a very good place to start. If you look at the practice of Information Architecture it is very much in an emergence. It is only as old as web design itself.

He reminds us of where we have come from. With references and examples from the old way (Encyclopedia Britannica) to the new (Wikipedia). The closed expensive accurate way, to the open, inexpensive and ‘close enough’ way.

We experience spatial and semantic information. Links, categories and rules give us the context and the connection to these ‘possibility spaces’. The link between these spaces defined as findability. However, Hinton states:

Findability is only useful in service of context and connection

He states the practice is a shared history of learning, and a community of practice. We are an emergent group. There are many new factors emerging within the context of the discipline which is still defining what it is.

Slide showing convergence of the elements of IA

Hinton explains that IA is just a part of user experience, alongside interaction design and usability. Peter Boersmo covers this in more detail here when talking about deep IA - though it is I feel different to Mathew Milan’s idea of what deep IA is. Of the ’sister’ disciplines, Hinton states that;

IA defines the relationships and connections between contexts. IXD is the interactive function within a given context. This overlap is seen in navigation…

I feel interaction design should move even closer to align with IA, they are inter-dependant. Perhaps we should be a part of the same discipline and converge.

Hinton looks again at the Web 2.0 darlings, Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook and states that IA is occurring here in a big way. Its a type of architecture that is different to the top-down classifications of the past. However it is concrete and vitally important to the site success.

Hinton explains that IA can be a thing, an activity, a role, a practice and a title. No wonder people are confused when they hear what IA is, and perhaps we are becoming more confused as practitioners. Hinton reminds us it depends on the cultural context of where we operate in.

A key takeaway for me is a realisation that IA is not going to die, it will not go away. We will always need to know where we are going, we need to help people classify, sort, signpost illustrate the paths that they wish to take and can not find.

Perhaps we are information guides as much as digital architects, building online spaces. It is a desire to help sort chaos, to define some level of order to enable humans to collaborate and interact within communities for their benefit.

Hinton ended this excellent talk to a great conference with a quote from the author William Gibson. We will no longer distinguish between the digital and the real world as the population of digital natives become ever greater. He remarks that one day our grandchildren will look back on us as quaint - the way in which we defined real spaces from digital ones.

I have a strong feeling he will be proved right. I have no doubt we need to embrace this philosophy, forget about barriers and think about the different ways of organising and presenting information.

As Sir Tim Berners Lee stated recently,

The future is always in the past and for the web particularly. In a hundred years, 15 years will seem to be just the infancy of the web, when the semantic web wasn’t even completely deployed.

Lets look forward to greater collaboration and a convergence of the physical with the digital. The need for the continuing expansion of the IA to incorporate all the different elements of UX is critical to the success of our work, and our discipline.

Mathew Milan - The Information Architect and the Fighter Pilot

If you click the image above you will go to a response to the presentation by Mathew Milan, that contains the presentation slides with audio and numerous comments from readers beneath it.

From my point of view this was the most thought provoking of the presentations because it touches on elements of my design education, that of reflective practice. But it is really important because of the ramifications of Milan’s observations, and the ensuing discussions…

I commented on the post:

….The fighter pilot story was an excellent way to re-frame how we think of ourselves as design practitioners. The OODA model (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act) is very similar to the reflective practice model talked about by Cal Swann.

He said that ‘The design process is iterative. It can only be effective if it is a constant process of revisiting the problem, re-analysing it and synthesizing revised solutions’

In effect it is a PAOR model - Plan, Act, Observe and Reflect. Its the reflection part that is important (perhaps the differentiator to Boyd’s) that feeds into the next cycle. In reflection we evaluate and prepare to synthesise our next move.

What we also need to remember is our ability to garner tools, techniques or tricks from experience. In the fighter pilot’s situation that may be through training or combat, in our experience it is through many different types of work.

Then we gain tacit knowledge , the ability to intuitively know when something is right and looks good. That is what defines great designers (or fighter pilots, sports stars, dancers etc).

Designing for emergent systems relies on tacit knowledge and no process or methodology will give you that.

It was a wordy comment to make I admit. But a presentation like this is meant to inspire and start discussions and Milan has a knack of conveying complex concepts in an easy to understand way.

The upshot is, we need to be able to adapt, those that do will survive. He states that we need to embrace the Chi (the unexpected or unorthodox) and the Cheng (the expected, orthodox idea).

Deconstruct to reconstruct

We need to synthesise our ideas faster, use our solutions appropriately. To construct effectively we need to deconstruct, break down to build up. Milan suggests we are too fixated with structure, we work to ‘permanent grids’, we are bad at ‘unstructure’.

This element harks back to Jared Spool’s presentation. How we become entrenched in methodology without the ability to move onto using techniques that perform well in emergent situations.

Milan states that we are only half a discipline. He didn’t really explain this in the presentation but he does in this post.  He states that our interaction design qualities are addressed easily (wireframes, flows etc) with visible elements. Knowledge management areas such as taxonomies and metadata are also a well-documented.

However his concern is the ‘deep IA’, the value of what we do beneath the deliverables.

What is the value of ‘deep IA’?

Well maybe the answer lies in the arts of persuasion, understanding user paths and designing with empathy of context. Emerging and adaptive systems are chaotic and unpredictable, but so is any design process.

There are always mental leaps that occur that can not be rationalised or explained. But we must embrace these relationships, that may be tacit and intangible, this is what we must be able to do effectively - use tools that bridge these chaotic unknowns.

I personally think the tool to do this effectively is the concept model. Its versatility to show various problems and relationships, its freedom and ability to show complex layers, make it a core tool to help exhibit fundamental elements of ‘deep IA’.

A fascinating talk that will help define a new direction, it was the meat between the bread of Spool’s keynote and Hinton’s closing plenary.

Jared Spool: Journey to the centre of Design 

Jared Spool’s opening keynote was perhaps deliberately inflammatory. If you go into a room of IAs and say UCD is dead you probably run the risk of losing half the audience within the first two minutes.

However, provocations aside, Spool raised some important issues that we need to figure out if we are working in a commercial environment where IA and usability are often questioned as being expensive luxuries.

UCD as dogma

His first observation was that companies that design with a UCD process are missing a trick. If the 20% of your users provide more than 80% of your revenue than designing for all users is inefficient. In effect UCD is an inefficient methodology that has become dogma.

Spool states that he challenges anybody to show him a product that has been developed in a UCD way that was deemed as a success. He argued that the iPod was developed without this methodology, 37 signals famously ‘design for themselves’. I thought this was over stepping the mark a little but it was all good theatre - let the show go on I guess.

What defines the best teams?

Making the observation that the best teams actually did away with parts of their methodology, Spool gave us some research findings into the best teams in the design world.

He stated that the best teams;

1. Ignored elements of their methodology
2. Focused on tricks and techniques to make things work better for each team member
3. Constantly exploring new tricks and techniques for their toolbox
4. Used a process as a recipe of techniques different for every application, not a step by step, or a one size fits all

The teams that were struggling were those chained to their methodologies and become entrenched in a kind of dogma. Spool talks about dogma as ‘unquestioned faith independent of any supporting evidence’.

Perhaps its best to forget about the word, but more importantly how we see dogma in business culture. Those that innovate, shrug off agreed ways of doing things, and take a free-thinking approach to practically change their environment and working practice.

In any working process people are the most important factor in a successful project, the team has the biggest part to play, and how it operates is key.Spool neatly reasserted this by telling the stone soup story, but it effectively encapsulates the collaborative model I wrote about here.

Qualities of innovative business cultures

Finally and most memorably, aside from the amusing audience participation routines, Spool covered 3 core UX attributes. Personally  I think they are more like the defining qualities of the cultures of successful innovative companies.

Photo from   Bart Vermeersch’s Photostream

They exhibited the following typified by a simple sentence;Vision: “Can you go up to anyone and ask what the design will do five years from now?”

Feedback: “In the last 6 weeks, have you spent more than 2 hours watching someone using your, or your competitor’s, product?“

Culture: “In the last 6 weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?“

Conclusions

In summary, Spool stated the need to focus on informed design and reward mistakes. Though I felt his conclusion lacked the bite of the start and the momentum of the middle, his keynote set just the right tone for the next 3 days.

The speakers throughout IA Summit 2008 have challenged us, (uncomfortably at times), to think differently about our work and roles in this ever-changing landscape.

Informed design decisions should be at the heart of what we do of course. Design research is at the bedrock of the work we produce.

But we need to be free to experiment and not become too concerned about making mistakes. Innovation can never thrive in a culture of blame, constrained by

It is important we focus on the three statements above but perhaps it is the decision makers who need to be asking these questions and getting their UX teams to act on them.

As a footnote to this I discovered this post by David Armano from the Critical Mass blog.