archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Boxes and Arrows just published part two of the Portal Building Blocks series – Introduction to the Building Blocks. This second installment covers the design concepts behind the portal building blocks system, and guidelines on how to flexibly combine the blocks into a well-structured user experience.

If you are working on a portal, dashboard, widget, social media platform, web-based desktop, or any tile-based design, this series should help clarify the growth and usability challenges you will encounter, as well as provide a possible solution, in the form of a simple design framework that is platform and vendor neutral.

Stay tuned for the third installment in the series, due out shortly!

*Apologies for another announcement posting* but now that the program is final, I can mention that I’ll be speaking at EuroIA 2007 in lovely Barcelona, as part of the panel Perspectives on Ethics, moderated by Olly Wright. My presentation discusses conflict and ethics as an aspect of design for social online environments.

I shared some initial thoughts on this (under served) area last year, in a short post titled Conflict-Aware Design: Accounting For Conflict In User Experiences. The essential message of this post – and the thing I’m thinking about most regarding the question of conflict – is “conflict equals interest, and interest should be a focus for design.” The panel will be the forum for sharing promised (but not complete) follow-up postings.

While prepping the submission, I was working with this treatment for the topic.

Conflict is a fundamental component of human character and relations, with important ethical dimensions. Yet conflict rarely appears as an explicit consideration during the process of designing the experiences, architectures, systems, or environments that make up the new social and participatory media we use daily. Now that media are social, conflict is inevitable.

How can (or should) designers ethically address conflict within design efforts? Does an ethical framework for design require us to manage conflict in character and relations actively? What mechanisms or social structures should designers use to address conflict within new experiences? Are there new kinds of conflict created or necessitated by the social and participatory environments emerging now?

Some specific areas of discussion: privacy, identity, ownership, responsibility, speech.

I’d love any thoughts on the topic, the treatment, the implications, etc.

Fellow panelists at EuroIA include:

• Olly Wright, Media Catalyst, NL
• Thomas J. Froehlich, Kent State University, US
• special mystery panelist…

Barcelona is a magnificent city…

The full conference program is available at this address http://www.euroia.org/Programme.aspx, and the roster of speakers along is worth the trip to Barcelona.

And DrupalCon Barcelona happens at the same time – I wonder what sort of cross-pollination will emerge…?

Viva Catalunya!

The Lessons From Failure Series (curated by Christian Crumlish) kicked off today at Boxes and Arrows, leading with my meditation on being an entrepreneur and what it means to face failure as a member of a rigidly defined society, titled It Seemed Like The Thing To Do At The Time. Stay tuned for three further installments from talented fellow panelists.

Also, look for part two of my series on designing healthy user experiences for portals using the IA Building Blocks in early July. Part one – The Challenge of Dashboards and Portals – describing the structural and usability weaknesses of flat architectures, was published in December.

Many thanks to the hard working volunteers at B+A for creating a forum for these ideas and the community around them!

For those in the enterprise IA / UX space, The next frontier in IT strategy: A McKinsey Survey centered on the idea that “…IT strategy is maturing from a reactive to a proactive stance”is worth a look.

This nicely parallels a point made about the reactive mindset common to IT in many large organizations, in discussion on the IAI mailing list last month. Lou Rosenfeld’s post Information architects on communicating to IT managers, summarizes the original discussion in the IAI thread, and is worth reading as a companion piece.

Lou’s summary of information architecture and user experience voices in the enterprise arena is noteworthy for including many examples of strong correspondence between McKinsey’s understanding of how IT strategy will mature (a traditional management consulting view), and the collected IA / UX viewpoints on addressing IT leadership – typical buyers for enterprise anything – and innovation.

Dialogs that show convergence of understanding like this serve as positive signs for the future. At present, a large set of deeply rooted cultural assumptions (at their best inaccurate, usually reductive, sometimes even damaging) about the roles of IT, business, and design combine with the historical legacies of corporate structures to needlessly limit what’s possible for User Experience and IA in the enterprise landscape. In practical terms, I’m thinking of those limitations as barriers to the strategy table; constraining who can talk to who, and about which important topics, such as how to spend money, and where the business should go.
Considering the gulf that separated UX and IT viewpoints ten – or even five – years ago, this kind of emerging common understanding is a good sign that the cultural obstacles to a holistic view of the modern enterprise are waning. We know that a holistic view will rely on deep understanding of the user experience aspects of business at all levels to support innovation in products and services. I’m hoping the rest of the players come to understand this soon.

Another good sign is that CIO’s have won a seat at the strategy table, after consistent effort:

Further evidence of IT’s collaborative role in shaping business strategy is the fact that so many CIOs now have a seat at the table with senior management. They report to the CEO in 44 percent of all cases; an additional 42 percent report to either the chief operating officer or the chief financial officer.

Looking ahead, information architecture and user experience viewpoints and practitioners should work toward a similar growth path. We fill a critical and missing strategic role that other traditional viewpoints are not as well positioned to supply.

Quoting McKinsey again:

IT strategy in most companies has not yet reached its full potential, which in our experience involves exploiting innovation to drive constant improvement in the operations of a business and to give it a real advantage over competitors with new products and capabilities. Fewer than two-thirds of the survey respondents say that technological innovation shapes their strategy. Only 43 percent say they are either very or extremely effective at identifying areas where IT can add the most value.

User Experience can and should have a leading voice in setting the agenda for innovation, and shaping understandings of where IT and other groups can add the most value in the enterprise. To this end, I’ll quote Peter Merholz (with apologies for not asking in advance):

“…we’ve reached a point where we’ve maximized efficiency until we can’t maximize no more, and that in order to realize new top-line value, we need to innovate… And right now, innovations are coming from engaging with the experiences people want to have and satisfying *that*.”

McKinsey isn’t making the connection between strategic user experience perspectives and innovation – at least not yet. That’s most likely a consequence of the fact that management consulting firms base their own ways of thinking, organizational models, and product offerings (services, intellectual property, etc.) on addressing buyers who are themselves deeply entrenched in traditional corporate structures and worldviews. And in those worlds, everything is far from miscellaneous, as a glance at the category options available demonstrates; your menu here includes Corporate Finance, Information Technology, Marketing, Operations, Strategy…

BTW: if you weren’t convinced already, this should demonstrate the value of the $40 IAI annual membership fee, or of simply reading Bloug, which is free, over paying for subscriptions to management journals

Direct connections between the war in Iraq and the realm of user experience are rare, so I was surprised when one popped up today in an article by the New York Times, titled 2 Car Bombings in Iraq Kill 25.

The article quotes an Iraqi, reacting to the destruction of a house containing a cache of munitions by American soldiers.  “The Americans are lying,” said Ali Jabbar, 28, one of several men digging through the rubble, where bicycle handlebars could be seen poking out. “If there were weapons there, they should have taken pictures to prove it.” But in a sign of the challenge Americans face here, Mr. Jabbar said that even if he saw such pictures, he would not be convinced that the destruction was justified. “The Americans can make it up with Photoshop,” he said.

It’s simultaneously terrible and fascinating that a tool I use regularly would appear in this sort of context. And yet it’s not unreasonable, given the ways that many futurists envision and describe warfare centered on information.

Here’s Alvin Toffler, from How will future wars be fought?

Above all, the full implications of what we termed Third Wave “knowledge warfare” have not yet been digested – even in the United States. The wars of the future will increasingly be prevented, won or lost based on information superiority and dominance. And that isn’t just a matter of taking out the other guy’s radar. It means waging the kind of full-scale cyber-war we described in War and Anti-War. Cyber-war involves everything from strategic deception and perception management down to tactical disruption of an adversary’s information systems. It also means understanding the role played by the global media in any conflict today. It means enhancing all your knowledge assets from intelligence, to research and development, training, and communication.

2007 looks to be the year that the user experience, information architecture, and design communities embrace systems thinking and concepts.

It’s a meeting that’s been in the making for a while –
At the 2006 IA Summit, Karl Fast and D. Grant Campbell presented From Pace Layering to Resilience Theory: the Complex Implications of Tagging for Information Architecture.
Gene Smith has been writing about systems for a while. At the 2007 summit Gene and Matthew Milan will discuss some practical techniques in their presentation Rich mapping and soft systems: new tools for creating conceptual models.
Peter Merhholz has been posting and talking about the implications of some of these ideas often.
– and seems to have reached critical mass recently:

• Adam Richardson Why Designing Systems Is Difficult
• Adam Greenfield on Two things product designers and manufacturers need to know
• Jeff Lash with Make your product part of a system

Here’s a set of reading recommendations related to systems and system thinking. These books, feeds, and articles either talk about systems and the ideas and concepts behind this way of thinking, or contain work that is heavily informed by systems thinking.

Either way, they’re good resources for learning more.

Tags:
http://del.icio.us/tag/systems_theory
http://del.icio.us/tag/systemstheory
http://del.icio.us/tag/SSM

Feeds:
Resilience Science recently featured three excellent essays on the work of C.S. Holling

Books:

• Ervin Laszlo – The Systems View of the World
• Ludwig Van Bertalanffy – General System Theory
• Gerald Weinberg – An Introduction to General Systems Thinking
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine – The End of Certainty
• Manuel De Landa – 1000 Years of Non-Linear History
• and also War In The Age of Intelligent Machines
• Steven Johnson – Emergence
• Manuel Castells – The Rise of the Network Society (vol. 2 of The Information Age trilogy)
• C. S. Holling – PANARCHY: Understanding Transformations In Human And Natural Systems

And for a lighter read, try anything by author Bruce Sterling that features his recurring character Leggy Starlitz – a self-described systems analyst (likely the first example of one in a work of fiction that’s even moderately well known…). His stories Hollywood Kremlin, Are You for 86?, and The Littlest Jackal (two in short story collection Globalhead), are good places to start. The novel Zeitgest focuses on Starlitz.

Articles:
Sustainability, Stability, and Resilience

We’ve needed to bridge the gulf between views of design rooted in static notions of form and function, and the fluid reality of life for a long time. I hope this new friendship lasts a while.

A recent question on the mailing list for the Taxonomy Community of Practice asked about search vendors whose products handle faceted navigation, and mentioned Endeca. Because vendor marketing distorts the meaning of accepted terms too often, it’s worth pointing out that Endeca’s tools differ from faceted navigation and organization systems in a number of key ways. These differences should affect strategy and purchase decisions on the best approach to providing high quality search experiences for users.

The Endeca model is based on Guided Navigation, a product concept that blends elements of user experience, administration, functionality, and possible information structures. In practice, guided navigation feels similar to facets, in that sets of results are narrowed or filtered by successive choices from available attributes (Endeca calls them dimensions).

But at heart, Endeca’s approach is different in key ways.

• Facets are orthogonal, whereas Endeca’s dimensions can overlap.
• Facets are ubiquitous, so always apply, whereas Endeca’s dimensions can be conditional, sometimes applying and sometimes not.
• Facets reflect a fundamental characteristic or aspect of the pool of items. Endeca’s Dimensions may reflect some aspect of the pool of items (primary properties), they may be inferred (secondary properties), they may be outside criteria, etc.
• The values possible for a individual facet are flat and equivalent. Endeca’s dimensions can contain various kinds of structures (unless I’m mistaken), and may not be equivalent.

In terms of application to various kinds of business needs and user experiences, facets can offer great power and utility for quickly identifying and manipulating large numbers of similar or symmetrical items, typically in narrower domains. Endeca’s guided navigation is well suited to broader domains (though there is still a single root at the base of the tree), with fuzzier structures than facets.

Operatively, facets often don’t serve well as a unifying solution to the need for providing structure and access to heterogeneous collections, and can encounter scaling difficulties when used for homogenous collections. Faceted experiences can offer genuine bidirectional navigation for users, meaning they work equally well for navigation paths that expand item sets from a single item to larger collections of similar items, because of the symmetry built in to faceted systems.

Guided navigation is better able to handle heterogeneous collections, but is not as precise for identification, does not reflect structure, and requires attention to correctly define (in ways not confusing / conflicting) and manage over time. Endeca’s dimensions do not offer bidirectional navigation by default (because of their structural differences – it is possible to create user experiences that support bidirectional navigation using Endeca).

In sum, these differences should help explain the popularity of Endeca in ecommerce contexts, where every architectural incentive (even those that may not align with user goals) to increasing the total value of customer purchases is significant, and the relevance of facets to searching and information retrieval experiences that support a broader set of user goals within narrower information domains.

Janus Boye (of CMSWatch) just published an article called The trouble with portal dashboards… in Enterprise Information, in which he discusses the usability problems of enterprise portals.

Janus identifies the essential problem of current portal design approaches built on flat tiles:

Today most organisations blindly adopt the default ‘building block’ approach to layout found in enterprise portals – a relic from the early days of public internet portals. But users complain that while such an interface may look slick in early sales demonstrations, in production it typically only facilitates work for technically adept super-users. The occasional user easily gets confused and frustrated working with a cluttered screen of little boxes showing many different portlets. Getting adequate value from the portal typically requires substantial training.

This is a good snapshot of the long term weaknesses of a flat portal user experience, what Janus calls “the default ‘building block’ approach” [emphasis mine]. It strongly parallels my recent post outlining some of the inherent usability weaknesses of portals, and is a great lead in for the building blocks. (Note: Janus uses the term building blocks differently.)

In another highlight worth mentioning Janus identifies six distinct types of portals, referring to them as use cases. I think of these as types of information environments. The difference is a semantic one that’s shaped by your context for the term portal. Janus is speaking from the business perspective, thus his focus on the business problem solved by each type of portal.

They are:

• Dynamic web publishing; the simplest use case and a common entry point for portal developers
• Self-service portal; enabling staff or customers to help themselves and obtain service on their terms
• Collaboration portal; enabling dispersed teams to work together on projects
• Enterprise intranet; helping staff work more efficiently, often via multiple specialised portal applications
• E-business portal; enabling enterprises to extend commercial information and services to external trading partners, suppliers and customers
• Enterprise integration; linking systems to achieve greater efficiency and agility.

What’s important to understand from this list is that the default flat tiles approach underlying these different environments is the same, and so are the resulting usability problems, with their attendant business costs. The building blocks will support all six portal types handily.

In a recent comment, Joe Sokohl asked about usability in portals, specifically if designing with the building blocks improves usability.

Here’s his question:
One topic I hope you cover is any usability testing results you might’ve come up with. How usable is this approach, for example? How successfully are execs using these tiles? I think it’s a neat way to shortcut the dev process, too.

Portal user experiences suffer from a number of inbuilt usability weaknesses that the building blocks are designed to eliminate. For instance, flat tile schemes assume all tiles are structurally the same, and that they have no relationship to any other tiles. This makes all tiles of equal importance to the portal’s information architecture. [Welcome to Flatland…] Yet any designer or information architect addressing diverse user needs and goals knows that the priorities of users make some content more important than others, and that the structure of the user experience should reflect these priorities and any necessary relationships.
Flatness also hampers interaction design and information design, obstructing the establishment of good visual flows and pathways leading the eye to the right areas of a portal page. The eye and brain (visual system) interprets the features and “terrain” of the current field of view, a process that occurs when users look at a portal page. The absence of conceptual differences between tiles in flat portal experiences makes it difficult to create supporting visual cues that direct the eye to the appropriate features of the field of view. Effectively, it’s a featureless landscape lacking depth that the eye and brain cannot easily interpret, an effect similar to driving through whiteout conditions (an extreme example).

Further, tight scheduling and budget realities often mean design teams inherit the default user experience aspects of tiles from the portal platform, with limited or no leeway for change. In these situations cases, the default designs and navigation become a technology constraint, instead of a point of departure, as intended!

The most common solution to these inbuilt weaknesses is to rely on the contents of tiles to solve all three problems at the same time: indicate structure and relationships, lead users to the right area of the page, and overcome the user experience design constraints of the technology platform or presentation framework.

This is the wrong approach, for many reasons. It counts on content to do the job of structure. It contradicts the purpose of independent tiles. It decreases usability overall, because in many portals, syndicated tiles appear in many different places and contexts where the relationships assumed and expressed in their content are neither present nor valid.

By contrast, the goal of the building blocks is to provide a simple vocabulary for creating useful structures and relationships obviating the need to overload tiles. Using the building blocks eliminates these sorts of emergent usability problems rooted in the weaknesses of flat portal user experiences.

Time and space allowing, I’ll talk more about some of the usability findings in the case study / example material that’s planned for the series. A brief note about executive dashboards, as opposed to portals: Dashboards often serve very small user groups, which means that usability concerns and findings end up being closely tied to the usage patterns and preferences of that small group (sometimes a single user). In several instances, after some very puzzling usability feedback, we discovered the preferred way of using the dashboard was to have an assistant print out a page assembled from a complex set of tiles structured with the building blocks.

I’m presenting for the Taxonomy Community of Practice web seminar today. I’ll be talking about a long-term, enterprise-level strategy and design engagement for a financial services client, sharing work that combines information architecture and taxonomy efforts over the past year.

The agenda for the call includes several other speakers; it should be a strong showcase of information architecture and taxonomy work from different settings.

If you’d like to listen, some details are below. Registration and more information is available from www.earley.com/events.htm

Date and time: Friday, December 1st, 2006 – 2:00 to 3:30 PM EDT

Duration: 90 minutes

Format: Teleconference

Cost: $50 per attendee

Register for the session (you will receive dial-in instructions and slides the day before the call)

Description:
User Experience design is often thought of as distinct or different from taxonomy design. What are good IA practices and how do they influence taxonomy design? In this session you’ll hear from three experienced IA’s who will share specific examples from their organizations and consulting projects that will illustrate principles that you can apply in your taxonomy projects.

In this session, hear about:

• a user experience design effort that combines information architecture and taxonomy approaches for a major financial services client
• specific experiences applying IA with Compaq and HP and “business taxonomies” – taxonomies that live within strict business limitations

Presenters:
Seth Earley, Earley & Associates

Joe Lamantia

Bob Goodman

Andrew Gent, Hewlitt Packard