archive.Joe Lamantia.com

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

What happens when this classic vernacular interjection meets linguistics, data visualization, and the Web?
The Aargh page, of course. (It should really be The Aargh! Page, but this is so fantastic that I can’t complain…)
Here’s a screenshot of the graph that shows frequency of variant spellings for aargh in Google, along two axes:

Note the snazzy mouseover effect, which I’ll zoom here:

Looking into the origins aargh inevitably brings up Robert Newton, the actor who played Long John Silver in several Disney productions based on the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson. I remember seeing the movies as a child, without knowing that they were the first live action Disney movies broadcast on television. So do plenty of other people who’ve created tribute pages>.
Aargh may have many spelling variations, but at least three of them bear a stamp of legitimacy, as the editorial review of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (Paperback) at Amazon.com explains, “If you’re using the 1991 edition or the 1978 original, you’re woefully behind the Scrabble-playing times. With more than 100,000 2- to 8-letter words, there are some interesting additions (“aargh,” “aarrgh,” and “aarrghh” are all legitimate now), while words they consider offensive are no longer kosher. “
There’s even International Talk Like A Pirate Day, celebrated on September 19th every year. The organizers’ site offers a nifty English-to-Pirate-Translator.
Most random perhaps is the Wikipedia link for Aargh the videogame, from the 80’s, without pirates.

Related posts:

Thanks to all who stopped by to ask questions and express interest in some of the concepts central to executive dashboards, portals, or to simply say hello during the poster session at the IA Summit in Montreal. Many of you took cards, and I look forward to hearing from you soon. Based on the level of interest, I’m talking with the good people at Boxes and Arrows about how to share some of this experience and these ideas in more depth. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, until the summit site offers a full set of presenter materials, you can find the.pdf version (it’s a largish ~6MB) here.

The published description of the poster is below:

Executive Dashboards: Simple IA Building Blocks Support A Suite of Sophisticated Portals
This poster depicts how a small set of standardized Information Architecture structures and elements was used to create an effective suite of interconnected Executive Dashboards at low cost and without substantial redesign effort.

This suite of dashboards meets the diverse information needs of senior decision makers working within many different business units in a global pharmaceutical company. These dashboards incorporate a wide variety of data types and functionality, but present everything within a consistent and usable User Experience by employing modular tiles and navigation structures.

This set of modular tiles and navigation structures met the diverse information needs of senior decision makers operating within several different business units.

The poster shows how the basic IA component or ‘atom’ of a tile or portlet, with a standard structure, elements, and labeling can contain a tremendous variety of content types. The content types include qualitative and quantitative visual and textual data displays, as well as complex functionality syndicated from other enterprise applications. It also shows how tiles are easily combined with other tiles or portlets to create larger scale and more sophisticated structures that are still easy for users to comprehend, allowing them to synthesize and compare formerly siloed information views to guide strategic decisions.

The poster shows how simple information architecture components common to all the dashboards allow rapid access to a tremendous amount of information, from many sources. The poster shows how this IA framework scaled well and responded to changing business needs over time, allowing the addition of large numbers of new tiles, views, and types of information to existing Dashboards without substantial redesign or cost.

The poster demonstrates how a set of IA components allows designers to present critical business information by operating unit, geography, topic, or specific business metric, at varying levels of detail, based on the needs of specific audiences.
The poster shows how this set of IA components allowed numerous design teams to innovate within a framework, thus creating an extensive library of reusable tiles and views available for syndication throughout the suite of Executive Dashboards.
The end result of this approach to solving diverse design problems is a series of well integrated User Experiences offering substantial business value to a wide audience of users.

I’ve added a batch of photos to the Flickr group for the IA Summit here. More coming soon…

Related posts:

After missing the first four IA summits, I’m very much looking forward to this year’s IA Summit in lovely Montreal.
For this year’s gathering, I’m presenting a poster on how a simple set of IA building blocks can support powerful information architectures, in the context of interconnected exeuctive portals. Aside from benefits in terms of user experience consistency, learnability, and increased rates of user satisfaction and adoption, the true business value of a system of simple information objects that conveys a tremendous variety of content is in meeting diverse needs for decision making inputs across a wide variety of audiences and functional requirements.
This is a follow-on to the better part of a year spent working on the strategy, design, and development of a suite of executive dashboards and portals for major pharmaceutical clients.
In the look-over-your-shoulder-as-you-run-forward mode typical of most consulting roles, it’s quite a bit different from the semantic web / semantic architecture work I’m engaged with now. But that’s the joy of always being on to new things

Related posts:

Two thumbs up to Anders Ramsay for organizing IA meetups down in NYC. I had the chance to come to one of these regular get-togethers in January, and meet Anders, Lou Rosenfeld, Liz Danzico, Peter Van Dijk, and quite a few others while in town to see clients. After some refreshing beverages at Vig Bar, we moved on to the Mercer Kitchen for a swanky, tasty dinner. Word of mouth has it that the duck at is a religious experience. And it’s always nice to put faces to a great many blog posts.
Anders posted some photos here:
http://ia.meetup.com/14/photos/
I don’t see any of the umbrellas decorating the interior of the main dining area in the photos – but you had to look up to see them hanging from the ceiling in the first place.
Visual Puzzler Challenge: someone in these photos is a System Architect maquerading as an IA – can you spot the imposter?

Related posts:

In October, I had the chance to attend the UI9 User Interface Conference here in Cambridge. I was registered for the full-day session Deconstructing Web Applications: Learning from the Best Designs, hosted by Hagan Rivers of Two Rivers Consulting. I also listened in on a few minutes of Adaptive Path’s workshop From Construct to Structure: Information Architecture from Mental Models. Recognized, well-informed speakers presented both sessions, and did so capably.
Deconstructing Web Applications opened with a useful theoretical section in which Rivers identified a basic model for defining a web application, continued into a breakdown of the base-level IA of a typical web app as presented to users, and then walked through a number of examples of how widely available web applications adhere to or diverge from this model and structure. The material in each portion of the session was well illustrated with screen shots and examples, and it’s clear that Rivers is a comfortable and experienced presenter who understands her material. I’ve recently made use of her framework for the structure of web applications in a number of my active projects.
The session made five bold statements about what attendees would learn or accomplish. In light of very tall requirements to live up to, Rivers did an admirable job of presenting an overview and introduction to several complex applications in a single day’s time. But I can’t say that I have a sense of the core Information Architecture or structure behind the tools reviewed during the session, or an in-depth understanding of why the design teams responsible for them chose a given form. Deconstruction was a poorly defined academic movement whose virtues and drawbacks still generate vehement debates, but as way of seeking understanding (and a choice for a conference session title), it implies a rigorous level of thoroughness that went unmet.
The emotional response section of the workshop was the least developed of the broad areas. It digresses the most from the focus of the rest of talk in form and content. I suspect it represents an area of current interest for Rivers, who included it in order to supplement the material in her program with a timely topic that carries important implications. Emotional design is certainly a growing area that deserves more investigation, especially in the ways that it’s tenets influence basic design methods and their products. However, in the absence of clearer formulation in the terms of reference from Rivers basic theoretical framework for web applications, this portion of the session felt tacked on to the end.
Of course it’s true that you shouldn’t literally believe what you read in any marketing copy – even if it’s written by User Interface Engineering (or possibly the PR firm hired to create their conference website?). But there are unfortunate consequences in creating infulfilled expectations: when you have to sell attendance at a conference to your management, who then expect you to share comprehensive knowledge with colleagues; when conference attendees make business or design decisions thinking they have the full body of information required when in fact they have only an overview; and when we as consumers of conference content don’t insist on full quality and depth across all of the forums we have for sharing professional knowledge.

Related posts:

Thanks to Beatrice Pulliam and Caryn Anderson for the the chance to talk about Information Architecture at a Simmons College panel on careers for LIS graduate students. The event – Information Professionals In and Out of the Box: An ASIS&T Alternative Career Panel – brought four GSLIS graduates and myself back to talk about potential careers related to LIS. I was the only non-graduate and the only IA on the panel. Titles for the other speakers included Manager, Data Services and Quality Product Manager, Metadata Specialist, and Database Manager – all roles that I’ve worked closely with or in some way performed under the heading of Information Architecture.

It was a genuine pleasure to talk to a group of interested students, and also my first window into the early academic codification that’s happening in and around the realm of IA.

After the session, I was introduced to some of the Simmons faculty; Candy Schwartz (also here), who taught the first dedicated course on IA offered at Simmons, and Gerry Benoit the current instructor. Dr. Benoit works in many areas, including Systems Theory – which is one of the subjects I’d like to explore more, since it seems very relevant to some of the core concepts of IA.

Following up, I learned that Caryn is
“…working with a Harvard research fellow and Fulbright scholar on the emerging specialization of Integration & Implementation Sciences which is coordinating research and development in the areas of complexity science, systems thinking, participatory methods, diverse epistemologies, interdisciplinarity and knowledge management for application to complex, large scale problems. One of the key challenges of integrating research from various disciplines is facilitating the various personalities, priorities and languages of the folks involved.”

Aside from sounding very interesting, this is a good summation of my current consulting role, minus the obligation to create too many Powerpoint presentations. I’ll try to find out a bit more, and put out an update on what I learn.

Here’s a recap of the session, complete with some zesty live-action photos.

Instead of a fun and furi­ous live set from an up and com­ing retro Mod punk out­fit, this was a frankly dis­ap­point­ing exam­ple of the mis­for­tu­nate mis­match­ing that occurs when the media appa­ra­tus deter­mines what it wants us to like. Friends loaned me their sec­ond album just as the pub­lic­ity wave was crest­ing a few weeks ago, and I was mildly excited by the energy I heard on repeated lis­ten­ings; their live per­for­mance didn’t sus­tain the feel­ing, how­ever, and given what I saw Tues­day, I wouldn’t rec­om­mend that any­one hop­ing for as much from them on stage as on disc take the time or trou­ble.

The basic prob­lem? Bluntly — Howlin’ Pete Almqvist wouldn’t shut up. I know it’s a chal­lenge to play a full set when your cat­a­log is as brief as theirs, but there’s just no excuse for stop­ping after every two-minute song to chat­ter about how won­der­ful your band is, and how ter­ri­bly enter­tain­ing you just were; espe­cially when it takes you longer to chat­ter about your song than it did to play it in the first place. At it’s worst, this is like musi­cus inter­rup­tus — it demol­ishes the nat­ural cycle of build­ing and releas­ing ten­sion that any dra­matic per­for­mance in the West­ern world not explic­itly billed as exper­i­men­tal should fol­low. I’ve never been this gen­uinely annoyed with a head­line act. I’ll con­fess to feel­ing a bit fraz­zled before I set foot inside the club, as I’d flown up from Atlanta only an hour before the show, after two full days of user research at an engi­neer­ing con­fer­ence (the joys of prac­tic­ing IA on a tight bud­get…), but I wasn’t alone in feel­ing the inter­rup­tions and dis­lik­ing them. On my left was a table of five frus­trated concert-goers yelling the inevitable “You SUCK”, con­tin­u­ously. I’d say it was lack of expe­ri­ence, given their age and new­ness, but I know The Hives have toured for years, and it seemed that their refusal to engage was more capri­cious than acci­den­tal.

Oh, Mooney suzuki was there as well. What’s with the Snake? I didn’t mind their prod­uct (and it had those sly “we’re art school kids lark­ing about with the iden­tity of musi­cians” tim­ber), but the vocal­ist looked and acted too much like Nicholas Cage doing his best Mod impres­sion of Elvis to allow me to sim­ply immerse myself in the music. The drum­mer looked like one of the Nerds from Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer…