Tag: systems


IA Summit Slides: Effective IA For Enterprise Portals

April 17th, 2008 — 12:00am

I’ve posted slides for my recent Effective IA For Enterprise Portals presentation at the IA Summit in Miami. Portals are not a traditional space for user experience practitioners, so many thanks to the packed house that turned out, and stayed as we both started late to accommodate the crowd, and then ran long.

These slides include a substantial amount of case study and example material that I didn’t cover directly in the talk. For the repeat session on Sunday, I showed additional examples beyond those included here in the starting slides.

Stay tuned for a more detailed writeup of both published and unpublished example material – one that shows the building blocks in action at all levels of a multi-year portal effort from initial strategy through design and into governance / evolution – in part six of the Building Blocks series running in Boxes and Arrows, due out once the post-summit flurry settles down.

Effective IA For Portals: The Building Blocks Framework from Joe Lamantia

1 comment » | Building Blocks, Dashboards & Portals, Information Architecture, User Experience (UX)

Connectors for Dashboards and Portals Live on BoxesandArrows.com

November 1st, 2007 — 12:00am

Boxes and Arrows just published Part 4 of the Building Blocks series, Connectors for Dashboards and Portals.
lamantia.connector.dropcap.s1.jpg
We’re into the home stretch of the series – just two more to go!
Stay tuned for a downloadable toolkit to support easy use of the building blocks during design efforts.

Comment » | Building Blocks, Information Architecture, User Experience (UX)

Building Blocks Definitions Published On BoxesandArrows.com

September 28th, 2007 — 12:00am

Boxes and Arrows has published part 3 of the Building Blocks series, describing the Container blocks in detail. Next in the series is part 4, which describes the Connectors in the building block system in detail.

If you’re working on a portal, dashboard, or tile based design effort of any kind, the building blocks readily serve as a common language and structural reference point that allows effective project communication across traditional discipline boundaries. These two articles in tandem (parts 3 and 4) provide details on how the Building Blocks can provide a strong, flexible, and scalable usr experience and information architecture framework for the long term.

My current plan is to release a toolkit at approximately the same time as part 4 of the series. Part 4 is in the editing stage now, so this a good time to ask readers for suggestions on what should be part of the toolkit, and what form it should take. Suggestions?

Comment » | Building Blocks, Information Architecture, User Experience (UX)

Designers, Meet Systems (Recommended Reading)

March 9th, 2007 — 12:00am

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:

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:

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.

Comment » | Ideas, Information Architecture, User Experience (UX)

10 Information Retrieval Patterns

June 29th, 2006 — 12:00am

In an earlier posting titled Goal Based Information Retrieval, I reviewed four modes of information retrieval that my team identified as addressing user goals in a broader and more effective fashion than the simple query and response searching common today.

In this follow-up, I’ll share a set of 10 potentially reusable information retrieval patterns that describe the ways users combine and switch modes to meet goals: Each pattern is assembled from combinations of the same four modes. We found these patterns while analyzing and interpreting user research on the goals and behaviors of a wide variety of users active within a large information environment. This environment provides complex financial services content and capabilities through a product-based user experience that requires a costly subscription. This particular set of patterns emerged from a mix of user research gathered using ethnography, contextual analysis, cognitive walkthrough, and heuristics review, in addition to straight forward interviews with users.

The four modes we found for our users were: seeking, visiting stable destinations, monitoring, and receiving delivered information (full definitions available in the original article). Each mode emphasizes a different combination of lower or higher levels of user activity to obtain information, and greater or lesser stability of the settings users encounter.

The patterns identify consistent combinations and sequences of the information retrieval modes that users employ while undertaking goals.

We’ve suggested names to capture the flavor for the ten patterns we found:

  • Seeker
  • Regular Customer
  • Explorer
  • Initial Subscriber
  • Vigilant Subscriber
  • Skydiver
  • Watchdog
  • Returned Expatriate
  • Vigilant Customer
  • Curious Subscriber

To make the patterns easier to understand, the illustrations and descriptions below show the different modes that make up each pattern.
Seeker, Regular Customer, Explorer Patterns

Seeker
The Seeker is looking for something. Once found, the Seeker goes elsewhere to accomplish other goals.

Regular Customer
The Regular Customer visits the same destination(s) consistently for the same reasons. Then the Regular Customer realizes they can save the time and effort of visiting, and switches modes to have the things they need delivered directly to them.

Explorer
The Explorer is learning about a new (or changed) environment; exploring it’s structure, contents, laws, etc. The Explorer may do this for their own purposes, or for others.

Initial Subscriber, Vigilant Subscriber Patterns

Initial Subscriber
The Initial Subscriber seeks what is needed, finds the things needed, goes to their location(s), and then chooses to have these things delivered to allow them to seek other things.

Vigilant Subscriber
The Vigilant Subscriber makes effective use of monitoring and delivery, followed up with visitation of destinations, to ensure they do not miss out on anything that might be useful to them within the environment.

Skydiver, Watchdog, Returned Expatriate Patterns

Skydiver
The Skydiver makes a bold entrance from outside the environment, and lands precisely on target.

Watchdog
The Watchdog first finds things, and then places them under careful watch.

Returned Expatriate
The Returned Expatriate was away, and is back again. They begin by revisiting known places, then seek out what has changed, monitor changes for a while, and eventually begin to have valuable things delivered.

Vigilant Customer, Curious Subscriber Patterns

Vigilant Customer
The Vigilant Customer comes by often, but wants to be sure, and so monitors things from afar for a while before deciding delivery is more effective.

Curious Subscriber
The Curious Subscriber has things delivered regularly, but visits all the same to see what else may be available. And just to be sure, they seek out the things they suspect are here, but cannot see immediately.

Reusing Modes and Patterns
Reuse is rare in the realm of user experience and information architecture. The information retrieval modes we identified are independent of user role, persona, or user type. As a result, the patterns assembled from those modes are also independent of the same contextual factors. Since the modes and patterns are not tied to specific features, functionality, or information structures, this would seem to indicate that modes and patterns may resuable in different environments for user populations pursuing similar root goals.

I hope mode-based patterns like these offer some level of reusability. To that end, I am curious about where and how they help define information retrieval experiences for other types of users and other domains.

If you use them, send me a note about where, when, and how.

1 comment » | Information Architecture, Modeling, User Experience (UX)

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