Adaptive Path Blog

This weekend I attended the BlogHer conference in San Francisco. There was lots of talk about traffic to blogs, and what you can do to increase readership, and generally promote your blog. Most of advice made sense, but there was one thing mentioned that got my blood boiling.

I was in a session on DIY Content Syndication and Promotion, and one of the audience members asked how you could use tags to help with promotion. One of the speakers, I don’t remember which one, advised that the best way to use tags is think of the most general topic you post is about and tag with that. Also, if you are commenting on someone else’s post or video, you should copy all of their tags and add a few of your own.

Um… excuse me? Sure, that’s best practice if you want to add tag spam, water down results and piss off people when they come to your post only to find that you are tangentially related to the topic they are interested in. Remember, it was this broad spectrum, shotgun approach to tagging that taught search engines they couldn’t rely on the keywords metadata field..

The rules for tagging are very simple:

1. Tag only significant mentions.
2. Tag at the level the item is about.
3. Use one tag per concept.

I like to use this rule of thumb to check to see if the tags I’ve chosen are accurate: If I did a search for the tag I’m considering, would I be happy getting this post/image/content item? If the answer is no, I drop that tag.

Following these rules to tagging insure that your tags are appropriate for your post/image/content item. Targeted tags help ensure that recall as well as precision are high. You want the folks who are interested in your specific topic to find your thing. If you are talking about the giant green dinosaur with glowing red eyes in South Dakota, you don’t want to tag your post with general terms like “United States” or “statues.” Better choices would be “Wall South Dakota,” “dinosaur statue,” “glowing red eyes,” and “kitschy roadside attractions.”

Recently on projects I’ve found myself designing a number of search results pages. While each project has its own set of requirements and nuances, I think there are a handful of elements that should be included in most all result page interfaces. If you start out with this list, and then tweak as your situation requires, I think you’ll end up with a pretty good page.

Here are the items on my checklist, in no particular order:

• Highlight the query term in the results.
• Restate the query on the results page.
• Show the number of results that were found.
• Include next and previous buttons, as well as links to additional pages, to move through results. These should be smartly linked; no link on previous if you are on the first page and so on.
• Include a query box so the user can search again.
• Don’t show the URLs of the result pages, unless your audience is techy enough to derive meaning from the URL.
• Have meaningful page titles and descriptions for each result.
• The page title should be the link to the result.
• Allow sorting and refinement tools if appropriate for your users and content.
• Indicate if a result is not a regular page (e.g., a PDF file).

What items do you have on your checklist?

I’m a big fan of indexes. There are many a content-focused website whose content could be made more findable with an A-Z index of the site content. There are lots of places on the web that talk about the merits of such indexes. Most will tell you to put a row of the alphabet at the top of the index, and have the letters be quick jumps (i.e., anchor links) to that section of the index.

But what about those letters that don’t have any entries? Do you show the letter and have it link to a message saying there’s no entries? Do you show the letter but have it not hyperlinked? Do you just remove the letter all together? Which option gives the better user experience?

This very question came up recently on a project I’m working on. My gut told me to show the letters but not make them links. But why? I looked high and low on the web for someplace that told me which was the better way, but I couldn’t find anything. Looking at examples of indexes wasn’t overly helpful for I saw sites doing it in all kinds of different ways.

So I turned to the wisdom of the crowds. I asked the question on Twitter and Plurk, as well as the Argus Associates Alumni. (Thanks to everyone who responded!) The overwhelming response was to show the links not hyperlinked, AND grayed out.

I also got multiple reasons for why this is the better approach:

• It preserves the pattern of the alphabet and makes glancing easier.
• Users don’t wonder why some letters are missing, which can make it look broken.
• It saves users from getting to a destination just to find out there’s nothing there for them.
• Some back-end work is saved if content is added in those areas in the future.

So there you have it. Be sure to include your unused letters at the top of your index, but gray them out and don’t make them links.

Like most folks in the office, I’ve joined the Twitter bandwagon. I find it’s an easy way to keep in touch with folks I don’t see on a regular basis. And learn new things about those a I do see.

Just now I checked out Twist, a site that lets you chart how much folks are twittering about a topic and plots them against each other, over time. It’s a neat way to see how topics ebb and flow. I thought it would be neat to see how much the five senses are talked about on Twitter.

I think it’s fascinating that folks Twitter the most about things they see so much more than any other sense. I would have thought that smell would have ranked higher. I wonder if it’s because we are used to sharing things we saw with our cell phone cameras. Or if it’s just part of human storytelling. “You’ll never believe what I saw on the way home today…”

Dolores Blog showed thousands of colors to people and asked them to name the colors they saw. They then plotted those names on a color Wheel, printed in the color. They have a blog post describing the project. The resulting image is beautiful. They then added a filter so you can search for different color names and see where it is on the wheel. It’s based on a study to test the universality of language.

When I first saw this, I thought it looked like a type of tag cloud. I like how their filter let’s you expand and contract the colors that appear on the wheel. It certainly helps to illustrate how ambiguous language is. I love that there are at least four different colors all called “chocolate.”

It also started me thinking about what other types of visualizations could be done. There are certainly lots of things that could be done intersecting it with other data, depending upon what you are interested in. Being able to see the color names along with if the namer was colorblind, their gender, native language and other demographic data would be interesting. I found myself wanting to click on a color name to get more information like how many times that name was used for this color.

What ideas for visualizations do you have?

I’ll admit it, I’m stubborn. Perhaps it’s my pedantic librarian roots, but I like words to mean what they mean. It drives me nuts when vendors take perfectly good terms and corrupt them for their own purposes. For example, it took me years to accept the use of the term “taxonomy” in a non-scientific classification context. Now it’s something that I use all the time, but I’m sure to be clear what definition I am using. Language is ambiguous enough as it is without vendors and marketers muddying the waters further.

“Ontology” is one of those words that up until yesterday, I felt protective of. It drove me nuts when folks would use it as a synonym for taxonomy or thesaurus. “We have perfectly good words to describe these things,” I’d tell myself. “We don’t need to use ontology as well.” Perhaps it was my own failure to truly grasp even the original meaning of the word that led to this stance. I mean, “the metaphysical study of the nature of being and existence” is a bit much to work into casual conversation. But ontology has just made a huge jump to the top of the list of words I use on a regular basis. Why is that?

This week I’m attending the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, CA. I’m finding myself surrounded by big brains who think and dream in OWL standards and RDF triples. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a conference where they actually show lines of code up on the screen. But this emersion has been great. I’m making all kinds of strange and wonderful connections between what I know and what I sort of thought I knew but now realize I had no idea about but oh gosh am I excited about it now.

The best example of this is “ontology.” I finally understand what those database folks mean when they say it. Ontologies aren’t synonyms for taxonomies — they work together. Ontologies are the rule sets — they set up the structure of how things are related to each other. They take the “related terms” of a thesaurus and completely blow it out of the water with the complexity and depth of relationships that are possible. With an ontology you set up how concepts and information relate together, and then use that as a blueprint to build out the instances, or what I would call the taxonomy or thesaurus.

But the ontologies go one step further than just being glorified vocabulary maintenance tools. Because of their close relationship to data modeling and database content, they allow connections, learnings, and inferences to become clear. And they, along with some other technology that I don’t fully understand yet, make those connections happen. I’ve said for years that building a thesaurus will help improve the results in your enterprise search system, or that you can relate terms in your thesaurus together to auto-populate related content or highlight cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. But I now see that this was only one part of the solution. The semantic relationships within the ontology are what enable the computer build out those connections. It’s the magic fairy dust that makes this stuff happen. And oh boy is that cool!

Founder Indi Young was interviewed by IA Voice, an IA Podcast channel in Europe about her mental modeling process. The postcast of the interview is available on the IA Voice site. Indi describes it as “kind of like a whole course compressed into a few minutes.”

I’ve been doing a lot of research into “advanced” topics in information architecture in preparation for my day in the UX Intensive. It seemed to me that I couldn’t talk about advanced IA topics without talking about Enterprise IA. But the more I’ve dug into the topic, the more I’m realizing that there really isn’t that much there there.

Most of what I’ve read about EIA is really core, basic principles of IA. They focus on understanding the business context, what the users need and a deep understanding of the content. The emphasis may shift a bit being a little less about content analysis and modeling and more on the business context and facilitation skills, but really, that seems a subtle shift to me. You have to understand the social and political factors that your IA is going into if you have any hope of it succeeding. To me that subtle shift isn’t enough to warrant the new label of EIA.

I do, however, believe that something called EIA exists. Though, I’m starting to wonder if like the unicorn it only exists in our imaginations and mythologies. To me, Enterprise Information Architecture is something that happens in large organizations, when different business units come together and start playing nice with their information structures. I’m talking stuff like the holy grail of a single product vocabulary used by all departments (something that at PeopleSoft we were never able to achieve despite my best efforts). Or better yet, crosswalks, switching vocabularies, or meta-thesauri that map like terms between business units and their databases. This means that the marketing department and the support department and the developers can all use their own terminology, but the end user has a seamless experience as they move through the content of the site, as they search various databases, and most importantly, they don’t have to worry that they aren’t finding all the relevant stuff.

I’m not sure that I buy Lou Rosenfeld’s vision of a board of directors that oversees information architecture within an organization. Perhaps we’ll get there one day. And we certainly need visionaries like Lou campaigning for such things if they are ever to exist. But I hate for IAs to think that unless they have an IA department they aren’t really doing EIA. Sure it’s easier with a team. But I think even one person, with the backing of their department, can make a lot of change in the right direction.

At some point, you’ll need more than one IA. I certainly found this at PeopleSoft. We needed one IA to keep the websites running smoothly. But we also needed someone who started to work at this more strategic, inter-departmental level. Someone who understands the basic, core principles of IA and sees them implemented throughout the organization, even if they have to do a lot of the implementing themselves.

So, I guess what I’m saying is, I don’t see EIA as this big, different, evolutionary progression from “regular” IA. EIA is regular IA, just with a slight tweak in focus.

I returned home from the IA Summit 2007 last night, and a burr has been rubbing my hide ever since. Since the Summit happened in Las Vegas this year, there was a lot of talk about the UX of Las Vegas, and how bad it was. Or rather, that Las Vegas didn’t really have a UX because it was bad. Because if you planned a UX it had to be a good one.

Huh?

Folks, everything that we come into contact with we have an experience with. That experience may be positive, or negative or neutral. It may be planned or accidental. It may be created out of an effort to make the world a better place. Or it may result from manipulative and selfish motivations. Either way, we (the users) are having an experience with said item, be it a website, a hotel, a towel or a piece of gum. Not to mention the fact that these are subjective determinations unique to each individual.

What I don’t understand is when the term “UX” took on the implicit connotation that to have a UX, whatever it is must derive from a place of wanting to improve the world. When did UX mean to make things better and good, to be altruistic and benevolent? Now, don’t get me wrong. Those are very noble goals, and they are certainly motivators for the work I do. But, come on.

“User experience” is a neutral term, in and of itself. It’s something that just exists, that just happens. Labeling it as a good UX or a poor UX or a manipulative UX is needed to clarify what type of experience we are talking about. For as much as IAs love their labels, this is a strange instance for us to forget them.

Andy and I finished up our work with Linden Labs and Second Life at the end of last week. We presented our findings and recommendations to the team, and had some good discussions about future directions they can go in. It was an intense, fun project, full of unexpected joys and experiences.

The team we had on this project was great. The folks at Linden are amazing—so insightful, so passionate, so committed to making Second Life better for their residents. That was probably the thing that stood out the most to me—just how passionate everyone we worked with was; both on the Linden team and the residents we talked with. People just don’t get excited like that with enterprise software. We couldn’t help but get caught up in their excitement. It led to a very fun project—much laughing and good team spirit as we explored the world together.

As Andy mentioned when we started this project, at Adaptive Path we don’t have a prescribed methodology that we apply to every project. Rather, we have approaches that we tailor to each individual situation. It was interesting the way our approach changed and worked in the unique environment of Second Life. Some things, like the way we conducted interviews, were the same as in the real world. If anything, they were enhanced by having a visual representation of the interviewee and us on the screen. (Though I think we still wish that we had found an animation to let us shake hands and other forms of body language.) At other times we found that our usual methods didn’t work so well. We’d start whiteboarding and then realize that we had just drawn a web interface. We had to consciously remind ourselves to step out of the web box.

The response we have gotten to this project has been overwhelmingly positive. Residents and the blogosphere alike are happy that Linden is working on making their product better. Blogging about the project as we were working on it was also something new for us. We thank Linden for being open to us trying this form of a case study.

I think the AP team has realized that there may be something in the future of virtual worlds and it’s something we’ll be watching, and participating in. I know I’m not ready to abandon Andromache Ayres yet—she’ll still be hanging out in Second Life in the future.

So thanks Linden Lab, for this opportunity. You have a great team and were a great partner to work with.