Transcription

VINEETA:   Hello,  Everyone had a good lunch?  I hope you’re not too sleepy because Monique has a really fantastic talk lined up, she is here from the Netherlands, all the way, and she is the first speaker this afternoon and will be summarising how important information architecture is in websites and in web design projects.  She has a degree in applied — sorry, she has a degree in — sorry, you’ve got a degree in information management and you’re going to talk about information architecture.

MONIQUE:  Thank you.  Can everybody hear me?  Okay, welcome to my talk on information architecture.  This morning I sort of woke up, that’s what happens when you do your first WordCamp talk, and I thought: ooh, I’ve picked the most unsexy subject on earth.  It is.  We all want to jump to graphical design because my background is in graphical design, but I’m really pleased for this.

So yeah, be kind.  It is my first talk.  I’ve got a lot to share so let’s hit the road.  This is me, one of my favourite pictures, you can find it all over the Internet.  I once got turned down for a freelance job because people thought they couldn’t take me seriously having this as a profile picture.  I think it is a good shift on picking the customers that fit you.  At present since 1971 and self-employed since 2007, first starting off doing a web shop on organic gardening, and I’ve been using WordPress professionally since 2011.  So, as I said, my background is in graphical design, graphical engineering.  I’ve done a lot of marketing over the years, and communications, and, well last year I got my degree on information management, and actually that’s where it all comes together, for me.

So in this talk I will cover what it is, why it is important, at least why I think it is important, what information systems are, and how to do good information architecture, which I think is the hardest part of my talk.  But let’s start out with what it is.  A great deal of the information I got from my talk comes from this book, Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond.  I think it is an excellent book as a starting point.  It digs into the subject really, really deep.  So if you’re interested in this, get the book.

Wikipedia has a very extensive definition on what information architecture is, people often confuse it with the navigation of the website, but it is a bit more than that.  I will save you from the long definition but in short, I think this what it is all about.  The architecture of a website makes the information findable and understandable, which I think is important as well.

So, about finding and managing.  Findability is a critical success factor overall for usability, because if users can’t find what they need through a combination of browsing, searching, and asking, well, the system actually fails, but you also need to think organisations and people that manage the information.  That’s an important aspect as well. I was going to treat you to a nice video of this library, The Two Ronnies, famous couple, maybe the English people know it.  They’re in a library where the books are sorted by colour, and it is going to show that is not really working for everyone.

What I really liked about the book I mentioned earlier, they gave this example of iTunes, and they share a story about two people working on a building, and the story has this metaphor of a minister passing by, and he looks at these two guys who are laying bricks.  And he asks them, like, the first person “What are you doing?”  And the guy says, “Well I’m laying bricks.”, obviously.  And he asks the second person and he says, “What are you doing?”  He says, “Well I’m building a cathedral.”

The minister is really impressed with the answer of the second guy, and he keeps thinking about it, and he decides to go back to the building site the next day to ask more about this guy who was building this cathedral.  And he is gone.  And there’s only the one guy laying bricks.  He says, “Where’s your colleague?  I want to ask him more questions about the cathedral”.

And he said, “Yeah he got fired because he thought he was building a cathedral but we’re building a garage, actually.”

That’s what you should think about before you start designing a website.  Are you building a garage or are you building a cathedral?  Or are you just laying bricks?  ITunes, they mention in the book, is a good example of a garage that turned out as a cathedral in the end.  First, it was a management system for just your local music, then you could buy music, then you could get podcasts, videos, whatever, but the original architecture of iTunes wasn’t really made for all these functionalities and as well, when you look at iTunes on your phone, well, no music on iTunes there.  You’ve got this app called music and an app called podcasts, so it is all in different sections, and there’s not really an overall experience that gives you the same experience with iTunes on your computer or on your phone.

So that’s what’s called system thinking.  Think about your website as part of a system, and give people the same experience on all platforms that you use it, in real life or online.

The next section is why it is important.  Small joke there.  I first had information gap, but I was at the tube when I saw “Mind the gap” and I thought: oh, I can use that.  Why is it important?  Well we suffer from information overload.  That’s not a new thing.  It has been a problem of centuries.  People were complaining about too many books like ages ago, and actually, the phrase “Information overload” was popularised by this guy Alvin Toffler in 1970, before I was born, in a book called Future Shock.  But it has really become a problem, the growth of information is disputed by computers and the Internet as well, and you can imagine that the findability techniques by the end of the 20th century are not really effective today.

So when you look at information architecture it actually covers three sections in this diagram.  That’s context, content and users.  And when you make decisions on the information architecture they will help you ask the right questions to your clients.

The first thing to start with is the context.  Without the context, it doesn’t really have a meaning to design a website.  So whether explicit or implicit, each organisation has mission goals, strategy, stuff, processes and procedures.

They also have physical and technology infrastructure, budgets and culture.  So this mix of capabilities is issued each to organisation and that’s why you have to look into the context every time and the key to success is alignment, like I said before, and websites really should reflect the organisation because you don’t want your website to look like a competitor, do you?

The second part, there’s no website or information architecture without content, and when you look content from the information architecture perspective, think about these six things: the ownership, who creates and owns the content?  And don’t forget the management of the content.  What types of documents will there be?

The structure, and think about some structural mark-up, like XML to exchange with other tables.  The metadata very important for structuring, and to what extent will it describe the content in your system?  And what is already there?

The volume of the content, as well.  Think about growth.  Is the information that’s there now, will it still be there in a few years’ time, or will it be a lot more?

And at last, how dynamic is the content?  Will it grow old very quickly or — well, you think about the age of the content as well, when you think about dynamism.

This is actually what I was thinking about when I was thinking about information architecture.  And as well, with people who design websites, I find myself guilty of that as well.  You think you know it better than your users do.  Well, you don’t.

Does anyone know what these paths are called in English?  Design lines.  The Dutch have a far better word for that.  Anyone know the Dutch term?  Elephant lanes.  Maybe the Dutch think they’re elephants.  I don’t know where it comes from.  There is a great book with all pictures of elephant lanes, but it really pictures that the designer thought a different thing than what the users would do, and maybe elephants are smarter and taking the shorter route, or I don’t know, they’re heavy to sort of make the hole in the grass.

But remember, when you design, you’re not your user.  And Crispin Reed was talking about that this morning, as well, he was talking about hippos, and I’ve mentioned in my introduction of this talk that ITHR method.  I don’t think this is right in stages.  What you think looks nice, is the best option, the user might think different.

Information systems.  I wanted to look at the more systematic approach on user experience and design.  From what systems there are, and you can use to organise your information, or your content.

I can’t go into it really deep.  The book does, but I’ll try and talk into some main aspects of information architecture, that concerns information systems.  First, I want to show you two forms of information architecture, and I’ve used the WordCamp London website as an example for top-down information architecture.  And when you approach it from here, it usually answers questions people that visit the website have, like where am I?  When you look at the website, it makes it clear.

How do I get around the site?  What’s available?  How can I contact a real person?  How can I engage on other digital channels?  Well, that’s clear a Twitter feed on it, so you know WordCamp London is on Twitter.  So these questions are answered by using top-down information architecture.

Another form of information architecture is bottom-up.  And recipe collections are quite a good example of that.  It is nothing about information architecture there.  You see the clear chunks of the recipe, the ingredients index, the methods.  That is all information architecture.  It structures a recipe, and the photo app on iPads are a good example of that as well, because I took a screenshot of my own iPad, and you can tell like that it’s sorted by date or geolocation, you know, where I have been on holiday last year, but from there, you can sort of like run it through, and it actually sort of calls on questions bottom-up information architecture.  That’s a different approach.

Information systems consist of four components, and the organisation systems is the first one.  And there’s a few challenges there.  Alice Still will do a workshop later on, and it is a great deal on information architecture as well, and let me pronounce this right.  Ambiguity.  A difficult word for me.  Classification systems are made of language, and language is ambiguous.  And you can have so many different meanings for one word.  So to conquer this challenge, make sure the context is clear for people in which you use these words.

Difference in perspective.  I already told you about The Two Ronnies library, sorted by colour.  There are people that sort their books by colour.  Anyone does that in here?  Sorry, that’s not — my boyfriend does.

It looks nice, though.  But whenever I want to read a book that’s in his bookcase, I always have to ask him: what colour is it?  And he will go “Red.”

And his red section is a bit bigger than this.  This is not his bookcase, but it looks like it.  It looks nice, though.

What you think about when you organise content, think about difference in perspective, because what might seem logic to you may not to another.

And I’m labelling an organisation systems are incredibly effective by the creator’s perspective.

Internal politics, that’s a challenge as well, and there’s always a tone of voice or the way people want to be seen by other organisations or users.  I was talking to a client and they did telephone services, and she didn’t call herself a call centre because that was something different to her, but not to me.  I think if you answer phonecalls or call to people, you’re a call centre.  But that’s like within their own branch, that’s something different.  So think about these things, how it affects your users.

Another part is organisation schemes.  I’ll go through a few examples of this as well.  A very simple one is exact organisation schemes, also known as known item search that really works for directories.  If you know you’re looking for someone’s name, if you just type it in, and there’s the result.  That rarely happens.  Not everyone knows what they’re looking for.  So here we go with my ambiguous organisation schemes.  And I’ve looked at two English websites of museums to show what types you have, and we can distinguish three types: topical, task oriented and audience specific.  And here is today’s website, let’s see if it works.  Yes.  “Art and artists” is definitely topic based.  “Plan your visit” is task.  They want you to do something.  “Book now”, task as well.  And “Become a member.”  Task as well.  This is quite a simple navigation.  You can’t get confused easily.

Museum of National History, also tasks, like “visit”, “discover”, they want you to do something but here we have another one “Schools”, and that’s audience based.  And still this a small navigation here, but I find this very confusing within like this navigation there, so make it clear for people when you use hybrid schemes like these, there is never single topic navigation or audience based.  Make sure, if you mix it, do it right, because people want to make a mental map of where they are and they get confused when you mix it up too much.

I have to rush a bit.  Labelling, it is one part of information systems as well.  And actually, without knowing it, everyone who makes websites makes labels.  They convey meaning without taking up too much space.

You have to know what is behind the door, and websites aren’t always as transparent as these boxes of herbs, so to minimise disconnect, you must do your best to design labels that speak the same language as the environment the users are in, reflecting its content.

So when we talk about labels, there’s different varieties.  Crispin Reed mentioned contextual links this morning already, and actually in your text you navigate through context actual links that are in block texts.  Headings are a very important part of the infrastructure, so you know where you are in different sections.  Already talked about navigation earlier on in websites.  Index terms can be a good way of structuring a website, and there’s iconic labels very often used on small devices, like phones.  But often, for the house or the burger menu, they’re iconic labels.

But labels can be ambiguous, like I said before.  The general guidelines to make it more clear is to narrow down your scope.  Make it understandable for people, reduce their perspective, and keep content user and context simple and focused.  If you’re designing a website for a large group, or different groups, it is very hard to stay focused.

Develop consistent labelling systems.  Think about the labels that aren’t necessary now, but may be in the future, so you will have space for them to add.  And think about style presentation, the syntax.  Don’t use noun or verb based throughout each other, and think about comprehensiveness and what your audience would like to see.  Navigation systems.  They’re actually one of the most important parts on websites of being structure, like the global menu is always there, so you need to pay attention to that.  And navigation is really important, because it prevents us from getting lost.  The signage here at the conference is pretty good, you always look for where to go, and think about it that way, when you design your navigation on your website.

There are three types: global, local and contextual.  The global menu is of course the global navigation on your website.  Local are usually subnavigations and contextual is like contextual links on your website.

Then we go on to navigation.  We actually end up in a grey area.  And you see information architecture right here, and under one big umbrella with different aspects of user experience design, because you can look at it from so many perspectives, doing interaction design or visual design is very different knowledge area than information architecture.

If you want to test your navigation, look it up on the Internet.  There’s the navigation stress test by Keith.  Go to the website, ignore the home page and pick a random page.  Figure out where you are, and get rid of the URL, and think about where you should go next.  If you end up on the page that’s logic from the navigation, you’ve done the right job.  Most of the time, you won’t, unfortunately.

Other parts of navigation you can think of as supplemental, like site maps or indexes, but guides as well, when you do a checkout process for example on a web shop like Woo Commerce, you get all these steps that guide you through the process, so you know where you are.  It gives you context.

At last, don’t let navigation drown the content.  Sometimes websites are so full of links and navigation that it really distracts from the actual content.

Another important part of information systems are search systems.  That’s a talk on its own.  So I’ll leave that for now.  But there is a big question you should ask yourself when you implement a search system on your website: does it need search?  Or maybe it’s just a solution to poor navigation.  I know on my computer I use the global search a lot.  You can imagine what kind of mess it is.  It is not very well organised.

Basically, when you need search, it is when you have lots of information, or fragmented websites, that consist of different subsites.

The last part, how do you do good information architecture?  I’ve no answer to that.  I’m sorry if I disappoint you here.  Like I said before, the context is really important, and every time you work with a new client there’s a new business context.  So there’s no one way of dealing with it.  There is a small process that you can follow to have like a way of structuring your information architecture.  Always start with research.  Most clients find this a really boring moment in designing websites, and they ask you questions like “When are we going to start the real work?”  They mean graphical design by that, because that’s more visual and appealing, and this is all very abstract to people, but when you do research it doesn’t really have to be extensive, even for small projects.  It is interesting to look at a research and look at existing materials that are there already.

Think about a current website.  Most of the time we don’t have to build from scratch, so look at the content that’s already there.  Most clients tend to think that’s rubbish and they want it all new, but there’s probably stuff you can reuse.

After that, you have to move on to decent strategy.  The research provides a contextual understanding that forms the foundation for development of the information architecture strategy.

Let me see.

Here’s the three circles again, and when you do research, well, you work with these three circles as well, and the process I showed before looks really clean, but in the real world the process is far more messy, especially with smaller projects and when time and money are on a tight budget, you have to make choices about what to include.

Good research means asking the right questions and these circles will help you do so.

Starting with the context, put some rugby in there, for the Six Nation lovers.  This guy knows where he is going.  He has a clear goal.  So I really believe in business context as a starting point, and not knowing what the strategy of the organisation is.  This is just as dangerous as ignoring your users so at least find out about a mission, vision and business goals.

The content, actually, the stuff inside your information environment.  Users need to be able to find content before they can use it.  So findability precedes usability.  So spend some time on studying objects and look at existing information architecture.  You can do content analysis, look at structural metadata, administrative metadata, and Crispin was doing subject oriented UX what is the object, how can you describe it?  What distinguishes it from others?  Think about these things, and how can you make the object findable for people and machines?  Because it always really helps by good information architecture.

So, I told you, information architecture is not very sexy.  This actually is information architecture.  So there’s no wireframes or prototyping involved.  You just make lists of content and create the relationships and where it should be positioned in your website.  So I can imagine clients can’t really deal with this.  How is it going to look?  Not there yet.

So eventually the users are the ultimate judges of your information environments.  You don’t want them to do this when they look at your website, do you?  So when you do research, do use this analysis.  Look at the content performance, visitor information, or search analysed.  I’ve recently been installing relevancy plugin for a few websites.  It gives you a good insight on your website if you have such function.  So find out about information projects that are already there.

Another good method is card sorting, and you can do it by hand, but there’s this website called OptimalSort, optimalworkshop.com, and they have good explanation on how it works.  It is free.  Up to 30 items you can put in there and invite people by e-mail, doing card sorting tests, and what you’re actually asking them is to group information, help you build the structure and you can get all nice analysis from that and sort out if what you thought was right, the user thinks that as well.

Resistance.  There was a question this morning with the other user experience talk.  If your client does not want to work with you on the project, how do you deal with that?  And the good answer was fire the client.  I think that’s a good one.

Common arguments for extensive research and really digging into information architecture can be that they don’t have time or money to do so.  They already know what they want.  I mean, the clients know what they want.  They have already done their own research.  But you will be likely to convince them that they can save time and money by doing research, and if you have this all sorted out, the process of design will be more easy and short, because you don’t get discussions on what should be where and what relations you should include.

The other thing is that managers don’t know what the users want.  I think this is right.  So involve them in user testing like card sorting.  Let them do the card sorting method as well.

I really like doing research.  Like I said, I did my thesis last year, and I couldn’t stop doing desk research, but at some point you have to get it together and make your story, make your strategy.  Because the more you learn, the more questions you have.  Usually, as designers, web designers, we don’t have the luxury to do extensive research, so make sure you turn it into a strategy and bring that to your client as soon as possible.

Another question arises there, because how can you develop an information architecture strategy when your client doesn’t have a business strategy?  Or how can you develop information architecture strategy when there is no content in place?  Business strategies, content collections and information architectures don’t exist in a vacuum.  They co-evolve in a highly interactive manner, and one cannot do without the other.

But developing alone information architecture strategy, it can help expose gaps in business strategy and content collection.  So it will give back feedback information to clients, and the process of making a strategy will force people to make difficult choices they’ve managed to avoid up until doing it.

I’m running out of time a bit, am I?  Okay, when you develop a strategy, there’s four parts you should consider thinking about.  The first thing, after research, is think.  Create some time to think over what you’ve learned, and digesting all that information you got in your strategy.  The good thing about thinking is you can do it anywhere.  So pick a nice spot to do your thinking, like a sunny terrace or a good park.

The next thing is articulate.  Trawl down, make mind maps, write down your findings.  After that, communicate with your client in an early stage so they can give you feedback on what you’ve discovered thus far.  The last part is testing testing, one, two.

Even running an informal test with one friend is better than not testing at all.  So testing is within reach for small projects as well.

After you’ve done your strategy, you need a plan to move your findings on to the people who are actually going to do the design, so you write a project plan.  It will force the team to ask the questions, and it is actually the bridge between the strategy and design.  So after this, you’ll be going to the designing part and that’s not part of my talk, so I won’t cover that.  But that’s when you go to the actual site mapping wireframes, navigation systems and prototyping.

Wrapping up, I hope I’ve given you some understanding on what information architecture is, why I think it is important, and the components that you stumble upon when you design information systems.  A bit short, but how to do some research and strategy.  How you maybe can convince your client that this is a part you should cover, and that was the end of my talk.  So thank you.  [applause].  Maybe there are questions that I can hopefully answer.

FROM THE FLOOR:  I have a question.  Where do we find your slides?

MONIQUE:  I don’t know.  (Laughter)  I can upload them.

FROM THE FLOOR:  That would be great, because it was such a good talk.

MONIQUE:  Okay, thank you.  My own website is currently undergoing construction.  [Laughter].  It is very hard to do your own information architecture, I can tell you that.  But I’ll post a link to the slides on Twitter, is that good?  Or you can e-mail me, if you want some more information on the subject, and I’ll put it on Twitter, I’ll put it on there.

FROM THE FLOOR:  What’s your Twitter handle?

MONIQUE:  @boemedia.  Okay?

Question?  Sorry.

FROM THE FLOOR:  Hi, thank you for your talk.  That was — I found that really very interesting.  I would like to know, how do you deal with clients who are so hooked on what they think is the latest method of presenting their website and navigation, but maybe you know that’s not going to work in the way it should work?

MONIQUE:  You’re talking about design fashion, trends?  Stuff like that?  Okay.  It depends.  That’s always a good answer to give.  No, it depends.  As I said before, I’m really hanging on to strategy, business strategy.  So if that trend doesn’t fit their users or clients, don’t do it.  I mean, always follow your goals for your business.  So I convinced them not to do — like search, they say every website needs search.  Well, maybe not all of them.  If they do want it, at least consider why they want it.  Don’t do it because it is a trend.  Do it because you think it is useful for your website.  Just make people ask the questions themselves.

Is that a good answer to your question?

FROM THE FLOOR:  I was just wondering, when you’re looking deeper, taxonomies, identifying the language of your audience is quite tricky to dig into that.  Do you have any tips for that?

MONIQUE:  Digging into the language of the audience?

FROM THE FLOOR:  Yeah, you’re talking about the individual language, certain words.

MONIQUE:  Okay, where will you start for taxonomies.  It depends, if you do a medical website, there’s a thesauri for that, so you could do those.  Most of us are not designing websites for really new businesses.  They’re unique to, you know, whatever.  So look at competitors’ websites and do research on social media.  You can see what they use, and what the users use.

FROM THE FLOOR:  As an example, you’d develop this site for generation Z?  They have their own language.

MONIQUE:  Yes, I’m not very good with children, I’m sorry.  It’s true.  I do marketing, but I don’t really do marketing for younger people because, I’m sorry, I don’t speak their language.  So maybe get someone involved who does.  Use younger people, maybe.  Testing as well, and what you can do with card sorting as well, is you can do open card sorting, and don’t present them with titles but let them fill it in and see if you can see structure in the words they use.  Maybe a good one.

FROM THE FLOOR:  I had a really quick question about other recommended reading.  Is there anything else you recommend?

MONIQUE:  I’ve got quite a few books, actually.  I was going to — I thought I had more time before doing this talk, but actually, up until Wednesday, I was working until 1.30 in the morning to finish it.  I wanted to do a sheet with resources, but if you e-mail me or send me a message on Twitter, I can give you some resources.  Finished?  Thank you.  [applause]

VINEETA:  That was a fantastic talk.  It did sound sexy, it’s okay.  That was the intention, wasn’t it?  No, it was very informative.  It was fantastic.