Catriona Cornett has created a interesting new blog with a very specific aim: to catalog inspiring and  thought-provoking quotations in relation to user experience design. Here’s how she describes it: “The idea behind it is pretty simple. I post user experience quotes that display the impact UX has on the world, and put them into images for people to save or print to keep the quote visible and memorable.”

Check it out at: http://www.inspireux.com

Slides for my IA Summit presentation (”Embodying IA“) are now available on Slideshare. I look forward to hearing your feedback!

The Jan./Feb. 2008 issue of American Libraries features an article by the omnipresent Stephen J. Bell on the benefits of taking a design approach to the delivery of library services.  By Googling his name I also came across this interesting handout on “Librarianship by Design” — basically a bibliography of design-related resources for librarians — and the blog Designing Better Libraries.

The American Libraries article provides a handy overview of how libraries might leverage user experience design techniques (and specifically the IDEO method) to ensure that their patrons enjoy happier, or at least less frustrating, library interactions.  I was surprised however that Bell didn’t really pursue the importance of integrating patrons’ online and physical experiences — a key point of emphasis in the MAYA design group’s work on the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, which Bell highlights – or spend much time exploring the importance of taking a user experience approach when implementing social software and Web 2.0 technologies, which are all the buzz in the library world these days.   I’d really like to see him tackle those topics in depth, through specific case studies….

Started reading William J. Mitchell’s Placing Words: Symbols, Space and the City over the weekend and am delighted I purchased this book on a whim while Christmas shopping at Borders. This quote alone is almost worth the price of admission ($19.95 in paperback):

“The social and cultural functions of built spaces have become inseparable from the simultaneous operation of multiple communication systems within and among them. Architecture no longer can (if it ever could) be understood as an autonomous medium of mass, space, and light, but now serves as the constructed ground for encountering and extracting meaning from cross-connected flows of aural, textual, and graphic, and digital information through global networks” (page 19 ).

This quote immediately reinforced two thoughts that I’ve had floating around my head for a while.

1) That the Media-Upper Providence library (whose renovation/expansion I’m helping to plan as a board of trustees member), like all libraries these days, needs to engage with broader efforts to adapt public spaces so as to accommodate easy access to the many layers of virtual information being provided by the rapid expansion of digital communications networks. I would argue in fact that the role of libraries should be to actively model various ways of managing the intersection of local/physical context and global/virtual communications. By introducing ever new cross-over points points to their patrons–e.g., by including pointers in their physical signage to help patrons move seamlessly between the Adult Fiction stacks and online book discussions about the novels housed in those stacks–libraries can serve as multivalent portals between the physical and digital realms, empowering members of all classes of society. Rather than signaling a step away from libraries’ traditional role, this strikes me as a true reaffirmation and revivification of that role.

2) The use of the second term in the label “information architecture” is not arbitrary, misleading, or inaccurate, as critics like Mark Bernstein have argued. In fact, it is in many ways quite apt, especially if IAs move beyond (as they should, despite the uproar it will no doubt invoke from the architectural purists) providing schemas for navigating between web-based resources to tackling the challenges mentioned in #1 above–namely, the challenges involved in helping people move more easily and intuitively between physical spaces/resources and virtual ones. Again, this strikes me as being in many ways just an adaptation and extension of the traditional role of librarians, as media-agnostic facilitators of information access.

Colleague Andrew Hinton forwarded this link to Jakob Nielsen’s recent rant on RIAs and Web 2.0 apps:  http://www.useit.com/alertbox/web-2.htmlGotta love those classic Nielsen overstatements:

• “… on the Web, most people are bozos and not worth listening to.”
• “The most-hyped site right now, Facebook, is the ‘Iron Chef‘ of the Internet. The Iron Chef competition makes for great TV, but has nothing to do with running a restaurant as a successful business.”
• “Marketing managers won’t remain clueless forever. Sooner or later they’ll discover that Web advertising offers almost no ROI.”

The big question for me when it comes to evaluating the adoption of RIA/Web 2.0 features is not so much usability (though that should be a baseline consideration, of course), but whether they positively reinforce or improve upon the existing service model. Which raises the question: How do you identify your site’s or application’s service model? This is not as obvious as it might seem. Saying that a site is an “intranet,” for example, identifies the type of user experience involved, but that’s not the same thing as identifying the service model informing that experience.

To get at the distinction: a public library could follow the traditional service model for libraries by making books, CDs, DVDs, etc. available for check-out and by providing traditional face-to-face reference service, childrens’ storytimes, adult programming etc. Or it could adopt the new “Library 2.0” service model, which leverages Web 2.0 technologies and social networking tools to enable patrons to provide more immediate and continuous feedback to librarians.  This approach enables the librarians to tailor their collection development plans, programs and services to patrons’ current, expressed needs, rather than having to monitor circulation, traffic and program attendance statistics over the course of the year in order to infer later on what those needs might be. The difference here is between a service model that takes a primarily passive approach to making products and resources available (and which requires a lot of guesswork and legwork on the part of the librarians), versus a more proactive and participatory model that invites patrons to help drive the purchasing and decision-making processes.

If you work on a company intranet it might be worth asking whether that site’s service model is a more or less top-down and passive one of “making the resources available to whoever’s interested in them,” or one that lets the users dictate (to whatever degree) what resources and services the site serves up.  If you’re looking to move from the former to the latter model, Web 2.0-style applications are definitely worth considering, given the clear potential they have–as even Nielsen grudgingly admits–for leveraging humans’ natural impulse to engage in social networks.  If you can successfully tie those social networking activities back in to the timely delivery of resources, tools and information on your intranet, then you’re well on your way to improving its service model.

Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability (O’Reilly Books, 2005) is an engaging, readable survey of the many wayfinding and networking technologies that have reconfigured our cultural landscape over the past decade or so.  Beginning with a meditation on how the “humble keyword” has teamed with the richness of the World Wide Web to deliver a previously unimaginable range of information resources and consumer choices, and proceeding through brief histories of wayfinding and information interaction, Morville hits his stride in central chapters on “intertwingling,” “push and pull” and “the sociosemantic web.”  

Borrowing the notion of intertwingling from hypermedia pioneer Ted Nelson, Morville waxes poetic in describing the brave new world where ubiquitous computing and the latest networking technologies conjoin to “import vast amounts of data about the real world” into our virtual information environments.  Any time we click on a hypertext link, toggle a remote control, or dial a cell phone, Morville observes, we partake of the fluid, nonlinear movement–often spanning “vast semantic distances in the space of a second”–that characterizes the bewildering/beatific state of “intertwingularity.”

Morville’s sense of wonderment at how ever-new combinations of “findable objects, tangible bits, wearables, implants and ingestibles” are creating “a realm in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime”–i.e., the realm of ambient findability–is boundless and contagious. After the first few chapters his perpetual tone of fascination tinged with awe begins to wear a bit thin, however.  It’s not that he runs out of interesting and provocative things to say, but rather that he attempts to touch on so many subjects that he’s forced to skate somewhat dizzyingly across the surface of most of them.  When he does slow down enough to construct a focused argument–for example, on the need for information architects to embrace search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to ensure that the sites they labor over are actually findable from outside their organization, or on the continuing value of the concept of the “document” in the face repeated claims of its imminent demise–he exhibits the kind of nuanced, far-sighted wisdom one would expect from one of the founding fathers of information architecture.  

Unfortunately, for the better part of the book’s 179 pages Morville wrestles with the inherent problem in attempting to survey several overlapping disciplines: the need to touch on every facet of his subject pushes him to string together superficial concatenations of related topics, rather than allowing him to develop a coherent and convincingly detailed argument.  With the exception of an intimate anecdote in which he relates how he discovered the solution to his chronic back pain by way of a last-ditch search on Amazon.com, the book lacks the kinds of telling anecdotes, in-depth examples and case histories that can help give broad surveys a more satisfying bite and depth.  

Interestingly, when I attended Morville’s presentation on “ambient findability, libraries and the Internet of things” at the American Library Association’s annual conference in June (around when I was making my way through the middle third of Ambient Findability), I found that his linked explorations came across much better as a longish slideshow than in book format.  As an audience member I was perfectly happy to enjoy the patter accompanying his slides’ illustrations and ignore the breezy segues between them, but as a reader of a book built on the same material I found myself losing patience with its abandoned assertions and unexplored opportunities.  Much as I admire the work Morville has done and continues to do on behalf of information architecture and user experience design, I have to admit that Ambient Findability left me with a vague aftertaste of disappointment.  Hopefully Morville’s insatiable curiosity and an impressive breadth of knowledge and experience–which come across loud and clear in this book, despite its general breeziness–will translate into a more satisfying end product the next time he tries his hand at a full-length study.

Dan Brown’s Communicating Design contains a wealth of examples of the ten main types of documentation that can inform a web site design.  Brown begins by describing three key user needs documents (personas, usability test plans, and usability reports), then moves on to discussing strategy documents (competitive analyses, concept models, and content inventories) and ends with a detailed analysis of four types of design documents (site maps, flow charts, wireframes and screen designs).

Along the way he provides rich discussions of the different approaches you might take to each document based on your particular audience and situation.  For example, he notes that a more narrative-based style might be more appropriate for presenting personas when your audience consists of stakeholders who are not particularly concerned about the technical details of user needs.  On the other hand, a “table” or “quick and dirty” approach might work better for designers who need an easy way to compare designs to user needs, or when your project doesn’t afford much time for user research.  He even provides sample layouts for each of these presentation styles.

Brown is particularly good on wireframes (both the HTML and paper varieties), providing rich descriptions of different layers you can add to your wireframes to address specific challenges.  This section also includes a recipe for “pain-free” wireframe creation and thoughtful tips for presenting wireframes to different types of audiences (e.g., business leads, engineers or visual designers).  His “They Say > You Say” suggestions for redirecting wireframe conversations when they start to go astray are priceless.

My one complaint about the book is that it’s surprisingly wordy: I would have preferred more annotated examples in place of some of the longer descriptive sections.  You may prefer (like me) to spare your eyes the strain of reading the 339 pages of smallish Bembo text by scanning it instead—but then stopping to dive in more deeply to the more compelling bits as you see fit.  Despite its occasional long-windedness however I would highly recommend “Communicating Design,” and suspect it will be one of those super-handy cookbooks you’ll find yourself returning to again and again.

With the advent of RIAs and Web 2.0 applications, are we entering a brave new world of web design & information architecture, or is it the same old same old but with a new face?  Or does it even make sense to ask the question this way?