UserInterface Roundtable: Foundations

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User-Interface Roundtable Foundations February
11th, 2005 Nathan F. Piazza
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1990-? Two Cultures of Web Software Design
Coders - understand digital systems - crave and
thrive on consistency, rigidity, highly specific
articulations of problems - let machines
handle minute details, that's what they're good
at - functionality is self-evident to
intelligent people who take the time to
understand the system - like
standards Graphic Designers/Marketers -
understand form - crave and thrive on freedom,
flexibility, and solve problems through
process - design the minute details, that's
where the devil is - a beautiful site with a
strong brand is the best site - standards are
subordinate to aesthetics and message
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1996-2002 The Age of Nielsen
Jakob Nielsen makes "Usability" a household
word - makes developers aware that user issues
are about more than aesthetics/business logic
and that a technically robust system is not
necessarily easy to use - sets down highly
prescriptive, rigid guidelines ALL LINKS MUST BE
BLUE! - by being so prescriptive, obscures the
real problems and methodologies
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Enter Information Architecture 2000-Present
A Group of Young Developers Reshapes Web
Development Christina Wodtke Jesse James
Garrett Challis Hodge Erin Malone - User
Experience is about more than "usability" - It
is about a commitment to testing and retesting
with real users - It is about taxonomies and
library science - It is about leveraging
emerging basic research in cognitive science -
and then refining the lessons learned in an
applied context - Nielsen's prescriptive
approach might have prevented a multitude of
blunders, but every organization needs a
role-player who can steward these issues. This
person is the Information Architect.
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Information Architects
- understand interactive form, not just graphic
form - crave and thrive on organization and
order, but value process highly and, most of
all, testing - design the site structure in
detail - functionality is only as self-evident
as you design it to be, even for highly
Intelligent users - standards are good when
they serve usablity - finally the SOFTWARE is
the DOCUMENTATION
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Higher Ed is Behind, But Catching Up
Who hires Information Architects? -Google,
Yahoo, IBM, Microsoft, Anyone for Whom Web
Software is a primary Business - Increasingly,
most of the Fortune 500 - A year ago, few higher
ed institutions had Information Architects. Most
still don't. - UVa needs to get out in front of
this issue 1. Train existing staff
conferences, literature, websites (like the
UIRoundtable) 2. Hire New Staff - This is hard
because the core competencies are recently
developed
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Who Does Information Architecture Now?
- Managers, based on gut instinct about what is
politic and necessary negotiating with -
Coders, who are generally annoyed by users and
their concerns and who Are especially annoyed
by - Graphic designers, who work mostly from a
sense of taste, instinct, or education that
often does/did not involve interactivity or
software tradeoffs.
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Deliverables What Do Information Architects
Produce?
1. Testing/Focus Groups (text, activity) How
will we find out what our users
want/need? Asking is more complex than you might
think. 2. Content Analysis/Task Analysis (text,
diagrams) What is the content? How does the
content organize itself? What precedents exist
for organizing it already? Are they
adequate? What are the processes to be modelled?
3. Wireframes (diagrams, mockups) Basic
outlines of page views with navigation, form
conventions, generic buttons, tabs, etc. 4.
Taxonomies (text, data, diagrams) What is the
stuff being dealt with? Above the DB level 2.
Rubrics (text, data) What will the metrics of
success be? ALL THE WHILE LEVERAGING AND
EVALUATING INDUSTRY BEST PRACTICES
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EXAMPLE Cisco.com 2004
Information Architects working for SBI.Razorfish
produced many HUNDREDS OF PAGES of documents
before a LINE OF CODE WAS WRITTEN, Including -
a great quantity of statistics gleaned from user
interviews and existing site metrics -
taxonomic data for Cisco's large catalogue of
products - a wireframe for every page type that
would eventually be on the site with
accompanying text explanations - a plan for
measuring the success of the site rollout
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The Future Beyond Usability to Social Software
Insight web software is not just about function,
but about connecting users To other users as
resources. Examples - del.icio.us -
Audioscrobbler - technorati tags - affinity
networks - flickr