Usability Blog – Consequencing

Interesting looking book coming out soon on web standards and findability. We design with web standards at the University of Salford, and our search engine results seem pretty good for both the Staff Channel and the Student Channel.

Just booked my ticket for the Information Architecture Summit Europe 2007. It’s in Barcelona at the end of September. I’m doing a poster on Taxonomy in Higher Education. Some great sessions, which it’s going to be hard to choose between. And I’m really looking forward to meeting more people who work in the fields. I only met one information architect at the Institutional Web Management Workshop. If you’re going to Barcelona, give me a heads up and lets meet up!

Link to my guest blog entry which Brian Kelly asked me to write for UK Web Focus: reflections on the web. The theme was some ideas to think about before my talk at the Institutional Web Management Workshop on The Promise of Information Architecture

Just got back from this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop where I gave a plenary on The Promise of Information Architecture and ran a workshop on Information Architecture in Practice.

During the plenary, I asked the audience how many institutions had at least one full-time information architect. Only three hands went up – and I suspect that most of those, if not all, were from St Andrews. So, it’s still a very small community. However, there seems to be some interest in the topic. I hear the phrase mentioned by people, and there was a good turn out for my workshop.

I had various activities planned for the workshop, but in the end, we only had time for the one on ‘what is information?’ The questions sounds easy enough, but it’s a good one. And where does knowledge fit in with the information archtecture role. Some academics argue that there is a level beyond knowledge, and that’s wisdom. Although, presumably, you have to be a professor to have wisdom

The rest of the workshop turned into an IA surgery, and I really enjoyed the discussions which came out of the questions people brought. We discussed, amongst other things, the relationship between information architecture and usability, governance, user testing, faceted taxonomies and portals.

I see that ask.com is know using thesaurus concepts. Search for a term, and look at the left hand bar. It includes options to expand your search, narrow your search or view related names (i.e. terms). It shows best bets, with more links for further options. This application if information architecture concepts is a huge leap forward for usability. Of course, it raises questions about the quality of the data. Can it be created by machine? Is it the job of a librarian? How do we take advantage of social tagging? I hope this facility will get people thinking about the funcationality of their institutional web search.

In this month’s .NET (issue 164 / July 2007) , Dave Chaffey advises a web designer who’s client who has changed their business name and needs redirects to a new domain name. Dave says that if the new site has a new URL structure / information architecture, the web author should set up mapping at page level.

Okay, let’s do a little experiment. How about transposing the words ‘information architecture’ with the second definition provided by the Information Architecture institute. How does it look now?

“[if] the new site has a different [art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability and findability] you should set up mapping at the page level”

The confusion of this sentence arises from the nature of information architecture. It is a multi-displinary strategic approach, whereas url structure is a specific activity which is a part of information architecture. It is vital that the complexity of information architecture is recognised, otherwise we will have web designers and web authors thinking that information architecture is something they do, and us information architects will have to reinvent the discipline to distinguish what we do.

Perhaps we need to set up an IA Watch organisation to look out for and challenge misuse of the term before we have to start talking about ‘Real Information Architecture’.

My review of the third edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web has been published in Ariadne.

It’s great to see that information architecture is becoming more present. In a survey last week by Netskills to see what training people want, information architecture was listed as one of the suggestions. And Oxford University advertised a post recently which included information architecture, although it was just for the student portal, so not the institutional level architecture which I am more interested in. This leads me to believe that the word information architecture is sometimes used when people are struggling with their web presence, but can’t really put their finger on the problem. I sometimes wonder if we’d be better off calling ourselves ‘institutional findability architects’. At least then, people might have a better idea of what we actually do.

I’ve been looking at the features of Google Mini. One set of documentation says that stemming isn’t possible, another set of documentation says that it is.