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Information

Architecture

Essentials

a workshop with Andrew Hinton & Dan Klyn at�

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Andrew Hinton @inkblurt�Co-founder of the IA Institute �Works as an IA consultant�Wrote a book: Understanding Context�

Dan Klyn @danklyn�Former Treasurer of the IA Institute�Teaches at the University of Michigan School of Information�Works as an IA consultant

Assistant on Richard Saul Wurman’s new book project

�Abby Covert @Abby_the_IA

President of the IA Institute�Works as an IA Consultant

Wrote a book: How To Make Sense of Any Mess

Introducing:

Exercises co-developed with

Abby as part of the

IA Summit 2015

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1990s

2000s

2010s

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150X/DAY

40HRS/MO

@davidpetersimon

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United States Of America by Joao Santos from the Noun Project

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Photo from Library of Congress Detroit Publishing Collection, Call Number LC-D4-3320

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Information architects do for digital products and services the same kinds of stuff that architects do for buildings: help people decide together to make meaningful and enduring changes to the environment that cost millions, impact the lives of thousands.

(Note the definition Wurman included on the book cover:

1) The individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear. 2) a person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge. 3) the emerging 21^st century professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding, and the organization of information.

Elsewhere Wurman has said: “I don’t mean a bricks and mortar architect. I mean architect as used in the words architect of foreign policy. I mean architect as in the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles to make something work--the thoughtful making of either artifact, or idea, or policy that informs because it is clear.”

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James Jerome Gibson (/ˈɡɪbsən/; January 27, 1904 – December 11, 1979)

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Information Architecture �is about the �structural integrity

of meaning�across contexts

What Things Are

@jarango

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!?!

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Shaping information architectures �to better ensure the realization �of experiences for users �that’re well- aligned with strategy

Ontology - Particular Meaning�What Things Are

Taxonomy - Arrangement of Meanings �Where Things Should Go�

Choreography - Stitching Experiences Together�How Things Connect

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What Things Are

Ontology: Particular Meaning

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The way in which you are and I am,

the manner in which we humans are is dwelling.�

��Dwelling itself is always

a staying with things.

- Martin Heidegger

We make structures in part because we sometimes want to stay in place, and we have things that we want to keep with us there, and good structures help us make sense of and understand all the things.

When we enclose ourselves in a structure with our things, we can start to make sense of the things and to make sense of the relationships between things and other things. And between things and ourselves. And when it’s time to make a change to those relationships, one way to affect that change among things and selves is by changing the structure enclosing us and our things. From the other direction, enough changes to the things inside the structure eventually necessitate change to the shape of the enclosing and underlying structures. So long as we stay among things, all of us are constantly using structures, and some of us need to be smart about making and changing them.

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Words And Pictures Help, Except When They Don’t

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What’s a hammer? What’s a store?

Facets

Location

Search

Learning

Relevance

Cross-selling

Utilities

Channels

Ontology is a big word but it’s becoming more important, because the more digital everything becomes, the more we have to explicitly decide what it means.

Even in a super-practical sort of store like Lowe’s, there are lots of complexities.

>>

In a store like this, they have to define what a hammer is, so that when you search for it. They have to prioritize by relevance – what rules and metadata come in to play for creating that order?

They have to worry about what geographical location you’re in, so they know what is available for you nearby, but they have to make sure you know they picked a store for you.

They have to define the facets that we use to filter and browse the product.

And not only that – retailers are having to branch out to provide a lot of the contextual knowledge and software mechanisms that support everything about what you’d use a hammer for, and how you’d use it.

>>

And THEN they have to be sure that all those structures and definitions and rules translate into other channels and devices.

This is an aspect of information architecture that is often overlooked – because typically folks start a project assuming everyone already understands what a hammer is, or what a store is. But those assumptions can get us in trouble. So we’re going to spend some time at the beginning of the day laying some big-idea foundations about why deciding what things are is so important, from an architectural point of view.

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What Do We Mean �When We Say What We Say?

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“Interested”

≠

“Like”

*hypothetical wireframe

But in digital environments, it’s not like drawing a wall and then seeing a wall built where you drew it. You can create a wireframe like this, for example, that simply outlines what should show up in a news application. It specifies that the recommended interest story function display content using an introductory slug – then listing the article name.

>> Only to discover that the way it ends up being made in the world has effects far different from what you intended. Who in their right mind would ever “like” a story as horrible as this?

>> Not only that – but your structure you put into the world gets repurposed and commented upon in contexts you may not have considered – as in this bit of snark from someone we know. Her comment is about content strategy and “UX” but the root of this problem lies in how CNN defined what “Like” would mean, and the rules behind it.

Structures exist in environments and ecosystems ((LASH AND TETHER))

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environment

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structures exist in environments and ecosystems

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information isn’t just one thing

Machine to Machine

Person to Person

Body to Environment

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Some of you may have heard of something called “affordance” – it was popularized by Donald Norman, but the idea originated with a scientist named James J Gibson, who invented a groundbreaking way of understanding how perception works.

The way Gibson talked about affordance was that it’s the properties of objects and surfaces in our environment that afford particular action for animals, based on the structural relationship between the animal’s body and the environment. The ground affords standing and walking upon. Air affords walking through. A tree branch affords grasping.

A frog can grab a fly out of the air with a sticky tongue – there are a lot of affording properties in those objects that allow that to occur. It affords the frog the ability to eat; it affords the fly the ability to be eaten.

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Invariants are important for semantic information, not just physical stuff.

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Semantic Information Across Layers & Channels

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What Do We Mean �When We Say What We Say?

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Each category valorizes

some point of view and

silences another.

Peter Morville

Intertwingled

Semantic Studios, Ann Arbor

2015

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What Do We Mean �When We Say What We Say?

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Words

We

Don’t

Say

Kurt Anderson

New York Magazine

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Break

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What Are The Things?��Pair off and dig into the world of the retail catalog you’ve been given. On what bases are these people thing-ing in their catalog? Make a bubble diagram to differentiate among clusters of more and less related things in order to arrive at a configuration of bubbles which indicates the relative sizes and meanings of the clusters.��Start with the biggest thing, and the slightest thing. How many orders of magnitude bigger is one from the other? How much overlap or circumscription is true based on what you see in the catalog? ��After setting up biggest and slightest, next you can ask: what are the least and most connected things of all the things?

Activity:

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Note: The Ontology of Shapes

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Where Things Go

Taxonomy - Arrangement of Meanings

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Andy Fitzgerald @andybywire

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Lists

Hierarchies

Polyhierarchies

Continuums

Matrices

Facets

System maps

etc …

taxonomy�Not just hierarchy

“the rules or conventions of order or arrangement”

Organising Knowledge

- Patrick Lambe

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Socks

faceted classification�Many relationships between

There are many ways of ordering, rather than a single, fixed hierarchy.

String multiple taxonomies together at once…

S.R. Ranganathan

1892 – 1972

http://w3.uniroma1.it/

_{color::pattern::material::function::length}

_{blue::solid::nylon::dress::14in}

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Where does this go?

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What’s next?

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ORDERLY

≠

ORDER

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“Taxonomies provide the lenses by which we perceive and talk about the world we live in.”

- Patrick Lambe, Organising Knowledge

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places made of connected language

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Web Store

Physical

Store

Books

Poetry

we understand places as “nested” structures

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taxonomy of place, not just objects

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Web Store

Physical

Store

Books

Poetry

people encounter the ‘what’ …

Information on 3^rd party platforms (maps, review sites, etc.)

3^rd party book retailers

Cultural history…

…across many contexts.

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Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind

“culture”

“love”

“fun”

“nature”

“jazz”

“economy”

“smart”

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“Recipe Box” – Desktop Web + Mobile App

Membership Card – Physical + Virtual

ecosystems made of language

But as we know, the world has gotten a lot more complex than websites and brick-and-mortar stores. As if that wasn’t complicated enough – we now have these information ecosystems that require definition and understanding by customers and users.

At Wegman’s – a high-end grocery store chain in the northeast – they added recipes and a “recipe box” to your relationship with the brand. Things that weren’t something you’d expect from a grocery store before. And they’re having to instantiate it across mobile and desktop, keeping everything synced together. It provides a place for making shopping contextually relevant.

Likewise they have a loyalty program with a membership card. And they’re having to go to lengths to explain how there is now a “virtual” card that works like your physical card. Because, after all, it’s all just semantic information anyway.

These things have to be defined – what is the card? What does it mean? At one retailer I worked at, everyone assumed the new loyalty card was meant to give you discounts – but it wasn’t at all, it was mainly for keeping track of what you bought at the store so you’d have the record of it online. The meaning of a loyalty card is in a cultural context, and in a business context, and lots of other layers of meaning.

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taxonomy = sensemaking

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taxonomy = placemaking

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Information Architecture �is a series of arguments�for arranging things�a particular way

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How are things arranged?

Propose a taxonomy strategy - aka an argument for a particular arrangement of the things -- for your brand based on the brief of your intended audience.

Activity:

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How Things

Choreography - Stitching Together Experiences

Should Connect

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Architecture is a choreography of the familiar and the surprising.

Charles Moore

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COMPOSITION

The ‘rules’ make dynamic systems out of labels & relationships …

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Links create rules.

(And rules can change links.)

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Information = multimodal

Machine to Machine

Person to Person

Body to Environment

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Chris Risdon / Adaptive Path -- http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/the-anatomy-of-an-experience-map/

products/services = multimodal

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The ‘rules’ make dynamic systems out of labels and relationships.

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Rules For How Things Should Connect

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Rules For How Things Should Connect

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Based on the conceptual model and taxonomy strategy you’ve developed, make a diagram to depict some of the ideal choreography that’d happen in the word-world you’ve created thus far.

Or: make a list of the kinds of choreography your model and strategy preclude or are meant to preclude.

Final Activity: