By Andrea Ames | Fellow, and
Alyson Riley| Member
This column explores the strategic aspects of information architecture and the tools to equip information architects (IAs) for success. Topics will address the business, strategy, user experience, and implementation of strategic information architecture, including organizational, content management, and tactical considerations. Send your comments, questions, and suggestions for future articles to thestrategicia@pobox.com.
In the last ISSUE, we discussed social media in the context of strategic information architecture. In keeping with this issue’s theme, we’ll explore the strategic and architectural dimensions of multimedia.
Defining Multimedia
Before we begin, let’s be sure that we share a common understanding of “multimedia.” The etymology is simple: multi + media
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Multi, from the Latin multus, meaning “much” or “many”
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Media, the plural form of the Latin medium, meaning “an intervening agency, means, or instrument”
In our world, the medium is an intervening agency between our message or communication and our users—that is, the receivers of that message. The message or communication is our content, and back in the old days, we considered “print” (or physical/hardcopy) and “online” to be our two technical communication media or “intervening agencies.”
In reality, clearly defining “intervening agency” is not so easy. Many factors can intervene between the message (content) and receiver (user) not just the medium. Today, what typically comes to mind when we hear “multimedia” is one or more of the following:
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Text
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Audio
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Static images (either drawings or photographs)
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Moving images—a series of consecutive drawings or photographs presented in rapid succession to simulate natural movement
Any of these can be provided physically or online.
The implication of this terminology exercise is that the four “media” that we typically associate with “multimedia” (text, audio, still image, moving image) are simply presentation formats just like those we associate with information design, such as table, ordered list, and unordered list. (We don’t think that this is particularly controversial, but if you disagree, we look forward to your email.)
Why do we dissect the word “multimedia” and define it and related terms so extensively? Having a definition gives us a way to start relating “multimedia” to other concepts in the content development and information architecture environment, such as “content” and “navigation.” We also find the architectural approach implied in the definition. If multimedia is simply a presentation format, what does that mean for us as architects, designers, and writers of multimedia content? Is “video” the thing that I develop? Or is it “content that is best expressed in moving pictures”?
An IA’s Conceptual Model for Multimedia
Marlana Coe, in Human Factors for Technical Communicators, includes the concept of medium in her “human factors metaphor for technical communication” (3). Her metaphor depicts a user and her world as the center of concentric circles representing the content and several “intervening agencies” (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. Coe’s model.
The core idea in Coe’s model is that the user operates in her world, and our content comes to her in that context. Before she can access and understand the content, however, she must get through the “intervening agencies,” starting with medium (print or online), moving through navigation, then the presentation of the content, and finally getting to the content itself.
We suggest that today’s model looks more like this:
Figure 2. Our model.
Given this proposed model, consider the following:
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“Content” is our message—the pure idea that we’re trying to communicate
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“Presentation” is the form, format, or design of that message—a visual, aural, or textual representation or presentation of the idea
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“Delivery mechanism” (or deliverable) is the method by which we deliver that message in the chosen form or format—the book, video, podcast, diagram, Help system, etc., each of which falls into one of two categories: physical/hardcopy or online (some fall only into one or the other; others can be provided in either)
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“Navigation” is the means by which we access the deliverable—search, browse, etc. and is typified by one or more navigation mechanisms, such as tables of content, navigation trees, tag clouds, search engines, etc.
In other words, a delivery mechanism might be a book, which could be printed, that contains multiple presentation formats or designs of the information, including text, static images, and moving images (remember the flip book? Google it!). Another deliverable might be a product demo on YouTube (putting it in the “online” category) that contains multiple presentation formats, including static and moving images and audio.
Differences between the models might appear subtle, but the impact of those differences is significant in the resulting information experience. For example, worrying about “online” vs. “print” from a delivery perspective (Coe’s definition of “medium”) is barely a blip on the modern IA’s radar. It’s pretty clear that in my effort to get to content:
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I first have to find it (navigation)
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I then have to understand how to use the mechanism by which it’s delivered to me (this might be very easy for common mechanisms like books or more difficult for mechanisms that the user is not familiar with)
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When I finally get to see the content itself, I first have to parse the presentation of it and determine what those presentation choices are telling me about the content (if I’m seeing an ordered list, for example, I might assume that I’m looking at task information)
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Now I can read the words, watch the moving pictures, listen to the audio, etc., and hopefully easily understand the messages in the content
And all of these “intervening agencies,” as well as the order in which the user encounters them, must be considered by you, the IA, when designing your content.
An IA’s Guide to Multimedia
Here are some considerations for designing multimedia into our customers’ (or our clients’ customers’) information experiences.
Content is king. Always. It doesn’t matter what the presentation format is. Consider your messages first.
What is the best way to present your message? It might be a table or a still image. It might be an ordered list.
Will my users need to refer to it? Some presentation formats do not lend themselves to reference. In other words, how will the user find that three-minute explanation that is buried in your video or podcast? And if you have to provide it elsewhere for reference, what is the added value of the audio or moving-image version? Is that added value worth the development and maintenance resource required?
Will my users be able to add value to it? In our last column, we discussed the ways that additional content contributed by users through social media can add value to your original content and keep it fresh; this is true of traditional text content and multimedia content. Consider opportunities for encouraging the growth of social content around your multimedia content. Can your users readily rate, comment, discuss, share, like, and link to your multimedia content?”
Will it need to be translated or made accessible? If so, you might have to provide several recordings or voice-overs in different languages, or a text version that a screen reader can decipher. Depending on your resources, this could be a deal breaker. Don’t forget about maintenance. If you change anything, you’ll have to re-record all of your audio and update the text script.
Be proactive. Models are an architect’s best friends. If you’re getting a lot of requests and demands from marketing, R&D, or other groups to produce multimedia and trying to balance those requests against some pushback from your technical communication team—or if you and your team are pushing for multimedia but your company is reluctant to invest—there are some practical actions you can take. Define the ways in which you, your team, your organization, your company will use various presentation formats and get agreement from all your stakeholders. Develop a model that prescribes what kinds of content get delivered in what delivery vehicle and presentation method. Be sure your model considers the types of content, such as product overviews, concepts, tasks, etc., as well as delivery mechanisms, navigation, and development and maintenance resources.
Keep it real. Everyone uses multimedia, and everyone has opinions about it. You must involve your users in order to tease out reality from individual perceptions. Once you’ve developed your multimedia model, validate it with real users of your content using real examples of content and in real-world situations. Users may tell you that they want to listen to a technical podcast while riding their bike; in reality, however, it may be hard for them to retain complex technical information delivered only in an auditory format. Using real content and observing users in real-world working contexts will provide you with the reliable data you need to create a solid architectural model that includes multimedia presentation.
Teach your team. We suspect that your writers typically “design” your information—that is, decide whether bulleted lists or tables are appropriate for specific kinds of messages. If so, you need that multimedia model even more. Create it, get buy-in for it, and use it to teach your team to appropriately select presentation types like moving images or audio.
Measure your impact. If you’re incorporating multimedia for the first time, establish a set of metrics that will allow you to weigh your impact, pre- and post-implementation. If you’re looking for tools to convince your colleagues on the financial side of the house to fund multimedia development, find ways to measure the ROI of multimedia against that of traditional static text—think about things like mindshare (including social capital metrics such as number of views, shares, likes, etc.), time to value (including metrics such as speed of comprehension, speed of task completion, etc.), and customer satisfaction.
And the Pressure’s On …
If you’re like us, you’re getting a lot of pressure to incorporate “movies” or “videos” in your information strategies and content. These requests are coming in from all sides: development, marketing, support, etc. And the pressure can come from a lot of places—from the desire to participate in social media or the need to manage one’s brand in current high-impact venues such as YouTube. However, this pressure can also come from an old, old problem, one that IAs have faced before: the “fix it in the doc” approach of years gone by. Yikes!
No matter your work context, most IAs today are pressured to incorporate multimedia content into their information strategies. And while we’re all feeling the pressure, we observe that it’s especially intense for those IAs who are working with product documentation. It’s that particular context and the “fix it in the doc” pressure that we want to explore a little further.
Let’s consider video as an example. YouTube is cheap and easy and plentiful, and a little exploration reveals that it contains a plethora of technical product movies, including demos by real people showing other real people how to use products in real-world contexts. You can find this “third-party documentation” at Amazon.com and in other product-selling contexts as well. Add to this situation the exponential effect of social media, and you might see an explosion of this kind of information describing your product.
Our extended, cross-functional teams see and experience this phenomenon for themselves in their everyday lives, and many believe it to be the “solution” to many of the documentation challenges (dare we say problems?) with which IAs wrestle. The reality is that if we don’t understand the real-world contexts in which real people use our products, the moving-image information that we produce will be as flawed as our text documentation.
And creating poor-quality moving images is far more expensive than creating poor-quality text, compounded even further by adding audio to the equation. We often hear the argument that people without corporate resources are creating and publishing videos of “acceptable” quality—so how can it be that costly? If we’re providing that video content as private citizens, that’s a fine argument. Most of our companies or clients, however, are liable for the content that we produce and publish under their auspices. There are legal implications of this kind of warranted content, and we must take the same level of care when ensuring the quality of video content as we do with text. In our experience, poor-quality video is more obvious to viewers than poor-quality text is. And poor-quality video can damage a company or product’s reputation much more quickly and easily than the same level of quality in text.
For IAs, this means that we must understand the root causes of the requests for this kind of information and not just react to these requests to spec multimedia as a cure-all. It also means that the time-tested technique of focusing on the user, her goals and tasks, her work context, and her information needs will give us the tools we need to work with multimedia in a high-value manner. This is true of any demand for specific content, presentation format, delivery mechanism, or navigation approach. The sum of these “intervening agents” equals the information experience, for which we professional IAs must take responsibility and own. Always consider first your users, the root cause of the problem you are trying to solve for them, and the best way to solve that problem—content first, then presentation, delivery mechanism, and navigation.
Acknowledgments
We’d like to thank Jennifer Fell, information architect and client technical sales professional at IBM, who has contributed greatly to our thoughts and assertions about multimedia in IA.
Andrea Ames and Alyson Riley are veteran, strategic information architects with over 35 years of combined IA experience ranging from large enterprises to small start-ups and from commercial to public-sector/government to academic environments.
