By Andrea Ames| Fellow
and Alyson Riley | Member
with special guest contributor Deirdre Longo
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.
Many information architects (IAs) are feeling the heat of mobile, of needing to integrate mobile into product and information user experiences. Mobile is a crucible—the pressure and constraints of the environment force IAs to figure out what’s important, to purify the user experience, to separate the essential from the waste. How does an IA make sense of mobile? What does mobile mean to the practice of our discipline?
First, we need to go back to the days of Marshall McLuhan and remember that everything is information, no matter how that information is rendered. Looking beyond the obvious, a decision is information; a task is information; an interface for enabling communication between human and tool is information. Many of us have thought for years that the boundaries (for example, in corporate environments where sheer issues of scale force practitioners to specialize) that we draw between people who work on different kinds of information are false, not to mention limiting. People-who-create-documentation, people-who-create-product-interfaces, people-who-create-graphics—you get the idea—are all people who create information. The successful IA in this new world order is a polyglot (if you’ll pardon the metaphor), fluent in the languages of content (text, image, sound) and interaction, who can determine which language (or combinations) best suits the audience needs of the moment and translate information in innovative ways given the constraints and opportunities of the environment—mobile or otherwise. The IA toolbox must include interaction design, interface design, product design, and visual design—but we’ve felt this way for a long time.
Second, we need to maintain our focus. Though the world of mobile offers mind-boggling opportunities for innovation, we need to remember that the core IA task in any design context remains the same: to target user needs with laser accuracy, then design and deliver the experience that best pairs user goals with the capabilities afforded by the technology or device at hand. The relatively small screen sizes of our mobile devices force us to eliminate noise, and the only way we can do so is by maintaining fanatic focus on the user. Jared Spool said it like this:
The megapixel real estate of the desktop screen allowed us to get a bit sloppy, permitting us to fill up the emptiness with confusing and cluttered functionality. Mobile applications refuse to tolerate that sloppiness. We need to think differently, looking at just the essentials of a great mobile experience. The best mobile applications cut down the functionality to just what makes the users successful…. On the surface, it feels like all the rules have radically changed. However, it’s the case that we’ve been preparing for all along. The commonality between desktop and mobile design is placing the user in the center. Mobile is a harsh mistress. She’s no longer putting up with what we’ve gotten away with on the desktop.
We eliminate the cognitive load on users by eliminating the user tasks, application functions, and information that just aren’t important—put another way, we “think more, create less.” It’s still audience and task analysis—it just looks a little more hip, and the stakes are higher. Be comforted: classic IA skills—such as the ability to “place the user in the center” by understanding user needs, motives, and tasks—will see us through this exciting transformation.
Third, we need to free our minds. With few entrenched conventions and often jaw-dropping technological capabilities, mobile turns us loose to imagine paradigm-changing experiences. In his article in the January 2012 edition of this magazine, Richard Saul Wurman imagines a new app that will “not merely archive presentations, as is currently the practice, but will offer a unique way to navigate, learn, and understand information based on one’s own personal journey and vast online resources.” In other words, we have an opportunity to free ourselves of the windows-and-hierarchies expectations of the past—and the “personal journey” is the key that unlocks the door. Paired with trends in IT innovation, mobile technologies provide us with never-before-seen ways of understanding exactly where the user is (mentally, physically) within their personal journey. Cartographic and spatial recognition technologies, global positioning systems (GPS), search analytics, natural language and data analytics (Google “IBM Watson” sometime!), image recognition, and advances in data visualization technology all give us transformative ways to understand and design for human intent, place, space, and trajectory. This sharpened, data-driven understanding of a user’s personal journey can help us create smart systems that eliminate many of the relatively dumb question/answer interactions to which users are accustomed in traditional computing contexts.
The Proving Ground
The models and methodologies for developing mobile content aren’t new. They’re the same as the best strategies we’ve been using for the past several years:
- Scenario-oriented information architecture, as part of an overall user-centered information development process
- Progressive disclosure of information, starting with embedded assistance
- Think more, write (or create) less
Although we’ve developed and educated around these models and methods for several years, moving an industry is slow. Mobile is forcing us to embrace these techniques more quickly.
Scenario-oriented information architecture and user-centered information development
Mobile isn’t just a small-screen version of the same application—the usage context and the scenarios are different, too. Development teams cannot expect to port applications from other environments to mobile, and nor should we. As with any new product, before we can design good information architecture, we have to understand the intended users, their experience, their context, their goals, and the tasks required to achieve those goals.
Some questions to answer:
- Is the mobile app a lightweight version of a full application?
- Will all users have familiarity with the full application that can give them context for their tasks with the mobile app?
- Are there tasks that are specific to the mobile app, and if so, what are they?
Scenario orientation is but one dimension of a suite of user-experience methodologies that we need to embrace. IAs who work in the product documentation domain can no longer sit on the sidelines of user-centered design, hoping that scraps of usability will trickle down to the information experience. We must drive product usability from the perspective of information. As Spool said, mobile real estate will not tolerate sloppiness, and neither can we.
Progressive disclosure of information and embedded assistance
Most users don’t follow help links in desktop and web applications, and they are even less likely to do so in mobile environments. Mobile apps must be designed for easy navigation and use. In addition to well-designed interactions, the text in the app itself (labels, input hints, and other static text) is critical to making the app easy to use. The lack of hover capabilities in the mobile environment removes an element of embedded assistance, putting even more emphasis on the text that is persistent in the UI. We must ensure that we have a model for the information that uses every bit of available text in the most effective way, without redundancy, and provides a way for users to get more information when necessary.
Think more, write less
We must carefully assess the skills of our writing teams to determine whether our writers can apply these models, methods, and strategies. Writing embedded assistance doesn’t mean editing user interface strings for capitalization; it means advocating changes to interaction designs, driving selection of clear and consistent terms, and writing more when, and only when, it’s needed.
When we’re thinking about users who might access information for a full product from a mobile device, we need to think about how easy it is to find content, how frustrating it might be to compare multiple topics with similar content, how much more overwhelming high volumes of content become, and how easy it will be to become lost in a flurry of links.
While the core methods for developing our architecture are the same, the outcome must be a very different information experience—a different environmental paradigm for communicating to and with our users. How can that be? We follow the same methods and expect a different outcome? User-centered design methodologies—scenario-oriented development, contextual inquiry and design, user definition and persona development, user testing, user and task analysis—are designed for just this purpose. If you believe that these methods are only for designing and developing products, you’re in the right place: Content, information, communication, documentation—whatever name you give it—and the experience in which it is presented to the user, that’s our “product.” When we employ these user-centered design and development principles to our practice, we base our paradigm-changing mobile information experiences squarely on trusted, time-tested methods.
Implications for IA Careers
“But I’m a technical writer, information developer, information architect, content developer, ,” we might be thinking, “not a user experience designer.” We argue that we are, and always were, designing the information experience, no matter what you call us. If you’re feeling uncomfortable with this assertion, you’re not alone. For many of us, this is new territory—especially those who are new to information architecture and coming from traditional technical writing roles. If you think critically about your jobs and roles for the past 5 or 10 or more years, you probably notice a shift in focus, from developing traditional deliverables—perhaps at someone else’s insistence, such as development or marketing—to thinking in a more user-focused way about what we deliver and how. Now that our roles have started to shift, we’re seeing a potential role revolution on the horizon (if it hasn’t already hit you) due to mobile; we need to evolve our career-development focus as well.
First, consider developing or enhancing your leadership and influencing skills. You can’t change things if you’re not a change agent. Until you are leading the discussion, information might continue to be a secondary consideration in the discussion, even in the mobile discussion. That is—from our users’ perspectives—unacceptable. If you haven’t done so in a while, check out some of the latest thinking on leadership. We’ve provided some of our favorites in the Leadership Resources list to get you started. Your leadership skills will likely be very useful as your team evolves to develop mobile apps—especially if your team expects to port applications from other environments directly from mobile, without considering the vast differences between traditional and mobile environments.
Next, really beef up your user-centered design methods—as if you were a usability engineer! If this is a completely new concept to you, pick up a copy of Usability Engineering by Jakob Nielsen, and read chapter 4, “The Usability Engineering Lifecycle.” Read it with “information” in mind instead of “product” or “user interface.” By the time you’re finished, you will likely have identified several techniques that you already practice. If not, this will give you a place to start thinking about what you do in a different way. This will also provide you with a launching point for developing a more user-centered practice for information architecture and adopting any user-centered design methodologies that you are not already using (such as scenario-oriented development, contextual inquiry and design, user definition and persona development, user testing, and user and task analysis). Adopting these methods for your mobile information design will ensure the best experience in every dimension of your app.
Third, don’t abandon your information development roots! Just because you are adopting user-centered design principles doesn’t mean that you are not an information professional. Bring that rich information architecture experience to this new, opportunity-filled mobile landscape. Add your newly expanded user-centered and leadership techniques to your information architecture toolbox to create the smart, highly relevant mobile apps that users expect, eliminate the traditional information interactions they typically experience, and help to drive your team to do the same with the rest of the product and user experience.
Conclusion
In 1967—long, long before “mobile”—Marshall McLuhan said that “environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally.” With this statement, McLuhan offers IAs both a warning and an encouragement: process and content are things that IAs understand well, but we should be wary of applying old design outputs to new environments. Mobile devices are not just new containers for the same old content. Rather, mobile represents a blurring of information and interface that is spawning new norms and expectations in human-computer interaction. These new expectations have profound implications for our work. Once we got away with providing generic, one-size-fits-all experiences. Today’s users expect us to do the refining and filtering for them—that is, to deliver an experience that is significantly more relevant and personal, tailored to a specific user’s intent and trajectory. IA success in the mobile space does not require changes to the core methods, models, and principles of information architecture, but rather transformation in the nature of the experiences we deliver.
Leadership Resources
360-degree Leader, Attitude 101, Laws of Leadership, and Laws of Teamwork by John Maxwell
Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman
The Speed of Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey
The Wisdom of Teams by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith
Influencer by Kerry Patterson et al
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury
Leading Change by John P. Cotter
Deirdre Longo is a strategic information architect for Enterprise Content Management products at IBM. She has over 20 years’ experience in various technical communication roles: writer, project manager, technical editor, and IA. She is a co-author of Developing Quality Technical Information.
References
McLuhan, Marshall. Essential McLuhan. Edited by Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone. New York: Routledge: 1997.
Spool, Jared. “UX and Mobile Design: 2012’s Challenges and Opportunities,” User Interface Engineering blog, 31 January 2012,
www.uie.com/articles/ux_mobile_design_opps.
