The Image Lab » Information Architecture

Innie Once More

evoljennifer — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 12:25:14 +0000

The term “Innie” has been used amongst my colleagues to refer to an Information Architect that works inside a large organization. At the Information Architecture Summit in Phoenix this April, Dan Willis and Mags Hanley paid tribute to this concept (Innies vs Outies, a UX Death Match). I’m invoking the term here to refer to my new career adventure.

At the beginning of October, I joined the User Experience group at Oracle. A few weeks in and already I can see opportunities to contribute to this team to drive high quality interaction for all the constituents that need to interact with Oracle online. This is a pretty big task. However, I’ve been in this situation before and it’s exactly the kind of challenge that I find incredibly rewarding. I like big, gnarly, complex communication requirements. I like the set of challenges that come with “making the complex clear”. I’ve really been enjoying digging in.

As something begins it implies something has ended. In taking my new gig I had to leave my EightShapes colleagues. I’ve worked with them for many years. I met Nathan at an IA Summit based on conversations there we asked him to build a documentation system for the company I was working for at the time, Sun Microsystems. That was just the beginning of many projects.

As an employee and contractor with EightShapes, I was a trusted partner in the work I completed for clients. I learned a great deal working for and with Dan, Nathan, Dimple, Jason, John, Chris, Izac, PJ, James, José, David, Debbie, France, Anna, Geoff and our lovely and collaborative clients. I think they should know I appreciate it.

It’s been three years on the ‘Outside’. The skills I sharpened and the great projects I got to work on while consulting definitely gave me insight that I’ve been calling on in my current role. So, here’s to making the complex clear inside the organization.

My Voice and the IA Summit

evoljennifer — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:13:53 +0000

I’ve been thinking about the experience I had chairing the Information Architecture Summit. The event has been key to me throughout my career. I got involved in Septemeber of 2008 because I was called to help Samantha Bailey with the 2009 conference. She needed to know that her in process work chairing the event was going to be left in reliable hands. I took that responsibility on and due to that, had the honor of being the volunteer in charge of curating the event in 2010. In retrospect, I wanted to share some of my thoughts.

CHOICES TO BE MADE

As the chair, I was empowered to make decisions. These are the some of the things I decided:

1) Most of the conference speakers are amongst us. They are our colleagues and they are sharing to help all of us grow.

There has been much talk about how the conference needs to be one track. Well, I remember the days when it was one track and the thing is it’s not TED. This is a practitioner conference.

That does not mean we shouldn’t try it. But consider this…Isn’t thinking about how many tracks first sort of backwards? Content first. Forms follows content. (Maybe this is what the content strategists are trying to tell us….)

An example from the planning this year – the conference was originally 3 tracks. We got so many great submissions, I made a game time call to add a track. We had the content. Why restrict it based on a notion of the format?

2) Keynotes & Plenaries

I outlined goals for the keynote and the closing speakers. I had an archetype in my mind of how I wanted the keynotes to impact the event. I then searched for people who met my criteria. I sought out lots of advice as well and got assistance from past IA Summit conference chairs and advisors.

Dan Roam

On day 1, Dan Roam painted the picture.

For the first day keynote, I wanted the kind of person that would lift the attendees up and provide a combination of forward thinking and orthogonally related value.

One person I was really excited about getting to speak was robotics professor Cynthia Breazeal but she was not available.

Many lists were shared with the advisors – and then Dan Roam‘s name came up……that clicked. I knew he would be very engaging and he would relate to the audience in a way that would fit within the framework of the event and provide value to the attendees.

Listen to Dan’s talk.

Richard Saul Wurman

Richard Saul W urman – Where the heck did he come from?

RSW came to us through the people in the community. Dan Kly n submitted a proposal to have a session with RSW. When I saw it I contacted Dan right away to find out more about this. Through several conversations a plan was hatched and RSW was coming to speak on the second day of the three day event. Symbollically this was important to me because one of the things he always talks about is “the spaces in between”. The opinions of his appearance at the event were varied. He caused much discussion and people were either very happy or very upset about the things he said and the manner in which he delivered those messages. BUT-he is ‘the guy’ who wrote the INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE book. So there’s that. You know, history? As the event chair, I didn’t think that kind of serendipity should be ignored. So we made it happen.

Listen to RSW’s talk.

Whitney Hess

How and why I chose Whitney Hess as the closing speaker.

I saw Whitney speak at the IA Summit in Memphis. I was never more inspired by someone at an Information Architecture related event than her. She made me want to do better work. She inspired me to think more deeply about it each day. That was the person I wanted speaking to everyone just before they left the conference that I led. The goal was inspiration. Sure it’s esoteric, but I think energy is essential to push us through challenges. Isn’t that part of what these conferences should provide? She brought that to the event in a way that nobody else could have.

Listen to Whitney’s talk.

3) The Theme

Once the keynote speakers were in place and the proposals were chosen, we had a schedule. I felt the keynotes presented a trifecta of varied and appropriate personalities to frame the event. This trifecta was part of a whole story about my thinking around the theme.

It was a two part theme:

I believe what I said to open the event sums up why I chose the theme.

“Why “This one Goes to 11?” It’s a cultural reference and it aides us in building connections. Connections to each other strengthen our community. These connections are strengthened even further when we come together and meet in person to share, listen, collaborate and hopefully disagree. When we come together we inevitably have those hallway conversations. Every year that I have attended the IA Summit, I’ve heard people say that exact phrase, ‘the best conversations happen in the hall.’ But those hallway conversations have context when we gather, they are fueled by the input we experience and a continuation of the discussion.”

Dan Roam helped us think about communicating visually.
RSW spoke to us about getting out of the notion of thinking about the ‘modality’ so much.
Whitney reminded us that anyone can at anytime be a hero for the user and that great ideas are just that – ideas. We need to work with the people that build the ideas to make them real.

THE PERSONAL TOLL

I was a volunteer. Since I helped Samantha with the 2009 IA Summit, I was at it for 20 months. It took many hours every week to make sure things were pushing ahead. Events like this tend to have lots of opinions without manpower behind them. When people offered advice, I did what I could to balance the value of the idea and the lack of resources. In the end, I’m pretty happy with all that we got done.

I started getting help from Abby Covert around October 2009. Her contribution was essential. We would not have gotten across the finish line without her. We reached out to people through Twitter and got more help. Lots of people contributed to the event and it would not have been the same without those contributions. I am grateful for every single person who helped.

NEXT YEAR

The thing that excites me the most about what happened this year is the fact that Livia Labate, the 2011 chair, is getting help. People are reaching out and sharing great ideas. I think that’s a remarkable outcome. Who could ask for more.

MY VOICE

Somehow in the process of all of this, I have felt oddly silenced by the experience. It might be due to the fact that I was focused on performing the role of conference chair as a way of exercising leadership and I have not yet identified a new goal. It might be related to something else. For two years, I didn’t feel it was appropriate for me to give a talk at the event because I was the chair and it would be inappropriate for the chair to take that opportunity from someone else. So even though I was able to orchestrate it, I was really only viewed as the person giving the announcements. It put me in a position that took me by surprise and I had an interesting revelation. Organizers are not seen as thought leaders but rather administrators. And in general administrators don’t have a voice because they are busy doing things behind the scenes.

I think that’s where my voice went. I started to respond to others because they had an assumption about me. As I’m slowly recovering from this, I’ve begun to get my voice back. One of the first things I felt should be shared out loud were the reasons behind my choices which were intentional not accidental or administrative.

SOME ADVICE

I learned so much working on the event. Here are some of the most valuable lessons that came out of it for me:

When you take on something bigger than you, understand it will consume you
Let it guide you as much as you intend to guide it
Leave room for serendipity
Have a plan, but be willing to adjust
Great ideas are plentiful, dependable volunteers are rare – discern the difference quickly
Grow a thick skin

I want to thank the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) for presenting the IA Summit throughout the years. They are the sponsoring organization and the people there do all they can to support us. I enjoyed my time working with them as a volunteer.

And on to IA Summit 2011 in Denver.

View my photos from the IA Summit on Flickr.

Women Speaking at the Information Architecture Summit

evoljennifer — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 05:54:24 +0000

Over the past two years I’ve been involved in the Information Architecture Summit programming.

This is an event sponsored by the American Society for the Information Age (ASISI&T). The event occurs April 7-11th in Phoenix, AZ.

In honor of Ada Lovelace Day I wanted to thank the women that will be speaking at the event. The willingness of each of them to share knowledge at this event is a generous and valuable act. We grow in our profession by showing up at events like this conference, sharing and taking that knowledge back to our work.

Thanks to all the people willing to do this. They are my heroes this Ada Lovelace Day.

In addition to the speakers, I want to send out a special thank you to the following women who volunteered their time to make the conference program and web site a reality:

Abby Covert
Livia Labate
Larisa Brandt
Mollie Clancy
Mags Hanley
Lori Baker
Sue Fensore
Dimple Mohan

The Gender of a Web Site Footer?

evoljennifer — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:28:04 +0000

I never thought about it before, but I guess in the process of anthropomorphizing, anything can be imbued with gender. Yesterday on Twitter – a couple of Information Architects stated their opinion on the topic.

Almost There

evoljennifer — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:54:28 +0000

I’ve had a second job for awhile. It’s a volunteer job. I’m on year two of co-chairing the IA Summit. We almost have the program ready this year. It’s been a long road but I think we’ve pulled together a great event that people are going to get value from. Working at my second job has definitely taken valuable blogging time this year, so I’m glad to see that I’m managing to push both forward at the moment. New habits for a new year, I guess.

So soon, the program will be live with registration, this is the Christmas morning anticipation I missed out on this year.

Conference Trip -Twitter as Diary

evoljennifer — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:15:22 +0000

This is the stream of tweets starting when I left Chicago for the conference. I thought it would be fun to make a blog post to capture the stream of consciousness that captured my IDEA 2009 experience. It was the first IDEA I have been able to attend since its inception a few years ago.

At the gate in Chicago -2 flights til Toronto- excited to attend @IDEA09 6:03 AM Sep 13th from Tweetie
@russu absolutely-so many stories-when do you arrive in Toronto? 8:10 AM Sep 13th from Tweetie in reply to russu
dear @livlab when you return from your run i have a present for you (i’m at the Sheraton) 3:07 PM Sep 13th from Tweetie
I’m heading to the Sheraton lobby now… RT @livlab: #idea09 peeps: when will lobby congregation commence? (via @mcarvin) 3:39 PM Sep 13th from Tweetie
finally met @theguigirl in real life AND she shared some bacon chocolate with me too #luckygirl 7:40 AM Sep 14th from web
Good thing @nathanacurtis brought all those extra scissors for @eightshapes workshop – #idea09 10:07 AM Sep 14th from Tweetie

And safe travel when they let you out. RT @livlab @semanticwill sending antibureaucratic thoughts your way. 11:33 AM Sep 14th from Tweetie
RT @gumptionthomas Facebook as landlord: “Sure, you can move out. But you need to leave your pictures, clothes, and furniture behind.”4:57 PM Sep 14th from Tweetie
do you have data in a google product?-YOU own it & they want you to be able to get it in and out easily
The Data Liberation Front (the Data Liberation Front)
Thanks to the volunteers #idea2009 8:19 AM Sep 15th from Tweetie

Tip for event MC’s be like @russu – bring your own laugh track 8:21 AM Sep 15th from Tweetie
@halvorson location…location…location – hope it was a really good egg 9:13 AM Sep 15th from Tweetie in reply to halvorson
Second speaker showing video I’ve already seen – #amitoopluggedintouserexperience? #idea09 9:25 AM Sep 15th from Tweetie
‘neither too chaotic or too routine’ that’s what humans thrive on #idea09 11:11 AM Sep 15th from Tweetie
Intriguing framework of architecting posed by @cwodtke illustrated by ‘our boys’ #idea09 1:09 PM Sep 15th from Tweetie

@akalata how about 7 in the lobby? we can go out side 4:39 PM Sep 15th from Tweetie in reply to akalata
when someone adds you to their mafia family PLEASE stop clicking on the link – bad things happen when you click the link #justsayin 4:40 PM Sep 15th from Tweetie
frack! i have no flight home after this trip to Toronto due to the confusion of a necessary rebooking! #madscramble 6:28 PM Sep 15th from Tweetie
ok – so now i have a flight home BUT i have to leave in the morning OR pay $900 to get there on thursday #traveliscomplicated 7:15 PM Sep 15th from Tweetie
@livlab at this point, it’s probably best to just ride the wave of social constructs discussion and late night burgers and fries #idea09 3:34 AM Sep 16th from Tweetie in reply to livlab
when i arrived home from #idea09 yesterday I closed my eyes for a little nap – 17 hours later I have awoken – good morning! #whyidonotnap 6:59 AM Sep 17th from Tweetie

Sharing the Wireframe Wealth

evoljennifer — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:02:06 +0000

A new blog to share UX deliverables launched recently. I became aware of it through a Twitter re-tweet.

I think this is a really useful idea. I’m a big supporter of sharing, I think it is the only way to help us evolve and advance our practice. The value IA/UX designers bring is not about the wireframes they produce but the thinking that goes into them. When we share these deliverables, the conversations that emerges is the conversation that will help us understand how to keep providing relevancy and value.

So head on over and share some wireframe love, or just peruse what has been shared so far.

Social Media is a useful term

evoljennifer — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 17:43:38 +0000

“Language is a virus from outer space.”

-William S. Burroughs

We evolve our language to allow us to communicate with each other. As there has been a great deal of change brought on because of the Internet, we have needed many new terms to describe this change. These terms have helped us to frame larger concepts. Our technology has given us abilities that alter our reality. I can communicate instantly with anyone in the world. This changes the game.

We’ve come up with all kinds of ways to describe what is happening. We might well have just gone back to McLuhan to find that this has all been predicted. But we must, because we are human, redefine it for ourselves.

I’d like to share some examples regarding what I mean when I say, we need this language.

Jesse James Garrett coined the term, AJAX. As I understand the story, he was trying to think of a way to communicate to a client some complex concepts. The technology for what he was describing had been around for awhile, but nobody had framed it as Jesse did. This framing made it a much more accessible concept and desirable as a tool for business and design.

Tim O’Reilly came along with his Web 2.0 conference. I don’t think I’ve met a marketing professional that doesn’t use the term, ‘web 2.0′ multiple times a day to attach the concept to the work they do. We need to understand the significant shifts that are occurring right now. Language helps us grok the bigger concept and discuss that concept and its details.

These words and phrases help us ‘contain’ something. They help us to understand it and communicate about it. Even though it’s not specific, it is useful.

Off To Canada

evoljennifer — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 12:30:03 +0000

I’m flying away to Vancouver, Canada today. I’m heading out to attend the 7th Information Architecture Summit. I’ve made it to this conference for 5 of the 7 and it’s been a big part of my career as an Information Architect. I’ve learned, seen, and evolved over that time. I’ve been doing this IA thing now for more than 7 years. I remember that first conference. It was such a rush to actually meet other people that had a job such as was describe in the O’Reilly Polar Bear Book. A third edition of that book has been commissioned by the original authors.

It’s been a thrill to be part of something like this. It’s given my career that sense of adventure and challenge I didn’t think was possible when I was in college. I never dreamed I’d be doing this. Now it’s off the Canada to meet up with my peers internationally and find out what’s been going on out there.

On my way home I get to stop by the campus in Menlo Park and meet with my co-workers about big project stuff. I’ll miss my husband and my doggies a ton. A week is a very long time when you are away from home. But as with all things there are trade-offs and I think they’d agree that this trade-off in order to be home all the time the rest of the time is a bargain.

On the road, new perspectives to be had. See you in Canada.

Developers should NOT, I repeat NOT develop user experiences

evoljennifer — Fri, 20 May 2005 13:52:00 +0000

Don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are amazing techies. They build code that makes things function in ways I could never imagine (on the back end) However, they should not ever design user experiences. The brain of a developer works in a very different manner. They don’t necessarily think about the user in a empathetic manner. They think about their system and how obviously someone should be able to figure it out. I mean of course the user spends time on all of our sites and applications and understands it’s a system that works in such a logical way….

User’s aren’t logical (necessarily) they are in a hurry and don’t spend nearly the time on something that you do! You’ve got to keep it simple, not logical, simple. I know how counter intuitive that sounds, but I should know I get lost more than most people. It is this trait that makes me that much better at the work I do.

This is a time of specialists, let us UXP people create the front and I promise I won’t write any code.