Week 10: Civilizational architecture

This week’s reading: Burnett & Marshall, Chapters 2-4

This week’s reading discussed some of the identity and civilizational issues surrounding the Web. Though the discussion bore only tangential relevance to information architecture, IA is an important cog in the massive machine of the Internet, and as members of this “cybernetic” system, it behooves us as architects to understand how our society uses this machine – and how the machine is changing society.

The great strength of Web Theory thus far is its ability to recognize and examine facets of the Internet that are so obvious to its users that we’ve long since stopped noticing them. One can’t critically think about a social force one takes for granted. I was struck especially by the discussion of the “network society” – a succinct and precise description of a system where “geographical connections that are no longer grounded in physical communities but are connected through the flows of information weaken the patterns of the formerly spatially constructed communities and societies” (p. 41). I grew up in Florida, but I also grew up on the Internet – and you can see which stomping ground shaped my social life more when you know that my best friends live in New York, San Francisco, Charlotte, and Edmonton, not in Fort Myers.

The authors of Web Theory, moreover, are right to predict that the many-to-many communication facilitated by the Internet means that I have “weak tie” social links to a great diversity of acquaintances who I might never know in real life. My Web acquaintances span races and classes, and include homosexuals, bisexuals, and transgendered people, Muslims, Mormons, and Wiccans, world citizens from Austria to Australia, vegetarians, furries, and at least one person who knows vastly more than I do about any topic you can name. Correspondingly, I don’t feel the exclusive loyalty to my home community, alma mater, or local sports teams that my parents did (though I’ll cop to being a St. Petersburg Times fanboy). I’ve largely replaced identification based on where I live or where I grew up with identification based on my interests and identity.

And as for identity, I found Burnett and Marshall’s treatment of negative and positive effects of the Internet on the lives of its users to be amusing and full of truths. The “opposing” viewpoints they presented reminded me of nothing so much as the parable of the blind men and the elephant from a previous reading. It’s quite true, as Kraut in particular suggests, that some people use the Internet in a way that interferes with local social circles – and also true, as he speculates, that this use can cause feelings of alienation and anonymity. But it’s also true, as Pew found, that the Internet can strengthen our connections with friends and family. If Nie and Erbing find that Internet use results in “spending less time with or on the phone with family and friends” (p. 66), this could be because, as Pew says, Net users “have used e-mail to enrich their important relationships” (p. 67).

It’s tempting for Net businesses to seek ways to capitalize on the ability of the new generation of users to form communities that exist outside of physical geography. Indeed, many have done so with varying success; Facebook’s valuation as of July appeared to stand somewhere between $12 billion and $24 billion. Certainly information architects trying to make their case to skeptical executives should be able, in some contexts, to argue in terms of Internet users’ propensity for constructing and broadcasting their identities using Web tools, as well as some users’ desire to be citizens of an Internet community. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with information architects arguing in those terms, or that a company errs morally when it encourages brand loyalty and community-building among its customers. Like many immersive media, however, the Internet certainly can have an addictive and anti-social effect on those who use it uncritically, and online communities like those of World of Warcraft and 4chan play a contributory part in these cases. A solution to this real problem is outside the immediate scope of the reading, but the more we can understand about the nature of the online medium, the better equipped we will be to understand our ethical responsibilities as producers and consumers of Internet content.

Week 9: The Architect's Garden

This week’s reading: Morville & Rosenfeld, Chapters 20 and 21; Burnett & Marshall, Chapter 1

Three diverse readings this week! The Burnett & Marshall chapter seemed to pivot away from information architecture and into the role of information technology in society. This is a legitimately fascinating topic, but the first chapter read like a fifty-page master’s thesis condensed by force into fifteen pages; interesting models and taxonomies are introduced only to be immediately abandoned without real exploration. This week I won’t worry about Web Theory, but instead will indulge myself in a case study. Riffing from Morville & Rosenfeld’s Chapter 21, I’ll talk about a social problem encountered by the users of an Internet forum I help administer, and explain how we used information architecture to solve it.

The forum in question, In the Rose Garden, has about 700 members, of whom several dozen are active contributors. Users are bound by our common interest in the Japanese anime “Revolutionary Girl Utena,” whose immense literary merits – though outside the scope of this blog – have proven multifaceted enough to sustain analysis and discussion throughout the three years of the forum’s existence. Three volunteers, including myself, administer the forum; most commonly, administration involves some routine content maintenance (dealing with multiple threads on the same topic, for example) and keeping an eye out for interpersonal conflicts on the boards.

Though IRG members are brought together by Utena, the bulk of activity on the forum does not directly pertain to the anime. Sampling a few popular threads would reveal political and social discussions, sharing of other anime, airing of college angst, and conversations about shame, anger, and joy. The most frequently trafficked threads, however, are “forum games.” Forum games are threads in which posts follow a simple set of rules – one thread might ask posters to add two words to a developing story, while another is dedicated to the results of a personality quiz. These games, as played on IRG, are usually more reflexive than thoughtful, but they’re easy to join or to post to, which accounts for their disproportionate popularity.

In 2009, the proliferation of forum games grew to the point where many users on IRG perceived them as an unwelcome distraction. Because of their popularity, forum games were usually ranked highly on the chronologically-sorted thread directories, burying more serious or intimate threads in the same category. After experiencing the problem firsthand for months and receiving a few user complaints, I concluded that forum games were inconveniencing many users and stifling other threads. Banning such games, however, was not an acceptable solution; forum games are good social looseners, serve as an access point to IRG for many new users, and – most of all – make many of our users happy, even the ones who also want to be able to find and post to more serious threads.

The solution – obvious in hindsight – was a change to IRG’s organization. In consultation with the other administrators, I created a new subforum that would be devoted to forum games. The subforum was accessible from the front page of the forum. Migrating all the forum games to a single, dedicated area of the site addressed the problem in several ways, but they all boil down to usability. Site users after the change were able to easily identify what section of the site would contain the kind of thread they were looking for. Those who wanted to quickly join a forum game knew where to do that; those who wanted to have a thoughtful conversation weren’t distracted by the game-driven irrelevance of top results in other subfora. The number of clicks needed to access any given thread was constant before and after the change.

As might be expected, the investment of time needed to implement this change paid off in a big way. Forum games continued to thrive in “captivity,” while threads elsewhere enjoyed renewed popularity. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was doing information architecture: designing a website to meet the needs and expectations of its users in an efficient and organized way.

One footnote, apropos of Morville and Rosenfeld’s allusions to the unique aspects of the evolt community in Chapter 21: Many IRG users have a strong preference for either forum games or discussion, and rarely participate in the unpreferred category. From an IA perspective this strengthens the case for the change we made, but at the time the administrators worried that segregating forum games might be tantamount to segregating users. Our small community is tight-knit, unlike the communities of many large Internet forums, and we were concerned about the social impact of “marking” forum games (and, implicitly, their players) in such a visible way. Though the change certainly did not rend the social fabric, I’ve informally noticed that crossover between forum games and other threads has seemed less frequent in the ensuing year. A few game players whose activity previously spanned the forum have settled into their new subforum and rarely emerge from it. Fortunately, there are several others who still bridge the gap, and IRG has not diverged into two unconnected forums.

So much for my belief that IA is a totally new subject for me. It turns out that I am, in fact, an experienced and successful information architect!

Week 8: At Last, Librarianship

This week’s reading: Morville & Rosenfeld, Chapters 17 and 18

Our topics this week – first, marketing our services to skeptical managers, and second, comparing IA to business strategy – were far enough outside my experience that I’m not sure how to react to them in a way that goes beyond recapitulation. I think I can best elaborate by comparing the challenges information architects face in justifying their existence to the challenges librarians face in doing the same.

Let’s begin with the obvious. Though the specifics of their duties differ, information architects and librarians are both broadly in the business of making information accessible. Both design systems of organization and labeling to make their information systems more transparent to the user, both create and use metadata extensively to expedite searches, and both are concerned with economizing user effort. As a result of their shared central mission, both librarians and information architects sometimes face questions from decision makers who do not perceive disorganized information as a serious problem.

Google Search, in particular, has contributed to the false impression that all the information in the world is now organized and accessible. Public librarians tear out their hair when their acquisitions budget is cut because Google is free; information architects gnash their teeth when the client wants to install a Google Custom Search bar and dispense with the messy process of web architecture. Sure, Google can’t design our reference queries or our browsing hierarchies, but do users really need that stuff anyway? It falls to us to make the case that, yes, users do need that stuff – and lots more besides that Google can’t do.

Not all of the text’s suggestions on how information architects can make this case are equally applicable to librarians. For instance, public and academic librarians are unlikely to impress policymakers with a return-on-investment analysis, which would contain even more unknowns than a similar IA analysis and would operate outside the myopic timeframe with which their funding authorities concern themselves. But librarians can make good use of the “pain is your best friend” principle (p. 375). We can use stories and presentations to illustrate the often humorously painful consequences of replacing human expertise with search software. We can challenge the policymaker to find a particular commonly sought piece of information using Google, forcing him or her to confront the imperfections of Google directly. We can even use comparative analysis to point up the exact stages where human reference librarians add value to a search process, as well as the types of patrons (such as the young, elderly, and uneducated) who have special trouble conducting information searches by machine.

One important difference between IA’s image problems and those of librarianship looks to the future. The mood in the IA community, as on page 377 of the reading, seems to be that broader recognition of the role of information architects is inevitable. By contrast, the mood in the library community is that future technologies will pose even more stringent challenges to our necessity than current tools already have. I conclude that it might be wise for librarians to restyle their role in civic life as including social information architecture. Library websites should evolve past being electronic card catalogs and instead seek to architect a broad information system, encompassing both physical and Internet resources, that is responsive to the most common needs of its users. This goal is particularly ambitious – most websites undertake to organize a much more limited set of resources – but some libraries, including USF’s, have already begun such an undertaking. I can think of a number of ways to make such a project feasible, and perhaps I’ll study something like this as part of my term paper!

Week 7: Case Studies In Why We Need Information Architects

This week’s reading: Morville & Rosenfeld, Chapters 14 – 16

Our reading this week covered a number of “small” topics within information architecture. The authors’ writing was as engaging as always, but I don’t have much to add with respect to their subject treatments, so I’ll focus in this entry on the information architecture of Google Sets and Textmap.com.

I’ll begin with Google Sets. I went in expecting a very classy information architecture; Google, after all, has reams of experience designing IAs and first rose to prominence in part because of its clean, easy-to-use interface. I had mixed luck with Google Sets as a search tool – it managed to complete a list of Greek moon goddesses, but not a list of recent U.S. presidents – but the effectiveness of the search algorithms that power Google Sets is mostly outside the scope of IA. I noted, however, that Google Sets also failed to return any results given the names Sleepy, Dpoey, Bashfull, and Dock [all sic]. Basic spell-checking is part of the domain of IA, a relative of controlled vocabulary, and Google Sets ought to have been able to reconcile these misspellings.

On a related note, on those occasions when my searches returned no results, Google Sets gave some tips for more effective searching. This is good design – but I was surprised when the tips included “use the full name” and “try being consistent.” There’s no reason a search company with the resources, artificial intelligence, and processing power of Google shouldn’t be able to algorithmically guess that “Harvard” means the same thing as “Harvard University” even without a formal authority file. From such experiences with this tool’s limitations, I’d have to say that Google Sets doesn’t live up to its potential as what could be an interesting tool for finding related keywords for the purposes of tagging or building a controlled vocabulary.

From a navigation perspective, Google Sets is also faulty: to my surprise, I discovered that there is no way to revise one’s search from the results page – a mortal sin in a search engine! To end on a positive note, though, I enjoyed the metaphor of the Google Sets front page, which precedes each search field with a bullet point. This visual shorthand for a list effectively conveys what the user can do with this tool.

From Google Sets we turn to TextMap. TextMap’s IA is frankly baffling. Its “entity pages” are full of fascinating-looking metrics presented without explanation. Better labeling needs to be brought to bear on this site. At the very least, the user needs tooltips; the entity pages offer no explanation, for example, of what a “polarity rank” or “negative raw count” is. The former is defined in the site’s “Frequenty [sic] Asked Questions” – it involves whether the subject is regarded well or poorly – but there’s no indication of how TextMap makes that determination. Similarly, each entity page contains a “relational map” that links the central entity to related ideas, but there’s no way to know what prompts the relationships. The page for “cat,” for example, links the word to “Yusuf Islam.” I had to Google to figure out this relationship: the famous singer-songwriter Cat Stevens is a convert to this Islamic sect. Yet the “cat” page is clearly defined by TextMap’s terse scope note as “animal,” not “person,” so why do links pertaining to Cat Stevens appear here? The “cat” map also links to the name “Sparky,” and I still don’t know why. Each box in the relational map has a different shape – rectangle, oval, or hexagon – but no key is provided.

To draw lessons from the above, it seems that what we have in TextMap is information without architecture. No organizational skeleton puts content elements in a coherent order; no labeling scheme elucidates meaning; navigation is mostly unassisted by common conventions such as hyperlinking or a side menu; and even the search function is poor, failing to deliver the user directly to the desired page even when an exact match is found. Without architecture, the structure falls to the ground. I can’t think of a purpose that I’m confident TextMap would reliably serve.

One bright spot in TextMap is its fairly conscientious vocabulary control in the form of synonym rings. Sony’s entity page, for example, contains some forty synonyms with various permutations of capitalization and punctuation, including “SONY CORP.,” “Sony LLC,” and “Sony Electronics, Inc.” Not every permutation is covered, but the range is quite broad for a home-brewed project, and there are enough variations that a searcher could readily find the page by entering even an inexact synonym.

These two websites, then, each offer lessons in what not to do in building an information architecture. Google Sets reminds us of the importance of vocabulary control to help software make logical inferences about the user’s meaning; TextMap reminds us that data needs to be illuminated by architecture before it can properly be called information.