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!