Week 12: The IA That Quashed a War

This week’s reading: Burnett & Marshall, Chapters 8 and 9 and Conclusion; Borgmann, Introduction and Part 1

Borgmann’s reading this week promises to grow into a rigorous information-science foundation in which to root information architecture, and next week I’ll begin examining the conjunction of his work with IA. For this week, though, I can’t resist the provocations of Burnett and Marshall as they describe the distinctive characteristics of the online music industry. Since they wrote too early to see the evolution of the iTunes music store, I’ll apply some of their ideas to iTunes and see if any characteristics of online music consumers can be extrapolated.

Burnett and Marshall sum up their critique of the music industry’s response to Napster in three points (p. 193). The first and second are closely related: they are the industry’s underestimation of the impact of the Internet on their business, and the studios’ choice to see MP3 and Napster as threats and not opportunities. Both points exemplify a mistaken and unprofitable philosophy of change: “How can we continue to do business as usual as everything changes around us?” Studios, like other businesses (and like libraries), ought instead to have asked, “How can we stand at the vanguard of this change and be ready when mainstream consumers demand digital services?”

The studios never did develop their own business model to deal with MP3s; other entrepreneurs did it for them. KaZaA, YouTube, and the Pirate Bay have each tolerated or encouraged widespread piracy in their attempts to develop commercial models that would flout the studios entirely. Pandora, Rhapsody, iTunes, and others have taken a different tack, negotiating with studios for the right to play or out-license their songs legally. Stores like iTunes have effectively stepped into the digital niche of the physical retailer, doing the work of salesmanship while artists and studios produce new work to license.

Why iTunes took so long to appear on the music scene is a question that would consume a much longer paper than this weekly response. In large part, however, the answer must be that studios hoped that the Internet and its challenges would go away and leave them to their profits of the 1990s. Even today, studios’ willingness to license music online is only grudging, and came about from desperation to steal market share back from pirate sites rather than from their own innovative proclivities.

But come about it did: piracy is almost as easy today as it was in the days of Napster and KaZaA, yet iTunes has crafted a successful business out of selling songs for $0.69 to $1.29. iTunes does well even though its songs are licensed and not bought. Whether studios and artists do proportionally well is, predictably, a matter of some dispute, but both Metallica and its label Elektra clearly make more money when I buy “Enter Sandman” from iTunes than when I download it from the Pirate Bay.

Why do music fans pay money for licensed music from iTunes rather than downloading music free of license from the Pirate Bay? I suspect that part of the answer – but only a small part – is that fans want to support the artists they listen to. Another part – but again, only a small part – is that fans fear retaliation for piracy, though anti-piracy lawsuits against consumers are still uncommon. The most important part of the answer, by far, must be that iTunes is a nice piece of software. The architecture of iTunes and its store encourage easy navigation, search, and downloading in a way that pirate sites do not. iTunes’ built-in ability to organize and play music likewise advantages it over the Pirate Bay, which operates strictly on a bring-your-own-software basis. In the end, the copyright wars between studios and fans have calmed not because of legal settlements – still ongoing – but because of great information architecture that makes fans able and willing to pay for music.

Perhaps the conclusion of this week’s reading, then, is that when an Apple information architect is asked what he does for a living, he might answer “I end copyright wars!”

Week 3: It looks nice, but does it work?

This week’s reading: Morville and Rosenfeld, Chapters 5 and 6

Our reading this week focused on two interconnected topics: how to conceptualize and group the organizational items of a system, and how to choose words or labels to represent them. It was an exciting pair of chapters, because the effectiveness of an information system like a website submits to empirical testing. That is, broadly speaking, it is actually possible to decide which of two possible schemes is better, in the sense of helping more of the users more of the time. In this comment I’ll focus on how we might apply empiricism to the ideas described in these chapters.

The text outlines organizational schemes appropriate for both exact and ambiguous searches. To use the language of my last entry, “fully realized” questions can be answered with straightforward schemes like alphabetical or chronological arrangement of data, but “fuzzy” questions – or items of information that fall into “fuzzy” categories – require more creativity in their organization. Most of the textbook’s examples of good interfaces give the user several access points in these ambiguous cases. Dell’s website (p. 65), for example, allows its customers to browse by topic (notebooks, desktops, support) or by audience (home, small business, government). A multiplicity of access points is likely to help some users and confuse others. Site analytics might help Dell empirically determine whether the former outnumber the latter.

A relevant metric of effectiveness might be the number of visitors who click on Dell’s topic links versus its audience links. A priori, I would expect that few visitors click “Home & Home Office” from the audience menu; these users are likely to have a more clearly defined need, and thus are more likely use the topic links. If analytics bear out this intuition, Dell should consider eliminating this hyperlink from its audience menu. Conflicting with this impulse, however, is the principle of comprehensiveness (p. 100): if we have special links for business and government audiences, shouldn’t we have a special link for home audiences? Retaining the “Home & Home Office” link might improve the menu’s consistency and thus help the user build a mental model of the Dell website, even if the link is rarely used.

The challenge, then, is to design an empirical test to settle the question of whether our little-used link contributes more than it detracts. A first approach might be to recruit a panel of diverse users, each with a genuine need. Through an automated survey, the website could prompt users to articulate their need. Half of these users could be directed to Dell’s usual site, while the other half are directed to a version of the site with the questionable link omitted. Their progress through the respective designs could be tracked and their success quantified through an exit survey. If one version of the site connects users with content with significantly higher consistency, and no intervening factors such as internal politics intervene, Dell should adopt the more successful architecture. This approach could be tested on micro aspects of design, such as whether to include a particular hyperlink, or on macro aspects, such as an entire top-down site redesign.

The Dell homepage reprinted in the book is dated 2006. I note with interest that in the intervening four years, Dell has given its site a complete revamp – consistent with the textbook authors’ emphasis on ongoing improvement. In 2006, the topical menu had pride of place on Dell’s site, while audience was relegated to a small-type menu of hyperlinks. By contrast, in 2010, the audience menu is splashed prominently across the top of the site; mousing over one of the labels (“For Home,” “For Small and Medium Business,” and so on) drops down a topic menu pertaining to the audience. This integration combines the advantages of both menus in a seamless way that is intuitive to Net-savvy audiences, though empirical testing could be useful to determine whether this two-layer sorting of content might be confusing to Internet novitiates.

Dell’s changes to its labels also merit attention. In 2006, the audience menu was headed “Solutions for:”, and its items were “Home & Home Office,” “Small Business,” “Medium & Large Business,” and “Government, Education, & Healthcare.” In 2010, the audience menu has no heading. The mouseover points are labeled “For Home,” “For Small & Medium Business,” “For Public Sector,” and “For Large Enterprise.” Three changes are interesting here. First is the change to the format of the list’s items. “Solutions for” rings of corporate jargon, which the text’s authors warn against (p. 85-86); Dell’s new formulation sounds much more natural. Second, we see that “Public Sector” has replaced the unwieldy “Government, Education, & Healthcare.” The latter choice is more descriptive, but the three indicated subcategories are heterogeneous; clicking this link is likely to lead us to a narrow, deep architecture where we’ll have to further specify that we work in education, then that we work in K-12 education, and so on. Public Sector, by contrast, denotes the same services more transparently – the label is effectively invisible to users who don’t need it – and the drop-down menu allows much of the disambiguation to take place in one click. Finally, we see that medium businesses have been reclassed with small businesses, while the term “large business” has been replaced with “large enterprise.” This could be an organizational change, but it’s more likely to be a labeling change; Dell has likely determined that its services for large businesses are disparate with the needs of medium-sized businesses, and has relabeled its categories to guide medium-sized business owners to the content most likely to be relevant to their need. The choice of the word “enterprise” in particular is clearly a labeling decision. “Enterprise” is an uncommon word whose connotation of scale may further help medium-sized business owners decide which menu category to pursue. All three of these changes have implications for the site’s overall architecture which could be user-tested by an experiment something like the one I described earlier.

My point in this entry is that IA guidelines are often useful, as when they suggest that we avoid jargon, but that site analytics and empirical testing are the ultimate tests of whether a site serves its users as envisioned. A building can be beautiful but uncomfortable, and a textbook-compliant website might still fail its users. In my first entry in this blog I discussed my view that interaction design is the parent discipline of information architecture. If so, then empiricism is the means by which we can determine whether IA is a properly dutiful child!