Lectures
Information Specialists at the Intersection of Information Architecture and Usability
by Alison J. Head
Delivered at Florida State University School of Library and Information Science, November 10, 2001.
It's a great honor to be invited to Florida State University to give this year's Srygley Lecture and to be included among the ranks of the esteemed speakers who have preceded me. I thank you very much for the invitation. It means a great deal to be recognized for my work.
Today, I would like to talk about the intersection of information architecture (IA) and usability, a topic that Dean Robbins informs me there is great interest in at the School. Specifically, I would like to provide some personal history about information professionals' growing interest in the two fields and discuss how and why the usability and IA fields overlap, especially from an information studies viewpoint.
Design Wise origins
Several years ago now, back in 1998, I began working on a book called Design Wise. [1] My motivation for writing the book was fairly straightforward. After a year of studying Human Computer Interaction at Stanford as a Visiting Scholar and building on my previous doctoral work at Berkeley in Library and Information Science, it became abundantly clear to me that information specialists increasingly needed a competency in, what I called at the time, design evaluation.
What this competency required, quite simply, was two major abilities. First, information specialists needed a clearer understanding about what good interface design is and why it matters, especially to users who come into contact with information resources through computers. It wasn't so much that design was new to the field of library and information science; the topic had certainly been touched upon before. It was more that our field had taken the topic of interface design and shunted it to a dark corner, with far too few voices recognizing its relevance.
The second design evaluation competency information specialists needed was hands-on, practical skills they could put to use in the front lines. In their own evaluation work, information specialists needed the wherewithal to dissect, analyze, critique, and judge whether the interface design was usable or not. Information specialists, whether they worked in traditional library settings or not, needed to be in tune with the interaction problems new formats and their designs could potentially cause users trying to find information.
Clearly, the need for a design evaluation competency was fueled by the changing times we worked in. In a relatively short time, information specialists were met by an onslaught of newly released computer-based products and services that a burgeoning information age was serving up to them and their clientele. From books, a comfortable standby for centuries, information specialists transcended into making decisions about how to choose CD-ROMs and new "GUIfied" versions of old standbys like Dialog and Datatimes. This progression, of course, set the stage for the Web, which unleashed a plethora of information resources from Grolier's Encyclopedia and Northern Light to THOMAS and the Drudge Report - all seemingly with their own sense of design.
In my book proposal for Design Wise, I wrote that it was time for information specialists to bone up on interface design, so they could make better decisions about the design and the usability of information resources. Once I submitted my proposal to a reputable publisher, it was only a matter of weeks before Design Wise was promptly rejected. The rejection letter was succinct, stating:
...this is not a book we can publish. We believe the book's target market of information service/product users - at least at this particular point in time - tends to be concerned mainly with content and cost factors, with factors such as interface design and ease of use taking a back seat.[2]
Admittedly, most authors are deflated by book proposal rejections. Instead, I have to admit I was a bit energized by the letter. I found myself taking solace in the old familiar quote "nformation is the gunpowder of the mind." [3] It came to me very quickly that it was time for usability to move out of the back seat, climb over, and take steering wheel firmly into both hands.
Meanwhile, in another part of the country
In the mid-1990s, two students left a doctoral program at the University of Michigan's School of Information Studies so they could go on to pursue their own difficult row and hoe it. In the early days together, the two business partners, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, latched onto a term - "information architecture" - which Richard Saul Wurman had originally coined for describing the arcane kinds of services the pair were increasingly providing to corporate clients with informational Web sites.
For Rosenfeld and Morville, IA involved the process of organizing content on Web sites so that information management and retrieval could best be supported. Their thoughts and practices led them to write one of the all-time best-selling books about developing organized Web sites, while at the same time launching thousands of careers for would-be catalogers, Web designers, and information designers. [4]
A slippery slope: Defining IA
In the early days, usability experts and IAs regularly took part in sympathetic dialogs about their work. Still, though, most of us considered our fields decidedly different. If nothing else, IA was still being defined; usability had 20 years of expertise packed behind it.
In 2000, the American Society of Information Scientists (ASIS) and Argus Associates, Rosenfeld's and Morville's growing IA firm, hosted the first ASIS Summit on Information Architecture in Boston. I attended the conference as a panelist. The summit was dubbed the "Defining Information Architecture" conference. Beforehand, in an email to conference panelist, Rosenfeld wrote:
The ultimate goal of this conference is to push forward the discussion of information architecture so that attendees leave with a better idea of what the field is and isn't, and with a better ability to discuss it with colleagues in other fields. [5]
And so it went. An eclectic group of professors, librarians, designers, usability experts, and a growing number of people with job titles of "IA" met for two days and chewed on, grappled with, and moved toward a working definition of IA. At the conference and elsewhere, a popular worldview had already emerged: there was the fledgling field of IA and an old guard field of usability.
The focus of IA was (and still is) on organizing information - the content, labeling, navigation structures, and search features - so that users are empowered by managing information they find in Web environments. To that end, IAs use tools that include, among other things, user observation, interviewing, card sorting, and ethnographic methods to give clients actionable blueprints and taxonomies.
As for usability, many of its practitioners, fresh from years of work on software and hardware, were caught up in trying hard to apply their established design principles to the Web. In general, usability involves the behavioral evaluation of systems, whether they are Web-based or otherwise, and measures whether users can effectively and efficiently complete the tasks they need to accomplish. The goal of usability work is to develop systems that accommodate users, by making them easy to use, easy to remember, quick, error-proof, and satisfying. Usability experts rely on surveys, contextual research, and task-based testing to measure behavior, offering up diagnostic findings with design recommendations to clients.
Dispatch from the front lines
Despite the disciplinary segregation that was occurring as IA honed its definition, the overlap between IA and usability was becoming increasingly apparent, especially for information specialists working out in the field. For instance, during this time, I was hired by a newspaper to design and conduct a usability test of their existing newspaper site. Our major findings from the first round of testing were grounded in IA. In fact, three out of five of our most significant usability problems were directly related to the site's ineffective IA. [6]
This pattern hasn't changed much over time. I just finished conducting usability tests of research intranets in seven different companies and found that only 43 percent of the employees who participated in the sessions could find what they had reported needing the most frequently at work - contact information for a fellow employee. The usability problems arose because the sites offered users a circuitous path to employee information on the site and an inadequate search feature. [7]
Familiar stomping grounds
It is no surprise that people trained in library and information science were (and continue to be) drawn to the user-centered focus of both usability and IA. What could be more compelling to those in the information studies field than improving how users find the information they need? After all, isn't this a foundation of librarianship itself, which drew many of us into information studies to begin with?
In a speech last year, GraceAnne DeCandido described the lure of librarianship by saying:
For most of us, what brought us to librarianship was the power of the word, the power of stories. Whether we called it reading, or scholarship, or research or study, what brought us to libriarianship was the power inherent in bringing together people and ideas. [8]
She went on to say:
If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas, it doesn't matter where the ideas reside. That means, if the ideas are on video, or on audiotape, or on CD- ROM, we adapted our collection policies to handle these materials. Format is no longer the controversial issue it once was. Or is it? [9]
The intersection of usability and IA
DeCandido's statement is instructive and revealing. For both IAs and usability experts, especially those with an information studies background - format is the issue. Imagine taking a book, with its predictable format, beefy paragraphs, and high-resolution images and then directly porting it over to the Web, without rethinking the format. This process, which unfortunately happens all the time, creates a format that can easily paralyze any efforts, as DeCandido put it, to bring together people and ideas.
But there are other issues beyond format, which reside at the intersection of usability and IA. At the heart of the matter, IAs and usability experts, especially those who work on information resources, have three concerns that bind them together. They are:
- A focus on users. Committed to helping create user-centered designs, both usability experts and IAs rely on direct feedback from users so they can make professional decisions about how a site defines and communicates its purpose and what the site's conceptual model is, or how it might work.
- Ease of use. Both usability experts and IAs work to cure Byzantine navigational structures, sloppy search features, and unclear labeling schemes that keep users from finding what they need. A user-centered site is a "learnable" and "digestible" one.
- Appropriate, accessible content. A rule of thumb for both fields is to offer the appropriate content - what users need - and make it easy to find, when users need it most. A shared mantra for both fields is the 80/20 rule, which states that only 20 percent of a site's content is used 80 percent of the time.
A holistic approach to usability and IA
There is a lesson to be learned in viewing IA and usability as separate disciplines. It is a lot like missing the connection between cataloging and reference work in libraries. Without mapping a logical and consistent organizational scheme onto a collection, few reference librarians, or patrons, would be able to support the kinds of tasks, necessary to the work at hand. Just the same, a Web site without an information schema, replete with navigational pathways and intuitive nomenclature sanctioned by an IA, guarantees a far less workable interface during usability testing.
Increasingly, in many settings, IAs and usability experts work closely together as the fields are viewed holistically, or as integrated parts in a larger system. A holistic view takes the same disciplinary definitions that we covered earlier but strings them together in a whole system, with representation from strategy, marketing, and technology. At many large corporations and organizations, strategies for Web development projects have demanded a holistic approach as a recipe for producing successful sites.
This outcome is what many involved with Web development call user experience. IA and usability are essential nutrients to cultivating the user experience, along with marketing, design, and engineering. One of the most comprehensive definitions of user experience comes from the Nielsen Norman Group. They identify a multi-disciplinary approach to design, which guarantees producing products or services that meet customers' needs and are, at the same time, satisfying and enjoyable to use. In more detail, they write:
"User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products. The first requirement for an exemplary user experience is to meet the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use. True user experience goes far beyond giving customers what they say they want, or providing checklist features. In order to achieve high-quality user experience in a company's offerings there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design. [10]
The experience economy
The need for user experience goes well beyond creating a viable and profitable model just for the Web. Accordingly, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore claim in their book that "the experience economy" is well upon us. [11] They report on a significant shift from a services economy to one focused on experience. They argue that it's no longer good enough for companies to provide potential customers with goods and services, that they must also "experientialize" products by making them memorable. Saturn, an automobile company that has salespeople line up and applaud every new Saturn owner that drives off the lot, or Nordstrom, a high-end department store, that has strategically placed a tuxedo-clad pianist who plays at the foot of the escalators in each of their stores, are just a few of the brick and mortar companies creating unique ambiance and also churning out profits in an experience economy.
Pine and Gilmore find the Web fertile ground for the experience economy, too, citing the lure of immersive online experiences. The authors write:
Experiences have always been at the heart of entertainment, from plays to concerts to movies and TV shows. Over the past few decades, however, the number of entertainment options has exploded. Today, the universe has expanded to encompass a vast array of new kinds of experiences, as new technologies encourage whole new genres of experience, such as interactive games, World Wide Web sites, motion-based simulators, 3D movies and virtual reality. [12]
All of this, of course, this is not particularly original. Marshall McLuhan heralded television, believe it or not, as a new medium that engaged and immersed audiences and would be the deathblow to print media. Douglas Engelbart, an idealist and inventor still far ahead of his time, envisioned and built one of the world's first personal computers in the late 1960s so that he could create what he called "an information space" where users could enter an immersive environment and meet, share information, and collaborate with others.
On to the transformation economy
It's the next stage that Pine and Gilmore predict, after the experience economy that can help us understand the relationship between IA and usability even more. The authors define a "transformation economy," which occurs when products and services are delivered that literally alter or transform customers' lives.
Pine and Gilmore use health clubs as a brick and mortar example of a transformation business. In theory, the use of a gym, regularly and assiduously, can transform customers - the way they physically look and their stamina. The authors conclude that the transformation economy will bring on a shower of new products, such as cars equipped with devices that make us better drivers, such as collision-avoidance radar systems and global positioning systems.
It may sound ironic, but libraries have been a transformation business, all along. Traditional library settings focus on putting people together with ideas that in many cases transform patrons' lives forever. The only difference is that patrons do not directly pay for the level of service they receive. Their only cost is just the effort they expend to find, learn, and absorb the knowledge they seek.
In conclusion, I'd like to suggest that usability and IA are, in many ways, transformation businesses. While traditional libraries offer a collection and services that set the stage for transformation, IAs and usability experts ensure the possibility of a transformation. They are the people working to see that a transformation could actually occur at all when a user interacts with an information system. In the highest regard, the intersection of IA and usability is about delivering the promise of transformation, no matter what new medium the information is packaged in.
Thank you very much.
Notes
[1] Alison J. Head, Design Wise: A Guide for Evaluating the Interface Design of Information Resources, Medford, N.J.: Information Today, 1999.
[2] Rejection letter from Pemberton Press, May 8, 1997.
[3] Neil Postman, paraphrasing David Riesman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1985.
[4] Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly & Associates, 1998.
[5] Louis Rosenfeld, email to speakers for the ASIS Summit on Information Architecture, February 12, 2000.
[6] The work was done for a pending redesign of The Press Democrat newspaper's Web site (http://www.pressdemocrat.com) in the summer of 2000. Permission to use this finding has been granted by The Press Democrat. In short, the IA-related problems with the site were: (1) the scope of the site, i.e., whether the content was advertising or information, was unclear; (2) the labeling offered little navigational guidance; and (3) information retrieval was poorly supported, i.e., the ability to search the site was available on only some of the site's pages.
[7] The study, "On-the-Job Research: How Usable are Research Intranets?" was published as an industry report by the Special Libraries Association in early 2002 by Alison J. Head with Shannon Staley. In the first part of the study, we found that users had to take a circuitous route, traversing through an average of seven different pages before coming up with the phone number, email, and physical location of the Director of Human Resources at their company. A big part of the difficulty behind this seemingly easy task was rooted in how the information was organized in employee contact databases. Even though participants flocked to the lookup feature during the testing, most struck out. Five out of six of the site's databases were only searchable by a known surname - not by department listings (e.g., Human Resources).
[8] GraceAnne A. DeCandido, "The Architecture of Fire: Librarianship Transformed," PALINET, Wyndham Franklin Plaza Philadelphia/Sheraton Station Square Pittsburgh, October 27 & 30, 2000, http://www.well.com/user/ladyhawk/
archfire.html.
[10] Nielsen Norman Group, Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman, "User Experience-Our Definition," 1998 - 2001, http://www.nngroup.com/about/
userexperience.html.
[11] B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 1999.
[12] B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, "In Search of the Experience Economy," based on extracts from The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre and Every Business a Stage, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 1999, http://www.managingchange.com/
guestcon/experien.htm, p. 2.