ia play

I’ve chatted to lots of friends who went to the IA summit and read some  of the threads afterwards.  I’m glad I didn’t go. The whole “we’re all just UX” debate  kind of makes me unhappy.  I’ll try and explain why.

It is all about the sparrows. If you don’t  get the reference then we probably don’t share a canon. And that’s part of the point too.

Sparrows are your archetypal bird. I’m not a sparrow in the IA world (never did much in the way of wireframing)  but I’m maybe a chicken. Not quite the first bird a little kid would think of but still quite clearly a bird.

But in a UX community I am different . Compared to the UX sparrow, I’m a penguin. I’m a bit of a weird bird.

Generally it is a bad sign if your professional community makes you feel like a weird bird.

I remember when I was first working with the UNESCO thesaurus I was amused to see that ‘home-makers’ was a sub-category of women. I just thought that reflected the age of the thesaurus (it has some particularly lovely terminology around disability too).

Now I don’t expect the Daily Mail to demonstrate cutting edge social attitudes, or to be honest , to have particularly great information architecture. So I really shouldn’t have spent quite so long trying to figure out where their recipes section was buried. There is a shortcut on the homepage but I’d come in via a search engine and foolishly thought I could work out the main nav to get me to my destination.

The penny dropped eventually. It is nestled in the ‘Femail’ section,  of course!

Food | Mail Online.

This article is part of a series about search log analysis which includes what people are searching for, spotting real opportunities and the geographical element.

As well as popular queries, I’ve been examining the bounce rates in our search logs. Often interpreted as a bad thing (after all, you don’t want people to leave your site) bounce rates can mean all sorts of things. The searcher could have rapidly realised they are in completely the wrong place for their query, they could have been dissatified with the content, or they might have only been looking for a quick answer which the site actually satisfied.

You need more evidence before you can unravel which of these reasons is causing a high bounce rate. If I see the query has a high bounce rate,  and a high number of new visitors and the query is non-RNIB specific  then this tends to suggest the searchers ended up on the site “by mistake”. I see this alot where the query is quite general e.g. “curriculum” or “flash” and then content on the RNIB is specifically about accessible curriculums or accessible Flash.

Some seemingly similar searches have very different bounce rates.  Searches for ‘Helen Keller’ average a much higher bounce rate than searches for ‘Louis Braille’. This doesn’t necessarily reflect lower satisifaction with the Helen Keller content. ‘Helen Keller’  goes to a simple lengthy page with limited onward links. Louis Braille, on the other hand, leads users to a mini-site about Louis Braille and Braille more generally.  Whilst ‘Helen Keller’ has a high bounce rate the term also has a reasonably high “time spent”, so you could interpret this as the searcher got the information they were looking for and didn’t feel the need to explore further.

The logs might provide evidence for areas where we should try and lower the bounce rates. Should we be trying to keep the attention of the web designers and developers who stumbled onto the site looking for general web design ideas? Or the schoolchildren looking for a Helen Keller biography to complete their homework? Or fundraisers looking for ideas for raising money? Which group represents a better opportunity for the RNIB? This needs more thought.

Intriguingly, the bounce rate for ‘RNIB judd st’ is twice that for ‘RNIB Judd street’ but the results are the same. Does that reflect the impatience of a searcher who won’t spell out ‘street’ in full?

Next:  spotting real opportunities

This article is part of a series about search log analysis which includes bounce rates, spotting real opportunities and the geographical element.

As I explained on Friday I’ve been categorising the top 500 referring keywords for RNIB.org.uk.

Before I did the categorisation, Helen Keller and RNIB were far and away the biggest referrers. Both are a magnitude of 10 larger than any other individual query. But the third largest query is for Glaucoma and other specific eye conditions appeared frequently throughout the logs (as do a multitude of Helen Keller related queries) so I was interested in other significant types of query.

So after my arbitrary categorising I ended up with these types (these are not actual keywords):

1. Helen Keller
2. Specific eye conditions
3. RNIB
4. Welfare support and benefits
5. Keyboard shortcuts
6. Eye tests
7. Equality and disability rights
8. Fundraising ideas
9. Louis Braille
10. Talking Books

(these ten cover about 50% of all the keywords)

As I said earlier the categories are a bit arbitrary. I could easily have grouped eye conditions and eye tests into ‘eye health’ and Helen Keller and Louis Braille could be “historical figures”. The categorising helps more as a activity for immersing myself in the full 500 list and getting a feel for what is significant in the logs.  The actual rankings are a bit of a red herring.

Next: bounce rates

This article is part of a series about search log analysis which includes what people are searching for, bounce rates, spotting real opportunities and the geographical element.

I’ve been rooting around in the search logs for RNIB.org.uk. We use Google Analytics which isn’t accessible so most data has to be exported and shared in Excel.

So far I’ve  got my hands on:

• the top 500 keyword referrers from external search engines (2008)
• top 500 keywords used on site search (last  six months of 2008)
• top referring search engines

But that’s plenty to be getting on with.

I have to remind myself I’m only looking at the most popular terms and there’s a whole long tail I have no visibility of.  There’s also some clearly dubious queries in the logs.

So far I’ve gone through the top 500 from external search engines and loosely categorised them. The categories aren’t particularly scientific;  I’ve grouped all eye conditions into one category and grouped all queries about Helen Keller into another. Those don’t seem particularly equivalent categories but there are similar in size of queries. I’m following my instincts a bit at this stage.

For each category I’ve added up the total visits, and then worked up the average bounce, time on site and new visits per query type. I’ve also started adding information about whether the query is likely to be answered with a quick fact or should generate a longer journey.

Some of the questions I am trying to answer:

• Which queries should influence  navigation design?
• Where should we be encouraging further/longer journeys?
• What content isn’t represented in the logs? We might need to work on optimising those.
• Which queries are a poor opportunity since the referral was accidental or mis-directed

As a side benefit I’ve already learnt what Bump-ons are.

Next: what people are searching for

My first six months at the RNIB are up. I’ve spent them mostly playing catch-up and firefighting on the intranet project. Now it is time to actually do some planning.

My department’s focus is mostly internal, I’m a bit of anomaly with my work on the website.

Some constraints to bear in mind:

• I’m the only IA
• Must be extremely responsible with the charity’s money
• Small organisation, doing many things, so staff are time-poor
• Software development is not what the organisation specialises in

At the moment I’m thinking we could get alot of value of focusing quite heavily on search. I’ll have to do that anyway for the website relaunch but there are big gains to be had from getting the intranet search working well and then exploring enterprise search.

I’m also interested in what we could do with automating related links. Never quite got there at the BBC but there’s an even stronger case here. Authors have very little time to create rich related links and the tendancy is to only promote content produced by their own teams, as ever.

Some simple reference data management might also be needed, possibly to support the enterprise search and automated links plan but also to improve interoperability of all sorts of systems.

Just first thoughts…

We’re moving onto a relaunch of the RNIB website. Work started (and paused) before I joined the RNIB so I’ve inherited a proposed new navigation structure.

To put the proposals in context I’ve been analysing typical navigation and tool bars on 18 charity websites. There seems to be a reasonably typical pattern of one main navigation bar, a secondary navigation bar and a utility toolbar which is often but not always in the footer.

The pattern for each bar is roughly as follows:

Main ‘charity’ bar
About Us – Get Advice – Learn About – Donate – Get Involved – News – Professionals resources – Shop

Extra ‘special audiences’ bar
For Children & Teachers – Media – Jobs

Utility bar
Accessibility – Contact Us – Help – Privacy – Terms & conditions – Site map – Global/associate sites

The terminology on the charity bar is usually tailored to the charity’s main area of activity e.g rather than Get Advice it might be Health Advice. The charity bar also occasionally included a key scheme and a link to local services but these weren’t common enough to make the cut for my pattern.  The special audiences bar is an interesting feature that seemed common on the sites.

(Charities covered: Oxfam, Christian Aid, Amnesty, Save the Children, Action Aid, Guide Dogs, Action for Blind People, Cancer Research, British Heart Foundation, Blood Pressure UK , Help the Aged, Action for Children, Barnados, Mencap, National Autism Society, Leonard Cheshire, Shelter and St Mungos)

Related posts

• keyword tools for seo and navigation design
• redesigning NTEN.org

Peter Morville has published a list of UX deliverables, complete with cute icons.

It is a nice list but the pre-amble rang warning bells for me with lots of enthusiasm for visual thinking.   I’m increasingly unable to benefit from discussions about IA deliverables in the IA community because I have to produce deliverables that are accessible to blind and partially sighted people.

The list started well in terms of accessibility with stories and proverbs, hardly typical on a list of UX deliverables. I’ve reviewed Peter’s list and compared to my early thoughts on accessbile deliverables to see if I’ve progressed at all.

• stories – fine
• proverbs – great, potentially even more memorable than stories and consequently repeatedly accessible
• personas – works, but without the poster
• scenarios  – ok without the illustrations
• content inventories – fine, but needs careful layout of excel
• analytics – presentation can be tricky. collection software often inaccessible
• surveys – much the same as analytics
• concept maps – love them but very tricky
• system maps – tricky – we tend to cobble something together in Excel/Word and use  outlining to create a hierarchy
• process flows – also tricky
• wireframes – largely doomed, if being used for a partially sighted audience then you need to think very carefully about descriptive text and the positioning of annotations
• storyboards -  definitely doomed
• concept designs – ditto
• prototypes – paper no, xHtml could be good, not sure about tools like Axure
• narrative reports – fine, although any illustrations will be a problem
• presentations – forget the powerpoint, just talk
• plans – don’t know if MS Project works for screenreaders? could probably do something that sort of works in Excel
• specifications – as for narrative reports
• style guides – depends how it is produced, some elements will be inaccessible but acceptably so
• design patterns – ok, if not reliant on images. Interactive examples might help (if screenreader friendly)

Looking at all those deliverables that are essentially flows or concept maps, makes me think a screenreader friendly mapping technique would be a big win. Even if you still won’t be able to “see it all at once”!

I first attended the IA Summit in 2004 and I’ve gone every year since. Each time the conference has given me a much needed boost of energy and optimism. So I’m sad not to be going to Memphis.

Timing isn’t good with one project launching and another kicking off in anger. But I would also have struggled to make the business case to my charity employers. We have budget to send staff to conferences but we need to be really really clear about the benefits.

The programme this year looks intriguing as ever but there’s nothing explicitly about my sector (charities), main products (intranet and CRM), technology (SharePoint) or  dominant issue (accessibility). There is a session about Agile and one on Web Standards but they’re the only sessions that my organisation would recognise as being relevant to what I do.

The presentation titles aren’t really very helpful on their own (Evolve or Die? You’re Not Doing It Right? IA Spy School? A House Divided?). I needed the descriptions when I was trying to make the business case!

I’ve got no team to manage anymore so the UX management stream is far less relevant than when  I was at the BBC. I can’t use visual communication methods like comics and lots of IA deliverables wouldn’t be easily re-usable with blind team-members without a lot of effort. Anything too future-facing/web 3.0 is just pie in the sky when you are still trying to get web 1.0 to work for all your users.

The strategic stuff would be applicable, although it is nowhere near as imperitative in a 3000 person organisation compared to a 30000 person one. MetaSearch, Facets of Faceting, and Business Centred Design all sound like sessions I would attend but they’re not enough.

Interestingly, having always worked in not entirely commerical companies, I feel a much greater sense of responsibility for the RNIB’s cash. The money we receive (for the most part) comes from people who wanted to make someone else’s life better, rather expecting to get some benefit in return.

Getting employees re-energised and re-inspired is a legitimate way for charities to use that money… but I feel an obligation to think of ways of achieving the same goal that don’t require me to fly to Memphis.

UXLondon may make up for the fact that EuroIA will probably never come to London.

The line-up is quite the who’s-who of the IA community:
Jared Spool and Eric Reiss are always hugely entertaining, Peter Merholz is usually thought provoking and you should expect some very practical stuff from Donna Maurer, Luke Wroblewski and Margaret Hanley.

Looks like more good stuff from the Clearleft team.