ia play

SharePoint search takes into account keywords in titles, URLS and hyperlinks. In each case the keywords need to be separated by spaces/underscores.

It also favours:

• HTML over documents, PPT over Word, and Word over Excel
• high-level pages
• shorter content pages/documents

These can be changed but it is generally not advised (imagine the manual equivalent of a plumber sucking air through his teeth).

Related posts
SharePoint search: Inside the Index book ‘review’
SharePoint search: good or bad?

One of my great hopes for our current intranet project is to significantly improve the intranet search.  The current set-up used the search bundled with Stellent. It is universally derided within the organisation and with good reason (the Stellent search itself may not be at fault, I imagine some changes to the configuration could fix some of the more significant problems).

I’ve heard mixed reports of Sharepoint search. Our suppliers are very positive about it, and it does seem hard to imagine how it could be worse that what we currently have.

At the TFPL conference I attended Sharon Richardson of Joining Dots defended SharePoint search. She went a bit far with the statement “…so the problem with search is not the technology, it’s the users” but there’s some interesting stuff in the ‘research‘ she referred to.

55% The content was badly named, didn’t contain the words the users was searching for, wasn’t easily identifiable in search results (e.g. if you have 2 results both called Cafe – which is for London and which is for Manchester?)

30% The content users were looking for didn’t exist

10% Users were using wide or strange search terms (why would somebody search for ‘google’ on the intranet? what exactly did they want to find when they searched for ‘form’?)

5% Search wasn’t finding appropriate content or ranking wasn’t appropriate

I’ve been keeping track of failed or problematic searches on our current intranet. Not particularly scientific but it has been an interesting starting point for evaluating the new search.

30% mismatches in language
25% inappropriate date ordering
15% lack of stemming
15% overly rigid phrase order matching
10% ambiguous queries
5% inappropriate alphabetic ordering of results

If a number of results are assigned the same relevancy then they are returned in date order, and if there are a number of results published on the same day then they are returned in alphabetical order. The relevancy scores don’t seem to distinguish between enough results, so the date and alpha ordering are regularly skewing the results.

The mismatched language and the ambiguous queries are sure to still be problems with the new search. I’m not going to endeavour to ‘fix the users’ here. There are plenty of solutions (best bets, related searches, faceted filters and synonym control) that we can utilise.

Interestingly my experiences with our existing search have suggested that searching for just ‘form’ can be an intelligent, considered tactic in less than ideal circumstances. If you are looking for the sickness form but you are not sure if it is actually called that (absence form, sick form etc) then searching for form and scanning the results can be your least worst option. Given our current search is pedantic in it’s insistence on exact phrase order, I find myself conducting single word searches far more often than usual.

Related posts
SharePoint search: Inside the Index book ‘review’
SharePoint search: some ranking factors

James Robertson of Step Two has published Metadata fundamentals for intranets and websites

The article is a great intro and neatly captures several of my metadata hobby horses.

Capture what you need:

“As discussed in the previous section, metadata is a burden on the authors of the content, and one that they may not fully understand or support.For all these reasons, only metadata that has a concrete and immediate need should be captured. Don’t set up metadata fields to support potential future uses” “authors may not have the skill, time or inclination to enter consistent and high-quality metadata.”

Start simple:

“It takes several person-years of work to develop a taxonomy, making it hard to justify, even though the return on investment will be several times the initial cost.
In the shorter term, organisations should therefore look to simpler approaches to metadata, pending the development of a more extensive taxonomy.”

Users must be motivated to tag:

“While tagging has proven to be successful on sites such as these, its use on corporate websites and intranets is much less clear. The motivation and purpose for end users to tag our content is not obvious, and this is key to the tagging approach.”

The November issue of FUMSI is out now and the Manage article this month is by Kate Simpson.

Kate’s article is Enterprise Information Architecture: A View From The Legal World

“Like many organisations, law firms have an odd relationship with information. They know information is really important, especially the really valuable stuff in people’s heads: knowledge. But there’s just so much of it. And because they know it’s important they are loathe to delete anything (just in case)…”

The other articles this month are:

• Share: Designing for the Social: Avoiding Anti-Social Networks by Miles Rochford
• Use: Free Data: Turning It into Something Worth Paying For by David Gudgin
• Find: Key to Research Success: Asking the Right Questions by Jane John

We all know we ought to be producing accessible websites and systems (nod here or you probably shouldn’t be reading this blog). I knew I’d learn about accessibility at a whole different level at the RNIB but what I wasn’t prepared for, foolishly perhaps, was needing to practice IA in an accessible way.

Alot of RNIB staff are blind or partially sighted so most project teams involve someone who doesn’t find traditional IA approaches particularly easy to engage with. My old colleagues would be distraught to discover that the solution is often MS Word or Excel.

Problematic:

• card-sorting (large print might work for the partially sighted)
• sketching (bad, particularly if your handwriting is poor)
• paper-prototypes
• any sticky note approach (I was particularly upset by this one)
• wireframes (can be laid out better, maybe a page description diagram would be better)
• sitemaps (can be done in Excel or maybe even Word. Not Visio. Ever.)
• user flows (I feel like there ought to be some way of making a user flow that screen-readers could follow, decision tree like?)
• alignment models
• swimlanes (maybe in Excel, although that sounds horrible)

Probably ok:

• freelisting
• nicely coded prototypes (none of your Dreamweaver muck, thank you)

I don’t think the odds are in my favour.

Last week I was invited to the V&A to talk about IA. The forward thinking web team had organised an afternoon of V&A staff and industry figures to discuss their web strategy, all in the presence of the V&A director.

In some ways this was much like any other web event I had attend. The food was, admittedly, better than usual and the building much more striking (the most ornate doorknob I’ve ever seen in a toilet cubicle and a highly intricate carved conference room table).

We discussed many, many ideas and possible paths but the real challenge remains; choosing the ideas to pursue and what order to tackle them in. And of course, the actual implementation. I left optimistic about the future of the V&A website. Not least because of how smart and pragmatic the V&A web team were but also because of the initiatives we heard about that are already live.

These include RSS feeds, V&A blogs, a Facebook presence and a beautiful Flickr group. Also interesting was the blogger outreach that they had undertaken to promote their knitting and dress patterns. Have a look at Things to Do to get a different view of the museum. There are no gradients or rounded corners but there are definite forays into the web 2.0 world.

The afternoon was wrapped up with drinks on a beautiful balcony with views across Kensington on a lovely autumn evening. Quite an inspirational place to work!

On Nov 3rd I’ll be taking in part in a panel (with Silver Oliver and Helen Lippell) as part of ISKO UK’s Semantic Analysis Technology: in search of categories, concepts & content. The seminar “aims to examine the real issues and technical challenges presented by automating semantic analysis for whatever purpose”.

Presentations by Expert Systems, Rattle Research and SmartLogic will be followed by the three of us sharing our auto-categorisation (or should that now be semantic analysis) war stories.

Whilst I can’t be said to have planned this, it appears I only work for organisations that aren’t really about making money.

I started my career with the Guardian newspaper. We were told at the time that the Guardian was “profit making but not profit driven” although this really refers to the Guardian Media Group as I believe the Guardian itself is ‘loss-making’. The Group is owned by the Scott Trust, a non-profit organisation.

I moved onto the BBC. A public corporation, it is funded by a combination of TV licence fee, commerical activities (BBC Worldwide) and a grant-in-aid from the Foreign Office (for the World Service). It has a Royal Charter and is governed by the BBC Trust. When people join the BBC they are often excited to be working for the public rather than shareholders. They are right that this is lovely. However working out whether you are doing well or not is a lot harder to work out. Hence my struggles with defining a metric for the information architecture of bbc.co.uk.

My latest move is to the RNIB. This much more straight forwardly a charity, the patron is the Queen.

It appears that mostly I work for the Queen.

Following on from the controlled vocabulary resources, I dug out what I have on automatic classification.

Strangely most of the information available on automatic indexing/classification/tagging is pretty dated (although it has been a couple of years since I was immersed in this stuff daily). The most detailed stuff seems to precede the arrival of folksonomies and user tagging, perhaps the buzz around tagging sucked up all the available energy in the metadata space?

DM Review’s 2003 article on Automatic Classification is a good intro to the various types of auto-classification: rules-based, supervised learning and unsupervised learning.

CMS Review has a good list of Metadata Tagging Tools and a list of other resources at the end.

Taxonomy Strategies provide a bibliography on info-retrieval that includes automatic classification articles.

From 2004 there’s the AMeGA project and Delphi’s white paper ‘Information Intelligence: Intelligent Classification and the Enterprise Taxonomy Practice’. Download from Delphi’s whitepaper request form.

There must be more recent stuff that this. I’ll start gathering stuff on the automating metadata page.

Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior is the first book from the Rosenfeld Media stable.

Mental Models is a very detailed step-by-step guide that gives you everything you could need to know to follow Indi Young’s process. The name ‘Mental Models’ doesn’t really convey the most important (in my opinion) aspect of alignment diagrams, the aligning bit.

The original announcement of the book defined Alignment Diagrams as mental models married to proposed features. Indi explains the debate about the title at the Rosenfeld Media site but I do feel the title only refers to half the process.

Here’s how our UX trading card from the IA Summit explains ‘Alignment Models’:

What:
Diagram that breaks down user activities into discrete tasks, arranges these activities in columns, and then uses the same columns to align the product features, functions, and content that support these activities. May also align business objectives.
Why
Provides gap analysis, shows product opportunities, and helps develop task-based information architecture. Serves as a roadmap, and anchors conversations about future features and content in actual user needs instead of individual stakeholder agendas.

In spite of being familiar with the principle of the method I felt that the book launched into the detail of the first step a little too soon without selling the overall methodology. I found it easy to forget the overall point of the method whilst immersed in the (admitedly very helpful) details of participant recruitment and interviewing. Given possible confusion over the title, this might explain the more baffled review on Amazon.

This is a great book if you know you want to get stuck in and start creating one of these diagrams and to do it properly. It could be a bit overwhelming if you hadn’t already come across the concept.

More detailed review to follow for Freepint…