ia play

from the Freakonomics blog in NYTimes:

while most industries are shedding jobs, consumer debt councilors, conservation consultants and green energy suppliers have ramped up hiring

Government and public sector won’t necessarily ‘ramp up’ hiring but the hiring managers may sigh in relief if the commercial sector stops ratcheting up salaries. Not that I’m wishing for a recession, of course.

I don’t often watch Dr Who so it was apt that when I did on Saturday (whilst fretting about how Pileswasp’s operation was going) it was set in a library. Or rather a library world:

Silence in the Library

In the midst of Jared Spool’s gadfly-esque “UCD never worked, maybe we should retire it” opening plenary at the IA Summit was a rope prop. The rope represented the number of visitors to a website. It had a knot to show the small percentage of visitors who are customers and another for the even smaller percentage of big spenders/ultra-fans. Jared suggests that a smart business person doesn’t worry about the huge percentage for whom the website clearly isn’t working and just focus on selling a little bit more to those ultra-fans.

Fair enough.

But oddly not everyone in audience is just trying to make lots of money. I was reminded of this in a recent presentation from the BBC’s marketing team about audience segmentation. Like any other organisation we have a segment of highly passionate fans but, as the presentation made clear, the BBC cannot just up-sell to our the high approvers. That’s not public service.

So BBC IAs have to think about the whole rope, I’m afraid.

One of the goals of personas is to challenge stereotypes and preconceptions. This worked nicely when we were working on persona creation for the redesign of bbc.co.uk.
The personas were all based on research from our audience research team but the team was questioning the pensioner profiles for using too much technology, complaining that “my gran is nothing like that”. This is when you have to point out that the pensioners AR were talking about were 65. That makes them most of my colleagues’ parents not our grandparents. And reminds us all we’re getting old.

The research was nicely validated by an interview we did a few weeks later with a recently retired librarian. She was using digital television (including catch-up TV), mobile phone (texting and taking photos), digital radio, PC (internet & email), digital camera & skype with a web-cam. She’s wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about technology but was heavily influenced by her children and her need to stay in touch with family elsewhere in the world.

But even when we’ve recalibrated our understanding of who pensioners are….it is still a common cliche to hear web workers challenge something complex in a product on the grounds that “my mum couldn’t use that”.

Now my mum and dad are retired computer programmers. They’re seriously old school. When I was a kid I played with abandoned punch-cards and that green bar printout paper. Dinner time conversations involved mainframes and COBOL. I thought this was all normal for grown-ups.

Given how extraordinarily geeky you needed to be in early days to get into programming, they’re probably more technically able than many of today’s geeks. So my mum could almost certainly use that. If she wanted to.

Now my sister… she thinks the rest of us Harvey’s are weird. She’s a much better touchstone for the real world.

We still have space to offer an IA work experience placement this summer, preferably July or early August.

You can get more information from the BBC work experience site or it might be simpler to read IA work experience on this site.

Only just realised our programme model is publicly available: BBC programmes ontology

We now have a top-level directory of /ontologies/. I’m not quite sure what I think of that. The metadata-geek in me is tickled. The bit that spent hours going through the list of all the random top-level directories is uneasy.

My dullest slide deck ever, I’m afraid. I felt quite sheepish given all the shiny, shiny powerpoint on show in Miami. And I do need to point out here than the 15 little people on the first page are only representative of the number of juniors and not their general shape (or colour).

I’m very glad we were able to run the session as more of a conversation than presentation in the end. Not sure how much of that will work in the podcast (coming soon to Boxes and Arrows, I believe).

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For those of you who’ve been asking about our job description for junior IAs:

Junior IA job spec

(We’ve shortlisted for a current junior vacancy. In our IA summit panel I said that the junior programme is my favourite part of my job…well the interviewing is a great part of that, particularly when we have such a good pool. I’m looking forward to meeting everyone.)

Ilaria got in touch to ask me to answer some questions for her thesis about Information Architecture:

1. First of all, I’d like you to introduce yourself, your job, main stages of your professional career and of your education (studies) that have brought you to deal with Information Architecture.
2. Do you think Information Architecture is more of a scientific or arts subject matter? Why?
3. Can you tell me any advantage in your Information Architecture job derived from being involved in communication/journalism?
4. Why, do you think, Information Architecture is so important and relevant?

Here’s my waffly responses:
1. I studied Communications at the University of Leeds and when I graduated I took a graduate trainee position with the Guardian newspaper in London. The role was working in their research and information department. It mostly involved putting newspaper articles into the electronic and paper archives and carrying out research for journalists.

My manager encouraged me to apply to study for an MSc in Information Science. Around a month before I was due to start the course, the website manager for the Guardian emailed everyone asking if anyone was available to work night-shifts on the Guardian website. I realised this would be interesting and a good way to fund my MSc so I applied.

Whilst studying for my MSc I was introduced to the concepts of information architecture. I read Rosenfeld and Morville’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and had a ‘eureka moment’ as I realised that IA would combine my interests in media and information management and just generally organising things! I decided to base my dissertation on IA.

At same time I was still working on the Guardian website. One night one of the team came and asked me where the letters page was on the website. I didn’t know off the top of my head so I had a browse around and I couldn’t find it. I realised if two of the staff couldn’t find it then there might be something wrong with the site navigation. I decided that my dissertation would be about the IA of the Guardian website. I carried out a number of card-sorts and category membership expectation tests and subsequently proposed a simplified navigation structure in my dissertation.

On graduation I applied to the BBC for a role called Assistant Producer, Search & Metadata. At that time there were no information architects at the BBC but shortly after I joined the BBC hired their first IA. I talked with him and tried to learn where I could. Later the BBC initiated a content management project and hired Margaret Hanley who had previously worked at Argus Associates. She built a team of IAs which I subsequently joined.

2. It is both, I’m afraid. Individuals who approach IA in very different ways. Some are very focused on metrics, search log analysis, multi-variant testing and rigorous user testing (although we rarely test to levels of statistical significance). Others come from a more creative background and focus more on the ‘design’ aspects of the role. Personally I think the reason IA is powerful and that IAs are valuable to organisations is because they combine thinking styles and should be at ease with both logical/analytical approaches and with more intuitive and inventive styles, and be able to use whichever is more appropriate at a given point in time.

3. Studying communications was useful in getting a foot in the door in media organisations but I’ve also been surprised at how much of both my degrees I have actually used in my career, particularly the sociology of communications that I studied in my first degree. I often find myself going back to David Gauntlett’s work (http://www.theory.org.uk/).

Journalism has always been about structuring information clearly. This can mean that in a media organisation an IA will find allies amongst the journalists who also think about IA problems. In my experience, however, it is also true that these allies can be found in the software engineering teams, design teams and amongst the product managers too.

Sometimes it can be difficult to be an IA in a news organisation. In journalism-led organisations the journalist is king and other disciplines may be relegated to the status of support staff. This can make it hard to be listened to. Luckily this is less the case in the BBC, hence why I have stayed so long!

4. For me, IA solves two main problems:
* ensuring content is findable
* making the complex clear

You don’t have to have an IA to do this. Many sites run by smart non-IAs have cracked these problems without having a dedicated IA but if they have thought about and solved these problems then they were applying IA thinking.

So why have an IA do this? It might be necessary to have someone operate in the role of facilitator/connector, who can talk the language of both the designers and developers. Or the project may be large enough to justify a specialist who concentrates on the IA aspects and frees up the other disciplines to concentrate to concentrate on, say, the emotional design, or the scalability of the technical solution.

My experience at the BBC has been that once a project team has had an IA on a project then they want one on the next project. They can’t necessarily explain why but they know it mattered.

A dedicated IA might be a luxury for many websites but having someone who thinks like an IA is vital.

We’re looking a a junior IA this time.

It’s a one year contract and the idea is that the junior would work on series of projects chosen to develop different information architecture skills e.g. wireframes, metadata and usability testing. Enthusiasm and aptitude is more important than experience:

https://jobs.bbc.co.uk/fe/tpl_bbc01.asp?newms=jj&id=21202