ia play

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

Most days it is a problem for the RNIB that most commercial IT software isn’t accessible. But there are some (very slight) perks.

One of my colleagues fends off lots of cold calls from all sorts of companies wanting to speak to various directors. The IT suppliers seem to be the easiest to get rid off as she politely asks them if the software is accessible (she usually has to explain why that’s important to the RNIB) and that seems to do the trick in getting rid of 90% of the sales folk.

Facebook friends will notice from my status updates that I spend far too much time “fantasy farm hunting”.  To be honest, it isn’t so much fantasy as a little premature. Mostly what I’m trying to figure out is where we should buy this future farm. There’s lots of factors involved.

High volumes of affordable small-holdings:

• Scotland, esp Dumfries and Galloway, Aberdeenshire, the Shetlands(!)
• Around Carlisle
• The Wash and the Fens (particularly anywhere that is at risk from rising sea levels)
• Wales, and Shropshire borders
• North Lincolnshire, East Yorkshire and North Yorkshire (slightly lighter volumes)

Our current work:

• London, esp King’s Cross
• Peterborough (my optional/alternative base)

Our family:

• London
• Yorkshire (Wakefield + Harrogate)
• Peterborough
• Bristol
• Aberdeenshire (never met that branch but they are farmers and apparently welcoming of black sheep)

Friends:

• London
• Cumbria
• Cambridge
• Bristol
• Peterborough

Good for woods:

• big chunks of Scotland and Wales
• Shropshire
• Cumbria
• North Yorkshire
• Norfolk

East Coast mainline looks like it may be a significant ‘spine’ for our search, with a slightly weaker pattern along the West Coast mainline. The trains only matter if we’re assuming we want to get back to London for work some of the time. If we cut the London link completely then the range opens up but, realistically, our budget drops dramatically.

This weekend’s fantasy farm hunting delights included :

The Smithy – Shropshire. Scores points for including a blacksmiths shop, some old pigsties and an acre of woods.
Foresters Cottage – Cornwall. Woodland, chicken runs and it’s a foresters cottage

Neither is particularly viable with that price-location combination. Fantasy farm hunting will continue…

I watched Horizon: How Mad Are You? the other week. It was a slightly odd programme in which the basic premise is the professionals try to guess which of the participants have been diagnosed with a mental illness. The participants had various activities inflicted on them to help the professionals identify the ‘mad ones’.

Generally the group agreed that cleaning up a revolting cow shed (to spot OCD) was far preferable to performing stand-up comedy (to spot social anxiety). PW and I nodded vigourously in agreement.

Which reminded me of the “Strip, Speak or Sing” debate:
A group of London IA ladies were discussing public speaking and whether those in the group who speak at conferences are “incredibly brave” or not. Somehow this evolved into a discussion of whether each individual would prefer to “Strip, Speak or Sing” in public  (in the appropriate context that is e.g. strip in a life drawing class, not just randoming stripping off in the office! ).

This was one of those conversations were each participant stared at the others in disbelief when they heard their order. Interestingly, no-one put Speak first.

Which in turn reminded me of an early BBC activity of working out the Myers Brigg types of all the members of a team. The team was then divided along MB lines and had to interogate each other about working behaviour. The conversation that struck with me, for obvious IA reasons, was:
“what? you never file any emails? none at all?”
“of course not. You mean some people really use all those little folders?”

All of these occasions were simple but necessary reminders that other people *really* don’t think like you.

(and if you’re wondering – I’m Strip, Speak, Sing)

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

The Right to Read campaign asserts that everyone has the right to read the same book, at the same time, at the same price. The ‘same time’ didn’t initially strike me as particulary significant but I hadn’t considered Harry Potter. Personally I wouldn’t queue at midnight for any book, just to read it as soon as possible, but plenty others would. Kids (and adults) want to be part of that, regardless of the quality of their sight.

One of the RNIB achievements that they are particularly proud of is getting Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince published as the first ever novel to be released simultaneously in Braille, large print and standard print. Apparently the publishers weren’t keen on releasing the novel to be transcribed before publication and needed to be reassured with promises of padlocked transcription rooms.

You can now get the Deathly Hallows in Braille from Amazon. But from the looks of it the same price mission still has a way to go.

RNIB training seems to include lots of gentle games and quizzes. Our sight loss training included a game that went as follows:

• Give participants the same information printed in different fonts sizes.
• Ask them to answer a question about the information
• Give the first person to answer correctly a metaphorical pat on the back (they need sweets here)

(it was more interesting than it sounds)

The idea being that you very quickly get what font sizes are easy to read. And therefore understand why all RNIB information is printed in 14 point and at first looks screamingly ‘loud’.

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.

It is a little strange working for the same company as my big sister, Catherine.

The RNIB is a small enough organisation that,  in-spite of her working in a completely different part of the country, many of my colleagues in London know my sister. They say we look alike. They also say she’s told them all my secrets.

I’ve already had to go to the Leeds office for a meeting so got to stay with Cath and see her in her professional guise. All her colleagues said we look alike too.

I know we’re the same size but I’m not convinced we’re that identi-kit. She does like purple too though.