ia play

I was digging around in my files this weekend and found this table I made once of different approaches to applying metadata to content. At first glance the volunteers example looks like it is only relevant to charities but alot of scenarios that refer to users tagging, it is actually volunteers tagging. The difference is doing something for your own benefit (users) or contributing something to a greater cause (volunteers).

	users	volunteers	staff-authors	staff-specialists	automatic-rules	automatic-training sets
	Users apply metadata to their own content or content they have gathered for their own use	Unpaid volunteers apply metadata to content produced by others e.g Freebase	The paid author applies metadata to their own content.	Paid metadata specialists apply metadata to content produced by others	Software applies metadata to content based on rules defined by specialists	Software applies metadata to content based on training sets chosen by specialists
Strengths	Cheap, real user language, subjective value judgements, highly reactive, latest trend vocab	depending on how handled can be more predictable and reliable than users, may be close to user language, can be guided more like staff, asked to go back and change	small commitment required from each staff member, expert knowledge of the content	highly motivated, objectives likely to be tied to quality of this work	more efficient than staff options	more efficient than staff options
Weaknesses	no guarantees of contributions, same tag to mean different things, different tags mean the same thing, cryptic personal tags, smaller interpretations drowned out, hardly anyone goes back and changes out-of-date tagging,	can require more management/attention than users, smaller number, may not make up enough hours, probably not viable in most commercial enterprises – although can still be done if company offers a free-at-consumption service that may be perceived as a public good.	low motivation and interest, may be too close to the content to understand user needs, more likely to be formal/objective	cost, needs to read the content first, may not necessarily be user focused, more likely to be formal/objective	needs operational staffing	hard to control, can be ‘black-box’, need a mechanism for addressing errors
Recommended environment	Large user-base, with a *selfish* motivation for users – often gathering/collecting, reasonably shared vocabulary, rarely works on a single site where the user could instead aggregate links or content on a generic site like delicious	Where you can rely on lots of good will. Probably in combination with another approach, unless a large number of volunteers are likely.	You have good historical examples of imposing new activities on the authors and getting them to follow them. Probably quite process and guideline driven organisation. Bad where your authors think of themselves as creatives…they’ll think metadata is beneath them.	Strong information management skills in the organisation. The project needs to be resourced on an ongoing basis. Business probably needs to see a very close correlation between the quality of the metadata and profit.	As for specialist staff.	Strong technical and information management skills in the organisation. An understanding from management of the ongoing need for operational staffing. Management do not believe the vendors promises.

Asking about a typical day is always an interesting question to ask in job interviews. All sorts of stuff gets chucked in job descriptions but there’s often no indication of whether that tasks represents something you’ll need to do every day or once a year.

A fairly typical day for me recently went something like this:

9am

Attend our ‘Knowledge cafe’ . This is an informal weekly meeting in a coffee shop with the project managers, business analysts, and knowledge managers. There’s no agenda, just a chance to recharge, share stresses and pass bits of information around. Nice, social and deeply useful.

10am

The rest of the morning is spent doing research, analytics, thinking etc. I might be buried in Google Analytics, auditing competitors, reading up on the technology or messing around with index cards, big bits of paper and a lot of furious hair twirling.

1pm

Meeting with content owners. Listening to them and their experiences/knowledge. Sharing IA insights. I used to find these depressingly familiar battles but I’ve tried to reposition them in my head. I’m not going to learn about IA in these meetings but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn about. Showing interest in the subject matter has actually helped make these meetings happier places.

3pm

Travelling to suppliers. They’re not too far but other days can involve lengthy treks to other offices.

3.30pm

Developers at the suppliers demo us the last few weeks work. We plan the next two weeks, flesh out user stories. The PM is usually there, often the web manager and accessibility consultant too.

The battle here can be to keep the focus on the important stuff. Making sure we’re working on simple, high value stuff rather than stuffing it full of bells and whistles. Suppliers generally just want to keep client happy, with the least effort. Mostly we have to be the voice of the user here, although occasionally the developers will argue than something isn’t user friendly (especially if it is complicated to develop).

5.30

Go home

The big shock for me, coming from a huge UX team at the BBC is there’s no designers involved, UX or otherwise. Visual design was outsourced, the details will be handled by the client side developer. Functional design and usability is the combined responsibility of me, web editors, business analysts and the accessibility consultants.

I produce very little documentation or deliverables.  Maybe a sitemap and some sketches for the content authors to think about. Some mock-ups to talk around, once we know what the site will look like. Mostly I think then talk.

Sometimes I”ll do whole days of each activity. Sit at home doing in-depth research, have all-day content workshops or be all-day on site with the developers. But more often than not days are mixed up like this. Makes me think of the polar bear venn diagram.

Related posts:

• IA deliverables
• The manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule

Last week I went to the Search Solutions event, held by BCS in their lovely office in Southampton Street. There were maybe 50 people, 6 or 7 women and seemingly even less laptops (which rather made it stand out from the more web-focused events I usually attend – because of lack of laptops not the male-female ratio).

I didn’t make masses of notes but I did capture a few points and reminders:

Vivian Lin Dufour from Yahoo talked about Search Pad, an attempt to make search more “stateful”.

Richard Russell from Google explained how the auctions for Google Ads work. Always interesting to hear more about the money side of things.

Dave Mountain, a geographer (another example of Nominative Determinism?) talked about geographical aspects of searching. He explained that if the task is “finding the nearest cafe”, then the ‘near’ isn’t a simple statement. There are types of near: as the crow flies, in travel time, in the direction I’m already going. After all you may not be interested in a cafe that’s already 5 miles behind you on the motorway. He had some good slides covering this, so hopefully they’ll be made available.

Tony Russell-Rose discussed Endeca’s impending pattern library. Should be interesting – public version to be available in the new year.

David White of Web Optimiser talked amongst other things about the importance of cross-media optimisation. He asked why don’t more companies, especially b2b ones, have phone numbers in title/description of search results? He also touched on the growth of twitter as a substantial source of referrals (in response to a question about whether Bing was increasing referrals and thus changing optimisation tactics).

Richard Boulton, as well as discussing his efforts with open source search, introduced us to the marvelous concept of dev/fort/.

“Imagine a place of no distractions, no IM, no Twitter — in fact, no internet. Within, a group of a dozen or more developers, designers, thinkers and doers. And a lot of a food.

Now imagine that place is a fort.”

Well marvellous to me but I wanted to get married in a Napoleonic fort so perhaps I’m not typical. He also mentioned searchevent.org, a day dedicated to open source search systems, which will hopefully happen again sometime.

Andrew Maisey talked about a school of thought that search will increasingly become less important on the site. Dynamic user journeys will encourage more browsing.

(Food was pretty good as usual for the venue.  I’m hoping that we’re going back to BCS for our team away-day later in the year and then I can have more of the strawberry tarts.)