ia play

The Guardian was my first job out of university.  I’m back 10 years later and the office is a whole lot shinier and is also closer to my house. So far, so good.

I’ve been surprised at how pleased I am to be getting back to the media.  I think it’s the culture of trying new things, of  exceptionalism and something about being engaged with the outside world.

But the very, very exciting bit is I get to work with Martin again.

On the downside the dogs in office count is likely to be zero.

Constraints was another topic of conversation in the coffee breaks between The Story sessions. I’m not sure how much it was inspired by the presentations or was just the direction the discussions went in.

At the BBC, our attitude to constraints and their role in design was one of the sources of friction we identified between our (finely defined) UX sub-disciplines. Those with ‘architect’ in their title tended to be very conscious of the constraints. The IAs often spent longer working with particular products and were more likely to be embedded with the product team. They developed a detailed understanding of the content structures, technical systems and the organisational politics around a product. The interaction and visual designers were more likely to work from the design hub with other designers and to work on products for defined projects. They came to projects fresh and unblinkered. Neither situation is wholly good or bad. Both bring insights.

But it did result in the designers feeling that the IAs were too aware of the constraints and were unambitious in pursuing the best solution for the users. Conversely the IAs often felt the designers were being idealistic and naive, and that’d they never get anything built.

(these are broad brush generalisations, there were some great examples of successful partnerships between the teams but there were certainly issues)

In these conversations somebody usually brings up the serenity prayer:

“God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And Wisdom to know the difference…”

My instincts are often on the side of accepting many of the organisations constraints. I like realistic plans, and I’m aware how deep seated some constraints can be. I don’t see how designs that never see the light of day help the users. But it would be simplistic to say I’m always on the side of conservatism.

In my last team, our troubleshooting explicitly involved dividing problems into ‘change’ and ‘accept’ categories but I surprised myself at how uncomfortable I felt at some of the things that ended up in ‘accept’. I wasn’t happy to just leave them like that.

This all reminded me of a creativity course that I found helpful in accommodating the instincts of both dispositions. One of the techniques the course taught was to explicitly structure ideas generation into phases:

• firstly unshackled ideas generation (everyone is reminded they’ll be able to bring the constraints in at the next step)
• then a step where the ideas are filtered with the constraints. Ideas are divided into do-able now or soon, and ideas that require work to tackle the constraints (which may require another ideas generation session!)

The approach helps me to use both my desire to make things better and my desire to get working stuff out the door. The different types of ideas could be taken forward by different teams but I suspect most of us would be happier if we could accommodate both types of challenge in our our work

The Story was a satisfying and intriguing day out. Chatting to @lynsey_s in a break, we reflected that it felt different to the usual speaking events we get to go to.

(although I’ve not been to much in recent years…my charity days have been focused on very tangible tactical events on topics like RFID and SharePoint).

The eclectism of The Story is often present at web/ux events and many of the topics were familiar but there was something else. There was a continuous sense of being exposed to depth, detail and obsession. these speakers were talking about things they’d been doing for years and years (often every day of those years).

Updated: I think Phil Gyford’s comments about his presentation fit with my impressions:

“It turns out that I need to run a website on a very specialised topic for eight years before I’m in a position to feel confident talking about it.”

http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2011/02/20/pimping.php

The Web Strategy Programme of work that I’ve been working on at RNIB has been completed and in the current climate there’s not likely to be big new web projects coming up. So it’s time for something new.

It’s tough times in the sector and it looks like I won’t be replaced with another IA.

I’m probably never going to work in an office quite as purple again.

And it’s really unlikely I’ll work in an office with this many dogs again (and that makes me very, very sad). I’m also disappointed that I won’t see the new online library through to launch.

Things to take away:

• sight loss is something that happens to lots and lots of people as they get older. Accessibility is just as much about partially sighted users.
• don’t do large scale customisations of commercial software (knew this already but seem to need reminding)
• proper lunch breaks, with nice people sat round tables eating nice food are a wonderful thing

A lot of goal setting articles include the assertation that “you overestimate what you can do in a day but underestimate what you can do in a year”.

A similar quote is attributed to Bill Gates:

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”

via The quotable Bill Gates | Developer World – InfoWorld.

There’s a long view planning technique based on these concepts. It asks you to “Describe your life in the future”:

• 50 years from now
• 25 years from now
• 10 years from now
• 5 years from now
• 1 year from now

I write the descriptions as  prose but I’ve seen this done in a more structured tabular way so that the same topics are covered each time.

50 years is so much time, it makes most things seem achievable. In fact when I’ve done this I usually find I can’t imagine much difference between 25 years and 50 years, as I usually assume I can get my goals sorted in 25 years. 50 years takes me to 82 but my life expectancy is longer than that even without taking scientific/medical advances into account.

Of course, the time points are completely arbitrary, so long as the final point is sufficiently far in the future.

It’s a good activity for planning and prioritising the meaningful stuff, and for when you need an optimism boost. It’s also  useful for “future now” activities. It challenges you to think about making 1 year look a lot more like 50 years.

A slightly uncomfortable but sometime useful variation is to include 100 years time, or after you are dead! How will you die, what will you be remembered for and by who, and what impact will you leave behind?

One of classic IA arguments is about why New Service X shouldn’t be added to the primary site navigation.

Users aren’t *generally* just wandering around the internet going “ooh, what’s that? I have no idea, why don’t I click it and see”. If you just add random new stuff to the primary navigation, the main thing that will happen is it will get ignored as users carry on their journeys to wherever they were already going.

It can work ok for a new product category e.g. groceries but it really isn’t very effective for a new brand or unfamiliar feature e.g. X-PIL.  Combined with a big marketing push it might work, so you can get away with it if you have reason to believe this is going to be a really big new feature e.g. iPlayer *and* you are going to heavily marketing the brand.

1. Ranking

This is the least visible thing, that you might not consider a feature, that mostly gets ignored and is absolutely the most important thing for you to dedicate time to getting right.

If the query isn’t particularly ambiguous then you need the top results to be right, without asking the searcher to do much else.

Ranking isn’t sexy and it takes care and attention. But isn’t magic, it’s just rules. Ask what the rules are. Don’t be fobbed off. If no-one knows, work it out yourself.

2. Manual Suggestions (query expansion/narrowing)

This basically means Best Bets.

I’m very, very attached to Best Bets. This is mostly because I’ve been a search product manager as well as an IA on search re-design projects. Once the project team has packed up, the product manager (or web manager/editor) can still improve results and resolve problems using Best Bets. And they will need to. Promise.

3. Automated Suggestions (query expansion/narrowing)

We can’t spell and we can’t type. And then we blame the poor old search engine when it doesn’t find what we were looking for.

Any decent search solution needs to have some solution to misspellings (where to put them is a problem for another day!). You can do some of this with Best Bets, but with a big and diverse enough set of users you’ll probably need something a bit more automatic like Google’s Did You Mean?

A related but broader concept is suggesting related searches. You might have spelt your query correctly but there’s a similar term that would get you better results. Ask.com used to do this.

It might seem perverse to prioritise the manual intervention over the automated one. I’d usually expect to have both but I have a few reasons for picking manual if it comes to a choice:

• the manual option is probably cheaper to add on if neither comes as standard
• automated suggestions often get better over time but might start a bit ropy
• automated suggestions may be ‘black-box’ you might not be able to do anything with them if they are wrong/misleading. And every system I’ve worked with and/or used makes mistakes sometimes.

It’s worth asking whether there is any control over the automated suggestions. Is there a dictionary? Is the right language (esp. UK v US English)? Can we edit it? How?

4. Filters and sort options (after you got search results)

These tend to get missed by users or interfere with their understanding of the page. Not all users will understand them, especially complex faceted filters. The positioning of filters/facets is very difficult to get right. Users home in on the top results, so above the first result is most likely to get noticed and also most likely to get noticed for being in an annoying position.

If you are doing product search then I’d probably still prioritise 1-3 but I’d strongly argue you need 4 as well.

5. Clever query language

Quote marks seem to be reasonably widely understood, so I might argue these should be higher up your expectation list.

But unless you’ll have access to your users and be able to train them all… I wouldn’t prioritise operators like wildcards, NOT/And/Or etc..

Find out what you get out of the box. Make that information available to interested users. But don’t invest lots of development effort and money here.

6. Filters and sort options (before you run the search)

a) Radio buttons and drop-downs.  These get missed, people don’t think about using them, they tend to just stick words in and hit go. Other users won’t use them because they don’t know they need to use them until they see the search results aren’t focused enough. So then they have to go backwards. So you might as well go with (4).

If you can sensibly default them then they can be more useful but establishing what the sensible default  is problematic.

b) Advanced search pages.
These are basically a collection of filters for the user to set before you run the search. Search specialists inevitably find advanced search useful but your average end-user doesn’t. The exception here is power users  but be sure the users actually are “power” users.  You are likely to find power users where there are time/cost pressures around searching e.g. staff answering customer calls or researchers using databases where they pay for searches. In these situations even reasonably techno-phobic users are motivated to get to grips with advanced searches including some of the more complex query building ones.

Another reason advanced search might be worthwhile is if your power users are also your most mouthy. If the segment of your audience that blogs/tweets is also the segment that might demand power features then you might consider the feature as marketing.

(Don’t be worried by people being intimated by the label “advanced”.  If they are intimated by the word then they’ll be intimated by the features. )