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

But I can’t say “I’m an user experience designer”.  In much the same way that I couldn’t say “I’m a neo-conceptual artist” with a straight face.  I wasn’t raised that way.

I’m a bit embarassed to say “I’m an information architect”.  And as I said before I tend to avoid that at work.

(I’ve got a biological taxonomy metaphor I can use here but the whole Lakoff’s penguin thing went down so well…I think I better save that for the pub)

It would be a bit like me telling you my husband is a “craftsman”. It is completely accurate. It has grandeur and a philosophical sweep. It gives his career a wide scope and avoids him being boxed in by his job title.  But it doesn’t help anyone of you realise that he could make you a rather nice spoon, a lovely rustic fence or even some really good charcoal. And that he might not be the best person to ask for an earthenware pot or an Aran sweater.

What’s the IA equivalent of  “makes beautiful, useful things with wood”?

Imagine it. A top-down drive towards machine readable content. An emphasis on the content rather than the style. A management team that understands that whizzy and award-winning is no b****y use if your users can’t use it (unless you count getting management their next job as a use).

But occasionally IA and accessibility, if not conflict, at least exchange a couple of slightly sniffy words.

Let’s take machine readable for a start. Which machine is doing the reading? And what language does it speak? Google and Jaws at the very least speak different dialects. I’ve been struggling for while to get to the bottom of the punctuation in URLs issue. SEO suggests a slight preferences for hyphens in URLs, screenreaders (well JAWs) seem to work better with CamelCase than with either hyphens or underscores (if the screenreader is set to read out the punctuation then imagine listening to all those underscores). It isn’t clear cut with either technology.

(as an aside, I was impressed to discover that JAWs seems to get Latin and had no trouble trotting through the Lorum Ipsum in lots of my documents)

In an effort to get a local navigation that shows the user where they are on the site, regardless of whether they are using a screenreader, we’ve ended up with a rather unfamiliar pattern of navigation on our new site. And as a general rule I don’t like novel patterns for common stuff like navigation. No-one wants to think about navigating.

But mostly my IA instincts and the needs of screenreader users are happily in tune, or at the very least don’t interfer with each other (courtesy of the magic of CSS).

Where it really gets interesting is when you consider screen magnification users. Screen magnification users are using the same interface as everyone else, just a whole lot bigger. I actually find screen mag much harder to use than a screenreader. I can mostly touch type and I tend to use the keyboard rather than the mouse so I don’t find a screenreader too much of a leap (when the site is accessible, of course!). But a significantly magnified screen is just baffling. It is the world as you knew it but nothing quite works the same. And moving around the screen just makes me feel a bit sick.

So some design constraints are: You can only see a very small amount of the screen at any one time. You don’t know where the next bit of information is, unless part of it is already on screen. And you don’t want to have to go back and forth on the page.

In many ways this helps the IA. It reinforces the need to follow accepted patterns. If the mag user is expecting the search box to be top left then don’t stick it in the middle of the left column or they’ll never find it.

Magnification creates a slight preference for linear, left aligned layout. You have to be careful with white space, otherwise the mag users is left with nowhere to go. I’m noticing a tendancy for my layouts to end up with empty space towards the right and bottom of the page.

A similar issue that isn’t really about magnification but about designing for low vision comes up when you design for significant font resizing. You can find that you are not making full use of the screen when the font is smaller.

Now none of this can’t be sorted out with some clever information design and a CSS whizz. Except maybe the URL punctuation but I should probably just get over that and worry about something a little more important.

Related posts

• accessible UX deliverables

I had a rummage around and created a quick list of content management books, presentations, and websites. Plus a short flurry of content strategy links as quite a few of the interesting structured content debates seem to have moved that way (is that a sympton of all IAs being UX designers these days?)

They can also be useful in helping you design navigation, choose your site name and even your company name.

Google provides all sorts of resources, some which seem to do very similar things.

There are analytics specifically for your own site:

• Google Analytics
• Webmaster Tools

And some that anyone can use:

• Google Sets
• Insights
• Trends
• Search-based keyword tool
• Adwords Keyword Tool

Of the ‘public’ tools I mostly use the Adwords Keyword Tool, inspite of not using Adwords.

Try searching for ‘phones’. From the results you can see whether ‘cell phone’, ‘wireless phone’ or ‘mobile phone’ is the dominant language in your area. When there are labels that my team is arguing about, Ill sometimes see if the Keyword Tool can add evidence to the argument.

But beware, they can get addictive.

We’re going to make sure our site architecture is sound before we worry about making it purty.

The story so far:

* We started with a card sort. Rebecca Sherrill, our Information Architect at Beaconfire, has written a terrific synopsis of that process, with definitions, a walk-through of the process, and an overview of the findings. You should read it.

* Building on the results of the card sort and an Audience Matrix (Excel) we had filled out earlier, Beaconfire produced a draft site map. Holly and I worked with them in a conference call to revise the map (PDF), then brought the entire staff into the process during our weekly staff call.

Beaconfire now has our feedback, which they’ll use to refine the site map, then produce a wireframe version of the site.

via Redesigning NTEN.org: of Card Sorts and Site Maps | NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network.

IA Summit

The IA Summit is still the main event of the IA year. There are usually 3 days of multi-tracked presentations preceded by 2 days of workshops. It is certainly a great place to meet IAs and to get a feel for what is currently capturing IAs imaginations. The pre-conference workshops usually include some good ones for people starting out. That said, the conference presentations themselves are more and more about general UX and web design. There’s a lot of philosophy, strategy talk and many presentations are focused on what highly experienced IAs should do next. If you are new to IA you might struggle to find more than a couple of presentations about the details of the craft.

The conference is very good value for money, especially when you consider how well fed you will be. If you are US-based then definitely go and make sure you sign up for a pre-conference. For everyone else, go if you can get your company to pay, otherwise consider some of the more local options (assuming you have them!).

EuroIA

EuroIA is the younger sibling of the IA Summit. Still very good value for money but slightly smaller and with fewer of IA big names. It can actually be a better place to get to grips with the basics as the European market is a bit less developed and there are still plenty of people wanting to talk about tackling typical IA projects.

Oz IA, IA Konferenz, Italian IA Summit

There’s a growing number of country specific IA conferences. They’ve got a good track record of attracting well known speakers for the main presentations. If your country runs one of these, I’d definitely suggest attending your local conference first. Just make sure you can speak the language!

Usability Week

An expensive option, especially if you go for the full five days. In spite of the title you can do two full days of IA tuition and you’ll get taken through the basics in a structured way. Just don’t expect small tutor groups. The tutorial audiences are huge. A good intro if your company has deep pockets but I’d be wary of shelling out for this myself.

UX London

In spite of the name, this was actually a good alternative to the IA Summit for Londoners, with many of the same regular speakers. For learners, Donna Maurer’s workshops would have been a great start and the rest of the event a good chance to see the usual suspects speak. Hopefully this will happen again next year.

IDEA

Oddly the IA Institute’s own conference isn’t really about the craft of IA, more the philosophical and creative landscape it sits within. Fascinating stuff but if you are new to IA you should go for the pre-conference workshop which tends to be more practical.

UX Intensive

Not so much a conference, but actually my best recommendation to people looking to learn about IA. Adaptive Path run great training events and UX Intensive is a nice balance of detailed IA craft and the broader UX context. Not cheap but well worth the money. You can also choose to just attend the IA day.

None of these options are cheap. The cheaper conferences really need you to pay out for pre-conferences to get value for money. And most people will need to shell out for travel and accommodation too. In my new non-profit mindset I’ve been thinking about cheaper alternatives and that’s a topic I’ll come back to later.

I’m trying to imagine the scenario when the user would think “I know…it’ll be in uncategorized”? Particularly given that the choices above are ‘fiction’ and ‘non-fiction’, surely one of the better examples of exhaustive options?

If Guy is still reading, I’d love to know the thinking…

I had some quiet time over Xmas and did some current state analysis of the online shop then. I’m so glad I did this. As per usual, as soon as the project actually kicks off there is limited time to do this sort of thorough research.

One of our business analysts has done a formal “as-is” review of the back-end processes but I’ve been concentrating on the front end user experience, particularly browsing the catalogues.

For my current state analysis I identified all the existing features. To do this:

• took lots of screenshots, of all the screen variations I found
• made a sitemap
• annotated the documents, identifying each separate element

Now just because we have all these features now, it doesn’t mean we want to keep them. That said, during the website redesign we missed things that are working really well on the existing site. The site looks clunky and old-fashioned but there’s some nice features in there. So I wanted to make sure I genuinely knew the site inside out.

The functionality basically breaks down into:

• arriving on site (including via search engines)
• finding and choosing items
• information about purchasing
• registering
• adding to basket and purchasing
• tracking/cancelling

I’m going to concentrate on the first two areas for now.

Within the main shop (i.e. not the book shop) there are

• a store homepage
• category pages (including sub-categories)
• product pages

There’s also a sitemap, terms and conditions, product news, pricing information, contact forms, and help information but the other three are the main page types.

The project already has a product backlog from an earlier attempt to kick it off. After I have annotated all my screenshots, I compiled a list of features and then compared that to the product backlog.

The backlog was missing the following elements:

• link from product page to product instructions
• link from product page to other product guide/pages
• link from category page to product category guide e.g. choosing a mobile phone
• information about product size
• offer product variations e.g. colour and size
• product image
• product image enlargement
• seasonal offers and selections e.g. Xmas
• alternative ordering information e.g. call this number
• vat price + non-vat price
• login as different types of shopper
• links to t&cs
• communicate different delivery prices (free, special + xmas)

This flagged up for me a problem with the way the backlogs were generated. Stakeholders contributed ideas for features they wanted to see but tended to assume they would automatically get all the functionality they already have. Even with this process, I almost missed out search from the list, as it is part of the main website navigation and I was ignoring the standard page “furniture”.

Some of these gaps would indeed be obvious as we built the site but a number are not standard e-commerce functionality and it is entirely possible that the project team wouldn’t have thought of them independently. So for me the current state analysis catches functionality that might otherwise have slipped through the net.

Next: business requirements

When I tell my friends that I’m working on an e-commerce project they look a bit baffled. It isn’t something that people immediately think of in relation to charities.

But we make/publish and sell a lot of stuff: books (braille, large print, audio etc), magazines, watches, telephones, kitchen equipment, mobility aids, remote controls, headphones, clocks, calendars, software, board games, playing cards, lamps, and batteries.

Our resource centres are also shops, and we have a moderately sized warehouse in Peterborough.

I’ve mentioned the bump-ons before, but some other favourite products include:

• Talking tins
• Audible liquid level indicator
• Braille playing cards

The first thing you notice when you go to the RNIB shop is that this page talks about two separate “stores”.

“At present our Online Shop and Book site are separate. You will need to register in each store to buy a product or listen to  book.”

Obviously less than ideal.

Once you get into the stores it becomes obvious that the shop doesn’t feel like a normal online shop. There’s some basic patterns and conventions about how online shops look that the site isn’t consistent with. That makes the site a bit confusing, you have to actually read everything properly… you have to think about what you are doing. The product pages themselves are ok but the lack of images in the browse pages means the site doesn’t scream shop at you.

We’re just starting the project to relaunch the shop now, so I’m going to be digging a bit deeper. The goals are roughly to re-brand, improve the user experience and improve the back-end processes. At the moment it is just fun to be designing a shop.

Next: Current state analysis