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).

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.)

Surprisingly this white paper on building multilingual solutions in SharePoints provides a good overview of how the search works, regardless of whether you are interested in the multilingual aspect.

White paper: Plan for building multilingual solutions.

Read page 15, titled “overview of the language features in search” for a description of content crawling and search query extraction. Then 16-18 provide a good overview of individual features and what they are doing.

Word breakers A word breaker is a component used by the query and index engines to break compound words and phrases into individual words or tokens. If there is no word breaker for a specific language, the neutral word breaker is used, in which case word breaking occurs where there are white spaces between the words and phrases. At indexing time, if there is any locale information associated with the document (for example, a Word document contains locale information for each text chunk), the index engine will try to use the word breaker for that locale. If the document does not contain any locale information, the user locale of the computer the indexer is installed on is used instead. At query time, the locale (HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE) of the browser from which the query was sent is used to perform word breaking on the query. Additional information about the language availability of the word breaker component is available in Appendix B: Search Language Considerations.

Stemming Stemming is a feature of the word breaker component used only by the query engine to determine where the word boundaries are in the stream of characters in the query. A stemmer extracts the root form of a given word. For example, ”running,” ”ran,” and ”runner“ are all variants of the verb ”to run.” In some languages, a stemmer expands the root form of a word to alternate forms. Stemming is turned off by default. Stemmers are available only for languages that have morphological expansion; this means that, for languages where stemmers are not available, turning on this feature in the Search Result Page (CoreResult Web Part) will not have any effect. Additional information about language availability for the Stemmer feature is available in Appendix B: Search Language Considerations.

Noise words dictionary Noise words are words that do not add value to a query, such as ”and,” ”the,” and ”a.” The indexing engine filters them to save index space and to increase performance. Noise word files are customizable, language-specific text files. These files are a simple list of words, one per line. If a noise word file is changed, you must perform a full update of the index to incorporate the changes. Additional information about the noise words dictionary and how to customize it is available at www.microsoft.com.

Custom dictionary The custom dictionary file contains values that the search server must include at index and query times. Custom dictionary lists are customizable, language-specific text files. These files are used by Search in both the index and query processes to identify exceptions to the noise word dictionaries. A word such as “AT&T,” for example, will never be indexed by default because the word breaker breaks it into single noise words. To avoid this, the user can add ”AT&T” to the custom dictionary file; as result, this word will be treated as an exception by the word breaker and will be indexed and queried. These files contain a simple list of words, one per line. If the custom dictionary file is changed, you must perform a full update of the index to incorporate the changes. By default, no custom dictionary file is installed during Office SharePoint Server 2007 Setup. Additional information about the custom dictionary file and how to customize it is available at www.microsoft.com.

Thesaurus There is a configurable thesaurus file for each language that Search supports. Using the thesaurus, you can specify synonyms for words and also automatically replace words in a query with other words that you specify. The thesaurus used will always be in the language of the query, not necessarily the server’s user locale. If a language-specific thesaurus is not available, a neutral thesaurus (tseneu.xml) is used. Additional information about the thesaurus file and how to customize it is available at www.microsoft.com.

Language Auto Detection The Language Auto Detection (LAD) feature generates a best guess about the language of a text chunk based on the Unicode range and other language patterns. Basically, it’s used for relevance calculation by the index engine and in queries sent from the Advanced Search Web Part, where the user is able to specify constraints on the language of the documents returned by a query.

Did You Mean? The Did You Mean? feature is used by the query engine to catch possible spelling errors and to provide suggestions for queries. The Did You Mean? feature builds suggestions by using three components:

· Query log Information tracked in the query log includes the query terms used, when the search results were returned for search queries, and the pages that were viewed from search results. This search usage data helps you understand how people are using search and what information they are seeking. You can use this data to help determine how to improve the search experience for users.

· Dictionary lexicon A dictionary of most-used lexicons provided at installation time.

· Custom lexicon A collection of the most frequently occurring words in the corpus, built at query time by the query engine from indexed information.

The Did You Mean? suggestions are available only for English, French, German, and Spanish.

Definition Extraction The Definition Extraction feature finds definitions for candidate terms and identifies acronyms and their expansions by examining the grammatical structure of sentences that have been indexed (for example, NASA, radar, modem, and so on). It is only available for English.

I laughed out loud at the accusation in the comments that content strategy, as defined in Rachel’s article, was an ‘expansive transposition’ followed by the explanation that we already have “user experience”, a term not unfamiliar with land grabs.

As soon as people don’t want to be constrained by their job titles, they start redefining their job titles as matching their interests. I realise I’m running the risk of falling foul  of my own critique.

A good while back, Chris Sizemore pointed me at Rachel Lovinger’s article Content Strategy: The Philosophy of Data.

He thought I might find it interesting as Rachel’s take on content strategy overlapped alot with how my IA team at the BBC had formed, as opposed to IA out in the digital agency world. Our heartland was content management and search, we did content audits, metadata models and were entranced by visions of linked data. We were part of a wider UX team, but it was an often difficult relationship, with many designers (UX or otherwise)  seeing us as cuckoos in the nest.

You’ll have probably noticed that I’m uncomfortable with the growing voices within the IA community to re-brand us all as UX designers. And I was struck by Rachel’s comments on her blog that a discussion of URIs didn’t seem at home at the IA summit . That’s led me to have a better look at what is going on in the content strategy field than I did when Chris first told me I ought to.

So as well as Rachel’s article, here’s some content strategy reading material

• The discipline of content strategy
  
• Content-tious strategy
• scatter/gather – blog of the content strategists at Razorfish
• Meaningful data – Rachel’s own blog
• A re-read of Ann Rockley’s Managing Enterprise Content might be helpful

Apologies to those of you who still find IA a new-fangled job title.

I’ve been reading extracts of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford. Crawford has a PhD in Political Philosophy, once worked writing abstracts for an academic journal service and now runs a motorcycle repair shop. His book, which began as an article in the New Atlantis, champions the virtues of using your hands to make and repair things.

He tells some fairly depressing tales of cubicle life:

“The quota demanded, then, not just dumbing down but also a bit of moral re-education, the opposite of the kind that occurs in the heedful absorption of mechanical work. I had to suppress my sense of responsibility to the article itself, and to others — to the author, to begin with, as well as to the hapless users of the database, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflected the author’s work. Such detachment was made easy by the fact there was no immediate consequence for me; I could write any nonsense whatever….

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this…

The good life comes in a variety of forms.”

via The Case for Working With Your Hands – NYTimes.com.

Web accessibility is a reasonably familiar topic for IAs but document accessibility is also important. Here’s some considerations for your typical Word documents.

To support screen magnification and other adjustments:

• don’t set the text to black. choose automatic (if you set the text to black and the person reading has the colours reversed for ease of reading then all of your text will disappear)
• use a simple clear font e.g. Ariel
• avoid italics
• use left aligned text including headings (screen magnification users often don’t realise there is content that is centred or right aligned)
• don’t use other colours for fonts (the RNIB training specifically asks us not to use fancy colours like purple. I don’t think it was particularly aimed at me)
• use 14 point text as the standard font size (this seems huge to me, but this is our recommended standard as meeting the needs of most readers)

Screen readers with speech output

• use the correct Word styles
• use heading hierarchies to communicate the structure of the document

You’ll note the advice is less detailed for screen readers. This mirrors my experience with web design in the RNIB. Outside the RNIB most accessibility conversations I heard focused on the challenge of designing for screenreaders but the challenges are much greater in designing for both magnification users and fully sighted users at the same time.

I’m going to “Innovations in Web and Enterprise Search” at BCS next week

Search Solutions is a special one-day event dedicated to the latest innovations in web and enterprise search. In contrast to other major industry events, Search Solutions aims to be highly interactive and collegial, with attendance limited to 60-80 delegates.

Provisional programme

09:30 – 10:00 Registration and coffee

Session 1: (Chair: Tony Russell-Rose)

* 10:00 Introduction – Alan Pollard, BCS President

* 10:10 “Enterprising Search” – Mike Taylor, Microsoft

* 10:35 Accessing Digital Memory: Yahoo! Search Pad – Vivian Lin Dufour, Yahoo

* 11:00 “How Google Ads Work” – Richard Russell, Google

11:25 – 11:45 COFFEE BREAK

Session 2: (Chair: Andy MacFarlane)

* 11:45 “Location-based services: Positioning, Geocontent and Location-aware Applications” – Dave Mountain, Placr

* 12:10 “Librarians, metadata, and search” – Alan Oliver, Ex Libris

* 12:35 “UI Design Patterns for Search & Information Discovery”- Tony Russell-Rose, Endeca

13:00 – 14:15 LUNCH

Session 3: (Chair: Leif Azzopardi)

* 14:15 “Search-Based Applications: the Maturation of Search” – Greg Grefenstette, Exalead

* 14:40 “How and why you need to calculate the true value of page 1 natural search engine positions” – Gary Jennings, WebOptimiser

* 15:05 “Search as a service with Xapian” – Richard Boulton, Lemur Consulting

15:30 – 16:00 TEA BREAK

Session 4: (Chair: Alex Bailey)

* 16:00 “The Benefits of Taxonomy in Content Management”, Andrew Maisey, Unified Solutions

* 16:25 Panel: “Interactive Information Retrieval” – details to follow

17:00 – 19:00 DRINKS RECEPTION

via BCS IRSG – Search Solutions 2009.

A recent conversation with a friend generated shock (and even a little scorn) that I’d been producing wireframes. I was firmly entreated to sketch instead. Around the same time a recruiter approached me with information on a job that would require detailed annotated UI specs of around 40 pages every fortnight.

The profession is still judged, by and large, by the quality of our documentation. Most recruiters and hiring managers seem more interested in the quality of annotation than the quality of thinking.

I’m rather inconsistent in my approach to documentation. Mostly the medium is picked for the context. Is the project agile? How good are the developers? Is there a remote team? Do lots of people need to be consulted? What are their reading preferences?

Whilst I’m happier with pen and paper  than computer, I think it is far to say that I doodle a good deal more than I sketch.  Now there’s always a way to get chickens into a blog post… this little trio were sketched during a conference presentation, presumably a scintilating one and probably about something 2.0 related given the labelling of the fowl.

In fact, it appears I doodle most when irritated by the speaker. In this case , rather than asking an insightful question to highlight the cliched and superficial nature of the argument, I wrote “blog, wisdom of the crowds, whatever”. That told him, I’m sure. I do still want this mug though:

None of this is what my friend had in mind though. She’d like this more: part user journeys, part concept map, but mostly not very pretty. Not really for sharing (apart from with you lot, of course) but it could be re-jigged into something more respectable.

I do these little pages all the time but again they aren’t for collaborative purposes. This one was so I could sanity check we had all the functionality we’d need on the product backlog before the supplier drew up the drawbridge.

Then of course, there’s cheating. Those search forms I shared recently were created in Visio but with the sketchy stencil:

I very rarely do this kind of documentation anymore. My business stakeholders are bored by them and the developers are best told what to do by pointing over their shoulders.

I do still do content models. This kind of specification still gets traction with the developers:

But, horror of horrors, a lot of my documentation these days is actually reasonably high-fidelity mock-ups. These are really aimed at the business stakeholders. Colours and fonts are pretty much fixed by our visibility requirements, so the business units know better than to ask for their favourite shade of puce.  And they worry less if they don’t have to try and visualise from wireframes. It doesn’t take me any longer as I’ve got a colour stencil and the choices are pretty limited.

Is this ironic? I’m working for an organisation of and for blind people and I’m producing the most colourful deliverables ever.  But then you should see the colour of the office floors.