smorgasbord-design

As our interactions with the web are increasingly dominated by search, a pertinent discussion amongst the IxDA community leads me to explore the role of on-site search dominance and draw some conclusions regarding its efficacy in various contexts.

The IxDA discussion list can be a peculiar place. Amongst the job broadcasts, tissue-paper critiques of other people’s work, calls-for-papers, book clubs and speculative ramblings on the direction of our industry, very occasionally a great little debate pops up. Props to David Hatch for starting a discussion on search-dominance, hypothesising “People search first because that’s how they’re used to finding info”.  The debate subsequently built up a head of steam when industry heavyweights Jared Spool and Peter Morville got involved, recalling memories of their good natured and informed search debate in 2001 (”In Defense of Search” – Peter Morville).

I’ve recently proposed more search dominance for a major client of ours and it was important for me to demonstrate that search should not be at the expense of category taxonomy or traditional navigation paradigms. Rather search should support and potentially lead the interrogation of the site by reflecting and responding to intents. Currently the data tells us that people use on-site search as a fall-back when traditional navigation fails; contentiously, Spool suggests this takes place off the homepage at deeper levels after people have exhausted the primary & secondary signposting,  my understanding is that this takes place because people have arrived at a lower level first (vide infra).

As-ever with our line of work, there is no simple answer and the caveat ‘it depends’ must be applied. Looking at the nature of the content will provide direction. Search-dominance is strong on Amazon and eBay: the breadth of product offering in these environments suggesting that a design dominated by categorisation wouldn’t work. Or would it? CraigsList recently underwent a theoretical redesign thanks to Wired and in one instance where search was presented as the dominant element, user feedback was interestingly negative. The breadth of taxonomic categorisation on craigslist and the familiarity of this for their users does lend it some support. I regularly cite Globrix, a British property search site that originally depoloyed little more than a search box on their homepage but has since modified their design to cope better with the a broader range visitor motivations (returning, non-buyers, agents). On Globrix the principle user-type (a property hunter) knows that the dominant meta data is location, this is their primary intent – find a house in a given location, only then will they filter on additional faceted needs such as price, dimensions, bedrooms and so on.

For the examples above the functionality and content of the site is well-known and thus either categorisation or search – if comprehensively considered – will be largely successful. Where the content is less well-known and Jared’s so-called ‘content identifiers’ don’t exist, search dominance might not be the best solution. Take the cited Sequoia Capital, as Hyperlabs‘ Stefano Bussolon indicated in the discuss, Sequoia has limited scent; one has to play with the search to uncover the information the site contains and this doesn’t particularly sit well with the nature of the content Sequoia holds, it doesn’t have the familiarity of Craigslist, Amazon & eBay. It doesn’t make interrogating their material impossible, it just makes it a few degrees harder and that just doesn’t seem right. Of course, there are other marketing reasons to do this to your site: a dramatic interface shift provides something to talk about, and gives you a great opportunity to fiddle and fettle with your content to start hiding or promoting various pages in-line with your business objectives.

Context of use should play a part in your thinking too. Bokardo’s Joshua Porter rightly directs us to consider the screen size of mobile users and the value of focusing on search where bordering a page in with navigation elements crowds the interface or directing people to scan and click within a tag cloud provides gestural/interaction problems.

Sitting above all of these considerations is the all-seeing eye of Google. We must accept that people are increasingly arriving deeper within (y)our site(s), Google doesn’t just send people to the homepage. People must engage with your architecture throughout the site and this may mean that – without the correct wayfinding at the point of arrival – they will resort to search from deep within the hierarchy. As William Brall analogised

“[your homepage is not] your front door… all your content pages are. More accurately, Google is your front door … or really your hallway.”

Finally, search can afford us valuable insight to what users are looking for. The interrogation of search logs and the careful consideration of user’s interactions with the search interface reveals – often in real-time – information about what content people are looking for and, importantly, how they categorise it. You may wish to expose this data back to your users “most searched for…” or use it to re-categorise and prioritise your content behind the scenes.

On-site search has an increasingly bright future, as the capability of the engines improve so will the results. As information architects we need to be mindful that taxonomies are, through their origins in the ambiguities of our language, inherently subjective. Exclusive reliance on categorisation is not a solution and that supporting them thorugh well-considered semantic and faceted search implementations will yield greater user-satisfaction and important insights to user-intents that can be gathered in real time to improve the findability of your content.

Useful Reference: Konigi’s pattern library of search interfaces

Last week I took some time out of my day to talk with Nick Southgate (Grey) and Victoria Murray (IPA) about Behavioural Economics. Specifically we talked about choice architecture and how this reflects my day-job. I could, and did, talk about default setting on transactional forms, page hierarchy, button sizes, pupil dilation and all sorts of strategies experience designers deploy to assist (and, let’s be frank, hoodwink) our users. Whilst I’ve got a good grasp of the behavioural side, the economics does continue to confound me.

I’m not great with money, but I like organising things. I can’t remember when it was that I got a copy of MS Money, probably around 2002, but it co-incided with my increasingly web-based life. At that time NatWest’s site was an HTML-skinned translation of their internal systems and as such was largely designed by bankers for bankers and consequently a grind to use. Time-outs, slow, paginated statements and nothing that could really pass for analysis or interrogation existed. To this end I’d download as much data as I could and import it into Money. Putting aside the usual Microsoft prejudices, this was actually software that worked. It allowed me to flip to and from accounts,  associate spending to categories, identify trends, budget, calculate interest and so-on and so forth.

The strongest element of this management for me was the assignment of categories. Before this point I kept this kind of stuff in my head: “I’ve taken about £50 out in cash this month”, “about £100 in groceries this month”, “£1000 of my savings is allocated for my bike/laptop/holiday” and so on.

If it turned out that I wanted a laptop costing £1200 and I had £700 in savings and £600 in my current account I could technically afford that laptop, but I wouldn’t buy it because, in my head, I only had £700 in the allocated savings account.

This was (it appeared) no different to putting coins in a piggybank – easy to deposit, hard to extract. Or allocating three cookie jars for deposit bits of your pay to rent, bills and food. If the food jar is empty, you tell yourself you can’t raid the bills jar – even though there’s money in there to feed you… This is a common strategy, it’s called bracketing (Soman & Cheema) or Envelope System (ostensibly ‘invented’ in The Great Depression)

Banks, largely, don’t let you do this online at-source. Well, they do if you count opening up different accounts. When my wife and I moved into our first owner-occupied place this year we started a process of bracketing by consolidating and creating accounts to deal with joint savings, personal day-to-day spending, personal savings and day-to-day expenses – not to mention investments and shares. This is clumsy and annoying. It means some are tax efficient, low-access accounts, some are distinctly not. What happens – even with MS Money to keep track – is that money that could be earning better interest doesn’t move in to the savings accounts until we have time to do it or – as happened recently – current accounts approach overdraft because nominally-protected savings haven’t been used to prop-up unusual spending patterns.

[Aside: I once heard a colleague talking about a sweep account where all his current account surplus was swept into his savings at the end of every month. A superb nudge, why don't all banks offer this?]

This strategy has been shown to be used by gamblers too. Winnings go in to a different coat pocket than their stake money, taking from the winnings pocket is a physical objection that increases the level of consideration to give the gambler a fighting chance of keeping their habit under control.

I’d assumed that I was doing this in MS Money too, allocating money to ‘cash’, ‘rent’ etc. surely, the same thing? A virtual cookie jar right? Nope. As Chris Peterson so rightly puts it, this is not the same. It’s ex post facto. I’m allocating the monies having already spent them, analysing and tracking my behaviour rather than using strategies of bracketing and assignment to modify that behaviour. Ok, so there’s some overlap; by knowing I’ve a budget of £100 cash per month, seeing I’ve spent £70 is helpful to reign in the next trip to the ATM but it’s still essentially a mental barrier. It’s diagnostic, not preventative.

So, on to the solution (and hat-tip once again to Chris though the answer did rather suggest itself). My online bank should allow me to allocate jars/envelopes/brackets. I could see my total account balance as allocated to my identified needs: a balance of £5000? £100o for the mortgage, £1500 for this month’s bills, £1000 for the holiday savings. So, I’ve got £1500 to play with this month? Well, last month you spent £400 on day-to day costs … so that’s more like £1100. Not quite enough for that MacBook Pro yet…

Each of these brackets could be intelligent, based on that post-analysis of your spending. They could be temporal, expiring once a time limit is reached, or rule-driven based on the achieving a financial goal. How strict these brackets are can be user-defined, do you allow one bracket to take from another under given conditions? Perhaps after asking you, ‘are you sure’? The equivalent of hiding the alarm clock on the other side of the room to make it harder to hit the snooze. This is information architecture, it’s choice architecture. It’s the taxnomic organisation of your finances and no bank is doing it in-house.

Sure, you can, of course, sign-up to online services such as Mvelopes promising this kind of functionality but who wants to do that? Why complicate the experience? I wouldn’t sign-up to Google Mail and then find a third party to manage my folders and mail rules. So, instead of blithering on about Mint et. al to financial clients and pointing out analysis capability they’re missing out on delivering, perhaps we can identify some territory that they could actually own … that is if they have the agility & appetite to do so.

David sent round a great article last week which I happily read on my commute home, happily because it helps me answer the increasing number of clients and colleagues that want every user experience to feel and innovate like Apple.

In “You Can’t Innovate Like Apple” [PDF], Alain Breillatt takes apart the culture, processes and economics behind the much-fêted and plagiarised technology company. Where this article differs from the wealth of Apple-gazing elsewhere is that is is derived from original research and pragmatic business objectivity.

I do urge you to read Alain’s article but, if you’re short of time and just need some bullet points for a lame presentation or a one-to-one with your boss, here’s the succint version:

• Pixel perfect mock-ups, lots of ‘em.
• Refine from 10 concepts, to 3 to 1.
• No (formal) market research
• Small, world-leading design teams
• Ownership of the entire process
• Slim product lines
• Maniacal attention to detail & pursuit of perfection.
• Inspirational leadership, focussed loyal footsoldiers.
• Reward.

Off you pop, go read the piece.

In other news
This is IA continues to develop with a few more postings going online this week. anything you see that you think represents IA in the real world would be gladly appreciated.

I’m contributing next week to the working party at the IPA looking in to Behavioural Economics, hopefully this will culminate in a published whitepaper where we can take the opportunity to demonstrate the the field of Information Architecture within (digital) advertising are already well-versed in Nudge techniques.

Last week I produced a document I’m pretty proud of. I managed to combine a comprehensive sitemap (exploring five tiers deep) which formed the basis of four additional layered views of a particular site demonstrating:

1. Visitor activity (sitemap nodes were coloured in a heatmap spectrum to denote the ‘heat’ of traffic)
2. Proportional size of channels, sections and domains – represented by proportional node bubbles.
3. Templates and compliance to current brand guidelines – which pages were on/off brand.
4. Technology – whether pages were active or static.

The sitemaps were printed nearly 2m across (A0 size) providing the first birds-eye view of the vast territory that this client was responsible for online. I’m happy to share anonymised visuals of these on request.

Enough with the chest-puffing already. Until we speak again.

So in my post about focus groups I lamented that the Ford Mondeo did nothing spectacular. I was wrong, as Robert Fein (Director of User Experience at Grand Union) carefully pointed out: it sold in the millions and won Car of The Year, at least in Europe.

I’m not an expert on the Mondeo’s history so forgive my inaccuracies. It was designed to be a “car of the world” (hence the etymology of the name) and therefore serve multiple markets. But it didn’t. It didn’t sell well in the US, prime Ford territory and there are lots of reasons for this. But, all that aside, Robert identified quite correctly that be considering price, variety of model range and so on as user needs as much as any other, Ford were creating a user-centred car. I’m extrapolating from his comments (made on Twitter) but that is in essence what he contends. And he’s right.

I’ve still got a way to go before I resolve the difference between listening to users and creating a desirable product based on their wants and listening to users to create a desirable product based on their needs and motivations. Perhaps its about the context in which you listen, what you hear and how – importantly – you interpret and respond.

:: Right, next post is about PlusNet and how they really listened to me and responded (eventually) to retain me as a loyal customer.

Poor old Rory, he can’t seem to do anything right over at BBC’s dot.life. One minute he’s been told he’s anti-Apple and the next, an Apple fanboy. Theoretical biases aside, his report on Jonathan Ive’s RCA session, “Listening to Mr iPhone” made for further corroboration that designing for people needn’t mean asking those people what they want:

“… how did [Apple] decide what customers wanted – surely by using focus groups? “We don’t do focus groups,” [Ive] said firmly, explaining that they resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone.

Christopher Frayling reminded us at that point of Henry Ford’s line about what his customers would have demanded if asked – “a faster horse” – and it’s surely true that the point of innovative companies is to come up with products that customers don’t yet know they need.”

Though the solution may not come out of a focus group; the problems certainly do. It is the interpretation of these problems that reflect – as human-centred designers – our skillset, in the same way a keyword reflects perhaps something of a user’s need but not necessarily their motivation. Recently I’ve begun to find myself faced with a long list of requirements from clients who’ve “listened” to their users and are passionately trying to ensure their next online release is the answer to their range of gripes and desires. It’s hard to knock these back and say “the customer’s wrong here” but in quite a few cases they will be. If we don’t we might find ourselves with the antithesis of Ford’s vision, The Ford Mondeo. A car so everyman, so bland and box-ticking that it did nothing spectacular at all – becoming a byword for mediocrity.

Ive doesn’t design mediocrity and the long-held assertion at Apple that the focus group is ineffectual hasn’t done their revenue or sales figures much harm has it?

:: More on how to interpret what users want from what they do/say, in “Desire Paths and Digital Ethnography“

Following yesterday’s post where I mentioned the analogy of the flimsy doorknob and in no small part influenced by Horry and Emmel’s seminal Campaign essay “Advertising Found Dead“, I have today launched This is IA.

My intention is to create a stream of photography showing information architecture in the physical world. I decided to run this as a separate blog from smorgasbord-design principally because it’s not just me behind this but a large number of IA evangelists including all the good and nice people at Dare.

Anyone who knows me, I mean really knows me, will be aware of my passion for the analogy. Explanations to clients and colleagues are, like a plasterer’s radio, liberally splattered with them. One of the strongest analogies that us Information/User-Experience Architects deploy is that of the construction industry; borrowing heavily from ‘real’ architecture. It’s how I explain what I do to my mum. I think she gets it.

So, when I picked up on Dustin Curtis‘ fine post on The Bathroom Door recently, it really struck a chord and thence went straight into my toolbox of bon mots. The story goes that Dustin visits a wealthy executive’s San Francisco house for a party. The house is “insanely beautiful … just about everything in the house is remarkable”, but this experience is tempered by the experience of using the bathroom door. A door with a knob which “felt loose and hollow, like cheap crap”. The paradox of being in a jaw-dropping house that relied – for one of the most-used interactive elements in the entire building – on shoddy ironmongery provides a wonderful analogy for interaction design.

Of course, it’s nothing new: attention to detail, red-route usability and so on. The key here is that by making some of these most-used interaction elements absolutely as solid and well-considered as possible then we go a long way to defining the experience overall. So, I ask you this: where is the bathroom door on your site, and how flimsy does it feel?

Emma Roberts in a classic greyscale Bruce Weber shot

I’ve been following the Riam Dean case with a great deal of interest. On the surface this is a girl who, born with a disability which led her to wear a prosthetic, has been sent to a stock room because it didn’t fit with the Abercrombie & Fitch look. The reality is surely something quite different.

I should declare I am a fan of A&F so I speak from a biased position but I cannot believe it is as simple as the Daily Mail and others would have us believe. A&F customers – and let us be clear there are millions of them – buy in to a brand look. This look is stage-managed, it’s cultivated, it is meticulously controlled. The reason for this is because it works, it sells billions of dollars worth of clothing. When A&F opened in London it was preposterously popular and the queues in Burlington Gardens at Christmas (during a recession) were lengthy even when a basic Polo short costs over £50.

When I go in there it’s no secret that I would like to look like the models in the doorway, like the handsome lads serving me and I probably gawp at the cute girls dancing on the balcony above the door. A&F (like many image-conscious brands) only employ good-looking people, Riam is good looking and they will have employed her no-doubt because she is pretty and would add to their cultivated look.

Riam is their target market: ‘college’, educated, petite, cute and willing to spend disposable cash on an aspirational brand (Aside: the brand is not so aspirational in the US, in fact they have created a premium A&F brand, RUEHL No. 925, to meet this market). It would make no sense for a well-manicured brand to piss off their market and create this kind of publicity.

So let’s start unpicking this case, bearing in mind we’ve heard a lot of Riam’s testimony but very little from A&F.

1. As a major American company that has experienced discrimination lawsuits in the litigation-happy USA their employment policy is likely to be watertight.

2. By agreeing to work for them (and there will be hundreds applying for each job) you agree to meet their look criteria. If she was not comfortable exposing her prosthetic limb then don’t work there, they were happy with it, they employed her. Girls not comfortable exposing their breasts aren’t strippers. Muslims not happy working with pork don’t make bacon sandwiches.

3. If she was unhappy to expose her limb why is is she is now happy to be photographed with it exposed?

4. It was her decision to wear a cardigan to cover the arm, not the firm attempting to cover it up and hide it. If I was happily employed by my employer but felt embarrased by something and wore an unauthorised (by contract) item of clothing I’d expect it to be considered a breach of contract.

5. The management team offered to resolve her dispute, she – according to their evidence – decided not to but rather go to court. What was the process that A&F would have followed to settle the dispute?

6. She is a student lawyer who will no doubt benefit from the exposure amongst an increasingly-competitive profession by making sure she is articulate and apparently principled. Call me a cynic but this smacks more than a little of self-promotion.

The way this has been made to sound is that Riam didn’t feel the need to mention her limb at interview, A&F found out, thought it didn’t look nice, made her wear a cardigan and then used a look policy to hide her in the store room.

I’m open to debate but I would hope that our proud and noble legal process are able to cut through the hyperbole here, on the face of this piece by CharonQC, I don’t hold out much hope.

UPDATE: 26th June 15:51 based on Maria Barbera’s evidence reported on BBC News

7. Abercrombie & Fitch told Riam Dean she could work in the store wearing short sleeves. Something Riam appears happy to do here and here.

8. Abercrombie & Fitch were aware of her prosthetic limb but were not aware that she had been given approval to wear a cardigan, her cardigan prevented her from working on the shop floor (not her arm) as it breached the look policy.

9. Riam was not distressed by the decision that she should work in the stockroom.

10. Riam’s initial complaint was that she had not been given the opportunity to remove the cardigan. The reason this was done was apparently due to the manager’s sensitivity to her body image – assuming she wouldn’t want to take it off, rather than insisting she did.

11. This is where the evidence from Ms. Barbera causes a problem because, rather implausibly, she asserts that she “did not make the link between the student’s reluctance to take off her cardigan with her disability”.

12. Taking a look through the statements presented on feminist Zelda Lily’s exclusive, “I Questioned My Self Worth” it seems Riam resigned via email and the company failed to follow this up or invoke the process that might have dealt with the apparent discrimination at an early stage.

13. There is an unsubstantiated suggestion that Riam was offered $10,000 (£6,000) to settle out of court.

So, I continue to follow this case with interest. For an discussion on the A&F look, this BBC News Magazine piece does a digestible job, though the usual narrow-minded comments add little to the debate.

I rarely buy a Sunday paper but today I picked up The Observer. That in itself shows how little I have come to care about the overweight £2 supplement-fest of traditional Sabbath newsprint. Irrevocably damaged by the packaging of throwaway DVDs and the cellophane-wrapped glossies that contain 3^rd rate cultural reviews and only smatterings of the kind of reportage that I used to find compelling over a lazy breakfast in Kent.

Inside today’s Observer was a lazy little piece of Twitter bashing by Barbara Ellen. A theme that’s been repeated in the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times of late. The general opinion goes that Twitter, and by implication almost any (micro)-blogging service, is a window on nothing more than banality, a product of the narcissistic age. Much of the blame is levelled here at celebrity Twitterers, the journalists taking great delight in selecting the most trivial output and demonstrating this as typical of the worth of the medium. At this point it becomes abundantly clear that many of these critics have not actually used Twitter in any way like that which more broad-minded individuals do.

Imagine taking a phial of water from the Thames, glancing at the muddy result and proclaiming the Thames itself boring, mundane. This is in-effect what comment like this is doing, Twitter is a stream, a veritable river of information that is nothing more than a conduit for the Zeitgeist. If you don’t like what’s being said then you don’t much care for the lives we lead for this is them, laid bare, broadcast. Take, for example the counter analogy, does one mundane and trivial piece in The Observer reflect the printed press?

Stephen Fry, whom Ms. Ellen invites to “hang [his] noble head in shame”, has the extent of following on Twitter he has not because of Jeeves & Wooster or Lord Melchett but because Stephen embodies the internet in its current form. He embraces dialogue, real-time output and the genuine excitement of the accessible, switched-on media. To compare his output with that of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher’s is not really comparing like with like, again it is akin to comparing a vacuous piece in London Lite with The Guardian; both are disseminated by printed press ergo they must they be the same?

But where I think Ms. Ellen’s focus settles is on the apparent hypocrisy of the individuals who bemoan invasions of privacy and liberty but are prepared to bare-all on Twitter; revealing their locations, itineraries and candid personal snaps of their lives. The difference here, Barbara, is that they have chosen to do this. If they are happy to take their self-publicity on which they depend into their own hands and many, many thousands are prepared to engage and converse with them in that regard who are we to criticise?

Later in the self-same paper I read a piece on the demise of MySpace (though it is perhaps over-played) and – in the way that when something vexes you it seems to be in every newspaper, bulletin and water-cooler conversation – it puts me in mind of other pieces I’ve consumed about the end of Friends Reunited and the apparent morbidity of the regional press. Clearly we are in tumultuous times. Consumers are consuming in a bewilderingly fluid manner. As fast as we all try and keep up stars are being born and going supernova with alarming pace. The only trend which runs concurrent in all this is the trend for digital.

Digital allows us all to be publishers and yet, as Demi Moore’s Twitter output has perhaps illustrated, this does not mean that we should. Or at least, that we need to sound the death knell for the traditional media big-guns. On Friday night I watched a superb new documentary series on BBC One (”Adventures In War Sea and Ice“)  which teamed Sir Ranulph Fiennes with Robin Knox-Jonston and John Simpson and tasked them with experiencing the others’ challenging line-of-work. In this inaugural episode, Simpson dragged his cohorts through the inestimable dangers of war-torn Afghanistan in the search of news. What it did perhaps illustrate to me was that John Simpson, carefully skilled orator as he may be, doesn’t actually do much more than collate opinion and rebroadcast it as his comment and insight. This is not to downplay his learned contributions and his ability to sort the wheat from the chaff but in simple terms he does no more than any of us citizen publishers do and thus it comes down to a matter of trust.

Trust is a theme taken up by Nick Cohen in his piece “Who would you rather trust – the BBC or a blogger” itself a response to Clay Shirky’s output “Here Comes Everybody”. Nick’s central theme appears to be that we can trust the (paid) hack more often than we can trust the blogger. On the basis of Simpson’s editing re-telling of his interviewee’s statements I’m not convinced that’s entirely the case. He argues that reporters of this ilk have “earned the right to be believed”. How? By attending a journalism course and spending a few years on the local rag being paid the minimum wage for writing pieces about the County Fair? I simply can’t concur especially when the unfiltered immediacy of a picture posted on Twitter or a video blog from the site of an atrocity demonstrates a vivid humanity that a hastily-scrambled satellite link-up from the rooftop of a distant hotel can never match.

There will always be a place for quality journalism and apocalyptic fears that camera crews won’t be dispersed to capture the stories, display a naivety that somehow citizen journalism and locally-sourced content won’t have an enormous part to play. Because the BBC truck hasn’t rolled into the township does not mean that BBC-affiliated bloggers, editors and analysts cannot take that content and demonstrate their value by producing from it a coherent, insightful and professional piece of news. The BBC’s role will continue to be one of aggregation, sourcing the news from individuals on the ground and overlaying the comment and impartiality for which it is famous. The difference is that the source of this news is increasingly unlikely to be a BBC employee with an expense account, a Marks & Spencer suit and a background in BBC Radio Cumbria.

Detail of the Morzine piste map

I just got back from skiing in the Port de Soleil area in France. It’s only the second time I’ve been skiing, the first being three cold and very wintery days atop Cairngorm Mountain in Scotland. I always expected the French Alps to be a more impressive affair; freeway-wide pistes, tree-lined rat-runs and acres and acres of skiable terrain. Add to that the inumerable chairlifts, gondolas (correct plural) and tow-lifts and the region was a beffudling confusion of signage and mapping.

I’d spend a large part of my afternoons (i.e. outside of our guided lessons) fixated on a tatty series of piste maps, glancing myopically at signage and lift names and trying to figure out where on earth I was, where I had come from and how I was going to get anywhere. This confusion was made a little worse by my inability to ski much other than ‘easy’ reds and (of course) the blues.

My issue is very much with the piste map. Even before I’d ever been on skis I’d seen these posted in hotels and magazines when summering in ski regions. Generally over-stylised in water-colour or faux-photographic rendering, they attempt to do more than just locate the various pieces of infrastructure, they are attempting to visualise a mountain range in all its wintery glory.

And this is – one of the reasons – where they fail. For a start the ones I was using rarely showed the direction of the piste. Of course, you can only really ski downhill and it’s not always clear in which direction the piste descends. Secondly the intersection of piste and lift was often ambiguous. Pistes may appear to end at a lift but the reality may be that the lift is the other side of an uphill ridge. Finally, the colour and weight of the line indicating a lift was unhelpfully typically black which – as you may know – causes a little confusion when establishing if it’s something I should avoid (difficult piste) or savour (circa 10 minutes of peaceful ascent).

My personal take is that we should follow the example of Harry Beck, the chap who rather sensibly realised that the relative geographic location and landmarking on the original London Underground maps was irrelevant to the subterranean traveller and thus a schematic representation was more effective. Using landmarks is not helpful on the piste, whilst it may be effective to the guide or experienced navigator, the majority of recreational users will find the succession of snowy peaks and wooded valleys impossible to differentiate – especially in low visiblity conditions when correct navigation is even more crucial. The maps, for example, only work in one orientation due to their use of shading and perspective.

So the market is open for the production of a piste map that supports:

1 :: piste direction (and potential graduations as green, blue, red & black not detailed enough)
2 ::  lift speed and capacity
3 :: lift and piste interchanges
4 :: non-geographical routing

I’m going to take a section of the Morzine (Pleny side) map and make an attempt at this, if you know of any Piste schematics that are a little more like this then let me know. I’ve also see examples like Whistler’s and Avoriaz’s that allow you to switch features on-off but this isn’t exactly practical on the slopes…

Let’s see where this goes.