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

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.

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.

There’s a Banksy round the corner which tugs at our paranoia, our suspicion of “surveillance Britain“. The recent Lords’ report summarised thus:

“Surveillance is an inescapable part of life in the UK, …Every time we make a telephone call, send an email, browse the internet, or even walk down our local high street, our actions may be monitored and recorded. To respond to crime, combat the threat of terrorism and improve administrative efficiency, successive UK governments have gradually constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world.”

To me this seems a peculiar thing to lament right now given that a total lack of surveillance has led to the militants in Lahore melting into the back-streets with nothing but a grainy TV camera shot to identify them. But these thoughts are nothing but an aside from the point of this post which was to join in David Aaronovitch’s lament about the (wanton?) abuse of statistics in the pursuit of public debate and hysteria.

Here in the UK we’re often described as the most observed nation in the world. That we’re captured on 300 cameras a-day. Aaronovitch set-out to forensically examine the pathology of that statistic and what he found was fiction. Really, fiction. That figure was made-up by a self-aggrandising academic, based on a contrived story, and yet it’s made its way into the zeitgeist and now everyone from Daily Mail to Observer readers and all those in-between believe it. 

David puts it better than I of course:

“I have no idea whether the “300 times” case is typical, but I fear that it might be, and that, if only there were more time to scrutinise all the claims made in such “reports” – whatever side they take – we would discover many “truths” that just aren’t”.

It’s a bit of a leap but it certainly put me in mind of a large number of lies, damn lies and statistics pedalled by the user experience community and others in defence of their work. Tweet me @smorgasbord or leave a comment with any you find.

I must be the bane of our office. At least two days  a week I stumble into the room with my bike on my shoulders and leave it propped up in the corner all day long. A few people have had bikes either taken or interfered-with outside on Margaret Street and Titchfield Street despite the presence of Velorution and a busy footfall. To me, at least, it wasn’t worth the risk and I got fed-up with carrying a few kilos of Kryptonite in my pack each time I rode in.

I genuinley believe Dare could create some kind of in-house storage; Fallon, over the road, have a section inside their offices where bikes are stored. Allocating a bit of wall-space or using a redundant corner of the floor would be a great way of promoting sustainable and healthy commuting – and a smart thing to show-off to clients too.

That said, I also wish that Boris’ London Cycling plan would look at creating some truly innovative ways of storing bikes. Using Bicycles recently posted a link to a piece on Wired: “Crazy Underground Storage Unit In Japan Rerieves Bikes In Seconds“. I like the (information) architecture of this in the way that the bikes are stored with unique ID and stacked in a rotary system that makes retrieval a quick process. On a personal level i’d be worried about the stability of the bike in transit and the potential for damage but it does look pretty neat. Of course, it would never work in London because the system would suffer from vandalism. There’s an innate respect for this kind of technology in Japan I think.

On a more continental note, this Plant Lock from The Frontyard Company is great for domestic situations. When I first saw it (thanks to a Tweet from Rob Shakir) I thought “nice, but flimsy” and yet, watching the video, it can handle some pretty determined attacks. The only thing that would put me off actually using it would be the fact that it means the bike is stored outside in the elements. However, their excellent covered unit (”Bike Port“) is much better for the back garden. Either way, if I was a landlord I’d stick these in for sure.

How nice would it be if the pavements of Fitzrovia featured planters with bikes locked-up instead of ugly, utilitarian hoops? I think London needs to get creative and Copenhagenize the streets.

Art of Football

Originally uploaded by Flo Heiss

The consequence of the creative teams from two top London digital agencies responding to Nike’s call-to-arms (http://www.nike1-1.com/). I think the three lions and the Katsushika Hokusai ‘waves’ are fantastic.

When I used to work at Norwich Union I once met enigmatic Sales & Marketing Director John Kitson to talk about my future role in the web team. At that point NU were flinging a lot of shit at the digital wall and some of it was sticking. They had one of, if not the highest, online media spends in the UK and the consequence of that was a lot of traffic. Coupled with an effective (if irritating) ‘Quote Me Happy‘ TV campaign by AMV BBDO, a worthy grass-roots sponsorship of athletics in an Olympic-winning year and all this meant that yellow was a strong brand.

And then the bad news started. NU were hemorrhaging jobs to the sub-continent, hemorrhaging money to Moneysupermarket and their friends for poor-risk customers who were price sensitive and the wheels started to fall off. Kitson moved sideways, a slew of marketing people came in and messed around with things, NU slipped off the radar, botched a takeover bid for the Pru and found themselves floundering. 

This week they annnounced they were unable to afford buying their biggest competitor, the RBS insurance group and, in the worst kept secret in Norwich, decided to ditch the 200-year old marque for the generic Aviva.

It’s the right thing to do for a company no-longer receiving gloriously profitable business from the British general insurance market. It’s also painful for Norwich as a city who have seen, under former tank-commander Patrick Snowball’s stewardship, a considerable loss of low-level tertiary industry employment in the city. Despite a considerable capital investment in their head office (which is actually now a lease-back arrangement), there will soon be little other than dusty archives to link Aviva with the city of its birth. Snowball was ousted and the entirely fiscal-orientated Igal Mayer was plonked in his seat by Andrew Moss. Igal has all the charisma of a sponge and I can say that with impunity having listened to him drone through teleconferences.

And so, to appease the baying yokel hoardes Kitson (bought back to place his hand on the marketing tiller) has decided to sponsor Norwich City. Something, I might add, they swore blind they’d never do. Reasons were comprehensive: it would upset the Scottish & York contingent (from the Commercial / General Accident arms), because it was already heavily invested in athletics and, more pertinently, because it was aspiring to be a global brand.

Casting aside the desire to appear global (as it can do that with aplomb with it’s non-specific Aviva marque) it’s a rather disingenuous piece of regional PR to throw some cash at the local team and smacks of management team with few ideas.

Recently stumbled accross these artistic sketch-notes by Mike Rhode taken during SxSW. Not only do these make use of the appealing paper and space of a moleskine but they also do a cracking job of conveying the idea generation at the conference. In the past, colleagues of mine have blogged and, this year, the whole event appears to have generated terabytes of social feed content yet there’s something in these quaint sketches that really appeals to me. I guess it’s got something to do with the artistic, creative attention to detail rather than the usual focus on the emerging technologies. This way, it’s almost all about the ideas.

Toby sent this round today which he found on one of my new regular blog-reads, Springwise. In short it’s a paparazzi service for non-celebs; get a photographer to follow you at a vaguely-determined time to capture “..a portfolio of pictures representing the fleeting moments of an authentic lifestyle“. I’m undecided as to whether I think this is a good/pointless business but, frankly, I like the chutzpah of it.