IAs, Language and Lego at IA Summit 2008

My first presentation to my first IA Summit is now over — a presentation on semantic analysis.

In linguistics, semantics is the subfield that is devoted to the study of meaning, as inherent at the levels of words, phrases, and sentences. In the presentation, I suggest that by analysing content from its semantic perspective, you can gain a much richer understanding of your content and the business logic that goes into creating it.

If you want to create a taxonomy, a comprehensive index of ‘things’ for help files and FAQs, understand, map and infer the user-behaviour that creates content, then semantic analysis is the tool for you.

If you were at IA Summit, and had any questions arising from the presentation, please feel free to post a comment below. The entire speaker’s notes for the presentation can be found on my slideshare site.

M

Hands up if you’ve heard of IA?

A few years ago I would have been surprised if anyone in government knew what on earth IA was. At my recent “Intranets in Government” seminar, nearly all those attending knew what information architecture was, what it was for, and knew you needed it.

Bad information architecture is one of the core reasons intranets (or any other website for that matter) don’t work. When your staff throw up their hands like the robot from Lost in Space and say “I can’t find anything” it’s usually because the information architecture just isn’t a good fit for the information you’ve got, or for the users who want to consume it.

Intranets don’t meet our expectations because many sites are structurally poorly designed and just plain hard to use [1].

One of the tricks to getting intranets to work, as we discussed in the seminar, is to have an effective information architecture — that is (amongst other things) a good:

• classification scheme for your content – one that works for content producers as well as for those who are going to want to find the information
• site structure — one that allows users to quickly find information
• page skeleton – with good visual flow of information and consistent placing of widgets, like navigation, breadcrumbs, branding, etc, on each of the pages throughout the entire site

As the AGIMO Better Practice Guidelines say:

IA is the foundation of good website design. It is about planning where information and services will be located on the site in the most convenient and logical way for users. Effective IA helps ensure that sites meet [both] business and user needs.

If you’re intranet isn’t working for you, then it’s time to get thee to an IA!

M

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[1]. Head, A.J (2003) Why research intranets fail. Business & Finance Division Bulletin • Number 123. Spring 2003

Top 10 checklist for user-centred design

I recently presented to the ACT chapter of Australian Business Analysts Association (ABAA) on user-centred design. It was a timely reminder for some that people, their needs and wants, are an important part of the system design and requirements gathering — just as important as the requirements of business owners and the strategic goals of the project.

My latest IA engagement was no exception. It was good to be able to show to many of the analysts on the project, who had never seen user-centred design before, what good information architecture can do for a project. They saw first hand that user-centred design, particularly as the centre of requirements gathering activities, and done early, often, and up-front (not squashed between analysis and system implementation) can address many of the typical change management problems associated with introducing a new system. The project sponsor gave me a telling look one afternoon and said “we should have been doing this from the start, shouldn’t we”.

Here’s my Top 10 check-list to increase a system’s usability and the satisfaction levels of its users.

1. Know your users: Take time to understand the people who are going to use the system, whether its a website or application.

2. Content is King: Design features and content specifically for your users, not for yourself.
3. Make it logical: The organisation of information and how the navigation works has to be logical to those who will use it.

4. Be consistent: Don’t make people constantly adapt to changes layout, language and navigation paradigms — it makes learning about and using the system very confusing.

5. Make it simple: Using systems should require as little mental effort as possible — there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to get the job done and having to work hard to remember how a system works at the same time.

6. Plain English please!: Do the terms and language used in the system make sense to the people who will use it? Don’t make them learn a whole new vocabulary with words that mean one thing to them but another thing when used in the system. Avoid legalese, bureaucratese and organisational jargon.

7. Make the information scanable: Information should be laid out on the screen so that it has a logical flow for the eye. Don’t make people have to remember that one piece of important information is here, while another piece is somewhere else. Similar pieces of information should be as closely associated as possible.

8. Navigation redundancy: People all think about information in different ways, mostly through association rather than categorisation. This means that you need to provide multiple ways of discovering information — and this doesn’t just mean browse and search. If you use a taxonomy, make sure information can go in multiple categories, and complement it with a folksonomy.

9. Design by convention: People have an expectation of how systems and their components will work based on previous experience of other systems. This means you need to make your design comply with those design expectations — banners, navigation, search, login, and even cart features all need to appear according to existing design conventions. This doesn’t mean you can’t innovate — just know what your users expect and make it easy for them to learn your system.

10. Make the design clear: This will help people avoid making mistakes when they use your system. Help them recover from errors through providing consistent messaging in the interface itself.

M