a jaundiced eye: stuck
for thursday, may 8, 1997. Lou Rosenfeld, Web Architect.
Joining us today is Lou Rosenfeld, the founder of Argus Associates and a regular contributor to Web Review.
My background is in librarianship and information science. It's an
interesting field; people on the outside alternate between such statements
as "Lou, you're right: it's obvious that librarians will soon rule the
planet" and "You mean you need a *masters* degree to be a librarian???"
When I did my masters work ('88-'90), about five percent of the students
were intrigued by information technology, and the rest feared it or didn't
see the point. The field has changed a lot since then; my guess is that
at programs like U of Michigan's, that breakdown is now 40%/60% or
thereabouts. By the way, I was in the 5% group of "techies".
However, I did fit the negative stereotype somewhat when I started library
school: I initially thought it would be the right program for me because
I wouldn't have to talk much in class (any public speaking at all seemed
worse than swallowing rhinoceres whole). Yet through some odd twists of
fate, I was teaching my own courses there just a few years later. As a
PhD student ('93-'94), I created and co-taught what I believe were
academia's first courses exclusively about the Internet. If you were
interested in the Internet and information technology, academia was a
great place to be in the early '90s. I was able to do my own research and
develop systems for filtering Usenet postings and tables of contents long
before it was fashionable, got to manage a gopher server, and was
generally humored as I tried to evangelize the Internet to librarians, UM
students, and lots of other folks.
1992 or thereabouts: I was up to my ears in Gopher stuff, and saw the
original CERN Web site. "Hmmph. Hypertext will never work. Associations
between chunks of information are too personal, and reflect the prejudices
of their creators; it'll never scale to wider audiences." Wrong.
October, 1993: I invite Rich Wiggins, Internet god of Michigan State
University and author of The Internet for Everyone to speak to my class at
UM: "I know you're all very involved with Gopher right now, so prepare
yourselves: very soon, the Web will take off. This new graphical thing
called Mosaic is going to change everything." Yeah, right Rich.
January, 1994: Likely PhD topic starts to take shape: "A Comparison of
Relative Navigability of Hypertext and Hierarchical Menu-based Systems".
Yep, the Web vs. Gopher. I'd just be finishing up that pointless, myopic
monster if I hadn't bailed on the PhD program...
Many librarians have feared the Internet (and still do) as a profession
destroyer. Much of librarianship is about mediation between the user and
the information. Suddenly, free information available via free software
and low-cost Internet connectivity. So who needs librarians anymore?
This may be true if you're the sort of librarian who considers only rooms
full of books as the place to ply your trade. But any librarian who
understands the Internet ought to think of it as "The Librarians' Full
Employment Act". Internet users will definitely become more savvy about
searching for and using information, and that will certainly undercut some
library services, such as document delivery. But Internet users will
learn enough to know that for higher-end, complex information needs, you
need a professional to help. There will be an unbelievable demand for
librarians who work outside traditional libraries in a few years. Many of
these will be "free agents" who will be differentiated (and known) by
their subject expertise. Easy and cheap access to information and
information technology will therefore greatly expand the presence of
librarians in our economy, though traditional libraries will continue to
suffer. Of course, I'm assuming the economy remains strong and that our
society determines a workable economic model to pay for these "new
librarians".
Oh, and one other thing about the Web and librarianship: this
intersection has also greatly increased opportunties for librarians to
work as information system designers; in my case, as an information
architect. Design of information systems is the other thing that
librarians traditionally have done (in addition to mediation), and has
always been the weaker sister in that regard. This is starting to change.
Joe, a professor at the UM School of Information and Library Studies, and
I founded Argus back in early 1991. Our business was primarily focused on
teaching Internet workshops on weekends and evenings. We managed to burn
out on this just before teaching such workshops became a profitable
endeavor. In 1994, Peter Morville joined us, and we moved into Web site
design. Joe is now an inactive partner in Argus. I believe that the IPL
began in 1995, after I'd left the School and began working full-time for
Argus.
I was fortunate to leave academia at just the right time. There really
was no way to make a living in Internet-related business before 1995, and
if I'd stayed, I would have missed out on all the excitement, not to
mention an incredible substitute for the pain, suffering, and expense of
an MBA degree. Is business different than academia? Night and day. At
least running your own business is. Being in academia or working for a
large organization mean constantly fighting with silly, venal
bureacracies. Running your own business means that you only occasionally
have to deal with these same bureacracies, and they pay you six or seven
times as much to do what they may have originally employed you to do.
Information architecure is essentially applied common sense. The main job
of the information architect is to get normally reasonable people to look
before they leap into the tempting but bottomless pit of information
technology. This is *very* hard to do, because it involves three
incredibly challenging tasks:
So, despite Donald Norman's best advice, I'd have to say the biggest
problem with the Web in terms of information architecture is that the
people behind the Web sites ignore their own common sense about how
information should be organized, navigated, labeled, and searched. In all
fairness, it's psychologically hard to resist the temptation of diving
into a Web site without making plans. And information architecture is an
intangible area, nearly impossible to measure in any way. You only notice
it if isn't working. So it's hard for most people to recognize the need
for information architecture. And that's why the state of information
architecture on the Web is so sad.
I'm optimistic, because, as with the status of librarianship, things will
change. Site builders will quickly become more savvy, and will realize
that there is something wrong with the way their sites work. And they'll
want experts to fix their sites. We now have clients who come to us
asking for "information architects". Incredible.
But I'm also pessimistic. Much of information architecture is essentially
information retrieval, which simply doesn't work too well, and which won't
get much better. Ever. Even if site builders do realize that a search
engine can't just be slapped on top of a site without at least some
optimization, there are really very few concrete, obvious heuristics for
configuring that engine. Too many variables, such as audience type,
content, format, structure, dynamism, and budget blur the situation.
The information architects don't have a hang-out on the Internet yet. Or
if they do, they haven't invited me! I'm hopeful that sites like
Jaundiced Eye or Stating The Obvious may evolve to be that sort of place.
In the meantime, read columns like usability guru Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox
and our own Web Architect series in Web Review magazine. Web Review will
also be featuring some usability-oriented columns by Keith Instone.
As far as books go, I'm a fan of Tufte's Envisioning Information and
Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things. The former will stretch
your mind, broadening your understanding of information architecture and
design; the latter will remind you that the the information system you
design should accomodate the user's needs, and not the other way around.
Peter Morville, my partner at Argus, and I are in the midst of writing a
book on information architecture for Web sites. It'll be strongly
flavored with our information science and librarianship perspective. It'll
be published by O'Reilly & Associates this fall. Please buy it. End of crass commercial intrusion.
Although I haven't read all these folks, all are important because they've
been successful at introducing the concept of information architecture
from their various perspectives. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't
think that any of them give information science and librarianship their
due as important components of information architecture. Argus' mission
is to change the perception that information architecture pertains
exclusively to the relationship of chunks of information *within* pages,
as opposed to *between* pages.
I think one reason the Web is so successful is that it allows us to "have
it both ways" when it comes to interface standardization. At one level,
the way the Web works is fairly standardized. HTML files generally convey
the same information, major browsers have the same capabilities, and so
on. On the other hand, designers are always grousing about the amount of
autonomy users have because they can configure their own browsers.
There's a tension there that I think is good; I worry that if this balance
of power was tipped further in either direction, well... the Web would
collapse, the stock market would plummet, wars would erupt, millions of
lives would be lost, and we'd be forced to go back to using Gopher.
In general, I try to get a very good sense of the following before I begin
designing an architecture: mission and vision of the sponsoring
organization, why they want/need a Web site, who their audiences are, what
content and functionality they want to offer, their organizational
politics, and what their resource strengths and constraints are. With
this knowledge, I can work from the top down with the users' needs in
mind. When possible, I try to draw from an existing and familiar metaphor
for organizing the site's content and functionality, or come up with one.
Often I apply or adapt a top-level approach from our stable of
architectures.
Lately we've been working on many sites that are sponsored by large,
political, and distributed organizations, so I try not to force them to
change the way their content is organized (which often reflects their
politics). Instead I try to build an infrastructure on top of that
content that, through inventive browsing and searching techniques,
provides users with logical ways of accessing that content.
I feel that anyone can improve their site by following the basics of
information architecture; namely, putting some forethought into
navigation, organization, and so on. However, I don't think that just
anyone can create a really interesting and effective information
architecture, at least not for the large, complex sites we tend to work
on. You need to be a bit of an artist and a bit of a scientist to pull
this off. Artist because you need a certain level of creativity to think
"outside the lines" and understand information spaces abstractly.
Scientist because ultimately you need to be aware that measurement and
quantification are important in justifying your work. Art doesn't fly at
a certain point. Lastly, I think you need to be an outsider. This makes
you a better user advocate, but also divorces you from the inbred
organizational biases that poison so many site architectures.
We are hard at work at coming up with good objective measures of the
relative merits of our approaches. But as I've said, this is really hard
stuff to quantify. And few clients are willing to pay for this aspect of
our work. Instead they just focus on getting the site built.
Jakob Nielsen has some good ideas about this, but they're very
usability-oriented and admittedly not especially scientific. Then again,
multiplying 'amount of navigation time saved by user' by 'number of users'
by 'cost per hour of user's time' can add up to some amazing ROI-oriented
numbers to show off.
Ultimately, we justify our work by our reputation and portfolio. And I'm
not sure if this will change soon.
Flexible, functional tools are great. For blueprinting, we use a general
diagramming program called VISIO. And we live and die by whiteboards and
paper prototypes. We try to not let the tools' complexity get in the way
of doing work.
So it shouldn't be surprising that we're not excited by tools like
MAPA;
they're pretty and sexy, but aren't practical for use as aids to design or
navigation.
The main thing to remember about this industry is that it is very very
young, and that users are generally not too savvy. They fall prey to
marketing hype pretty easily; it's hard not to, what with the claims
being made by vendors, and the overall allure of information technology.
But that's changing pretty quickly. People are getting smart fast about
this stuff. I'm optimistic that the best technologies and approaches
will win out over time, and that the marketing of products will have less
and less impact on decision making.
The Internet community will build an immunity to the "hype of the month"
nature of the technologies you mention above. Instead, they'll focus less
on the Internet as a thing and more on using it to get work done and
communicate more effeciently. A by-product of this enlightenment will be
an understanding that automation can not address all of our information
needs. "Intelligent agents" and artificial intelligence will lose their
luster and we'll finally understand that they are useful only in limited
domains, and can't replace the skills that information professionals
(i.e., humans) bring to the table.
I'm really looking forward to that time.
Push is yet another instance of marketing folks getting us all hot and
bothered about a technology being "The Answer". My point was that push is
good in narrow, limited situations. We won't and can't get all our
information through push, so let's all calm down about push channels
replacing our Web sites.
Push is not new; many of us have been subscribing to mailing lists for
years. We didn't want and didn't get all our information that way before,
so why should things change now? Answer: marketing hype and prettier
presentation thanks to new technologies.
Push systems, in order to deliver complex information (beyond headlines,
weather reports, sports scores, stock quotes, and other info-pellets),
would require incredible user profiling interfaces that would be too great
a burden for the user to maintain. My research with Maurita Holland in
the early '90s seemed to make that point for me. But I'd better stop, or
I'll rehash the entire Web Architect column.
Not much other than how much I appreciate this opportunity to ramble, and
how much I'm looking forward to the field of information architecture
growing and maturing over the coming years. Thanks again!
© 1997-2001
Steven Champeon. All rights reserved. |