Category: Information Architecture

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UX-LX: Designing Search Experiences in Lisbon!

May 24, 2023 9:00AM-12:30PM WET
Sensemaking, Search and SEO at UX-LX: UX Lisbon

Register for UX-LX

Designing Effective Search Experiences

How do people locate and discover information online? Well, they type keywords into a search engine and then select items from the search results, right? This is the current mental model of how search/retrieval works for most users. But it’s not the only way people search, nor is it necessarily the most effective for the information seeker.

In this workshop, you will learn about ”Sense-making,” a search behavior that information architects, user experience (UX) and usability pros should not ignore. You will learn how individuals (and groups) plan and carry out search activities. How a searcher’s goals affect their sense-making tasks. And how accessible design and information architectures improve search performance. At the end, you you will understand how to optimize the user experience of your products and search engine results pages, so people get the information they need with less frustration. 

Topics covered:

  • Approaches to sense-making & information seeking behavior
  • Searcher goals that affect sense-making tasks
  • How accessible design and information architecture improve search performance
  • Where & how to implement search-related sense-making in user personas/profiles & customer journeys
  • How to optimize individual search listings for findability & sense-making
  • Search strategies for apps, video, voice and ChatGPT

Exercises:

  • Individual and group search exercise
  • Analyze a selected web page for accessible design and search optimization
  • Incorporate search behavior characteristics into personas and JTBD
  • App, video and voice search optimization
  • Discussion of new and emerging forms of search experiences

Attendees will learn:

  • How to identify search behaviors and incorporate them in personas and JTBD tasks
  • How to architect & optimize different types of search experiences
  • How accessible design can improve search experiences for everyone
  • How search strategy differs for websites, apps, voice, video and emerging experiences


Any requirements for attending: None

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Information Architecture Conference 2023

I am also hosting a full day workshop on Safe Tech Audit: Applying IA Heuristics for Digital Product Safety Testing in New Orleans on March 28 at IAC23: The Information Architecture Conference. Registration

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IAC23: Safe Tech Audits in New Orleans!

March 28, 2023 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM ET
Safe Tech Audit: Applying IA Heuristics for Digital Product Safety Testing at IAC23: The Information Architecture Conference

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Are you creating products that respect the needs and autonomy of your users? Are you concerned about how GDPR, CPRA and the proposed ADPPA data privacy regulations might affect your digital product? Would you like to learn how to evaluate your digital products for safe technology behavior?

It’s possible to measure ethical behavior of technology, and Information Architecture heuristics provide a useful testing framework. Building on the Safe Tech Audit presented at IAC22, this full day workshop will discuss the role of usability and application of Abby Covert’s Information Architecture Heuristics in technology development standards from the 2011 National Strategy for Trusted Identity in Cyberspace to the Internet Safety Labs’ ISL Safe Technology Audit. You will learn to use the framework to perform a product integrity test of a web technology of your choice.

In Part One, you will learn:

  • What are technology specifications and how are findability, understandability, accessibility and usability factors in developing them?
  • How do the various data privacy laws affect the use and control of personal data?
  • How can Information Architecture inform the design of safe and respectful apps and websites?

In Part Two, you will

  • Perform Safe Technology audits to measure product safety of a website and compare different kinds of technologies (news sites, social media, university websites, retail stores, etc.)
  • Select a website or app of your own to test and develop a plan to address any negative results (you won’t be required to share the results if you don’t wish to)
  • As a group, we will create an artifact to present on IAC23 Poster Night.
Register for IAC23

UX-LX 2023

I am also hosting a workshop on Sensemaking, Search and SEO in Lisbon on May 24 at UX-LX 2023. More details soon! Registration

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Me2B Alliance

Background

The Me2B Alliance is a standards development organization comprised of software engineers, policy analysts, UX experts, business and philanthropic leaders who are committed to giving individuals more say in how technology treats people. We are setting up a rigorous independent testing and certification program for websites, apps and connected devices. The Me2B Alliance is comprised of working groups for Me-s (the consumer), B-s (the business) as well as the Policy and Legal and Certification working groups. Together, we are setting the standard for Respectful Technology.

My Role

My role at the Me2B Alliance is twofold: I am leading up the Research and Validation practice to provide user experience and other research services to the various working groups, exploring questions around the consumer experience of their relationship with digital technology.

Secondly, I am developing the product integrity testing framework for digital technologies, in particular mobile apps and websites. This framework, coupled with data integrity and security testing, makes up the requirements for Me2BA certification.

User Research Methods

Ethnographic Research

I am engaging consumers in one on one conversations about their relationship with technologies they use in their day to day lives. Research questions range from and their understanding of privacy policies, terms of use agreements and other agreements they make implicitly by using a technology. for example, do users change how they interact with a website when they are familiar with the legal terms of the website? And would a score make a difference?

Preference Testing

I performed a series of tests of the certification mark to be used as a symbol of trust in connected digital technologies. This included interviews, focus groups, unmoderated 5-Second preference tests and surveys.

Product Integrity Testing

I developed a UX Integrity framework for the Me2B Safe and Respectful Technology Framework (now published as the Me2B Safe Specification). This framework was based on an applicaiton of IA heuristics to ensure that notices of data collection, use and sharing is Clear, Findable, Accessible, Credible and Communicative or understandable by a wide audience of human and machine readible or accessible devices.

Tools

Interviews and Focus Groups: Zoom, UserInterviews.com, Surveymonkey

Preference Tests and 5 Second tests: UserInterviews.com

Collaboration: Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Microsoft365, Trello, Monday

Artifacts

Safe Tech Audit: IA as a Framework for Respectful Design (April 23, 2022)
Conference Presentation: Information Architecture Conference 2022

Spotlight Report #5: Me2B Alliance Validation Testing Report: Consumer Perception of Legal Policies in Digital Technology (January 18, 2022)

Spotlight Report #3: Me2B Alliance Validation Research: Consumer Sensitivity to Location Tracking by Websites and Mobile Apps (November 5, 2021)

Shedding Light on Dark Patterns: A Case Study on Digital Harms (April 28, 2021)
Conference Presentation: Information Architecture Conference 2021

Webinar: Me2B Research: Consumer Views on Respectful Technology

Future Plans

We are planning to conduct three focus groups per month of consumers and digital product designers/managers. The research will continue to evolve our understanding of how consumers experience their relationship and risks with respect to digital technologies.

Safe Tech Audit Sketchnotes – IAC22

Zsofi Lang’s Sketchnotes from my talk “Safe Tech Audit: IA as a Framework for Respectful Design” from The Information Architecture Conference 2022:

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IA Conference in Quarantine: On-Site to Online in 30 Days

The IA Conference ended its four week run, which as some of you may recall was originally a five day event In New Orleans with 12 preconference workshops and 60 talks in three tracks. The format changed to all prerecorded talks released in three tracks daily over a period of three weeks. We put the plenaries on Mondays and Fridays and special programming, like panel talks and poster sessions, on Wednesdays. We used Slack for daily AMAs and Zoom for weekend watch parties and Q&A sessions with plenaries. Other social and mentoring activities took place mornings, weekends and evenings.

The workshops which usually come first were all moved to the fourth week except for Jorge Arango’s IA Essentials. We had a lot of student scholarship attendees and didn’t want to make them wait until after the main conference.

We have a lot of amazing people to thank for puling it off, starting with dozens of volunteers whose stamina is inspiring. I honestly wasn’t sure we could hold people that long. But Jared Spool thought we could do it and Cheryl at Rosenfeld Media gave us some valuable advice about connecting through online platforms.

So, what did we do? Check out this presentation “Rapid Switch: How we turned a five day onsite event into a monthlong, online celebration,” presented at the 500 Members Celebration of the Digital Collaboration Practitioners.

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Please Drive Slowly on Neutral Ground

August 26, 2019 NOLA Ready Alert instructing residents regarding parking restriction lift during flood warning.

My son, Jay, is a sophomore at Loyola University in New Orleans, so the worrywart parent I am signed up for NOLA Ready alerts to track emergencies during hurricane season. The above flash flood alert caught my eye, particularly the reference to parking restrictions on sidewalks and neutral grounds. Flooding in New Orleans streets can get dangerous so the city allows residents to to park cars in neutral areas during heavy rainfall.

The phrase “neutral ground” caught my eye in particular. I am co-chairing the Information Architecture Conference this year, in charge of Experience, so I’m interested in spotting terms that might be unique to New Orleans.

One of Jay’s favorite places to hang out in the Uptown neighborhood is called Neutral Ground Coffeehouse. It’s a place where people of all ages can gather, sip coffee, listen to live music and generally enjoy themselves. Like Temple Sinai on Charles Street across from Loyola’s Jesuit campus, Neutral Ground is a place where a Jewish kid from New York City can find some familiar culture and feel at home, with nightly programming, a weekly poetry hour and open mic on Sundays.

The phrase “Neutral Ground” didn’t seem particularly unique as far as two word phrases go. Other than the clever play on coffee “grounds” it never occurred to me that “Neutral Ground” had a specific meaning in New Orleans history.

On the NOLA Ready alert, neutral ground refers to the grassy median space between the lanes of major streets. On lanes where the city’s iconic streetcars run there are expanses of neutral ground that accommodate the trains with additional buffers. The area may or not be elevated from the main street level, but with the sidewalks, they provide a place for cars to park during heavy storms. We found ourselves waiting in these areas for traffic to pass at several intersections where they do not have many traffic lights or pedestrian signals.

Canal Street Mid City Neutral Ground. Photo by Infrogmation of New Orleans, December, 2016. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Canal_Street_Mid_City_Neutral_Ground_Dec_2016.jpg

A 2017 Times-Picayune story describes the original Neutral Ground as the center of Canal Street, which represented the division between the historically French and Anglo-American sections of the city. The French Quarter is on the north side of the divide and represents the First Municipality which was settled by French Creoles in the early Eighteenth Century. The Second Municipality, on the south side where the Central Business District is today, was settled by English speaking people after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

Below is an 1798 map showing the French Quarter and fortifications. The diagonal line to the left of the quarter is the boundary of an adjacent plantation, owned by John Greamer and his brother.

New Orleans in 1798 in accordance with an ordinance of the Illustrious Minustry and Royal Charter (as reprinted in the 1880s. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by user Infrogmation.. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NewOrleans1798_map.jpg

Below is an 1816 plan for New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase was completed. The rectangular area at the peak curve of the Missisippi is the French Quarter. Canal Street is the leftmost street in the French Quarter area, one block to the right of the diagonal plantation boundary, now Common Street.

1816 Plan of the City and Enrirons of New Orleans, taken from actual Survey by Barthelemy Lafon, via book “Charting Louisiana, Five Hundred Years of Maps” edited by Alfred E. Lemmmon, John T. Magill and Jason R. Wiese, Historic New Orleans Collection, 2003. Posted to Wikimedia Commons by user Infrogmation.

Canal Street’s center divide was officially declared “The Neutral Ground” by the Daily Picayune on March 11, 1837 and the term has since been the general phrase to describe what most other places call the median.

I’m sure I’ll keep learning more New Orleans lingo in preparation for our conference in April. Just yesterday in a marketing team call, Joe Sokohl, our Experience Director who has family ties there, used the term “lagniappe,” another distinctively New Orleans term, derived from Quechua, to describe swag or giveaways we might provide at the IA Conference. I guess we all need a dictionary, so here’s a couple to keep up (these sites also have information for visitors):

Experience New Orleans, Say What?
http://www.experienceneworleans.com/glossary.html

New Orleans.com, NOLA Speak
https://www.neworleans.com/things-to-do/multicultural/colorful-words/

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Pervasive Information Architecture in Emergency Management

NYC Emergency Operations Center, NYC Office of Emergency Management

The floor plan of the NYC Emergency Operations Center is a great example of pervasive information architecture, where the structure of the physical space mimics the structure/hierarchy of the people and systems in the space. It shows what each watch commander monitors, how reporting agencies and government community services like Department of Homeless Services and the Red Cross are grouped. It is a space that is designed to get optimal information flow from person to person, which supplements data flow from machine to machine.

For more, see my presentations on the Semiotics of Emergency Management.

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The Occasional Mentor: How to Advance as a UX Professional

I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity. 

One of the things that makes a very good UX designer is developing empathy not just for the user but also for your entire team. Knowing what the user and your teammates can and cannot do, what frustrates them and how you as the designer can make their experience easier or more enjoyable is a key part of UX. What I have been doing to advance in the field is start to expand my professional development beyond the usual design conference or Agile sprint Meetup. I have started to attend conferences and networking meetings outside my specific field of IA/UX. With a mentor’s encouragement, I have even begun going to the kinds of events that may seem a little scary to the average designer, like cybersecurity, cloud computing and semiotics/philosophy groups.

My approach to these events going in is understanding that much of what I will see be gibberish at first. I once attended a “search engine usability” event at Columbia Business School that was literally Greek to me: slide after slide of computational algorithms peppered with Greek letters. At first I admit I felt way out place, but I decided to just absorb the atmosphere and observe the people in the classroom. A different feeling washed over me as I stepped into that observer role. These were people who quite literally speak a different language than me and who may have a similarl, “fish out of water” experience at a design-oriented Meetup. I once met a female programmer at a design sprint event who claimed to “think in code” and admitted that the sketching part of an exercise was difficult for her. I think she was doing a similar observation technique as the one I used at the Columbia lecture. That kind of self-reflection about your own experience versus the experience of those who are more (or less) comfortable in a given context can be useful when working with team members or users whose context may be equally foreign to you as a designer.

I’ve had similar experiences attending financial and human resources related events in my role as COO for a financial wellness startup (although these were at least usually in English). Being able to step into the role of an ethnographer or anthropologist without entirely objectifying the experience and humanity of the subject group–in this case fellow conference attendees–is a great way to develop as an advanced UX professional.

Another thing you can do to develop as an advanced UX professional is to mentor another designer. I started mentoring in my local UXPA program after having been a mentee in the same program last year, which has been very valuable and rewarding. I don’t believe I was consciously trying to experience mentoring as a user of mentoring services when I joined as a mentee. I had real needs for which a mentor would be valuable. But the experience allowed me to feel empathy for the mentee when I became a mentor myself.

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Wikipedia at IA Summit 2016

As a Wikipedian who has been increasingly involved with editathons in New York City since completing my MLIS degree at Pratt Institute School of Information, I have been interested in creating bridges between the Wikipedia and IA communities. Thanks to a Wikimedia Foundation TPS grant, I was able to represent Wikipedia at the 2016 IA Summit in Atlanta and at the IA Institute’s workshop on Architecting the Information of Georgia House Bill 757, hosted by the Center for Civil and Human Rights.

I am especially interested in the linked data capabilities of Wikipedia and Wikidata as it is a growing topic among Information Architects and increasingly affecting how digital environments are structured and built. Last year, I created WikiProject: Information Architecture to pique interest among the IA community in Wikipedia editing, with the ultimate goal of showing IAs how their knowledge and expertise contributes to engaging Wikipedia users. I also presented a session on IA and Wikipedia at the 2015 Information Architecture Summit in Minneapolis and wrote an article on IA in Wikipedia for the ASIS&T Bulletin, which increased interest in potential editing and collaboration with the Wikipedia community. While I was originally interested in getting more IAs involved to develop Information Architecture topics in Wikipedia, it is becoming increasingly clear that the IA community is equipped to collaborate with Wikipedia on its own technology development and projects.

This year’s IA Summit was a continued exploration of the relationship between the Wikipedia and IA communities at the 2016 IA Summit in Atlanta. On Saturday May 7, I represented Wikipedia at two events, a workshop hosted by the Information Architecture Institute at the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, and IA Summit Game Night which took place the same evening at the Omni Atlanta Hotel. The workshop, “Architecting the Information of Georgia House Bill 757” was the Institute’s response to the proposal of a bill that would potentially discriminate against the LGBT community. About 30 IAI members attended. The format was primarily discussion and centered on the role and impact of language in legislative processes. My input centered on Wikipedia as an information architecture tool that describes and related concepts internationally through its articles and Wikidata. I proposed that the IA Institute and its members should take a greater role in editing and offer their expertise in the structure of information to the Wikipedia community. I further made an appeal for information architects to take greater ownership of the structure of language and concept relationships as defined in Wikidata and its tools and APIs.

IA Summit Game Night, held immediately after the IAI workshop at the Omni Atlanta Hotel, hosted 85 attendees. Players selected from ten tables, one which was dedicated to Wikipedia. We set up the unofficial Wikipedia game and also used it as a way to introduce information architect practitioners to Wikipedia editing. The evening went from 8-11pm and we played several rounds of the game. Most of the people who stopped by the table who inquired about my role with Wikipedia turned out to already be editors, but mostly on a very casual level. I encouraged them to continue to edit and discussed the structure of Wikidata as a tool that IAs can use in developing information spaces outside of Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Gamers at IA Summit 2016 Game Night
Wikipedia Gamers at IA Summit 2016 Game Night

Wikipedia Swag at IA Summit 2016 Game Night
Wikipedia Swag at IA Summit 2016 Game Night

Game night was a lot of fun and opened a conversation about the ways that IAs can participate in local Wikipedia activities in their areas as well as generally as editors and developers of tools that utilize Wikidata. I handed out pins and stickers throughout the three day conference.

My roommate during the event, Marianne Sweeny, will be one of three co-chairs at the 2017 Information Architecture Summit in Vancouver, March 22-28. She is very interested in developing a greater role for Wikipedia at the 2017 event and has asked me to prepare a proposal for engagement next year. Thoughts include an ongoing Wikipedia booth or table in the exhibition hall, train the trainers events, weekend long Editathon related to the conference theme, Game Night participation and other activities TBD.

I plan to share a report of the event at the May 25 meeting of the NYC Wikipedia meetup.

My goal for this event was to get more information architects involved with Wikipedia: what it is, why it aligns with their own work and how they can be involved. Last year’s editathon in Minneapolis was a good start. I am confident that this has been an important activity to build bridges to ensure that our communities support each other. Over time, the benefit to WMF of a collaboration with the IA community will be improved architecture and user experience based on sound information architecture practices.

As for the conference itself, my notes from the IA Summit sessions are available at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14YuldZDpjoe6JEtIxB7qp5Ai0FjILaMc7UYrk8zCrT8/edit?usp=sharing