I was a late blogger. It must have been around 2004 when I started blogging in earnest. Greenonions.com was primarily a vehicle to elaborate some strange (some might say paranoid) ideas about how cognitive linguistics (as described in George Lakoff’s book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things) can shed light on the challenges with content management. I wrote dozens of blog posts on how the metaphors we used to describe content management were (a) evidence that we had conceived the technology incorrectly and (b) actively undermining our efforts to implement good content management systems.

The two venues where I really got to explore these ideas were at the IA Summit in 2006 and at the IA Retreat in 2005. At the Summit, I led part of a workshop sponsored by the IA Institute, and then I gave a regular session on new ideas in content management. The Retreat was more fun. I constructed a workbook (PDF download) that drove the conversation.

I’m confident that with sufficient time to do research, I could elaborate this concept into something substantial. The language we use to talk about computing no doubt shapes the design of interfaces and the ways technology integrates into our lives. Emphasis on “sufficient time”.

Summary: Thoughts on user-centered design through the lens of a flamewar on the DC-area bluegrass mailing list.

If you’re not familiar with bluegrass music, “Appalachian Jazz” wouldn’t be a bad description, nor would it be an insult to either genre. Both jazz and bluegrass are rooted in improvisation and a call-and-response dialectic relationship between the musicians. Both serve as frameworks for ever-expansive forms of music, yielding derivatives that build upon the basic assumptions (see also Jamgrass, Newgrass, etc.).

Both forms of music have a canon, their “standards,” which every novice has to learn in order to become proficient in the genre. In bluegrass music, standards are relatively simple pieces, generally using three chords with confined melody lines. Though bluegrass is characterized by its musical qualities (high tenor vocals, emphasis on fiddle, banjo, and mandolin, high speed tempos), its roots are geographical: in mountain music, and as close to oral history as you can get. Writing it down is a recent endeavor (as is its study by urban Jewish guys).

User-Centered Musicianship

The hot topic on the DC-area bluegrass mailing list these days is a flamewar about requests: members of the audience shouting out songs they’d like to hear. If you’re a national act like Del McCoury or Ricky Skaggs, you’re getting requests for your own work. If you’re a local act, the requests are for standards. The poor song chosen as the standard to represent all standards is a song made famous by the Osborne Brothers, Rocky Top. (It’s actually kind of an interesting song with a mode change in the bridge, but that’s another story.)

To take requests or not: those are the two schools of thought have emerged in this conversation. The former is epitomized by this quote:

Musicians who think they’re too good to play requests are missing the whole point of what it means to be a professional musician.  Being a professional means treating playing music as if it were a business, and the point of a business is to give customers what they want.

(No names to protect the innocent. Archives of the list are open only to subscribers.)

There’s another musician on the list who takes the opposing view, that taking requests somehow compromises his professional integrity. He said:

Let me put this in the perspective from the audience not from the stage.  I go to hear a band to see what they got. I want to hear them play and sing – I want to hear something new even if it is a twist on an old song. I don’t want to hear Rocky Top or any of the other beat-to-death songs. These songs bore me and are usually not played very well.

Performance Art

One of the things I love about music as an artform is that songs–to varying degrees–can be seen as frameworks. A piece of music can be played as written, but there are infinite opportunities for musicians to interpret, through rhythm, harmony, arrangement, and other stylistic elements. (Liz Danzico has been exploring the relationship between improvisation and design.)

When one musician remakes or covers a song by another musician, he or she sees an opportunity to explore the framework authored by someone else. (Heavy-handed interpretations can be as simple as “let’s play Aerosmith in the bluegrass style.” More subtle interpretations involve finding a way to put your own stamp on a piece, perhaps leveraging strengths of your band.)

This is what makes standards such a useful language for musicians. Simple frameworks for everyone to learn gives novices a common starting point. Seasoned musicians reinterpreting the canon provide models for students to understand the different ways to apply technique to a particular song structure. Moreover, seasoned musicians can enjoy a musical conversation with each other (a “jam”) even if they’ve never played together before, because everyone draws from the same frameworks.

The Audience

The flip side, of course, is that standards are “boring” to some musicians. When someone in the audience calls out “Rocky Top,” professional musicians hear “We want the lowest common denominator. We’re not interested in YOUR original music.”

This attitude is a useful input into the conversation about user-centered design, especially as products become more participatory. A few ideas:

Standards: The word “Standards” is appropriate. In both music and design, they represent meaningful starting points, a common language. Designers may resent standards because they don’t want to use the same old conventions for solving a design problem (just like musicians who feel like there’s nothing left to interpret on a song). At the same time, standards are a language to which everyone (at least in theory) can relate–designers and users alike. Apply a standard to a design problem, and you have at least some guarantee that users will have experienced the convention previously.

Requests: Musicians who resent simply having to fulfill every request by the audience parallel designers who don’t responsibly interpret user needs. Research may identify countless feature requests, but acquiescing to every desired feature does not yield a better product. Both musicians and designers need to incorporate requests into the larger, but more local framework: the project parameters, the business requirements, the technical constraints, and the designer’s own voice.

Ownership: Who owns the music? One musician calls it HIS music, and another calls it THEIR music. Still another uses the first person, OUR music. The nature of performance art makes the concept of ownership difficult, and each perspective is a useful lens with which to look at music. HIS music: he’s expressing his own compositions and interpretations; he’s demonstrating his aptitude for particular techniques. THEIR music: the audience bought the performance or the recording; they’re the customer, and they need to be satisfied. OUR music: playing music is a dialog between the musicians and the audience; musicians respond to the vibe, and the audience responds to the performance.

Interactive products, especially those that are attached to the internet, paint a similarly blurry line. I buy an iPod, but the design is Apple’s, no? I fill it with music, configure the settings, perhaps customize with a case, and it becomes “more mine”. This is less direct in web sites that allow me to contribute content, reconfigure the framework, and extend invitations to other participants. Twitter offers a useful example, incorporating features that came from emergent use, not from explicit user research. (This is a design technique called “paving the cowpaths,” that is, formalizing features that have become entrenched.) As a person who used the “RT” convention (to mean “retweet,” a feature subsequently incorporated into the product) am I partially responsible for the design of Twitter? Do I have some ownership of the product? (Even if the implementation is not ideal.)

The Future of Participation

In her interview on the Pipeline, Liz Danzico talks about the increasing blurry line between consuming and creating. Audiences become more active participants in the creation process. To see a drunken “Free Bird!” request as a parallel might be doing a disservice to the metaphor. Live performances don’t offer a useful framework for considering the future of user experience. Even more recent innovations like karaoke and open mic night, as well as old stand-bys like pulling a volunteer from the audience, don’t shed light on what a participatory medium looks like.

In a sense, user experience designers have it easier than musicians. We’re used to people taking products and finding novel application for them. As this practice becomes more pervasive, as products become more about their adaptability and their connectivity, musicians may find themselves in the hot seat. Some may be forced to revisit their assumption that performances are entirely within their control.

I’m not interested in drawing a solid line between IA and content strategy: you do this and I’ll do this. As we’ve seen with most multi-disciplinary approaches to design, different people bring different perspectives. In the elaborations below, that’s exactly my intent: to show how the perspective of a content strategist is useful in design challenges I face day-to-day as an information architect.

Range of priorities

What I said: The range of priorities within a given content type. For example, is every press release going to be equally important (or unimportant), or is there a big spread between the most important and the least important press release?

Why this takes a content strategist: Intimate knowledge of the content and how users relate to it helps answer the question whether the content type is inherently important in their work, or whether importance is driven by external circumstances and other criteria.

Why this matters to IA: As I’m designing an interface to highlight content, I need reliable ways to prioritize new compositions. If there’s a big spread, I’ll need to develop a metadata framework that provides other means for prioritizing content.

For example: A high-tech marketing site offers various “solutions” that correspond to particular business problems. Imagine a “green technology” section within the government industry pages. The green technology pages provide various types of content–white papers, case studies, executive briefs, brochures, etc. Users can click a content type to see a full list. Some compositions are more important than others because they have a longer shelf-life. Some brochures, for example, provide an overview of green technology while others describe specific applications. Some brochures reflect the latest thinking while others provide more of a foundation.

Algorithmic prioritization

What I said: Whether the relative priority among its peers can be determined by a rule, or if a human needs to decide. That is, given a set of five press releases, is there a rule I can reliably apply that will prioritize them? (For example: release date.)

Why this takes a content strategist: Intimate knowledge of how the organization creates content can identify whether they’re capable of supplying sufficient metadata to support elaborate prioritization criteria or whether they have people dedicated to providing editorial support.

Why this matters to IA: My specifications need to distinguish between content areas that are populated automatically and those that require human intervention. I need to be able to spell out the rules for prioritizing content, but I want to make sure I do it in a way that’s sensitive to both user needs and the organization’s ability to support it.

For example: Suppose we decide that the green technology page should incorporate a taste of each of these content types. To create a focal point for the page, we need to pick one main composition from among all the content. We then need a couple examples of each type–exemplars that illustrate the kinds of information you’ll find. We decide that for the page’s centerpiece, there’s no convenient criteria for selecting that content automatically. Instead, the design specification calls for human intervention to determine the most appropriate composition for the center piece.

Inherent prioritization

What I said: Whether there is an inherent prioritization between content types. That is, is every press release going to be more important than every white paper?

Why this takes a content strategist: Understanding the range of content to appear in each type, an how users relate to that variety. Also, content types represent genres, so content strategists will understand how people integrate those genres into their work.

Why this matters to IA: Yet another rule to facilitate prioritization. If I understand that one type of content will always be more important than another, I can use content type as a prioritization criteria.

For example: One more look at our “green technology” page on this high-tech client. User research shows that purchasers of the client’s products are most interested in how their own peers have been successful with green technology. The design team decides that case studies should therefore be the most important content type. At the same time, the business doesn’t want a case study to overwhelm the other content types: there’s plenty of valuable information in there that also helps people decide to buy. To balance these needs, the design team decides to build more solid relationships between the other content types and case studies, such that every white paper, brochure, and executive brief points back to a case study, and vice versa. Through designing page components, the information architect makes this relationship explicit.

• Do these design challenges ring true? How would you have handled them differently?
• Do the perspectives implied in these vignettes align with your experience?
• Are the distinctions drawn sufficiently clear/vague to suit your team?

What do you think, should I elaborate the other points, too?

Summary: In which I attempt to clarify content strategy by doing it in terms I understand: my own.

Content strategy is the the kind of thing that loses clarity when I try to look at it directly. I can glimpse it out of the corner of my eye, but attempt to stare it down, it hops away. (You know, the rabbits are just emerging in my neighborhood, so maybe that’s what I’m talking about.)

Information Architects and Content Strategists: Like kids in a sandbox. Kids that don't throw sand at each other.

Anyway, for the last couple years, I kept thinking to myself, if I just take a couple hours to sit and think about this, I’ll be able to nail it down. (Not talking about rabbits any more.) I’m frustrated with the characterization of content strategy as “good writing” or “operational issues.” They are unnecessarily limiting, even if taken in the context of the web. I know there’s a design component here, a newly emergent set of  challenges that comes with preparing information to be delivered online.

Content Strategy is Design

Content strategists are designers, just like I am. And like me, the information architect, the “stuff” content strategists design is somewhat more abstract, somewhat less defined than a couple million pixels. But, aside from the composition of content, content strategists haven’t (to my satisfaction anyway) defined what it is they design, what’s the output of their work.

I’m not sure I could do that for my profession either. It took me a decade to be able to say, “Information architects design structures.”

But what I can do is tell you what I need. I can tell you how I’d like to work with a content strategist as co-designers. I need you, Content Strategist Person, to tell me the following 10 things about content:

1. Range of priorities: The range of priorities within a given content type. For example, is every press release going to be equally important (or unimportant), or is there a big spread between the most important and the least important press release?
2. Algorithmic prioritization: Whether the relative priority among its peers can be determined by a rule, or if a human needs to decide. That is, given a set of five press releases, is there a rule I can reliably apply that will prioritize them? (For example: release date.)
3. Inherent prioritization: Whether there is an inherent prioritization between content types. That is, is every press release going to be more important than every white paper?
4. Plans for growth: The organization’s plans for growing or changing the content.
5. Level of effort: The complexity of the production process for each content type. Which content is hard to produce? Which content is easy to produce? Which content can I count on to always be up-to-date? Which content should be prioritized when it appears, and otherwise remain in the background?
6. Metadata authoring: The organization’s capacity for applying metadata, and what’s realistic in terms of populating a metadata framework. We’ll have lots of good ideas on how to link content together, but those ideas probably won’t work unless we understand the organization’s ability to tag the content.
7. Metadata parameters: Parameters for different metadata fields. As we’re designing wireframes, let’s be smart about how much text we need to display.
8. User needs: The need for transparency to the users about some of the underlying structures. How much do users care about content type? Help me distinguish administrative metadata from metadata that actually contributes to findability.
9. Users needs (2): How the content fits into user scenarios. Is this transient content (stuff just to get them just to the next step) or destination content? How will people use the content once they find it? What are you doing to align the content with requirements specified in personas or elsewhere?
10. Sample content: Finally, if you want me to put sample content in my wireframes, I’m totally game. Just give me the sample content.

Ultimately, my job is to design structures. These are structures that establish navigation pathways, search frameworks, and business rules for governing how to display information. In order to design those things, I need insight into what you want the content to be, how you want it to behave, and what structures will let the content thrive.

My Promise to You

Far be it for me to make demands without promising something in return. That’s thirteen years of marriage talking. (Who says our personal lives can’t affect our professional ones?)

What I promise to do for you:

• Collaborate with you to establish a content model: a network of categories that classifies content by its function or structure. It’s easier to talk about content by its type, and content type should refer to a predictable format that enables it to fit into a structure.
• Design structures that provide useful and meaningful ways to find content. You can already tell that I think of content as a living, breathing organism with a life independent of the structures I design. I hope that the structures I design align with that behavior, providing an ecosystem that doesn’t get in the way of the content.
• Collaborate with you on determining a metadata framework. Content describes content, I know that. I can think laterally about the content as it uses metadata to draw relationships between it and other information on the site. I help explain the relationships I’d like to see between content to aid in findability and to teach users about the range of content available on the site.
• Communicate the different ways in which I intend to chunk the content. When I say “chunking” I mean the different ways I can expose a composition in the interface. Sometimes I just want the title and author. Other times I need title and blurb. But sites are getting more complicated: more opportunities to chunk, and more things to chunk up. I can boil these opportunities down and create a structure to facilitate the display of content in a variety of situations and scenarios.
• Establish flexible templates to accommodate the nuances of content. As simple as it is to make generalizations about content types, every composition is a different challenge. The templates provide a reasonable starting point, but we need to design them to provide some flexibility, allowing each article or story or posting to

That’s only five things, but I’ve got obligations to my visual designer, project manager, and usability guy.

So, what do you think? Can we work together? What else can you do for me? And what can I do for you?

Much affection,
Dan

Image from Flickr user @alphageek, licensed under Creative Commons

Maybe it’s just the projects I’m working on, but I feel like I’m using the word “constraints” a lot.

(That sounded a lot more bitter than I intended.)

It’s a word we’ve been throwing around, but experience shows there’s considerable nuance to it. Shining a light on these constraints may help us better understand the boundaries in which we must operate, and help us spell out the requirements for a project.

Nathan is working on an essay about design standards, and he’s taking a more thorough look at how designers and organizations should relate to them. Standards may be a way of dealing with constraints, or a constraint in and of themselves, but there are other pieces to the framework that bear spelling out.

What is a constraint?

Constraints are inputs into the design process that make designers are focused on solving the right problem. The design process depends on exploration and iteration, two things that can take designers further away from appropriately solving the right problem. Constraints allow us to evaluate the output of our design process to make sure we achieved our objectives.

What I’m most interested in, though, is a taxonomy of constraints. What are the specific things that establish boundaries and provide a means for validating design?

User research

Designers who subscribe to user-centered design philosophy prioritize user research perhaps above all others. In short, user research yields a set of expectations–what users would like the product to do. As we produce design ideas, we can compare the idea to user needs. Doesn’t address a need? The idea dies.

Project objectives

Most of my work these days involves designing web sites to meet a specific business objective. Sometimes it’s hard for me to relate the business objective to any other constraints, but that’s the nature of the organizations I’m working for. The project is a small piece of a larger machine. Depending on the piece and the machine, failure of the part may or may not mean failure of the whole. Regardless, these constraints can sometimes seem arbitrary as they serve some abstract objective and not a concrete requirement driven by users.

Project parameters

As much as we don’t like to admit it, there are external (and again, seemingly arbitrary forces) that scaffold the design process. Most explicitly, these are deadlines that confine the range of activities we can perform in order to conceptualize and flesh out a design. Less explicitly, these may be the whims of project stakeholders and other team dynamics.

Technical implementation

Though technologists are fond of saying “We can make it do anything,” the truth is that most design work happens in the context of existing systems. These existing systems come with capabilities and configurations that make some design ideas more feasible than others. The sometimes unsaid extension to the technologists’ mantra is “We can make it do anything with sufficient time and budget.”

Operational implementation

Just as the technology provides a context for a design idea, so too does the organization that will support it. There are people behind every technology, having to provide support in everything from customer help to content updates. Without the infrastructure from an operational perspective, some design ideas will not be successful. To thrive, a design must acknowledge the organization that will support and maintain the final product.

Industry standards

Otherwise knowns as “best practices,” these conventions emerge after withstanding the test of time. Used widely on other web sites, such standards become constraints in so far as they establish a baseline from which other design decisions extend.

Organizational standards

This is where Nathan’s essay will come in. Establishing standards specific to the organization is a complex process with numerous benefits. Suffice it to say that from the designer’s perspective, standards provide a range of starting points for solving problems. Positioning and integration into the design process is crucial: done poorly, these constraints come across as creativity-killers.

Design principles

A good team will summarize their direction in a single theme or collection of bullet points. This direction is specific: “make it easy to use” gets eliminated as a principle pretty quickly, for example, because it isn’t specific to the project and is common to all our projects. Instead, design principles are specific and meaningful to the team working on the project. They are means for making design decisions.

They are, in a sense, a super-set of all other constraints. I didn’t really think about this until now, but teams compose design principles when they want to boil down everything they’ve learned from all the other constraints.

Constraints are good

I don’t know if this–design decisions within a framework of constraints–is the right way to look at design. I can’t imagine Steve Jobs making a list of constraints before sketching out the Next Big Thing. On the other hand, design doesn’t end with a concept. Myriad other choices go into realizing a vision like the iPod. No doubt constraints play a role in mediating these other decisions.

Here’s the thing: I like constraints. They define a design problem. They help me understand what success is. They let me collaborate efficiently with other team members who share an awareness of the project’s boundaries.

Further exploration

Some ideas on exploring constraints further:

• Prioritization: What process do we use to prioritize constraints? Is there a Maslow’s hierarchy for constraints that implies which things are most basic and which are less necessary?
• Distinguishing from requirements: What’s the difference between requirements and constraints? In short, requirements state the problem and constraints are a tool to help me solve the problem. Can the distinction be more nuanced than that?
• Managing conflicts: How do project teams deal with conflicting constraints? Presumably these conflicts are ironed-out at the beginning of the process, but in practical terms, I suspect this does not happen formally until the conflicts arise.

Summary: Don’t send business colleagues a Wall of Prose. A well-structured email can get you faster responses. This post includes a few tips.

As @periodicdesign might tell you, I’m on a rampage. Having gotten way too many messages with 3-4 paragraphs of dense prose, I decided enough was enough. “Crafting these messages,” I said, “need to have the same care as a client deliverable.”

Unfortunately, I work from home in my basement, so no one heard me. So, I assembled a few tips and sent those around in — you guessed it — a well-structured email. Everyone at EightShapes is now trying their hand at improving the legibility of their email.

General Principles

Email should communicate three things:

• Action: The message should make it clear what I need to do.
• Issue: The message should describe the key issue or problem.
• Data: The message should provide any necessary background information.

Email Structuring Tips

To communicate Action, Issue, and Data, messages should:

Use headers to delineate sections

I use boldface headers throughout the message to distinguish different elements. Typical headers include “Action”, “Summary”, “Background.” I also try to make my headers as specific as possible. While this means that every email might be structured differently, it’s more important to communicate the gist of the message from the headers.

Start with the action item

The first sentence in every message is the main action I expect from the recipient. It’s phrased as either a question or an imperative (“review the attached document”). I try to make the action as specific as possible such that the recipient doesn’t have to read the rest of the message if they’re pressed for time. Examples:

Action: Prospective Client X has a project starting in 3 months time, lasting 6 weeks. We have a prior relationship. Pursue?

Action: We have 20 hours left in the budget for Project ABC. Please consult with client to align remaining funds with scope.

Include deadline

When do you need the action done? Highlight the deadline.

Make recommendation

If appropriate, I include my recommendation or thoughts. Again, I keep this as succinct and as specific as possible. Example:

Dan’s Recommendation: Complete wireframe for screen X and await feedback from client before starting visual design.

For some reason, I always include my name. I think it saves the recipient a step: “Who’s this message from again…?”

Summarize message

Sometimes, I need to include a lot of information in the message. Rather than eliminate information, I’ll summarize the situation. I tend to use 4-5 sentences of prose for this, since I’m trying to paint a picture. This summary appears toward the beginning of the message (between the action and the bulk of the email), labeled “summary”, and lacking some specifics.

Whether people read it or not, it’s a useful exercise for me to make sure I can relate the situation succinctly.

Use bullets for sub-topics

Bullets are the bane of slide presentations, but very useful for email. After a new header, I’ll break the topic down into its key points. My bullets tend to have a leading phrase in boldface that provides an overview of the point. Example:

Client has concerns about direction

• Heavy-handed menus: The navigation mechanisms encroach too much on the content area.
• Progressive disclosure: The interactive elements revealing hidden information are not apparent.

Anticipate needed information

For prospective clients, my business partner likes to know three pieces of information. Whatever else I put in my message to him about a prospect, I also put those three pieces of information.

The best way to do that is to look at the action item and think, “What would I need to know in order to answer this question myself.” If you can think of a data point, but don’t actually have it in-hand, be sure to highlight that in the message. Example:

Mid-sized project likely good match

• Starts: Not sure. Assume ASAP.
• Duration: 4-6 months
• Scale: Not sure of exact budget but likely comparable to Project ABC.

Two more things

• I also put key phrases in boldface to make them stand out.
• I like to enumerate attachments so people know exactly what they’re getting.

The Future of Email

I’m experimenting with using more color to communicate overall disposition of email. I’m also thinking about ways to make email more visual. Unfortunately, it’s rare that a quick sketch (after scanning and attaching to the message) is faster than just writing.

Structured Email: What’s the Real Return?

It would be hard for me to quantify the value of well-structured email. I don’t mean that it would be hard to measure, I just mean that it would be hard for me, personally, to measure. Mostly because I’m lazy.

And it’s because I’m lazy that I’m confident more structured email is helping. I’m responding to more messages, and gleaning the overall gist of a message is much faster. I anticipate a few other benefits:

• I search email a LOT to find stuff. I hate tagging/labeling/classifying/foldering messages. I just archive everything. With better structure, I anticipate search will be more effective.
• Referring to old email will become much more efficient. Scanning a well-structured message will likely yield that elusive piece of information much faster.
• All of us do email every day. Forcing ourselves to be structured about it might mean that we get in the habit of doing it, and that habit may find its way into other aspects of our professional lives. Imagine highly structured meeting minutes, project plans, and client deliverables!

You might worry that a structure is a creative-killer. This is perhaps a topic for a separate blog post. Suffice it to say that creating a well-structured email is a design problem in and of itself, one that requires careful thought and sensitivity to your users.

What do you do to write more structured emails?

These principles were the topic of my short session at this year’s IA Summit (taking place in the arid, strangely quiet Phoenix, Arizona). I’ve posted the slides to SlideShare (also embedded below), and the speaker’s notes are intact. For those interested in the process that got me to the slides, you can download a PDF of the outline I prepared.

One of the major conclusions of my work in content management theory is that systems designed to enforce decisions will fail. Consider a workflow system that forces users through the same process, regardless of circumstances. Invariably, situations arise where the basic workflow doesn’t hold — authors are absent from work, editors don’t have the right expertise to review a document, the content demands a new structure. Yet the majority of content management systems — indeed, most business systems — prevent humans from accommodating these scenarios because they are confined by the rules imposed by the computer.

I realized that computers should stick with what they’re good at — serving up information — and humans should be allowed to do what they’re good at — making decisions about day-to-day situations.

Coincidentally, I have begun work on a new system that is ripe for applying this philosophy. This project has a couple things going for it:

(The purpose of the project is to support a process for reviewing submissions from this organization’s customers and providing some kind of response.)

We’re still in the early stages of the project, but so far it seems to be working well. The project manager, tech lead and analysts have been enthusiastic to play with these new techniques, for which I’m most grateful. The design team seems to know that I won’t let them down, and they’ve been positive about my lines of questioning, so I seem to be getting at information that will help inform the design. Here’s what we’ve done so far:

Decision Lists

Instead of compiling all our observations into a list of requirements, we brainstormed a list of decisions our users have to make during the course of the process. These decisions were expressed in the form of questions like, “How many reviewers will we need?” Though the answer varies with each situation, they pretty much always have to answer this question.

As the brainstorming progressed, we sorted the decisions in more or less chronological order and categorized them in different events. For each event, we indicated who the key decision-maker was and the scope of the decisions — what the decisions applied to, whether that be the entire project, one of the customer submissions, or one element from one of the customer submissions. Most importantly, we began listing the inputs — the information that the users need to make the decisions.

The outcome of this process was a table that listed every decision our users have to make during this process. I also captured some of our outstanding questions about the process, so we could clarify with users at a later date. Some observations from this exercise:

Most of the data for this exercise came from the team’s existing knowledge. Obviously, first-hand user research is preferable, but at this point infeasible.

Sorting Decisions into Screens

Admittedly, after we came up with this list, I wasn’t sure how I would use it. Everyone got into the process of creating the list, but I hadn’t though much further ahead. I was used to personas — a flury of activity yielding deliverables that sat on the shelf.

After a requirements meeting with the client, we held a post mortem and the project manager indicated that we were starting to come up on the design deadline. I suggested a brainstorming meeting, but wasn’t entirely sure how I would facilitate it. At first I thought about an exercise I saw Marc Rettig demonstrate where he’d taken all the system features, put them on stickies, and organize them into related groups. It then occurred to me that I could do the same thing with our list of decisions.

I printed each decision out on a card and we did an internal card sort. There were a couple principles guiding the card sort:

During the process, we elaborated on the kinds of information the users would need in order to make the decisions. We also realized that although we’d separated some decisions by events in the listing exercise (above), they really went together. In other instances, we divided a single event into multiple groups of decisions — one event ended up as three groups of decisions.

To facilitate the activity, we imagined each group a “screen”, such that a user should be able to make all the decisions in the pile without having to click away. In other words, one screen in the application should be able to support all the information required to make all the decisions in the pile of cards. This is how I set up the exercise for the team, and thought it made sense because we were trying to group like decisions. In the back of our minds we knew that this initial take may be totally off base, but it did help move the discussion along.

The feedback on this exercise was very positive. It allowed us to envision the user experience without getting caught up in screen design — even at a basic level. I didn’t stand at a white board and sketch rectangles. It was refreshing.

Decision-focused Wireframes

Even my wireframes look different. I’ve only just started, but for the first time my IA decisions have real traceability. In addition to functional annotations, the wireframes include the decisions that the screen needs to support. I’m taking a crack at ranking the decisions based on our card-sorting conversation. Each wireframe, therefore, includes a list of decisions that the user should be able to make when looking at the screen and which of those decisions is most crucial.

The wireframe itself is shaping up like my page description diagrams — a list of content in priority order. By including the list of decisions, I’m showing my work: the most important information on the screen corresponds with the most important decisions users have to make.

Next steps

It’s hard to say at this point whether this approach is worthwhile, and the success of the wireframes will be a big part of that. The challenge for me will be to get out of the high level and focus on the details. (Though a decision-based approach does force this by putting crucial information front-and-center in the design process.) There are a few other things that we’ll need to work out:

Despite these reservations, I’m really pleased with how this approach is working. For years I’ve wondered how to adapt the requirements process to the needs of an information architect. Conventional requirements (”The system shall…”) have always felt inadequate to capture user needs for our purposes. Personas are too high-level, too difficult to apply directly to requirements. Use cases are too time-intensive. For the first time, I feel like I have a useful mechanism for capturing IA requirements.

Creating and Using Concept Models

Hosted by TriUPA
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
September 8, 2009 9am-5pm
Details and registration

The ideal tool for thinking through and designing structures for today’s web sites, concept models have become extremely popular artifacts. Creating them, and getting your team members to buy into them, can vary from challenging to really challenging.

Instead of representing individual web pages, concept models describe structures that are more appropriate for planning complex navigation strategies and working with content management systems. Their flexibility means you can apply them in a variety of circumstances and use them to describe different kinds of structures.

I’ve revamped this workshop from the ground-up, after getting lots of great feedback over the last couple of years. The content focuses more on pragmatic issues and now includes a section on translating concept models into wireframes. I’ve also created two sample models that will form the basis of our discussion.

Creating and Using Flow Charts

The Mansion at Strathmore (Bethesda, MD)
September 25, 2009 1pm-5pm
Details and registration

This is the next workshop in EightShapes’ monthly series. I’m especially excited about this one because I haven’t taught a workshop dedicated to flow charts, only as part of a larger workshop on deliverables.

Our clients are increasingly asking for flow charts (again!) since they’re crucial to planning and describing overall experiences. There are also a couple interesting variations which we’ll cover as well (storyboards, more focused on narrative; and wireflows, flow charts that integrate wireframes).

Early bird pricing (US$195!) lasts another couple weeks, so register now before the price goes up!

Hope to see you at one or both of these!