A transcript of Episode 286 of UX Podcast. James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom are joined by Donna Spencer to discuss look back on how the practice of information architecture has changed over the years, and the complexities of today’s information projects
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This transcript has been machine generated and checked by Bevan Nicol.
Transcript
Per Axbom
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Computer voice
UX Podcast Episode 286
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
I’m James.
Per Axbom
And I’m Per.
James Royal-Lawson
And this is UX Podcast, balancing business, technology, people and society every Friday since 2011. And we have listeners literally all over the world, from Puerto Rico to Uganda. And from time to time, we bring you a repeat show. This is an episode from our extensive back catalogue resurfacing some of the ideas and thoughts from the past that we believe are still relevant, and well worth revisiting.
Per Axbom
And today, we are revisiting our conversation with Donna Spencer. For a long time a freelance user experience designer, who specialises in large messy websites and large messy business applications. And today, she’s the principal product designer at Maker X. She has written three books on card sorting, on web writing, and information architecture. And we met her at EuroIA 2017, where she hosted a workshop introduction to information architecture, covering core concepts and practices that are fundamental to any kind of information architecture work.
James Royal-Lawson
Now, Donna, she is Australian, and lives in Australia. That means that it’s not so often you get the chance as a European to meet her and talk to her in person. But she was here in Stockholm for EuroIA in September 2017, as well as being on holiday with her daughter, so it was especially good fun, sit down face to face with Donna and have a chat.
James Royal-Lawson
What do you even say to people to get them introduced to information architecture?
Donna Spencer
So I teach this workshop in two formats; one as a half day and one as a full day. And here at your EuroIA – let’s, let’s get that one in a word – I had four hours. And teaching information architecture -all the things – in four hours is insane.
James Royal-Lawson
Almost anything in four hours…
Donna Spencer
I know. So and this is gonna sound really dry as well, but I promise to make it more fun than this is gonna sound. I talk about category theory. So I teach people about how we think we think about categories – like Aristotelian category theory and modern category theory. And so how we actually think and how categories work in our brains and how language and categories are embodied and stuff, and I make it fun, and we play some games. So that’s kind of the foundation. And that’s, I think, a foundation for information architecture work is really understanding groups of things and concepts and ideas. And then we go through a little bit of an activity in a workshop. So we go through something to work on. So we do a tiny weeny bit of user research discussion. And I focus on because these days most people who turn up to a workshop know that user research exists. Many of them have done it. They know something about it. So I don’t need to teach them what user research is.
James Royal-Lawson
Because when you got this kind of audience, we were at a UX Information Architect conference, which isn’t the place that strikes me as where you’d turn up, to get on the train to actually start your journey in some of these subject matters.
Donna Spencer
Yeah. So in there, I talk only about the things that you might think about for user research if you’re doing an information project. And, I mean, there’s not a lot but I just get them thinking about those things. Because I find that when I’m working with people, if they’ve done a whole bunch of discovery kind of user research, they haven’t always thought about real information use and really diving into how people find/use/share information. So I do a little bit of that. Then I talk a whole chunk about content analysis, because I think that’s again, one of the things that if you’ve been doing more interactive projects, and all of a sudden you need to do a more informational one, I’ve seen a lot of projects fail to understand the content deeply. People are really good at going ‘we know we need to understand our users,’ so they do good user research but fail to understand content. So I dive into that. Teach a little bit of content modelling so they can start thinking about relationships and objects and what content actually is. I talk about different kinds of classification schemes, like when audience schemes work and when task-based schemes work, and also object-based schemes and things like that.
James Royal-Lawson
Oh, you mean to target audiences?
Donna Spencer
Yeah. So, if you’re doing an information architecture, one of the things that comes that clients will often say is, ‘we should arrange this content by our audiences.’ So universities will often do staff, future students, current students, alumni. I always have an example from Dell, because they say, “for work,” “for home,.” Just insane categories, because the products that you buy, you could buy for either theme. So like, that’s that kind of I talked about the all those ways that you can organise so audiences and tasks and subjects and geography, time based scheme. So we talked a chunk about when those things work, and when they don’t, and I give them because I’ve done this a lot. So I can give people lots of tips on things like audience based schemes and say, this seems like it’s going to work, people will say it’s going to work, you will be frustrated, because it feels like it’s not working. And that’s because it’s not gonna work. Yeah, and then, and then I usually run out of time. Teach a little bit just about, you know, tips and tricks. And, you know, things that people ask me over the years about what their IA is.
But the difficulty of all of this is that every single person in that room will have a different kind of information architecture project. Some of them will be doing global navigation for some kind of information, heavy site, like an intranet, or government content or something. Yeah, some of them will be doing e-commerce where they’ve got like a bucket of products that they’re trying to describe, tag and surface. And those things are really different. So it’s hard to even in a day to cover off the different styles of projects that people are doing, and the bits of skills that they need and kind of make it coherent. But you know, I’ve been trying, I’ve been trying for 10 years, if people walk out with good skills to take them through, but it certainly isn’t everything. So glad today that this
Per Axbom
But it gets you thinking I mean, you really stopped to think and sit down for hours and just think about information architecture. Yeah, my feeling is, has been for a while, actually. I mean, my Bible back in the day, it was Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. That’s how I got into the industry, basically. But it seems like people have forgotten this core knowledge. And when you try to learn UX today, it’s all about experience and image. And it’s like Apple. Exactly. Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
So it’s about tools.
Per Axbom
So it’s like, so I’m sensing like, it’s forgotten. So we, and that sounds it’s really relevant to have an introduction. I think I need one.
Donna Spencer
Yeah, and it’s not a criticism to say that. I’ve been in this field for a long time. So I watched as you know, first, we were all about information architecture. And that’s what we were doing. And we were figuring out how to do structures and navigation and search and all kinds of things. And then the field did fall into user experience, and really thinking about those experiences and starting to talk about how we make things delightful and sticky and engaging. And, and that’s super cool. Like it’s really fun. It’s more interesting for visual people who I’m not one. But yeah, I’m seeing an awful lot of people who have been in UX for a while, but don’t have the information architecture skills they need for a complex project. And so that is why it’s good to have intro workshops, good books, because a lot of people are hitting this wall where they’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve done some navigation design’ And they think they know, but they don’t know – God, I sound so critical sometimes.
A lot of times, they just don’t know what they don’t know, the structure and setting up things well, and not diving into interface design before you’ve thought about your content and how it all hangs together. I worked on a project once where the timing didn’t work very well, with my availability. So they started navigation design before I’d done the content model. And I said it wasn’t going to work. And I went, I couldn’t tell what the project was. But I looked at the navigation design. And I said, you know some of that’s really good. Some of these cannot work. You can’t put that content on the page with that sidebar, because there is no relationship between those objects. You do need to wait for the model so that you can see this piece of content, I can then find this other stuff in the database and put it on the page. But if you’ve done your modelling or understood your structure, certainly can’t like I was putting things on the screen. But until you hit that wall and you go ‘Ah, there’s a gap and I didn’t know how to do that. And this thing didn’t work.’ I think it’s a big… you don’t even know what you don’t know.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly, and that that is I think one of the biggest challenges we we have in the industry is you’ve got to feel where the boundaries are, of what you know. And without coming into contact with multi-disciplinarians or a multitude of aspects of the work, you’re never going to know. ‘Oh, yeah, of course, I didn’t need to think or talk to him about this image at this point.’
Donna Spencer
And this is what conferences are great for, because you can turn up and sit in a room and have ideas fall in your head that you didn’t know that you needed to know. And go, ‘Oh, look, there’s all these other things happening out there. There’s techniques I’m not hearing about.’ One of the things that happens when the industry is busy is we’re all so busy working hard, we don’t write. Because we’ve got jobs and things. So there’s always stuff happening when people are learning how to do things better and making new techniques, and we don’t get to write it down and share it. Because it’s easy without jobs. The best books have come out of economic slumps.
Per Axbom
Oh, yeah, that’s true.
James Royal-Lawson
Yes, I mean, I haven’t read anything for a year. Because I’ve just been busy.
Donna Spencer
I’ve got a list of projects that I’d like to write, but I’ve got a job. And it’s great. And I go to work. I’m not going to write on the weekends.
James Royal-Lawson
But sometimes it is just enough to have that taster. Like we do on the podcast as well, we introduce things to ourselves – new topics that we haven’t really heard of. But it’s enough to actually just know they’re existing, to give you the insight into what you need to do. So what, so what has changed? I mean, from the viewpoint of information architecture, and thinking about how you would introduce someone to it. How would you introduce them now compared to maybe 10 years ago,
Donna Spencer
I think two things have changed. One is that most of us are working on much more complex things than we used to. And both our industry and the “client” industry at large, have also in that time had exposure to user experience. Our industry has had exposure to some information architecture concepts and things. So because clients, you know, I understand that usability matters, and that experience matters, they will then pick up some, like some work and just do it themselves. So we’re not getting that level of simple work anymore. Like the consultants don’t do easy things. So that, you know, industry as a whole doesn’t, doesn’t necessarily have to work on easy projects. So we’re getting the harder projects, of course. And we know more about what we’re doing, so we’re doing our complex projects better, I think as well.
So I mean, you think about something like, you know, big catalogue, like Etsy, or eBay or something and the way we would have designed it 10 years ago. We’re doing better at it now because we collectively just had more experience. And 10 years ago, we weren’t dealing with as much user generated content and personalisation. And so many people logged into things and tried to deliver experiences that fit those people. We weren’t doing as much “recommendations” work. I can’t think of really good recommendations sites 10 years ago. I’m working in TV at the moment. And just like super-obsessed about understanding why people like shows, like, what is it about that show on that show, that are really similarly different that means a person likes both of them. And, you know, 10 years ago, we weren’t diving into those kinds of details. Weren’t trying to deliver personalisation.
James Royal-Lawson
We weren’t collecting the data. We didn’t have the services to collect it.
Donna Spencer
And we didn’t have as much analytics and data. Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
It just struck me now that, even longer than 10 years ago, we were doing services and websites where it was their first website. So the tools we had, maybe 20 years ago, or 15 years ago, you were getting gigs where you actually had to take a company from off the web to on the web. Yeah. So approaching those kind of projects from am Information Architecture point of view is totally different to when you’re getting called in by a client who has an E-commerce site or something where you’ve got to pull in what they’ve got and make adjustments.
Donna Spencer
So with all of the backend systems and all the – I’ve done grocery websites, and it’s actually fairly easy to come up with the IA. That’s a job that’s doable. I mean, there’s some work when you’ve got 20,000 products in a store, but we know how to tackle that. The hard thing is bridging that and the backend systems that have things classified in an entirely different way. The grocery store I work for their backend classifies soda bottles by size. Because that’s what matters when you’re putting things on shelves. Humans want cola, lemon, lemonade, whatever. Humans think about the flavours they want or the brands that they want not the size of bottle. So you need to bridge those crazy things.
James Royal-Lawson
And how you categorise and group. I mean, I don’t think of all the one and a half litre bottles of Coca Cola products first. I’ll maybe I’ll think of Fanta orange first. And then would say, okay, that’s too much for the kids to drink. I’ll get a smaller bottle.
Donna Spencer
Yeah. So the IA for that is easy. Comparatively. Still needs thinking but the hard bit is the integration, working with the organisation, with their existing systems there. And there were really interesting problems. But they turned big really fast. It looks like you need to fix the IA. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I can do that. But what about all of this?
Per Axbom
I’m sort of wondering, who’s doing all this work? Because I’m looking at looking at job listings and I don’t see anyone list that they want information architects. I look at the UX job postings; they don’t list information architecture as a competence. So what are the clients asking for? Do they know what to ask for?
James Royal-Lawson
Well, before you answer, Donna, I was gonna throw in and say, another difference, maybe with 15 years ago: SEO branch. And I wonder if that’s related?
Donna Spencer
Well, we did seem to go through an SEO period where everybody was really focused on getting their SEO right. And then I think, at least in my experience, the SEO and information architecture folks kind of realised that as long as you’re not trying to do dark SEO, just doing really good content, well-grouped, well-structured, well-labelled, gets you a very long way. And then there are tweaks which, how many – 10 years ago, when SEO was all the rage – it wasn’t tweaks, it was massive SEO efforts. And that’s possibly why it was a point where information architecture fell off a bit as well.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, well, that’s my feeling a bit. That 10 years ago, people and organisations became acutely aware of appearing in search results. And a lot of the times, it was an information architecture problem, or a content strategy problem that you can’t appear top three on Google for something that you have no content about. It’s kind of kind of basic, in some ways, but that was what happened.
Per Axbom
Unless you do white text on a white background.
James Royal-Lawson
Ten years ago, people weren’t really picking up the phone and ringing up information architects to solve that problem. Because it was SEO companies who were jumping on the problem.
Donna Spencer
So we probably always had a marketing problem. And so you were about to say about who’s doing this work?
Per Axbom
Yeah. I don’t know anyone who calls themself an Information Architect.
Donna Spencer
Except me. Yeah, exactly. Actually, there’s probably a few people.
Per Axbom
Obviously, I know people.
Donna Spencer
I think, sometimes, I mean, loads and loads of projects are easy enough for user experience folks with a bit of knowledge and maybe you’ve read a couple of books, maybe you’ve read the polar bear book or my book. There’s lots of projects that are simple enough for that. I suspect that a lot of projects are being done by good user experience folks, but failing. And people don’t quite know why they’re failing. I do see, sometimes, projects like people show me what they’ve worked on, I look at the IA over categories, and like, ‘Oh, I know that’s going to fail.’ Because they’ve done something that put an audience scheming where it shouldn’t or something. And there are some really complex problems that information architects are being asked to do.
So I’ve worked on federal government, whole of government information architecture. Because Leisa Reichelt knew that she needed information architecture and knew me and knew to ask for it. The job I’m doing the ABC and they know they need information architecture because they’ve got a lot of content that they’re trying to structure. So they know enough to know to ask. One of our big retailers in Australia Mags Hanley’s working for – Mags is ex-BBC ex-UK, really well known information architect – they knew that they had a problem with their catalogue and to ask for it. So, it does get asked a bit, you probably don’t see it. It’s probably much more ‘I know we need this and because it’s super complex I am going to hand pick people.’ That’s possibly why it’s not turning up in job listings. But there are definitely people around still with that kind of detail, focus and skills.
James Royal-Lawson
And the fact that there’s so many existing things like websites, and it’s maybe not seen as necessary to bring in the information architect specialist as a job, you know, when you already have the grocery categories on your on your ecommerce site, and so on.
Donna Spencer
Yeah, you’ve already got a taxonomy for your catalogue.
Per Axbom
But you need to revise.
Donna Spencer
Sometimes, people aren’t trying to fix the fundamental problems as well. We see this kind of flashier, more fun, more innovative projects, and probably fewer ‘Oh, my God, we’ve got to fix the fundamentals here.’ And that might be part of it as well. I’ve certainly had a project that’s like, ‘Oh, that’s way too hard to rebuild that, we’ll just make a new one. And start from scratch.’
Per Axbom
To get people interested in information architecture, I know that you like to play games, as well. You have some exercises. Could you recommend some exercises that you could do with your team to get them thinking more about information architecture?
Donna Spencer
Yes. But And the yes but is, I’m not gonna say it depends. I think you need to. So I’ve always been of the mind that I invent techniques quite a lot. And I always have, because I always go, ‘Okay, I’ve got this problem. What might I do with this problem to solve it?’ Rather than say, ‘What game might I play? Or what technique might I use?’ So often I’ll invent stuff. I didn’t invent card sorting. It was already around. But stuff like card sorting, or techniques or games that help people see that other people think differently are really good. So you can do something where you get ideas of your content, or if you grab a grocery store list or, grab any kind of domain and say, ‘Okay, organise these.’ And you just show people that they think differently. And that’s often really good to do with stakeholders to show that stakeholders, or people who have expertise in a field, think very differently to people who don’t have expertise in it. So you can play games like that in workshops that help people just go, ‘Ah, we’re different to each other.’
Per Axbom
I really like that. Because, I mean, that’s something that a lot of UXers presume that what they’ve thought up is the solution, andin just doing an exercise like that, it’s so fast, and you realise everybody thinks differently.
Donna Spencer
Yeah. And we think differently because we’ve got different upbringings, different specialisations, different ways we use words. There’s a lot of people who are working in more than one language, and that affects thought, and how you think about how things might be grouped. But so does your culture and your way of approaching the world. So being able to show people that is often a really good start just to go, ‘Look, this is what we’re dealing with, dealing with people thinking in different ways.’ We just did this super-fun thing at the ABC the other day where (because I’m working in TV, and we’re looking at personalization for our TV homepage) we got our usability testers to do this thing where they design their perfect homepage.
So we like we basically got, you imagine Netflix, and there’s gritty, horror films, sci fi, thrillers, blah, blah, blah. So we got all of our rows of different kinds of content. We said, ‘Here you go make your perfect homepage.’ And they would go through. And you could do this internally as well. They went through and went ‘No, no wouldn’t like that. That’s stupid. I feel like I should like this one. So I’m going to put it on. I feel like I should watch more of that. I love those. They’re great.’ Boy, we learned a lot of stuff. And then, even if you don’t get internal people to do the activity, showing them what we learned from it and showing them the things that people did and why they did it. So might not be a game inside your team, but showing why people think. And the stuff like, ‘I really feel like I should be better at that. So I’m going to put this on my list. Even though I know I’m never gonna watch it.’
James Royal-Lawson
It’s a fantastic amount of meta information that you gather from that process. Now we’ve got characteristics for these objects that are buried amongst these objects.
Donna Spencer
So we can make a category of documentaries you think you should watch. And it would probably work.
James Royal-Lawson
…or extrapolate other documentaries from those.
Donna Spencer
Yep, or something. But it was a really fun game to play in a usability test. And it’s not necessarily an existing technique that’s out there. I’m like, ‘Huh, what are we trying to learn? I reckon we could do this thing and it’d be really fun.’ It’s super-fun just sitting and talking to people, saying, ‘So what do you watch on TV? Why do you like that?’ It’s really interesting diving into the details of people’s brains. And making them think about why they do things.
Per Axbom
I’m really excited, I’m actually going to schedule in a reading of your book now. I’m realising I need this.
James Royal-Lawson
I’m feeling much more excited about information architecture.
Per Axbom
Thank you so much. Thank you for sitting down with us.
Per Axbom
I really like what Donna said about the best books have come out of economic slumps, because that really made me think of how much our world changes. As we also talked about, how much has changed since I read about information architecture for the first time. And you read a title like the title of a workshop, which is ‘Introduction to Information Architecture’ and you think, ‘yeah, well, I know that sort of,’ and then you don’t think about how much has changed in the 15 to 20 years since I first read that polar bear book. And I realised, there’s so much to learn here that we should be focusing on that, as we said, are core competencies that we should be thinking about, before we even put pen to paper, before we even do a sketch, we need to think about the structure, we need to know what we’re doing.
James Royal-Lawson
I saw, of course, Donna’s workshop title and thought ‘Oh, Introduction to Information Architecture.’ But if she if you put it actually as ‘REintroduction to Information Architecture.’
Per Axbom
Yes, exactly.
James Royal-Lawson
Then I think I’d have raised my eyebrows a little bit and and thought about how much things have changed and how it isn’t the same as what it was. And how maybe you do need to rethink some of the core skills you’ve got or awareness that we’ve talked about. A lot of time, it’s enough to just know something exists and how to pick up on it rather than learn it thoroughly yourself.
Per Axbom
And also, like we said, a lot of the things that have changed – that things are much more complex today than they were before. Which means I think that information architecture really is even more relevant today than it was before. There are so many more things to consider when you’re building a website, and trying to help people, to empower people, by making it easier to navigate.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. That made me think of complexity. It’s because it’s the integration between different interfaces or systems or databases or information models. And it reminded me of our chat a year ago, with Jonas Soderstrom, and we talked about complexity and how things are just so complicated now.
Per Axbom
Yeah, and which is a really huge problem in itself. Something we should be addressing more. Because a lot of the times we think that, ‘yes, what we do is about making it simple for people, making it easy for them to find and understand information.’ But it should be more about helping them learn, helping them make better decisions. So the complexity, I think, should be something that we should be more aware of, because it’s there. And it’s, it’s something that we can’t always help everyone with, unless we actually – now I’m thinking about information architecture again – unless we actually do the legwork and understand how the different bits and pieces of the worldwide web fit together for each individual so that they can navigate it.
James Royal-Lawson
I think Donna mentioned discovery and the work you do during the discovery phase. Coming up later this autumn, we have an interview with Dan Brown about discovery. But, I feel there’s a lot of focus around discovery being to do with the interface. Discovering what people want to do with interfaces and how they’re going to work with interfaces. How do they currently use interfaces? Even though there’s a lot of ethnographic aspects, too. Some of the things to do with information structures perhaps is underlooked in discovery phases..
Per Axbom
I definitely believe so. Yes.
James Royal-Lawson
And even looking at existing data. That’d be interesting to think more about how you can might be multi-dimensional in your discovery phases.
Per Axbom
Yeah. And I really liked that she also brought up the importance of diversity in the way that we discussed, that you have to notice how different people interpret information in different ways. And people want to have interfaces in different ways. Because we are different people. It’s hbard to find one solution, and that’s where information architecture can help. Because it can help you create solutions where you can attack, see information from different viewpoints by sorting it and navigating through it in different ways.
James Royal-Lawson
If you enjoy the show, then please rate us, star us, heart us, or whatever interaction pattern that the particular platform you’re listening to us on has decided to employ. And there’s bound to be a whole team of wonderful UX designers who’ve decided what is best for you in that platform. We’re @uxpodcast – one word – if you want to @mention us. Shownotes are available on uxpodcast.com. We are your hosts James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom.
Per Axbom
Remember to keep moving
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
Knock knock.
Per Axbom
Who’s there?
James Royal-Lawson
Mikey.
Per Axbom
Mikey, who?
James Royal-Lawson
Mikey doesn’t fit in the keyhole.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Donna Spencer recorded in September 2017 and published as episode 286 of UX Podcast.