Joe Lamantia.com

I just posted slides from my talk at the recent Enter­prise Search Sum­mit in NY “Search Me: Design­ing Infor­ma­tion Retrieval Experience”

Here’s the abstract from the session:

This case study reviews the meth­ods and insights that emerged from an 18-month effort to coör­di­nate and enhance the scat­tered user expe­ri­ences of a suite of infor­ma­tion retrieval tools sold as ser­vices by a major invest­ment rat­ings agency. The ses­sion will share a method for under­stand­ing audi­ence needs in diverse infor­ma­tion access con­texts; review a col­lec­tion of infor­ma­tion retrieval pat­terns, look at con­cep­tual design meth­ods for user expe­ri­ences, and review a set of longer term pat­terns in cus­tomer behav­ior called life­cy­cles, and con­sider the impact of orga­ni­za­tional and cul­tural fac­tors on design decisions.

This ses­sion will presents reusable expe­ri­ence design tools and find­ings rel­e­vant for con­texts such as enter­prise search and infor­ma­tion access, ser­vice design, and prod­uct and plat­form management.

Thanks to every­one who came by!

Read­ers active in the enter­prise, intranet, por­tal, and syn­di­cated con­tent & func­tion­al­ity spaces might be inter­ested in The Build­ing Blocks of Effec­tive Por­tals that appears in the Novem­ber / Decem­ber issue of Intranets Today.

Intranets is one of the lead­ing pub­li­ca­tions focused on these top­ics, with reg­u­lar con­tri­bu­tions from the likes of Rachel Alexan­der, Jane McConnell, and James Rober­ston.
You will need a log-in to read the com­plete arti­cle on-line, but per­haps you were think­ing of sub­scrib­ing, and this will pull you in.

Read­ing about the recent release of Social­Text 3 I was struck by the strong par­al­lels between the defin­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics of enter­prise envi­ron­ments in 2003/2004, and the emerg­ing pub­lic Web 2.0 land­scape. The essen­tial char­ac­ter­is­tics of many enter­prise envi­ron­ments are:

• Syn­di­ca­tion: streams of mod­u­lar con­tent and func­tion­al­ity broad­cast widely to sub­scribers within the fire­wall, such as enter­prise data feeds, ERP, BI capa­bil­i­ties, CRM, cus­tom capa­bil­i­ties shared via SOA
• Ser­vices (e.g. envi­ron­men­tal, like the bees we used to have for pol­li­na­tion): iden­tity, secu­rity, pub­li­ca­tion, data man­age­ment, cloud stor­age, imap email, etc.
• Social Struc­tures: tan­gi­ble net­works & com­mu­ni­ties of like-minded peo­ple, ori­ented around a com­mon prac­tice, pur­pose, process, or pain; think of all the matrixed, hor­i­zon­tal org struc­tures and ad-hoc net­works encoded via inter­nal email lists, IM, sprawl­ing intranets, cor­po­rate direc­to­ries, etc.

These same attrib­utes are emerg­ing as the hall­marks of the pub­lic Web 2.0 land­scape. This is how the three S’s man­i­fest for Web 2.0:

• Syn­di­ca­tion: A lit­eral and fig­u­ra­tive tor­rent of con­tent in the form of blogs, RSS, feeds, streams, APIs, for social objects of all types, as well as cat­a­logs of rentable content
• Ser­vices: This layer is grow­ing rapidly for the pub­lic inter­net, with OpenID / OAuth, map­ping, visu­al­iza­tion, backup, cal­en­dar­ing — the list is nearly infi­nite, and still expanding
• Social Struc­tures: The Web (and soon the mobile uni­verse) is pro­foundly social now, and will con­tinue to become ever more so.

I think you can eas­ily see the strong par­al­lels. It’s this sim­i­lar­ity between the older enter­prise envi­ron­ments and the emerg­ing Web 2.0 envi­ron­ment that user expe­ri­ence prac­ti­tion­ers, — and espe­cially any­one prac­tic­ing infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture — should note.
Why? As I’ve writ­ten before, mod­u­lar­ity is every­where in this new envi­ron­ment, it’s appar­ent at all lay­ers of the infor­ma­tion world, from util­i­ties like pro­cess­ing power, to ser­vices, to the ele­ments that make up the user expe­ri­ence. The effects of mod­u­lar­ity in syn­di­ca­tion, ser­vices, and social struc­tures on devel­op­ers and IT have been pro­found; prac­tices, processes, orga­ni­za­tional struc­tures, and busi­ness mod­els have all shifted in response.
This wave of change first affected the devel­op­ers who build and work directly with code and sys­tems. But inevitably, dis­ci­plines fur­ther up the stack are feel­ing the impact of this shift, though many of us (and I’m putting user expe­ri­ence in this class) may not know it yet.
How will we feel that impact? One obvi­ous way is in the pres­sure to adopt agile and other mod­u­lar prod­uct con­struc­tion prac­tices cre­ated by and for devel­op­ers as the pre­ferred way to struc­ture user expe­ri­ence and design efforts. This is a mis­take that con­fuses the dif­fer­ent stages of soft­ware / dig­i­tal prod­uct cre­ation (as Alan Cooper explained well at Agile2008). Design is not con­struc­tion, and shouldn’t be treated as if it is. And one size fits all does not work when choos­ing the process and toolkit used for cre­at­ing com­plex dig­i­tal prod­ucts, ser­vices, or expe­ri­ences.
One result of this mod­u­lar­ity rules all approach to user expe­ri­ence is the ero­sion of bounded or well-structured design processes that bal­ance risk effec­tively for the var­i­ous stages of design, and were meant to ensure the qual­ity and rel­e­vance of the result­ing prod­ucts and expe­ri­ences. Ero­sion is vis­i­ble the trends toward com­pres­sion or elim­i­na­tion of rec­og­niz­able design con­cept explo­ration and usabil­ity ver­i­fi­ca­tion activ­i­ties in many design meth­ods.
More imme­di­ately — in fact star­ing us right in the face, though I haven’t seen men­tion of it yet in m/any user expe­ri­ence forums — is the grow­ing num­ber of sit­u­a­tions wherein there’s “No designer required”.
Exam­ples of this abound, but just con­sider this fea­ture list for the Social Text 3 Dash­board:

• You decide what matters
• Cre­ate your dash­board in minutes
• Include 3^rd party infor­ma­tion and applications
• Track & attend to what’s most impor­tant to you
• Sta­tus updates flow auto­mat­i­cally, as you work

If that’s not spe­cific enough, here’s what comes out of the box, in the form of pre-built widgets:

• My Con­ver­sa­tions — changes oth­ers have made to any Social­text work­space page you authored, edited, or com­mented on
• My Col­leagues — recent updates made by peo­ple you are sub­scribed to
• Work­spaces — work­spaces you have access to and their activ­ity metrics
• Work­space Page — any page from any of your Social­text workspaces
• RSS Viewer — results of an RSS feed you configure
• Work­space Tags — a tag cloud of all tags in a par­tic­u­lar workspace
• All Peo­ple Tags — a tag cloud of all tags on peo­ple in Social­text People

No archi­tect required for most peo­ple here… and this trend is every­where.
And then there’s the awe­some spec­tre ofcom­modi­ti­za­tion. Lis­ten­ing to a friend describe the con­fus­ing expe­ri­ence of try­ing to select a short list of design firms for inclu­sion in an RFP made the link­age clear to me. I’ll quote Weil’s def­i­n­i­tion of com­modi­ti­za­tion from the paper ref­er­enced above, to make the point explicit.
Please recall that com­modi­ti­za­tion denotes the devel­op­ment of a com­pet­i­tive envi­ron­ment where:

• Prod­uct dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion is very difficult;
• Cus­tomer loy­alty and brand val­ues are low;
• Com­pe­ti­tion is based pri­mar­ily on price; and
• Sus­tain­able advan­tage comes from cost (and some­times qual­ity) leadership.
• Com­modi­ti­za­tion is dri­ven by excess capacity.

Please note that I’m not imply­ing user expe­ri­ence prac­ti­tion­ers face overnight obso­le­tion.
But I am say­ing that I doubt our cur­rent dis­ci­pli­nary world­view and toolkit ade­quately pre­pare us for the real­i­ties of the new envi­ron­ment emerg­ing so rapidly. Code, by con­trast, is and always will be mod­u­lar. (After all, that is the defin­ing attribute of our alpha­bets.)
But user expe­ri­ence is holis­tic, and has to learn to build in its own way from these smaller pieces like a writer com­bin­ing words and phrases. Even­tu­ally, you can cre­ate works of tremen­dous depth, rich­ness, and sophis­ti­ca­tion; think of Ulysses by James Joyce, or the Mahab­harata. These are richly nuanced expe­ri­ences that are the result of work­ing with mod­u­lar ele­ments.
My sug­ges­tion for one response to the oncom­ing wave of mod­u­lar­ity and com­modi­ti­za­tion is to focus our value propo­si­tion in the cre­ation of tools that other peo­ple use to define their indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ences. In other words, shift our pro­fes­sional focus to higher lay­ers of abstrac­tion, and get into the busi­ness of defin­ing and design­ing frame­works, net­works, and sys­tems of expe­ri­ence com­po­nents. Prac­ti­cally, this will mean things like observ­ing and defin­ing the most valu­able pat­terns aris­ing in the use of sys­tems of mod­u­lar ele­ments we design, and then advis­ing on their use to solve prob­lems. This is the direc­tion com­mon within enter­prise envi­ron­ments, and in light of the appear­ance of pub­lic pat­tern libraries (Yahoo’s UI), I think I see it hap­pen­ing within parts of the user expe­ri­ence com­mu­nity. I’m not sure it’s hap­pen­ing fast enough, though.
I hoped to com­mu­ni­cate some of these ideas in my talk on why frame­works are the future (at least for any­one prac­tic­ing Expe­ri­ence Archi­tec­ture) for the 2008 EuroIA Sum­mit that just took place here in lovely Ams­ter­dam. I’ll post the slides shortly. In the mean­time, what do you think? Is user expe­ri­ence ready for the mod­u­lar­ized, enterprise-like envi­ron­ment of Web 2.0? How are you respond­ing to these changes? Is com­modi­ti­za­tion even on your radar?

I’ve posted slides for my recent Effec­tive IA For Enter­prise Por­tals pre­sen­ta­tion at the IA Sum­mit in Miami. Por­tals are not a tra­di­tional space for user expe­ri­ence prac­ti­tion­ers, so many thanks to the packed house that turned out, and stayed as we both started late to accom­mo­date the crowd, and then ran long.
These slides include a sub­stan­tial amount of case study and exam­ple mate­r­ial that I didn’t cover directly in the talk. For the repeat ses­sion on Sun­day, I showed addi­tional exam­ples beyond those included here in the start­ing slides.
Stay tuned for a more detailed writeup of both pub­lished and unpub­lished exam­ple mate­r­ial — one that shows the build­ing blocks in action at all lev­els of a multi-year por­tal effort from ini­tial strat­egy through design and into gov­er­nance / evo­lu­tion — in part six of the Build­ing Blocks series run­ning in Boxes and Arrows, due out once the post-summit flurry set­tles down.

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I’ve just started a new ‘Orga­ni­za­tional Archi­tec­ture’ group on Slideshare, to explore links to user expe­ri­ence, and ques­tions like these:

• What is orga­ni­za­tional architecture?
• How does orga­ni­za­tional archi­tec­ture relate to user experience?
• What can user expe­ri­ence prac­ti­tion­ers bor­row from OA to become more effective?

Join now!

The cul­ture, struc­ture, and work­ings of an orga­ni­za­tion often pose greater chal­lenges for User Expe­ri­ence prac­ti­tion­ers than any tech­ni­cal or design ques­tions at hand. If you’d like to know more about the fac­tors behind these sit­u­a­tions, be sure to check out We Tried To Warn You: The Orga­ni­za­tional Archi­tec­ture of Fail­ure, by Peter Jones, just pub­lished by Boxes and Arrows.

Peter is an inde­pen­dent con­sul­tant with deep exper­tise in research, prod­uct design, and strat­egy. His talk for the panel on fail­ure at the 2007 IA Sum­mit was insight­ful and in-depth, and this two-part series offers quite a bit more very use­ful mate­r­ial on the roots and warn­ing signs of orga­ni­za­tional fail­ure (by com­par­i­son, con­sider the very brief post I put up on the same sub­ject a few years ago.)
Peter’s is the sec­ond writ­ten fea­ture to come out of the fail­ure panel (my mis­sive on the par­al­lels between entre­pre­neur­ial and soci­etal fail­ure was the first). I’m look­ing for­ward to part two of We Tried To Warn You, as well as addi­tional fea­tures from the remain­ing two pan­elists, Chris­t­ian Crum­lish and Lorelei Brown!
Here’s a snip­pet, to whet your appetite:
How do we even know when an orga­ni­za­tion fails? What are the dif­fer­ences between a major prod­uct fail­ure (involv­ing func­tion or adop­tion) and a busi­ness fail­ure that threat­ens the orga­ni­za­tion? An organizational-level fail­ure is a rec­og­niz­able event, one which typ­i­cally fol­lows a series of antecedent events or deci­sions that led to the large-scale break­down. My work­ing def­i­n­i­tion: When sig­nif­i­cant ini­tia­tives crit­i­cal to busi­ness strat­egy fail to meet their highest-priority stated goals.”

Boxes and Arrows just pub­lished part two of the Por­tal Build­ing Blocks series — Intro­duc­tion to the Build­ing Blocks. This sec­ond install­ment cov­ers the design con­cepts behind the por­tal build­ing blocks sys­tem, and guide­lines on how to flex­i­bly com­bine the blocks into a well-structured user expe­ri­ence.
If you are work­ing on a por­tal, dash­board, wid­get, social media plat­form, web-based desk­top, or any tile-based design, this series should help clar­ify the growth and usabil­ity chal­lenges you will encounter, as well as pro­vide a pos­si­ble solu­tion, in the form of a sim­ple design frame­work that is plat­form and ven­dor neu­tral.
Stay tuned for the third install­ment in the series, due out shortly!

For those in the enter­prise IA / UX space, The next fron­tier in IT strat­egy: A McK­in­sey Sur­vey cen­tered on the idea that “…IT strat­egy is matur­ing from a reac­tive to a proac­tive stance“is worth a look.
This nicely par­al­lels a point made about the reac­tive mind­set com­mon to IT in many large orga­ni­za­tions, in dis­cus­sion on the IAI mail­ing list last month. Lou Rosenfeld’s post Infor­ma­tion archi­tects on com­mu­ni­cat­ing to IT man­agers, sum­ma­rizes the orig­i­nal dis­cus­sion in the IAI thread, and is worth read­ing as a com­pan­ion piece.
Lou’s sum­mary of infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and user expe­ri­ence voices in the enter­prise arena is note­wor­thy for includ­ing many exam­ples of strong cor­re­spon­dence between McKinsey’s under­stand­ing of how IT strat­egy will mature (a tra­di­tional man­age­ment con­sult­ing view), and the col­lected IA / UX view­points on address­ing IT lead­er­ship — typ­i­cal buy­ers for enter­prise any­thing — and inno­va­tion.
Dialogs that show con­ver­gence of under­stand­ing like this serve as pos­i­tive signs for the future. At present, a large set of deeply rooted cul­tural assump­tions (at their best inac­cu­rate, usu­ally reduc­tive, some­times even dam­ag­ing) about the roles of IT, busi­ness, and design com­bine with the his­tor­i­cal lega­cies of cor­po­rate struc­tures to need­lessly limit what’s pos­si­ble for User Expe­ri­ence and IA in the enter­prise land­scape. In prac­ti­cal terms, I’m think­ing of those lim­i­ta­tions as bar­ri­ers to the strat­egy table; con­strain­ing who can talk to who, and about which impor­tant top­ics, such as how to spend money, and where the busi­ness should go.
Con­sid­er­ing the gulf that sep­a­rated UX and IT view­points ten — or even five — years ago, this kind of emerg­ing com­mon under­stand­ing is a good sign that the cul­tural obsta­cles to a holis­tic view of the mod­ern enter­prise are wan­ing. We know that a holis­tic view will rely on deep under­stand­ing of the user expe­ri­ence aspects of busi­ness at all lev­els to sup­port inno­va­tion in prod­ucts and ser­vices. I’m hop­ing the rest of the play­ers come to under­stand this soon.
Another good sign is that CIO’s have won a seat at the strat­egy table, after con­sis­tent effort:
Fur­ther evi­dence of IT’s col­lab­o­ra­tive role in shap­ing busi­ness strat­egy is the fact that so many CIOs now have a seat at the table with senior man­age­ment. They report to the CEO in 44 per­cent of all cases; an addi­tional 42 per­cent report to either the chief oper­at­ing offi­cer or the chief finan­cial offi­cer.
Look­ing ahead, infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and user expe­ri­ence view­points and prac­ti­tion­ers should work toward a sim­i­lar growth path. We fill a crit­i­cal and miss­ing strate­gic role that other tra­di­tional view­points are not as well posi­tioned to sup­ply.
Quot­ing McK­in­sey again:
IT strat­egy in most com­pa­nies has not yet reached its full poten­tial, which in our expe­ri­ence involves exploit­ing inno­va­tion to drive con­stant improve­ment in the oper­a­tions of a busi­ness and to give it a real advan­tage over com­peti­tors with new prod­ucts and capa­bil­i­ties. Fewer than two-thirds of the sur­vey respon­dents say that tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion shapes their strat­egy. Only 43 per­cent say they are either very or extremely effec­tive at iden­ti­fy­ing areas where IT can add the most value.
User Expe­ri­ence can and should have a lead­ing voice in set­ting the agenda for inno­va­tion, and shap­ing under­stand­ings of where IT and other groups can add the most value in the enter­prise. To this end, I’ll quote Peter Mer­holz (with apolo­gies for not ask­ing in advance)
”…we’ve reached a point where we’ve max­i­mized effi­ciency until we can’t max­i­mize no more, and that in order to real­ize new top-line value, we need to inno­vate… And right now, inno­va­tions are com­ing from engag­ing with the expe­ri­ences peo­ple want to have and sat­is­fy­ing *that*.“
McK­in­sey isn’t mak­ing the con­nec­tion between strate­gic user expe­ri­ence per­spec­tives and inno­va­tion — at least not yet. That’s most likely a con­se­quence of the fact that man­age­ment con­sult­ing firms base their own ways of think­ing, orga­ni­za­tional mod­els, and prod­uct offer­ings (ser­vices, intel­lec­tual prop­erty, etc.) on address­ing buy­ers who are them­selves deeply entrenched in trad­tional cor­po­rate struc­tures and world­views. And in those worlds, every­thing is far from mis­cel­la­neous, as a glance at the cat­e­gory options avail­able demon­strates; your menu here includes Cor­po­rate Finance, Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy, Mar­ket­ing, Oper­a­tions, Strat­egy…
BTW: if you weren’t con­vinced already, this should demon­strate the value of the $40 IAI annual mem­ber­ship fee, or of sim­ply read­ing Bloug, which is free, over pay­ing for sub­scrip­tions to man­age­ment jour­nals

I’ve cre­ated a sug­gested (and highly orig­i­nal) tag for book­mark­ing items related to the build­ing blocks:

ia_building_blocks

I’ve tagged a few items on del.icio.us — my default book­mark­ing ser­vice — and will mon­i­tor tag streams from some of the other book­mark­ing ser­vices.
http://del.icio.us/tag/ia_building_blocks

I’m pre­sent­ing for the Tax­on­omy Com­mu­nity of Prac­tice web sem­i­nar today. I’ll be talk­ing about a long-term, enterprise-level strat­egy and design engage­ment for a finan­cial ser­vices client, shar­ing work that com­bines infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and tax­on­omy efforts over the past year.
The agenda for the call includes sev­eral other speak­ers; it should be a strong show­case of infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and tax­on­omy work from dif­fer­ent set­tings.
If you’d like to lis­ten, some details are below. Reg­is­tra­tion and more infor­ma­tion is avail­able from www.earley.com/events.htm
Date and time: Fri­day, Decem­ber 1^st, 2006 — 2:00 to 3:30 PM EDT

Dura­tion: 90 minutes

For­mat: Teleconference

Cost: $50 per attendee

Reg­is­ter for the ses­sion (you will receive dial-in instruc­tions and slides the day before the call)
Descrip­tion:
User Expe­ri­ence design is often thought of as dis­tinct or dif­fer­ent from tax­on­omy design. What are good IA prac­tices and how do they influ­ence tax­on­omy design? In this ses­sion you’ll hear from three expe­ri­enced IA’s who will share spe­cific exam­ples from their orga­ni­za­tions and con­sult­ing projects that will illus­trate prin­ci­ples that you can apply in your tax­on­omy projects.
In this ses­sion, hear about:

• a user expe­ri­ence design effort that com­bines infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and tax­on­omy approaches for a major finan­cial ser­vices client
• spe­cific expe­ri­ences apply­ing IA with Com­paq and HP and “busi­ness tax­onomies” — tax­onomies that live within strict busi­ness limitations

Pre­sen­ters:
Seth Ear­ley, Ear­ley & Associates

Joe Laman­tia

Bob Good­man

Andrew Gent, Hewlitt Packard