Joe Lamantia.com

In case you couldn’t make it to Ams­ter­dam for EuroIA 2008, or if you were in town but pre­ferred to stay out­side in the warmth of a sunny Sep­tem­ber Sat­ur­day than ven­ture into the mar­velous Tsuchin­ski the­ater, I’ve posted the slides from my talk Frame­works are the Future of Design.
Enjoy!

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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My slides from Blogtalk 2008 are avail­able online now: I went through a lot of ideas quickly, so this is a good way to fol­low along at your own pace…
FYI: This ver­sion of the deck includes pre­sen­ters notes — I’ll upload a (larger!) view-only ver­sion once I’m back from hol­i­day in lovely Éire.

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Boxes and Arrows just pub­lished Part 4 of the Build­ing Blocks series, Con­nec­tors for Dash­boards and Por­tals.

We’re into the home stretch of the series — just two more to go!
Stay tuned for a down­load­able toolkit to sup­port easy use of the build­ing blocks dur­ing design efforts.

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!

*Apolo­gies for another announce­ment post­ing* but now that the pro­gram is final, I can men­tion that I’ll be speak­ing at EuroIA 2007 in lovely Barcelona, as part of the panel Per­spec­tives on Ethics, mod­er­ated by Olly Wright. My pre­sen­ta­tion dis­cusses con­flict and ethics as an aspect of design for social online envi­ron­ments.
I shared some ini­tial thoughts on this (under served) area last year, in a short post titled Conflict-Aware Design: Account­ing For Con­flict In User Expe­ri­ences. The essen­tial mes­sage of this post — and the thing I’m think­ing about most regard­ing the ques­tion of con­flict — is “con­flict equals inter­est, and inter­est should be a focus for design.” The panel will be the forum for shar­ing promised (but not com­plete) follow-up post­ings.
While prep­ping the sub­mis­sion, I was work­ing with this treat­ment for the topic.
Con­flict is a fun­da­men­tal com­po­nent of human char­ac­ter and rela­tions, with impor­tant eth­i­cal dimen­sions. Yet con­flict rarely appears as an explicit con­sid­er­a­tion dur­ing the process of design­ing the expe­ri­ences, archi­tec­tures, sys­tems, or envi­ron­ments that make up the new social and par­tic­i­pa­tory media we use daily. Now that media are social, con­flict is inevitable.
How can (or should) design­ers eth­i­cally address con­flict within design efforts? Does an eth­i­cal frame­work for design require us to man­age con­flict in char­ac­ter and rela­tions actively? What mech­a­nisms or social struc­tures should design­ers use to address con­flict within new expe­ri­ences? Are there new kinds of con­flict cre­ated or neces­si­tated by the social and par­tic­i­pa­tory envi­ron­ments emerg­ing now?
Some spe­cific areas of dis­cus­sion: pri­vacy, iden­tity, own­er­ship, respon­si­bil­ity, speech.
I’d love any thoughts on the topic, the treat­ment, the impli­ca­tions, etc.
Fel­low pan­elists at EuroIA include:

• Olly Wright, Media Cat­a­lyst, NL
• Thomas J. Froehlich, Kent State Uni­ver­sity, US
• spe­cial mys­tery panelist…

Barcelona is a mag­nif­i­cent city…

The full con­fer­ence pro­gram is avail­able at this address http://www.euroia.org/Programme.aspx, and the ros­ter of speak­ers along is worth the trip to Barcelona.
And Dru­pal­Con Barcelona hap­pens at the same time — I won­der what sort of cross-pollination will emerge…?
Viva Catalunya!

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

Mark Blu­men­thal, of Pollster.com, recently posted a set of text clouds show­ing the words used by each can­di­date in the Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial debate Thurs­day night. The clouds were gen­er­ated from tran­scripts of the debate, using Daniel Steinbock’s Tag Crowd tool.
Can­di­dates’ Text Clouds

In the screen­shot of Mark’s post­ing, it’s easy to see this is a great exam­ple of a col­lec­tion of text clouds used for com­par­a­tive visu­al­iza­tion and inter­pre­ta­tion. The goal is to enhance under­stand­ing of the mean­ing and con­tent of the candidate’s over­all con­ver­sa­tions dur­ing the debate, an idea I explored briefly last year.
Just a month ago, in a post that iden­ti­fied text clouds as a new and dis­tinct tag cloud vari­ant, I sug­gested:

text clouds may become a gen­er­ally applied tool for man­ag­ing grow­ing infor­ma­tion over­load by using auto­mated syn­the­sis and sum­ma­riza­tion. In the infor­ma­tion sat­u­rated future (or the infor­ma­tion sat­u­rated present), text clouds are the com­mon exec­u­tive sum­mary on steroids

Sup­port­ing the com­par­i­son and inter­pre­ta­tion of polit­i­cal speeches is an inven­tive, timely, and resource­ful appli­ca­tion that could make text clouds a reg­u­lar part of the new per­sonal and pro­fes­sional toolkit for effec­tively han­dling the tor­rents of infor­ma­tion over­whelm­ing peo­ple in impor­tant sit­u­a­tions like vet­ting polit­i­cal can­di­dates.
I espe­cially like the way this use of text clouds helps neatly side­step the dis­heart­en­ing ubiq­uity of the sound­bite, by aggre­gat­ing, dis­till­ing, and sum­ma­riz­ing all the things the can­di­dates said. I sus­pect few — if any — of the cam­paigns real­ize the poten­tial for text clouds, but they def­i­nitely know the detri­men­tal power of sound­bites:

“It’s a mess,” said an exasperated-sounding Mr. Prince, Mr. Edwards’s deputy cam­paign man­ager. “Debates are impor­tant, but in these big mul­ti­can­di­date races they end up not being an exchange of ideas, but just an exchange of sound bites. They have become a dis­trac­tion.“

From Debates Los­ing a Bit of Lus­ter in a Big Field

The value of a col­lec­tion of sound­bites over an insight­ful dia­log is — apolo­gies for the pun — debat­able. But even if a sim­ple exchange of sound­bites is what the new short­ened for­mats of many debates yields us, text clouds may help derive some value and insight from the results. The com­bined decon­struc­tive and recon­struc­tive approach that text clouds employ should make it pos­si­ble to bal­ance the weight of sin­gle remarks of can­di­dates by plac­ing them in a larger and more use­ful con­text.
His­tory Repeats Itself
In the longer term view of the his­tory of our responses to the prob­lems of infor­ma­tion over­load, the appear­ance of text clouds may mark the emer­gence of a new gen­eral puprose tool for visu­al­iz­ing ever greater quan­ti­ties of infor­ma­tion to sup­port some qual­i­ta­tively ben­e­fi­cial end (like pick­ing a good can­di­date for Pres­i­dent, which we sorely need).
The under­ly­ing pat­tern — a con­sis­tent oscil­la­tion between man­ag­ing effec­tively and inef­fec­tively cop­ing, depend­ing on the bal­ance between infor­ma­tion quan­tity and tool qual­ity — remains the same. Yet there is also value in know­ing the cycles that shape our expe­ri­ence of han­dling the infor­ma­tion cru­cial to mak­ing deci­sions, espe­cially deci­sions as impor­tant as who leads the coun­try.
The NY Times tran­script of the debate is avail­able here.

2007 looks to be the year that the user expe­ri­ence, infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, and design com­mu­ni­ties embrace sys­tems think­ing and con­cepts.
It’s a meet­ing that’s been in the mak­ing for a while -
At the 2006 IA Sum­mit, Karl Fast and D. Grant Camp­bell pre­sented From Pace Lay­er­ing to Resilience The­ory: the Com­plex Impli­ca­tions of Tag­ging for Infor­ma­tion Archi­tec­ture.
Gene Smith has been writ­ing about sys­tems for a while. At the 2007 sum­mit Gene and Matthew Milan will dis­cuss some prac­ti­cal tech­niques in their pre­sen­ta­tion Rich map­ping and soft sys­tems: new tools for cre­at­ing con­cep­tual mod­els.
Peter Mer­hholz has been post­ing and talk­ing about the impli­ca­tions of some of these ideas often.
– and seems to have reached crit­i­cal mass recently:

• Adam Richard­son Why Design­ing Sys­tems Is Difficult
• Adam Green­field on Two things prod­uct design­ers and man­u­fac­tur­ers need to know
• Jeff Lash with Make your prod­uct part of a system

Here’s a set of read­ing rec­om­men­da­tions related to sys­tems and sys­tem think­ing. These books, feeds, and arti­cles either talk about sys­tems and the ideas and con­cepts behind this way of think­ing, or con­tain work that is heav­ily informed by sys­tems think­ing. Either way, they’re good resources for learn­ing more.
Tags:
http://del.icio.us/tag/systems_theory
http://del.icio.us/tag/systemstheory
http://del.icio.us/tag/SSM
Feeds:
Resilience Sci­ence recently fea­tured three excel­lent essays on the work of C.S. Holling
Books:

• Ervin Las­zlo — The Sys­tems View of the World
• Lud­wig Van Berta­lanffy — Gen­eral Sys­tem Theory
• Ger­ald Wein­berg — An Intro­duc­tion to Gen­eral Sys­tems Thinking
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Prigogine — The End of Certainty
• Manuel De Landa - 1000 Years of Non-Linear History
• and also War In The Age of Intel­li­gent Machines
• Steven John­son — Emer­gence
• Manuel Castells — The Rise of the Net­work Soci­ety (vol. 2 of The Infor­ma­tion Age trilogy)
• C. S. Holling — PANARCHY: Under­stand­ing Trans­for­ma­tions In Human And Nat­ural Systems

And for a lighter read, try any­thing by author Bruce Ster­ling that fea­tures his recur­ring char­ac­ter Leggy Star­litz — a self-described sys­tems ana­lyst ( likely the first exam­ple of one in a work of fic­tion that’s even mod­er­ately well known…). His sto­ries Hol­ly­wood Krem­lin, Are You for 86?, and The Lit­tlest Jackal (two in short story col­lec­tion Glob­al­head), are good places to start. The novel Zeit­gest focuses on Star­litz.
Arti­cles:
Sus­tain­abil­ity, Sta­bil­ity, and Resilience
We’ve needed to bridge the gulf between views of design rooted in sta­tic notions of form and func­tion, and the fluid real­ity of life for a long time. I hope this new friend­ship lasts a while.

A recent ques­tion on the mail­ing list for the Tax­on­omy Com­mu­nity of Prac­tice asked about search ven­dors whose prod­ucts han­dle faceted nav­i­ga­tion, and men­tioned Endeca. Because ven­dor mar­ket­ing dis­torts the mean­ing of accepted terms too often, it’s worth point­ing out that Endeca’s tools dif­fer from faceted nav­i­ga­tion and orga­ni­za­tion sys­tems in a num­ber of key ways. These dif­fer­ences should affect strat­egy and pur­chase deci­sions on the best approach to pro­vid­ing high qual­ity search expe­ri­ences for users.
The Endeca model is based on Guided Nav­i­ga­tion, a prod­uct con­cept that blends ele­ments of user expe­ri­ence, admin­is­tra­tion, func­tion­al­ity, and pos­si­ble infor­ma­tion struc­tures. In prac­tice, guided nav­i­ga­tion feels sim­i­lar to facets, in that sets of results are nar­rowed or fil­tered by suc­ces­sive choices from avail­able attrib­utes (Endeca calls them dimen­sions).
But at heart, Endeca’s approach is dif­fer­ent in key ways.

• Facets are orthog­o­nal, whereas Endeca’s dimen­sions can overlap.
• Facets are ubiq­ui­tous, so always apply, whereas Endeca’s dimen­sions can be con­di­tional, some­times apply­ing and some­times not.
• Facets reflect a fun­da­men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tic or aspect of the pool of items. Endeca’s Dimen­sions may reflect some aspect of the pool of items (pri­mary prop­er­ties), they may be inferred (sec­ondary prop­er­ties), they may be out­side cri­te­ria, etc.
• The val­ues pos­si­ble for a indi­vid­ual facet are flat and equiv­a­lent. Endeca’s dimen­sions can con­tain var­i­ous kinds of struc­tures (unless I’m mis­taken), and may not be equivalent.

In terms of appli­ca­tion to var­i­ous kinds of busi­ness needs and user expe­ri­ences, facets can offer great power and util­ity for quickly iden­ti­fy­ing and manip­u­lat­ing large num­bers of sim­i­lar or sym­met­ri­cal items, typ­i­cally in nar­rower domains. Endeca’s guided nav­i­ga­tion is well suited to broader domains (though there is still a sin­gle root at the base of the tree), with fuzzier struc­tures than facets.
Oper­a­tively, facets often don’t serve well as a uni­fy­ing solu­tion to the need for pro­vid­ing struc­ture and access to het­ero­ge­neous col­lec­tions, and can encounter scal­ing dif­fi­cul­ties when used for homoge­nous col­lec­tions. Faceted expe­ri­ences can offer gen­uine bidi­rec­tional nav­i­ga­tion for users, mean­ing they work equally well for nav­i­ga­tion paths that expand item sets from a sin­gle item to larger col­lec­tions of sim­i­lar items, because of the sym­me­try built in to faceted sys­tems.
Guided nav­i­ga­tion is bet­ter able to han­dle het­ero­ge­neous col­lec­tions, but is not as pre­cise for iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, does not reflect struc­ture, and requires atten­tion to cor­rectly define (in ways not con­fus­ing / con­flict­ing) and man­age over time. Endeca’s dimen­sions do not offer bidi­rec­tional nav­i­ga­tion by default (because of their struc­tural dif­fer­ences — it is pos­si­ble to cre­ate user expe­ri­ences that sup­port bidi­rec­tional nav­i­ga­tion using Endeca).
In sum, these dif­fer­ences should help explain the pop­u­lar­ity of Endeca in ecom­merce con­texts, where every archi­tec­tural incen­tive (even those that may not align with user goals) to increas­ing the total value of cus­tomer pur­chases is sig­nif­i­cant, and the rel­e­vance of facets to search­ing and infor­ma­tion retrieval expe­ri­ences that sup­port a broader set of user goals within nar­rower infor­ma­tion domains.