The care and feeding of taxonomies

My presentation from the 2012 ARMA NCR IM Days conference is available for download:

The Care and Feeding of Taxonomies: Taking an Enterprise Approach (PDF, 709 KB)

A few resources of interest and great inspiration, with apologies for being so old-school: I could have written whole posts about any one of these, and this is only a partial set of citations. The age of Internet learning and too-busy-thinking-to-write-about-it, I guess.

White papers, articles, blog posts, presentations

Beyond the Polar Bear (Mike Atherton, BBC; presentation from IA Summit 2011)

A Brief History of Information Architecture (Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati, Journal of Information Architecture, Vol. 3, Issue 2)

Information Architecture – which one? (Linda Daniels-Lewis, Systemsope)

Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings (Google Official Blog)

Topic Overview: Information Architecture (Greg Leganza, Forrester Research)

What is the Business Value of Taxonomy? (Earley & Associates)

Websites & blogs

The Accidental Taxonomist

Earley & Associates

Semantic University

The Taxonomy Blog

Taxonomy Strategies

Books

A Semantic Web Primer
(Grigoris Antoniou, Paul Groth, Frank van van Harmelen, and Rinke Hoekstra; The MIT Press; 3rd edition,  2012)

Everything is Miscellaneous
(David Weinberger, Times Books, 2007)

Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness
(Patrick Lambe, Chandos Publishing, 2007)

Structures for Organizing Knowledge: Exploring Taxonomies, Ontologies, and Other Schemas
(June Abbas, Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2010)

Opening eyes and minds with usability testing

I have had the good fortune recently to participate in two Government of Canada projects where we’ve had a usability expert as part of the team. (My double good fortune has been that the expert is Lisa Fast, of Neo Insight.)

Both of these projects involve the design and development of web-based discovery systems, where the content itself is sourced and aggregated from multiple levels of government.

My role has been designing the information architecture, specifically metadata structures for describing and tagging the information, and the vocabularies that are used to populate the metadata. These vocabularies are used as facets in the interface, to help users navigate, filter and discover information.

This role has also involved content design, since we’re concerned not only about how stuff gets found, but also about what gets found. The content portion of the project has involved a lot of effort to simplify and streamline government content, encouraging authors to use plain language (oriented to the citizen-user) and the active voice. Usability testing has had an impact here, too: it’s quite bracing to watch someone struggle to make sense of what your website is trying to tell them – typically, struggling to find a nugget of relevant fact in a sea of words.

Lisa’s testing asks users – farmers, small business owners, manufacturers – to complete a set of tasks fundamental to the discovery system and “think aloud” as they go. To get early input, the tests are conducted on a private online prototype system. She records each session in a way that protects the identity of the person: in the video clips, we can see what they are doing on screen, and hear their voices, and we know something about the type of business that each subject operates.

The focus of the testing is to determine whether users can perform essential tasks efficiently and successfully. The process allows us to zero in on the things that slow them down, or stymie them completely: finding it difficult to choose between options, choosing incorrect options, correcting themselves when they’ve made a choice with unexpected results, or hitting a dead end. In our iterative, prototype-based process, we’ve even been able to make design tweaks on the fly during the testing, and see the impact immediately. In future, we’ll be able to continue to monitor task performance on the live systems, and improve them further.

For the taxonomy, the usability testing has revealed the enormous difference in efficiency that small changes can make. These changes involve term selection, ordering of terms, and ordering of items in lists.

As an example, we used “business planning & development” as an entry under the question “What do you need assistance with?” The former tends to over-emphasize “business planning,” which many business operators think of as an annual process, or something that’s done in order to secure financing. “Business development” proved largely meaningless to the test subjects. What we wanted to convey was the idea of setting goals for business expansion and long-term success. Putting “growth” as a trigger, close to the beginning of the phrase, and removing “development” altogether, increased success rates when users were asked to find services that would help them increase the profitability of their businesses.

Content can be a tricky thing. The testing has borne out everything you ever heard about good web content: it needs to be scannable, to the point, and task-oriented. (Readable content is only one aspect of the content challenge. Another partner on the project, Joe Gollner of Gnostyx Research, has blogged about this, specifically about how IT deals with content. You can read Joe’s insights about this on his blog, The Fractal Enterprise:  see Fear of Content.)

Perhaps most importantly, however, it’s not just the designers who have benefited from the testing. Lisa’s video clips, and her recommendations and test results, have been shared extensively with the business side of the project: with project sponsors, partners, and other stakeholders. The “voice of the customer” is not always so immediate in government projects, and it has really engaged them. One provincial executive described the video performance of users on his provincial pages as “depressing,” which I think is a sign that Lisa’s work really hit home. In another study, partners dragging their feet about the need for a new system shifted to being completely on board when they saw that the new system delivered 30% higher success rates in comparison to the old system.

Says Lisa: “Usability testing tends to engage partners and stakeholders as part of the team – they all want to help the users they’ve seen struggling in the videos. They become committed to improving their components of the system. The iterative testing in these projects rewarded that team approach with user success rates that climbed into the golden 90% range by the final round of testing.”

Yay team. And thanks, Lisa.

P.S. Both projects have used an iterative design process, with multiple rounds of testing and refinement. Project executive Stephen Karam of Systemscope will be speaking about this design process at GTEC on October 19: http://www.systemscope.com/news/systemscope-at-gtec-2011/ (Workshop #2).

 

 

 

 

Of rot and puffery

The Government of Canada’s (GC’s) Web Usability Week event was an important milestone. For the first time a concerted effort was made to educate GC web teams and individuals about user-centered design: the principles, the methods, and the myriad of tools available, including the GC-led Web Experience Toolkit. (By way of contrast, the US government  has been providing web usability guidance to its web publishing community since 2001.)

Congratulations are due to the energetic group of public servants behind all of this, all of whom have fire in their eyes, and endless patience.

A portion of the Information Architecture and Content Findablity course that I delivered was focused on the challenge of dealing with ever-proliferating content. This is, to my mind, the most significant barrier to usable GC websites.

Everyone knows there’s too much of it, and many people believe that a high proportion of what’s been published could be removed from the web tomorrow without any discernible impact, and certainly no public outcry. For those of us who stare at this problem regularly, it’s a sad irony to witness vocal public demands for more and better government information, while our government’s web workers drown in a sea of apparently useless content.

Better findability is certainly part of the solution, but it’s nearly impossible to improve findability without knowing what’s there to be found, and who might be looking for it, and why.

For some attendees, this may have been the first time they were introduced to the idea of ROT (redundant, outdated and trivial) as a way of getting a handle on the problem. The need to “reduce the rot” is critical, particularly with the imminent Standard on Web Accessibility, which has implications for every single page of GC websites.

I fear, however, that many of the people who attended Web Usability Week are powerless to do much about this massive issue. There is an accountability gap in government web management, and its roots are easily identified: the GC continues to enforce, in policy and guidance, the notion that the web is primarily a communications vehicle, rather than the government’s most important and efficient way of delivering service to the public.

The result of this is that the vital function of web gate-keeping is performed almost wholly from a communicator’s perspective: Is this content on message? Does it follow our (often antiquated and print-based) publishing rules? OK, go. And we hope you are satisfied with the efficiency of our web publishing services; please come again. We are happy to publish anything, but we specialize in inflated puffery that tells Canadians about our accomplishments without regard for their goals or interests.

Since that’s how most web content gets published in the first place, taking it down requires a reversal and transformation of accountabilities that many institutions are simply incapable of. While web groups struggle to shift the responsibility for the care and feeding (and removal) of content to those who create it, their senior managers continue to expect the same people to deliver an efficient publish-on-demand service.

Where is the accountability for web-as-service? Who’s got the authority (and the will, and the knowledge) to manage a web publishing model that enforces web gate-keeping on the basis of user needs, usability, web appropriateness, and service outcomes? Is it realistic to expect the DG of Communications to be that person? Or anyone whose primary job function is communications, for that matter?

This is the point at which user-centered hearts turn in hope to web governance. It’s clearly lacking, but it is massively difficult. Just as an example: who in the organization is accountable for search effectiveness? Communications? “Business-side” content providers? IT? Information management? Web interface designers?

Correct answer: all of the above. So how is that going? Now, ratchet this question up to whole-of-government search and ask it again.

The response that’s needed is a more profound shift in thinking. There are too many strategic accountabilities (like service strategy and design, content strategy, and usability) that are currently homeless. They’re important. They need a place at the table, and some real authority.

I’d love to be proven wrong, so if you have an example of a GC organization that’s got this covered, please let me know.

Web Usability Week

Aboutness Inc. is pleased to be part of the Government of Canada’s upcoming Web Usability Week event.

I will be teaching a one-day course on Information Architecture (IA) and Content Findability, to be repeated four times during the week of March 21-25.  The course covers principles and methods of designing IA for the web, as well as practices and techniques for getting a handle on content.

The course material draws heavily on my IA and web project experience with federal government institutions. I’ll spend some time on the practical realities of IA and usability in a federal public sector context — I’m hoping this will encourage some of the participants to share their experiences, too.

If you’re a federal web person, I hope to see you there!

Getting started

Give me a second, here. I’m trying to order my thoughts.

Which is funny, since I’ll be using this space to talk about ordering things: about information architecture, and taxonomies; about ambiguity and precision; about tasks and goals; about discovering and retrieving information.

I’ve never met an organization that didn’t have some kind of findability headache, and the pain is usually exacerbated by the continuous proliferation of more and more stuff to find (or not find, which is extremely costly). I have been working on content, organizing, and finding challenges for almost 20 years, and I look forward to sharing some thoughts about that.

Probably in random order.