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After Day 1 of Oz IA, I thought I’d put up a few extra thoughts about Day 2. It was cut short for me due to other responsibilities, but all up it was a hugely humbling, rewarding, energising and inspiring experience.

The coffee, gourmet juices and tweets continued to flow freely, and the sessions got even more animated and engaging:

• Gary Barber took us into the courtroom with a scathing critique of tag clouds and who is to blame for their faults (hint: it could be the IAs). I was talking to him afterwards, and it’s not so much all tag clouds that are wrong, but their implementation as-is, rather than being critically assessed by IAs and reinterpreted for each individual use. Great stuff.
• Matt Moore’s Playing games with culture was the one workshop-oriented session, where everyone had a ’serious’ play with the Organisational Culture & Knowledge Management Methods Cards from Straits Knowledge. A fun way of revealing the sorts of team-culture lessons that may otherwise be lost if only resorting to dry presentation and workshop formats.
• Melissa Cooper from the ABC showed us how ruthless you have to be in designing search experiences for mobile interfaces. I can only aspire!
• Matt Fisher took us way out of our cushy little high-bandwidth graphics-rich always-on bubble and showed us the sort of ingenuity you need for designing systems for Defence, where water and dust wreck laptops and there’s no constant connection. What humbled me was the sorts of challenges that diggers are surrounded with when trying to carry out the same sorts of communication- and tech-related tasks we take for granted, and their contribution to refining such systems that can go on to be used for remote communities in developing countries. Very very worthwhile. Sort of puts my dinky little interfaces into perspective.

Oh, and one more thing I encountered: there’s this huge connection between being an IA and loving good food! You know who you are, and more power to you.

Can’t wait for next year!

I’m finally home after day 1 of Oz IA 2009, and absolutely knackered. What. A. Day. The presentation content was as diverse and interesting as the program suggested, but for me the greatest highlight was the meeting of minds of so many IAs.

First up was Matt Hodgson’s The Evolution of the Agile IA. Matt took us through a rollicking ride with where IA has come from, where it’s at now with the emergence of agile methodology, and where it’s going. One of the things I took from his messages about IA and agile was that in some ways we as IAs are already practicing some degree of agile without even knowing it; taking the big step into agile and leaving waterfall behind shouldn’t be too much of a pain.

I was up second, presenting on Guiding the way to living greener: how psychology helped IA for a new government website. I got some great feedback after it, including some requests for more information about how the ‘concierge’ model manifests itself in the various user interfaces used in the livinggreener.gov.au website. It was always going to be tricky to include the principles aspects of the presentation along with the applied aspects. I erred on the side of principles, given that the focus was on how motivational psychology can contribute to IA design. Maybe next time I would focus more on the UI aspects!

Cast herewith for your perusal (or go to my prezo at Slideshare):

Matt Balara was doing some awesome sketches of his thoughts coming out of each talk on the day, and here’s a pic of the page he sketched for my talk. It’s interesting that the key points that arose for him were:

• Designing for people where they were at
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
• ‘The Concierge’ interaction model - answer question and offer even more
• Personas are partners

Other highlights of the day:

• Non-stop supply of fantastic real barista-served coffee - Single Origin, no less. I think I had 5? Stopped counting… Oz IA, you have spoiled me for any and all conferences in future.
• Non-stop supply of fruit juice cocktails. Wanting to hold on to my masculinity, I didn’t indulge in this aspect of the conference much. But dayam, muddled mint and watermelon tastes good.
• Stamford Interactive’s war stories of the pleasures and pains of being involved in a massive government intranet redesign project. Girls, I felt your pain.
• Suze Ingram’s lightning-paced but highly entertaining review of prototyping tools. Expression Blend and Axure came up pretty well. I won a demo access pass to one of the online prototyping tools… no idea which one, now! But full points to Ian Stalvies, who won a fresh spanking new copy of Axure, for getting the trivia question right about the capital of Brazil (or somewhere like that).
• Last and definitely not least: I have never seen so much twittering in all my freaking life! It was quite weird to see so many laptops open with people having one eye on the speaker and one eye on tweetdeck. Extra extra weird to see my own tweets retweeted on other people’s screens.

More fun in store tomorrow…

A lot of the projects I work on involve generating ideas and user interfaces for systems to get collaboration happening for organisations. Many business decision makers are all too aware of collaboration’s benefits, but struggle to make their systems realise these benefits. One of the reasons could be a lack of a rational model underlying the system changes needed.

I find collaboration is a lot like religion: most people already think they know what collaboration is, could talk about it a bit, but probably haven’t really fully experienced it. It’s something other people do. A big reason for this is the language we use: we tend to talk about it in terms of its outworkings, motherhood statements, and end products. Do these sound familiar:

• Collaboration will deliver more innovation
• Collaboration will make us more efficient and more profitable
• Collaboration will strengthen brand loyalty
• Collaboration will enable more effective management
• Collaboration will reduce greenhouse gas emissions
• Collaboration will end war and bring about world peace

…OK, you get the point. We can’t help but think about collaboration in grandiose hyperbole. What business decision makers are often left with is a big chasm between collaboration’s great promises, and the right systems and interfaces to actually get it happening. I think we need to speak more in terms of information models, and start with the patterns and habits that people are already used to. I think we can speak more in terms of good old stock-in-trade for Information Arhictects: finding, organising and sharing information.

Finding information: moving beyond keywords

Search is big. I mean, really big. Google has spawned not only its own verb, but new approaches to searching and sifting through information that others are adding innovative thinking and features to all the time (like Clusty and Vivisimo).

Search is crucial for collaboration because we’re always going to approach information in terms of what we want more than what we can give. It’s time that the various comprehensive search features out there were made more available inside organisations’ systems. Searching for information has to be integrated (searching several systems at once), contextual (offering more relevant results related to your tasks) and predictive (offering avenues that you might not have anticipated).

When predictive search works together with integrated and contextual search, organisations can better anticipate what issues lie over the horizon, giving them an edge over their competition.

Organising information: moving beyond folders

Information is traditionally organised into files, folders and business areas. Think of your average office intranet, and the way your files are arranged on your server; everything is probably arranged by the organisation chart. The server probably has a big folder called ‘Clients’, with hundreds of folders for specific projects inside. This type of thinking arises from the more traditional metaphors we’re used to, like filing cabinets, rolodexes and business cards. It works up to a point, but it relies more and more on keeping that mental model of the structure in your head.

This creates issues when new uninitiated staff arrive, when the organisation restructures, and so on. This approach can also limit scalability, place too much reliance on technology and hold back organisations’ potential.

A more useful model puts the person at the centre of the information, and organises everything by connections. Connection-based categorisation adds a new dimension of relevance to information management, and allows a more flexible, agile and future-proof way of finding and working with information.

For example, every document on your server probably belongs to some sort of project, case or other discrete unit. It has one or more authors, one or more versions, and so on. Every author has a relationship to that project (a role to play, duration they’re on the project), relationships to the other authors, and other similar projects that they have worked on. And each of those projects has its own relationships.

Get the idea? Mapping this sort of metadata reveals connections that users may not be aware of, and aid in searching, browsing and adding richer meaning to that document. One example of this in action is the way LinkedIn displays connections to other people that you’re linked to. It does this to give greater context to connections, and reveal other people you may not have known about, or may not know that your connection is connected to.

Here’s a table comparing the ways organising information by connections can help:

This approach doesn’t necessarily mean replacing existing organisation practices and technology. It means adding the connection management layer to make your existing organisation more effective.

Sharing information: moving beyond email

Sharing information is actually an oxymoron to a lot of people; there are many people who have got to where they are precisely because they don’t share information, and perhaps are specifically required not to. But for the rest of us who aren’t spies or lawyers, there can still be a culture of only sharing information when we have the time and when we’ll profit from it.

But let’s assume we are sharing information. It typically means relying on technology that is simply not purposed for collaboration. It typically means using email messages to do the sharing, and the inbox to do the collecting, which presents all sorts of limitations in terms of file versions, decentralisation and difficulty in finding information. Collaboration can instead be fostered with the following factors:

• Openness – the more people are present and able to contribute in a collaborative space, the more useful it is. A knowledge management system open to only a few authors won’t be used as much as a more multi-author (or wiki) based system.
• Trust – information has to have credibility and authority to be relied upon.
• Convenience – the easier it is to seek and contribute information, the more the system will be used.
• Context – people have more incentive to use collaborative tools when they are seamlessly available as a part of the work they are already doing.
• Personalisation – offering features that let people customise the system to the way they work increases use and usefulness.

Start with the information design

Effective collaboration systems should start with a clear articulation of the information model, and the way that an organisation’s people are to use that model. Getting used to talking about the information design rather than the high-falutin’ benefits will help these sorts of projects actually succeed.

It will also help in resolving sticky issues like governance in systems that express the points of openness (above). It will help to strike the right balance between ‘top-down’ governance, corporate-regulated roles, permissions and information management, and ‘bottom-up’ open contribution and sharing.

It will help change a system people have to use to a system people will rely on. Amen to that!