Today I distracted myself from the fact that I wasn’t at Information Online 2009 by attending four and a half hours of Information Architecture workshops. MPOW had arranged for Donna Spencer from Maad Mob to talk to people involved with creating web content.
Last year I mentioned that I was very sad to be missing Donna’s workshop at the Edge of the Web conference in Perth, ( Information Architecture in Austrlia – where are the librarians? ) so I was very glad to catch up with it today.
During the first hour, I may not have been within rotten-egg throwing distance of Senator Stephen Conroy (see a transcript of his talk here – note the jump from “filtering does not slow down the internet” to “we support freedom of speech” without any sign of logic ), but I did learn about:
- Why we should bother to put things on the web
- What we need to do to do it well
- Some tips and tricks
- How to make sure we look after what we do
I liked Donna’s idea about what we are aiming for when we create websites – to allow other people to do things they want in their own time in the way they like best. She stressed the importance of user research and suggested it can be direct or indirect and self-reported or observed. Methods include interview, diaires, surveys, journals, card sorting, task/activity analysis, website stats, user logs and focus groups.
Donna showed the image of the “knowledge gap” from Jared Spool’s post What Makes a Design Seem ‘Intuitive’? . Often people in an organisation overestimate the amount that their users know. We need to work out what our users know now and what they need to know from our site – and how to bring these together.
The tips and tricks included
- Knowing what people want and writing to them
- Using a real and consistent voice
- Show, don’t tell – and take into account different learning styles when you do this
- Add in a few features to make people stop and think
User research should be done for all web sites , but for some it is absolutely crucial. Donna showed the graphics that she created for this post, Making decisions about user research . It outlines a series of factors to consider when evaluating how important it is to do user research. The criteria include:
- Importance to business
- User impact
- Cost
- Whether it raises the company profile
- Whether it convinces others
- Wehter it harnesses existing knowlege
- The ability to stop in the middle and re-do, to iterate
- Ability to collect feedback
As happens in many organisations, it is easier to get special funding to makeover or re-do a website, or create a new project than it is to get ongoing funding to maintain a project well. We need to ensure that funding and maintenance are built in.
After the first hour, I went off for an hour’s break and pretended wasn’t envying everyone at Info Online while I read Paul and Neerav’s excellent aggregated page of social media posts that use the conference tag, #io2009 . I’d love to see an RSS feed from it.
I’m not going to outline what was covered in the three hour workshop. Much of it was elaboration on the morning’s workshop and most of what I got out of it was hearing my work colleagues explore the concepts and work out how they might apply at MPOW.
I would recommend that if you get a chance to catch Donna’s workshops , you do so.
n is my protected account that you can request to follow, but I need to OK it before you can see my updates. It’s a comfy place where I metaphorically sit on the sofa and kick of f my shoes and laugh and learn from the twitter people I follow.