The AYCL Blog

How we provide feedback to others matters as much—or more—as what we say, and ultimately contributes to the success of our work. Ahava Leibtag shares an approach for creating the right environment to give critical feedback without putting people on the defensive.

Watch this seminar if you would like to improve the way you deliver and receive critical feedback.

Information Architecture is a practice of arranging parts to make sense of a whole. Naming and cataloging information in a logical and simple framework is a critical step to creating an understanding between the content and our users, says Abby Covert.

Collaborative Information Architecture is a practice that draws stakeholders out of their respective silos within an organization, helps teams reach clarity on content and goals, and ultimately creates a common ground of understanding between all parties through the use of meeting facilitation, and visual diagrams that communicate complexity and resolve conflicts.

Collaborative IA can alleviate the following problems:

• Internal disputes over what to call things
• Lack of clarity over what things “are” within an organization (people often have a different understanding across departments)
• Overlapping functionality
• Lack of prioritization of audiences or goals
• Arguing about priority through a lens of organizational politics
• “This is how we’ve always done it” thinking
• “Lacksonomy” instead of taxonomy, when language and structure is developed organically and not thought-out

Qualitative and Quantitative research are powerful tools that help us understand our users, their motivations, and how they interact with our products. Laura Klein breaks down the difference between these two methodologies and provides us with a formula for how to use them to test and improve upon a specific experience along the user’s journey: the onboarding process.

Discover a framework for measuring the success of the onboarding process as well as specific tactics for teams to use to problem-solve weaknesses in their own onboarding and optimize products for success.

Which would improve your site more: a defined content strategy, or a redesign? Karen McGrane, in her interview with Jared Spool, “Integrating Content Strategy into Your Design Process,” makes the case that a redesign is not the universal fix-it-all that many companies desire, and that content strategy is often where groups should focus their effort.

“I think some of my love for content strategy in this day and age is, in a sense, acknowledging that in many situations a redesign is not the answer,” says Karen. She says that often times, her clients aren’t seeing the traffic that they expect on their site, and believe that the resources required by a major redesign will lead to gains.

But for many organizations, says Karen, “The effort that they should be putting in should be in their content.” Changing the design in major or minor ways is always an option, but “none of that is going to be worth it if you don’t have the content to back it up.”

Many businesses don’t know how to get to the root of the problem when the customer experience fails. With service design tools, we gain a full understanding of the environment in which our products live and are used by customers.

If you are curious about how service design works, or you are familiar with it and would like to learn more about service design tools, get started here.

There are four techniques, influenced by game thinking and design, which product developers can use to get them to a minimum viable product to test faster, says Amy Jo Kim. The most critical step of the four is finding your Core Loop.

What is the core loop? It’s the heart of your product, a series of actions that engages and delights your users and makes them want to return. A successful core loop drives long-term user engagement with a product.

So, how do you find it? Design your experience to evolve over time. This isn’t about designing how the product looks, but rather systems. Ask yourself what the customer’s experience with your product will be like, and how it will grow and evolve. Define what fun looks like for your audience. (It can mean different things to different people.) Then find and court early, passionate adopters of your product and seek their opinion.

That early feedback will be crucial to your product’s development. If you can nail these early customers, who are not always representative of your ultimate end-market, they become partners and collaborators in your product as it develops.

A common mistake in user onboarding design is an experience that shows complete user engagement with the product right out of the gates. A more successful approach, explains Samuel Hulick, starts where the user starts. In this approach, the onboarding design helps users move incrementally toward their next step, growing and adapting to the experience.

Map your users’ first experience with your product. Imagine what happens in their first sitting. If you use tool tips, don’t throw them at the user all at once. Deliver them one at a time, and make sure they are action-oriented. If you do use tool tips, expect them to be skipped, especially if they are not action-oriented.

People don’t buy products, Samuel explains. They buy better versions of themselves. What is the improvement that your product is providing? And how can you move your users toward that step?

From, “Growing Your User Base with Better Onboarding,” a virtual seminar with Samuel Hulick.

Visual models help us get unstuck when we rely too heavily on linear thinking or logic that ties us to certain assumptions or approaches in our problem solving. When we visually conceptualize ideas, we get out of our heads, arrange, interact, and share information in ways we might not otherwise consider.

You might have some hesitation about creating your own visual models, but Stephen Anderson strongly suggests you give it a try. Models help us see patterns in information, and combinations, that reveal new insights.

Many of use charts and diagrams, models and templates to track data or map a user experience—even visual models as simple as a Venn diagram or XY matrix. These are all highly useful methods to help us solve problems and create a new understanding of the work that we do.

You’ve got a website full of uncaptioned videos and images, PDFs that don’t meet ISO standards, and a checklist of other legacy media that has to be “fixed.” On a limited budget. And by yesterday, of course. What’s the best strategy for bringing your legacy media up to date?

Let analytics be your guide, says Whitney Quesenbery, accessibility expert and co-author of The Web For Everyone. Which PDFs are downloaded most often? What are the most popular videos? Find out where users go and what they do.

Once you’ve identified key tasks and content, you can explore any existing barriers and address these systematically. While you’re in the process of updating PDFs, for example, you can give users the option to contact you and request a specific PDF in accessible format. This is another source of “street research” that will help you prioritize your work.

Whitney’s advice? Acknowledge the problem. Communicate that you’re working on a solution. And focus your energy and resources on the things that your users are most likely to need.

By Abby Covert

This post was originally published on Abby's blog, Abby The IA, on August 5, 2016.

Last week I had the pleasure of teaching a new webinar for UIE’s All You Can Learn Library. The video is now available, and with permission from UIE I have decided to share and primary lessons of the talk. 

(You can get Abby's slide deck or read the transcript)

Why Collaborative Information Architecture?

I talk to a lot of people about IA. It is one of my favorite things to do. One common theme I run into in these conversations is how to deal with people. It seems that everyone agrees that the main challenge of practicing IA is not deciding where to put things or what to call things, it is doing so in an environment where people have diverse opinions about where to put things and what to call things. After bumping into this reality enough times, I decided to really give it some thought. The result is this:

Too many people are practicing information architecture alone at their desks and presenting the results to their colleagues and clients. As a result, they are struggling to make actionable change, being discouraged by lack of understanding and getting frustrated with not being respected for their expertise.

How to Make Sense of Any Mess, I wrote: “…making maps and diagrams alone at your desk is not practicing information architecture.”

I made this point in passing to get across the idea that dealing with other people’s opinions is part of IA work, not something we get to choose our way out of. Ever since writing this line I have looked to pressure test it and create lessons around how to get other people involved in IA work.

Because in my experience, practicing IA with other people is not only more efficient, it is also more effective.

In preparation for the webinar I sent out a survey asking people a few questions about challenges they face in practicing IA. The result was 79 in-depth responses where people poured their hearts and souls into two simple free text fields.

Here is a recap of the common things I heard:

• Conversations about language are difficult because people within a single organization are often speaking different languages based on role or area of focus
• It is common to run into arguments about priority (of audiences, of goals, of resources et al) and for prioritization to be considered through a lens of organizational politics not user centricity
• People complained about the prevalence of “This is how we have always done it” thinking and how hard it is to get organizations to change
• Other competencies were reported to ignore or override decisions made by IA or seeing IA as cosmetic and arbitrary
• Lack of time or budget for collaboration, testing and iteration around IA was often attributed as the largest thing standing in the way of good IA thinking

With all this in mind I set out to create a webinar to help people think about their IA process and look for opportunities to make it more collaborative.

In this 90 minute presentation I cover:

• How to communicate the value of IA to your organization
• How to make time/get time for IA
• How to think about IA in agile vs waterfall environments
• How to use stakeholder interviews to get people invested in making things clear
• How to facilitate low fidelity conversations about language
• How to mine for language across channels and contexts
• How to use diagrams and drawing exercises to collaborate on IA with others
• How to get people to actually pay attention to controlled vocabulary work

One of the most valuable parts of the research survey was the “burning IA questions” that people asked — but with all the content I had to share in the webinar, a lot of those great questions ended up on the cutting room floor. Below I would like to answer the top five questions that people submitted that didn’t make it into the talk.

How do you establish trust when you don’t have years of experience?

The best advice I can give you when it comes to building trust is this: listen more than you speak. I find that often times people go through their days aiming to be seen as the smartest person in the room, constantly looking for opportunities to show off their skills or ideas. If you instead spend most of time asking questions and genuinely listening to the answers your clients and colleagues give you, you will be seen as a more trustworthy partner.

The second piece of advice I have for you is to stop having opinions. Well, more like stop weighing in with your opinion. When we talk about IA we are already dealing with many people’s opinions. You want to position yourself as someone who will help to weigh and compare all the opinions that exist so progress can be made, not as someone who will take sides or fight for a certain point of view. Both of these pieces of advice require you to set aside your ego in service of acting as a filter for others. This is a serious challenge to overcome if you want to be trusted in doing IA work, especially without a proven track record.

“When making a cup of coffee, the filter’s job is to get the grit out before a user drinks the coffee. Sensemaking is like removing the grit from the ideas we’re trying to give to users.” excerpt from How to Make Sense of Any Mess

Who within an organization should own the IA?

The simple answer is everyone. I have experienced the IA being owned in technology, marketing, design, product and even most recently by finance… all have resulted in the same issue. Whatever group owns the IA gets its priorities all over it. So instead of deciding who should own the IA, I have started to recommend that my clients create governing bodies for the IA that include cross functional members who come together on a set schedule to discuss IA issues and make IA decisions. By making it so that there is no one group or function that owns the IA it is more likely that decisions will be upheld and questions will be routed appropriately.

Can we practice IA with others without them knowing what IA is?

Yes. Often the best way to talk about IA is to talk about the two concepts within it: language and structure. Both of these concepts tend to make sense to folks across functions and areas of experience. So while educating people on IA can be useful when trying to influence an organization to care about it, it is more 201 level content best taught once the 101 concepts are clear and actionable.

Is it possible to architect something that you don’t understand because it is just too big, too specialized or too complex?

I spent a lot of time thinking about this one. I landed here: No it is not possible to architect something you don’t yet understand. It is the process of understanding it that allows us to shape places in support of it. I have been in many circumstances where the brain-hurt of getting up to speed was hard to stomach. I have lost sleep thinking “this is going to be the mess I can’t make sense of” and yet with time, persistence and bravery I have always been able to break it down and understand it. Here are some tips:

• Take your time, some things take a while to unravel. Spread the work out and take breaks to think on it. Sometimes our brains need to sit with something passively to have a real breakthrough
• Visualize it, it is always more complicated when it is kept in our heads alone. These visualizations can be messy and stay messy for a long time while you are working through the mess. Don’t be afraid of unresolved diagrams, they are sometimes needed to resolve larger issues surrounding the diagram
• Use your naivety as a tool to get people to break down complex things into its parts. I have often asked my clients to describe something as if they were speaking to a grade school classroom.
• Compare it to something you do know. Find a metaphor or like minded thing in the world that can serve as a bridge between not knowing and knowing

How do you balance the need to continuously educate your co-workers with not getting stale/turning people off with constant preaching?

There is a thin line between educating and preaching. The first tip I have on keeping from turning people off is similar to the advice I gave on question 1. Try listening more and talking less. What would it be like to go into your next meeting and pose everything as a question? Often the person you are trying to educate can tell you what they don’t understand easier than you can educate them on everything you know while hoping something will stick. So after an initial period of proactively introducing some concepts around IA, keep your teaching reactive to what people are struggling with. Also work on your critiquing skills, and make sure your opinions aren’t clouding your judgement. It is common for people to get all hopped up on their own expertise and use their expert voice when voicing their opinions.

Lastly, make sure people know that you know that IA is subjective. There are many ways to do this work. If people understand their role in making good IA choices, they are more likely to feel educated, and not preached at.

—

I hope you found the presentation and my answers to these questions useful. I am always open to questions from readers, so throw them my way if you have them.

Thanks for reading.

Abby "the IA" Covert is an independent information architect living, teaching and working in New York City.

When you’re a design lead within a large organization, you’re often in charge of groups of designers across different silos. As a design system advocate, you position yourself as a collaborator, someone who’s there to help folks understand the importance of standards, not just point out issues and oversights during a quarterly review.

Nathan Curtis, EightShapes founder and author of Modular Web Design, uses “design clinics” to build collaborative relationships and keep his team faithful to standards and design systems. Once a week, he holds drop-in office hours. Designers and developers stop by to present their work and get advice about how to bring it in line with the corporate brand.

Design clinics are a lightweight, informal way to “triage” glaring discrepancies while fostering a sense of unity and collaboration. They don’t eat up a bunch of hours, but they can have a huge impact on the quality and cohesiveness of your organization’s designs.

What strategy characteristics lead to concrete elements that will actually work for your team? Jim Kalbach knows how to remove fuzziness from design discussions and inspire consistent action from diverse personalities.

If your strategy discussions feel more like political battles than progressive team-building, this seminar is for you.