Index
About the ACIA
Contact Us
ACIA Main Page > Strange Connections > Information Architecture 2000 (November 3, 2000)
See also:
Conference Program
(includes links to presentations)
Pre-Conference Seminar
Upcoming ACIA Events
Subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter.
More Strange Connections
The ACIA is sponsored by Argus Associates, a leading information architecture consulting firm.
Peter Morville's bi-weekly column on the evolving definition of information architecture
Information Architecture 2000
What do information spaces, Sweden, invisible work, XML, footpaths,
wearable computers, and nude beaches all have in common?
If you attended Information Architecture
2000 in La Jolla, you know these
were just some of the strange connections made during this
thought-provoking event.
While there's no substitute for the physical, intellectual, and social
immersion of a conference, I hope this article will serve as a map to some
of the people and ideas that became part of our user experience.
Samantha Bailey and I kicked things
off with an advanced seminar on
thesaurus design, covering a full semester's worth of graduate-level
material in one day. While the focus was on controlled vocabulary
development, topics also included collaborative filtering, automated
indexing, faceted classification, and return on investment.
Examples
and Resources are available
to all.
One advantage of organizing a conference is that you can make yourself the
featured keynote speaker. In my talk, dreamtime.com, I asked information
architects to slow down, referencing Roger McNamee's suggestion in Fortune
magazine that "Internet time will prove to have been a hormonal thing."
I also built a case for renaming our current era as the "Information
Architecture Age," a time when we can all make lots of money and pursue
our cyberspatial dreams concurrently. Hey, anything's possible with fuzzy
math.
Next up, Terry Swack advocated a
holistic approach to experience design,
emphasizing the importance of aligning business strategies, technologies,
organizations, and customers' needs.
Terry explained that usefulness (would I use it?) and usability
(could I
use it?) are both critical to the creation of successful user
experiences.
Andrew Dillon began with a cautionary
note, warning us to avoid "gurus
with guidelines." We should listen to our users instead.
Andrew then presented some disturbing research suggesting among other
things that:
Bonnie Nardi made a compelling case
for ethnographic studies as a
complementary approach (to usability engineering, for example) for
learning about information seeking behaviors and other forms of "invisible
work" performed every day by real people in the real world.
(Chris Farnum, an information architect at Argus, put a different twist on
applied anthropology in a high-tech environment, suggesting that Bonnie is
an expert at studying "users in the mist.")
Bonnie showed us a fascinating product under development at AT&T called
ContactMap.
It provides a unifying interface for describing, visualizing,
and leveraging personal social networks.
Her discussion of ContactMap gave us a hint of how next-generation
information architectures might leverage these social networks to provide
unified access to people, content, and services.
Karyn Young brought us an insider's
view of what it's like to be an
information architect within an immense company like IBM. I enjoyed her
story about how Lou Gerstner scared people into implementing a standard
navigation system across all 14 business units.
And I was impressed by some of the ways her group has been able to
demonstrate return on investment, for example tying $50 million in savings
to their latest redesign.
Lou Rosenfeld facilitated a
stimulating discussion regarding the impact of
wireless appliances on information architecture.
Andrew Dillon railed
against the PDA of today as an unusable device that's too easy to forget
at home. He called for an integration of physical and information
architectures; a world with information and interface embedded in our
walls.
Seth Gordon pointed out that our
clothing may soon be serving as
another portal into cyberspace.
Vivian Bliss presented an astonishing
case study, taking us behind the
Microsoft firewall to see what may be the most sophisticated intranet
portal in the world. These folks are years ahead of most of their peers,
in terms of integrating controlled vocabularies, metadata registries,
personalization, XML and XSL into a working information system that is
highly useful and usable.
Oh, and by the way, they've managed to save about 45 person years so far
by creating a flexible portal architecture that's being adopted by other
departments around the company.
Though I'm not sure that Peter
Merholz lived up to his new title as "the
bad boy of information architecture," he did stretch our minds with an
exploration of the ways we might leverage the inherent qualities of
information, user behavior, and the process of evolution to design
adaptive information architectures.
Peter presented some photos of Berkeley footpaths,
as evidence that
landscaping architects often fail to predict where people will want to
walk. He encouraged information architects to take a more careful look at
the patterns of usage within our web sites, to see what we can learn from
our users' digital footprints.
Andrea Gallagher did a wonderful
job bridging the gap between information
architecture and user interface design, describing the people and
processes involved in developing task-oriented web applications.
Andrea explained that the information used to describe products and
services (i.e., metadata) limits the potential array of tasks and affects
the user's understanding. For this and other reasons, information
architects and user interface designers must work alongside one another
from the beginning of a project.
Finally, I really enjoyed Andrea's suggestion that we need to "wallow in
the information." It brought to mind an image of a happy
hippopotamus
rolling around in an immense pile of documents.
We rounded out the conference with a panel discussion centered around key
questions for the field of information architecture. This was a highly
energizing experience, because of the active participation of what was
probably the most experienced audience of (roughly two hundred and
fifty)
information architects ever assembled.
There was a real feeling of community, or as Vivian Bliss put it, a sense
that we were "among our own tribe."
After the conference, a bunch of us hiked down to the beach (not the nude
one), and watched from Flat Rock as the sun set over the Pacific ocean.
It was a nice way to end the day.
It also provided one more reason to start planning Information
Architecture 2001. I love staying in luxury hotels along the
Californian
coastline.
What did you think about Information Architecture 2000?
Please send your rants and raves to Peter
Morville.
Subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter for notification of new articles.
If you'd like to bookmark this column use this and
if you'd like to bookmark this article use that.
Pre-Conference
Keynote
view slides
online 
download PowerPoint
file
Designing Effective Digital Relationshipsview slides
online download PowerPoint
file
Understanding and Evaluating the User Experience with
Information Spaces
Andrew argued that we must consider the softer issues like aesthetics and
emotion in our designs, since they have a measurable impact on customer
satisfaction.view slides
online download PowerPoint
file
An Ecological Approach to Designview slides
online download PowerPoint
file
Information Architecture for Diverse Audiencesview slides
online download PowerPoint
file
Panel Discussion: IA in a Wireless World
Knowledge Architecture: MSWeb Case Studyview slides
online download PowerPoint
file
Adaptive Information Architectureview slides
online download PowerPoint
file
Structure and Function: IA for Web Applicationsview slides
online download PowerPoint
file
Into the Sunset
End Notes
The ACIA is Sponsored by Argus Associates, Inc. Copyright 2000 All Rights Reserved