IA and usability

I really enjoy teaching our new workshop on SharePoint Information Architecture (IA). There is nothing like teaching to further one’s own knowledge. The classes attract a diverse range of students. Some come knowing little about SharePoint or IA; others have expertise in either SharePoint or IA. The mix of knowledge in the class brings a wide range of issues to discussions and the class-dynamics and interaction lead to valuable new insights into SharePoint design, development and adoption.

Many organizations do not spend the time and make the effort to understand user requirements in detail.   And even when they do, they are often unable to translate requirements into effective content organizing principles, critical to successful SharePoint deployments.

Earley & Associates recently announced a webinar series on Content in Context: Why Dynamic Content and Content Choreography is Critical to Information Management. Since you may be asking yourself, “what is content choreography?” we thought we’d share the history of the term and what we mean by it.

Back in March of 2011, a major global high tech company engaged Earley & Associates to work on the redesign of a major website, site search, metadata and all new web CMS and DAM infrastructure. It was an enormous undertaking, headed by Marketing and involving brand managers, the SEO team, content authors, creative agencies, a systems integrator, a user experience design agency, technical consultants, and the IT department. The existing sites were to migrate from traditional navigation, search and single page content to a totally new paradigm of dynamic content collections, where user context would be driven by the search experience more than by navigation or site depth. With personalization. And in multiple languages. Taxonomy and metadata would play an important role in each of these areas, but just how well the whole system was going to hang together (“If we do not hang together, we shall all hang separately...”) was a real concern, and the very reason we’d been called in as a sort of SWAT team.

I recently pulled out my yellowed copy of Michael Dertouzos’ 1995 What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives.  What I found interesting is how some of those predictions were spot on and some oddly naïve about just how much humans can change.

In “What Will Be” the term used to describe how people get their jobs done by leveraging various tools for managing documents and information was “Groupwork”.    Today, we simply use content management applications to get our jobs done.    See my recent blog, “This internet thing? It's gonna be BIG!” for more discussion on what will be, what is, and what is to come.

As I looked back over the last 15 years, I thought about the progress made in content management platforms; and the hype that accompanied each one.  “Now, we will we have an end to information chaos! We can control what goes where and enable easy access!”  Sadly, each new offering led to its own flavor of information chaos. 

So is SharePoint 2010 the platform that will solve the problem? Or, will we find that information chaos is migrated along with content?   It’s really up to you and your organization. The opportunity is there but don’t take it for granted.

As I talk to companies and other enterprises, I find that most fall into the same trap – they buy a tool, install it, roll it out and wait for their people to get more efficient and effective.  They wait… and wait… and…  Instead of things getting better, they actually can get worse. 

Why is this, I asked myself.   Here are the five things that came immediately to mind.

Taxonomists never work in isolation: they collaborate with subject matter experts, content managers, systems integrators, information architects, and webmasters, among others. One type of professional whose area of expertise requires close work with taxonomists is usability or user experience professionals. Quite simply, usability professionals design user interfaces to software, websites, and information services, among other products and services, to make them easier to use. Since the objective of a taxonomy is to help users find information, and user professionals’ goal is to help users achieve their tasks and goals, there is obviously some overlap.

Experienced taxonomists are already familiar with usability issues, and usability professionals who work on website or online information systems usually have some familiarity with taxonomy. But each may not have full expertise in the other’s field, and thus it makes sense to collaborate.

Taxonomists and usability experts not only collaborate to achieve better results, but they can also learn from each other. I recently found this to be the case when I attended the UPA Boston Ninth annual Mini Conference on June 9. “Mini” is hardly the name for it, with 450 attendees, 32 speakers in four simultaneous tracks of sessions. Yet I was the only taxonomist among the hundreds of user interface designers, usability engineers, user experience experts, and the like.

What Usability Experts Can Learn About Taxonomies

Card sorting is a popular technique for getting at users' understanding of content structure, relationships and terminology. I often will break out a card sorting exercise early on in a taxonomy project using terms extracted from the client's content or pre-existing taxonomies to get a sense of what kind of organizing principles are important to the users. I also find it to be a great way of socializing the project and educating people in taxonomy and information architecture.

Recently, I've been doing a lot of digital asset management (DAM) projects, where our taxonomy is meant to help organize and give access to a collection of images or other visual assets, usually through faceted search. While the typical card sorting activity is still relevant, given that we'll be using words/labels to create the taxonomy for the assets, I've found it to lack a certain something in this context.

So during my current project with a global pharmaceutical company, I decided to try a different approach: a visual card sort.

The same rules apply here as they do with traditional card sorting: you can do an open card sort (no pre-defined categories given), or a closed card sort (established set of primary categories). The only real difference being you do it with pictures, not words. And it tends to be a bit easier and fun, as many people are inherently visual.

Best Practice #3: Use concise and precise terminology.

As I've mentioned in previous best practices (#1 Less is more and #2 Grouping and chunking), a lot of these design principles apply to any navigational construct -- using concise and intuitive labeling seems like a no-brainer. Given the textually charged interface and the amount of thinking you are asking people to do to navigate your site, mega menus simply force you to follow these rules more strictly.

Hunting and pecking for the right label to click on in a mega menu is no small task, so you really need to avoid the 2 major categories of labeling problems:

1. Excessive length & concatenation: 

When you're trying to cram 20+ links in a hover pane, every character counts. If you've got extraneous words in your labels that make your links harder to scan, or even worse cause wrapping (*gasp*), take out the scalpel and try some creative rewording or restructuring. Labels should be short, sweet and precise, leaving nothing to guessing. Call it what it is as simply as possible, don't try to be fancy - you'll just end up confusing users.

Additionally, avoid concatenating (joining) more than 2 items in one label. Laundry list labels (this, this, this & this) are much harder to scan, as you force the user to read all the way to the end before they can move on. We also recommend you avoid having too many concatenated items in one menu or group. Ampersand-farms can make a menu much harder to scan and it usually means that you have tried to put way too much in one category and need to think about restructuring.

Here's an example of some labelling that breaks these rules:

I'm now back home in Montreal fighting jet lag (yawn) after a great week at the J.Boye 2009 conference in Aarhus, DK. It was a great experience I hope to repeat. Perhaps my favourite event was the last one - the town hall debate, reserved for the die-hard attendees who hadn't run off to the airport. In this session, we were given 6 statements to consider and vote upon, after hearing from two "debaters" who represented the pro and against. In this case, we had the "good doctor" (David Ott, attendee from World Health Organization) and the "panda" (Neil Morgan, attendee from Word Wildlife Federation).

This is a seriously fun session that not only drew lots of laughs (I'll point out the memorable quotes), but also some intense debate. Here's a recap for those who missed out, but also this can serve as a checklist at J.Boye 2010 to see if our predictions came true. (You can also watch the video)

#1. CMS is a commodity.

Pro (Ja): Sure, "CMSs are like water - get it from one company or another, it's all dirty". (Janus Boye) There's not much difference between all the systems and vendors, so it'll eventually be like choosing a brand of shampoo. Lather, rinse, repeat every 3 years.

Against (Nej): CMSs are actually quite different - there are some that are industry-specific, scenario-specific, there are no real standards governing their architecture. You need the appropriate tool for the appropriate task - choose wisely.

Result: AGAINST - CMS is NOT a commodity. It'd be interesting to count how many in the audience were vendors... Let's see how we feel about this one after the web idol contest in 2010.

Best Practice #2: Use chunking and grouping to increase scanability and learnability

So you’ve taken the mega-menu plunge and you now have more labels to fit into your drop-down. How do you make sure it doesn’t look like a mess of text?

There are a couple of options:

Grouping:
Create clear and logical groupings within the menu and give them prominent labels that can easily be scanned.

There are four elements to this approach

1. Logic: Groups have to be internally coherent and logical. Either they are all children of a common parent or somehow conceptually related in a way that is evident and quickly learnable.

2. Labeling: Use simple, unambiguous labels that convey the nature of each group. Decide if your labels will be “clickable” – is there a landing page behind them or is it just a visual way-finder? The mega-menus tend to discourage clicking on such intermediate levels, but marketing may want the space to provide category-level merchandising.

3. Volume: Follow general good practice on number of items in a category. We can thank cognitive science for an easy rule of thumb of 7 +/- 2, but I would say that in a mega-menu, space being limited, I would reduce that to 5 +/-2. This will reduce visual noise and fits well with best practice #1 (less is more).

4. Visual distinction: Use striking colors, increase white space between groups, use shading or dotted lines… anything that you can do to make a visual separation between the groups so that they eye can quickly skip from one group to the other without much thinking.

Let's look at some examples.

No matter where I run, I cannot seem to hide from them.

They fly out of website navigation menus with no warning. They assault my senses with link overload.

...they are...mega menus.

Are they a new navigation paradigm or just a bad fad - like acid washed jeans?

And whose idea were they anyways?

It's difficult to trace the starting point of the mega menu (or mega fly-out, or maxi menu, or whatever you call them); they started popping up on e-commerce sites a couple of years ago. The first one I bumped into one, my brow got that wrinkle it gets when I am at once curious and horrified - horrious? curified? I remember thinking, really? This is what we are doing now instead of putting effort into making our drop-downs more usable? Let's just add more drop-down...

Once the initial feeling of horriosity passed, I just forgot about it (aka denial). None of our clients were using them, so I didn't really have to pay attention. And THEN, this March Jakob Nielsen put out an Alertbox saying "Mega Menus Work Well." That was really the clincher. If Jakob/NNG says it's ok, well there goes the neighbourhood.

Since then, we've had a couple of clients go down this road. And I've kind of gotten used to mega menus... in the way that one gets used to white noise or a bad hair cut. To the point where I think that it's time that we acknowledged that a lot of websites are using them - for better or for worse - and that they are here to stay until the next navigation fad comes up. So it's probably a good time to set some basic best practices, to "limit the disasters" (limiter les dégas, as we say in French).