Fritillaria

User Research on the Team

2011-01-04T15:02:00.009-05:00

Customers need websites that work. Business owners need projects that deliver on organizational goals. IT developers need to know what to build. Enter user experience: the profession that bridges the gaps.

User experience (UX) team members ensure that business needs are identified, buildable blueprints are delivered to IT, and end users get websites and applications that engage them, delight them, persuade them, answer their questions, and exceed their needs and expectations.

Research plays a critical role in the sphere of user experience. User research boils down to finding and listening to the voice of the customer. This strategic approach works particularly well when carried out collaboratively, with the participation of business, IT, and users alike. The user researcher translates the mandate to "fight for the user" into specific research activities, trackable metrics, actionable reports, and more. The lead researcher will also look at how user research can creatively permeate many aspects of an IT project and even extend into related channels. For instance, research can engage with the help desk, marketing department, and social media manager, to the mutual benefit of all.

In my current project, I serve as User Experience Team Lead for a major government web portal. One of our first actions two years ago was to establish a solid foundation for user research that would work within an Agile development environment. That meant our research activities had to be fast, focused, and answer critical interface questions for features that were just about to be built. One piece included setting up a large and representative user engagement pool from which we could draw respondents on short notice. Another was to lay out our research tools up front in a roll-your-own user research handbook. Another element was to put a range of metrics into place, and we now track help desk stats, ACSI survey results, web analytics, and media mentions, and create regular briefings on all these findings. We also succeeded in establishing a participatory research approach that engages users, team members, and business owners in the process of collecting information and translating it into improved design decisions. Furthermore, the UX team has begun supporting stakeholders with research for marketing and communication efforts on behalf of related projects.

Baking in user research can also pay unexpected benefits. A powerful lobby approached the business owner of my current government project and wanted to know how their constituents were being served by this high-profile web portal. Preparing a report was a simple matter, and our in-person briefing demonstrated that the voices of their constituents have been represented throughout the process via interviews, card sorting exercises, focus groups, and prototype tests.

In short, research gives us tools that work for the project, the owners, and the users. Having user research on the team is a win for everyone.

eGovernment Challenges and Information Architecture

2010-05-13T14:48:00.006-04:00

Government work provides profound, often deeply frustrating, and generally amazing wide-reaching opportunities to apply our IA/UX powers in the service of millions. But this year’s Information Architecture Summit had no sessions specifically about IA in government settings.

And so I asked... “Shall we lunch?”

A group of Washington, DC government IAs and representatives from Canada and Sweden formed a topic table to start the discussion. During our hour we had time for lots of questions, a few answers, and some very interesting lines of inquiry.

Going Beyond Silos

There are political and developmental challenges to delivering access to applications and data across organizations. But there is a desire among government project owners to share, pointed out Duane Degler, who consultants for U.S. government agencies. Yet it’s hard for them to find others in the ecosystem with whom to share. Most government employees work either in delivery programs or in operational support of delivery programs. Civil servants often find their program mandates don’t reward, enable, or even allow collaboration. There is a need for agencies to change their processes, and opportunities to use new technologies and conceptual models to support that.

New paradigms, like Open and Transparent Governance, are indeed emerging. Under this aegis we can see examples of data sharing and public transparency on Data.gov http://www.data.gov/ for the US and Data.gov.uk http://data.gov.uk/ in Great Britain.

As another example, Murray Thompson brought up the new, Open311 API for service requests from citizens to local government. FixMyStreet lets citizens throughout Great Britain report local problems. San Francisco set up a Twitter hashtag to tweet issues to the 311 service, and has just released its CitySourced mobile app. Washington, DC, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Toronto are among those who are building apps and mashups under the new API.

The eBenefits portal that Ironworks Consulting is engaged in is a joint Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense project by mandate. While inter-departmental and inter-organizational cooperation therefore had the green light, from the beginning it’s been a challenge to broker permission into a reality. The key was to start with those business partners who see the vision and are willing to play, and then build a sucessful platform that everyone wants to get involved with. More thoughts on challenges and timelines for big eGovernment projects are in the blog article Citizen-Centric Portals In a Nutshell.

Cross-channel service design
Jonas Sonders talked about a Swedish social security help desk project in 2007 with the goal of increasing the number of hard questions staff have to deal with, while also reducing the number of staff. To achieve this, they made the simpler questions self-service, put an AI chat avatar into place, and created a “my page” for answers.

But to make this work, productivity expectations have to change (e.g. it must be okay for help desk staff to take longer to answer questions). Content has to be written to answer the hard questions. Everyone and everything has to be ramped up. In fact, the help desk vision is now out-stripping the underlying information structure. To keep up, solutions from an architecture point of view include, for instance, putting hooks in the system between data entry and information.

Semantics, persistence, ontologies
Thom Haller, who teaches and consults on writing for the web, introduced a discussion on “persistence.” What are ways of capturing classifications and organizing schemes so they get carried with the related data into the future? This is a challenge for NARA, Library of Congress, and other long-term archival receivers-of-information. Lea Taylor of MITRE pointed out that content owners ask that their blogs be archived and distributed via CD, although no user interactivity via comments are possible then. Furthermore, what needs to be discoverable in the web-enabled government? For instance, are tags legally discoverable? What’s the disposition policy and where does it come from? (In the US the answer to that question is that while the National Archives would have the ultimate voice, someone at the agency in question proposes a disposition policy.)

A follow-on discussion was held on sharing vocabulary models and classification schemes. We touched on how we might share vocabulary models (thesauri, tag models, ontologies) across groups (agencies, departments, federal/state/local, or even international) to support linking data and cross-fertilizing content.

The good news
The bottom line is there are ever-growing opportunities for IAs to build platforms for citizen-centric government. And to do so successfully, we need to continue bringing an enterprise-focused point of view to the table, including strategic and cross-channel thinking.

Service Design and the Customer’s Journey

2010-04-24T20:18:00.017-04:00

Call it by other names – multi-channel service design, customer relationship management, cross-channel experience design, customer experience. We’re talking about how people interact with a whole system, over time.

To get your head around it, think about the customer’s journey. We have no control over the path our customers use. They approach us from all angles... from our website, some else’s website, phone, kiosk, bricks-and-mortar location, help desk, walking billboard, social media locale. They go where ever they will to get further information or complete a transaction. From the customer’s point of view, they’re just interacting with our brand. And they don’t care about what channel they’re using.

That’s why we have to care.

Service Design is Hot
Designing for the customer experience was one of four main themes of this year’s IA Summit. Four sessions I attended either addressed it directly or used work products from a service design exercise to make a point. Outside that conference, the topic is either just emerging or has been around for decades, depending on where you look. Recently it’s been talked about in Peter Morville’s Ubiquitous Service Design blogpost, by Tim Brown of IDEO on Design Thinking last year at TED, and in web collections such as ServiceDesignTools and the Flickr Service Design group.

Tools for Service Design
Service design can be integrated into user experience projects with some tools to help organize your design thinking and communicate and collaborate with your clients about it.

The first step in grappling with designing for the whole customer experience is to create a simple Service Inventory. Identify 1) the touchpoints where the user interacts with the company or product, and 2) the services being provided by the company or product. Then create a grid with touchpoints along the top and services as rows, and fill in the details.

A number of examples of the Service Inventory appeared throughout sessions at the IA Summit, including the Leaving Flatland: Cross-Channel Customer Experience Design workshop, Pervasive IA for the Augmented Tomorrow session, and the Vanguard Experience Strategy session. Other templates are available online, for instance on Flickr and ServiceDesignTools.

A next step is to come up with a Customer Service Blueprint. This is more elaborated view of the system, which 1) differentiates services that are visible to the user and those that are backstage, and 2) shows relationships among and journeys through the services and touchpoints.

A third tool called a Service Prototype models or mocks-up the customer experience. For example, Business Origami, created by Hitachi and adapted by nForm, is a tabletop tool that simulates the service experience through specific touchpoints. It’s used to describe current states and explore future scenarios. For instance, at their IA Summit workshop Jess McMullin and Samantha Starmer had participants use Business Origami to map scenarios for services within a conference hotel environment.

As with all these tools, a Service Prototype can be workshopped by the design team or created in collaboration with clients, designers, and users.

Selling Service Design
Along with many service channels come many service owners. How can you convince all these stakeholders you have insights that can improve the customer experience? A couple of tips and thoughts:

Look into how service owners get incentivized when transactions happen via channels other than their own. Work those angles (and/or suggest a business process improvement that adds such incentives).
Let your metrics include success across channels – e.g. does your email newsletter also drive traffic to the retail store?
Don’t try to boil the ocean; instead think about channel pairs. For instance, make connections between the call center and the website.
Tell stories – fairy tales – about how experience could be and should be for your customers.

Put It Into Play
In short, just step up to the plate and own the passages that make up your customer’s journey. By the use of some straight-forward tools and processes (which are mostly extensions of items that should be in your user experience toolkit already), you can incorporate service design thinking and deliverables into your overall practice.

Searching for the Fundamental Flaw

2010-03-23T12:59:00.005-04:00

I daydream occasionally about a hypothetical candy box of doctorates, from which I might some day pluck a thesis to pursue. The creamy center of each potential research project is a variation on the urgent question HEY,WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON HERE!

Among many burning questions, I really want to know: Why is software for users SO difficult to design well? To put some perspective on this, I wonder...

Can consciousness in the universe be understood as an attribute of the mind of God? (Department: Philosophy)
How do we bring an observer across the liminal space between audience and stage and thus into participation – and make her go back again? (Department: Theater)
How can one help readers and writers from a western / linear literary tradition understand and tell non-linear narratives? (Department: Literature)

(Wait, wait, that last one was my graduate thesis. Well, the practical answer is: get a job as an information architect.)

Personally, I think all my questions are relevant to user experience. But again, perhaps the most pressing one is:

Why is software for users SO difficult to design well? (Department: Computer Science)

My theory is as follows. There was something twisted about how information technology came into being on the planet Earth. It didn’t have to be this way, and on other worlds it may have developed quite differently – perhaps organically instead of mechanically, perhaps initiated by artists or librarians or composers instead of by adolescent suburban math geeks. But in our reality, as a result of how this all got started, user-facing aspects of all information systems inherit foundational flaws that make it necessary for the user experience profession to exist. If that is so, then what are those flaws?

I should confess I’ve received no props for this theory so far. When I posed the question at a think-tank knowledge-share meeting, I got blank and silent stares from 200 pairs of engineering eyeballs. When I chatted with my friend Eric Reiss about this theory, he waved his hand and told me all new ideas get built wrong at first – that for instance chairs as we know them didn’t exist until something like the 15th century. But I don’t buy it – I know there’s something going on here.

And some day, I mean to find out what it is.

Metadata, Taxonomies, Vocabularies - Do What?

2010-01-08T08:25:00.002-05:00

Imagine standing in front of a wall of cubbies filled with parchment scrolls, and not being to find the Tractatus you know exists in there. Or no – make that try to find the right health insurance claim form on your corporate intranet. Your predicament is as old as civilization itself. And content classification structures, including tools like metadata and taxonomy, were invented thousands of years ago to deal with it.

But let’s say you want to build one of these taxonomy or metadata things yourself. You might first want to figure out what those terms mean – though ironically enough, there are creative differences over how they’re defined and used. Nonetheless, the following offers a high-level description of these key terms.

Taxonomies arrange content objects into relationships. The folder structure on your computer is a taxonomy of files and groupings. A good office supplies website uses a taxonomy of products so you can find and purchase supplies. The government uses taxonomies as well; for instance, the DoD Core Taxonomy is a set of categories for people, processes and technologies to support the fulfillment of Department of Defense missions. Pretty interesting stuff!

Taxonomies are also knowledge maps that enable you to see the shape of the knowledge domain. The tree structure of a site map tells you at a glance how the sections and subsections of a website relate to one another. And if you’ve ever held a copy of Roget’s thesaurus, you’ve had a taxonomy of the English language in your hand.

Metadata are detailed elements that give us a way to categorize and standardize how things are described within a taxonomy. The best-known scheme for metadata is Dublin Core, a set of 15 elements including “title,” “creator,” and “subject.” A metadata specification defines the attributes of each element (e.g. name, definition, comments, and references), but doesn’t dictate its vocabularies or the format in which the elements appear. By separating the metadata scheme from the vocabularies, you give yourself a system that is flexible and technology-independent.

Vocabularies are lists of words used to categorize content objects. A list of U.S. federal agencies, a list of attributes of wines, and a list of music genres are all examples. If a controlled vocabulary is being used, then every website or database would call each term by the same name (or a taxonomy would specify a clear and explicit relationship among the terms being used). So “Department of Veterans Affairs” or “VA” could be terms in a controlled vocabulary, while “Vets Affairs” would (probably) not be. In fact, lists of terms that don’t adhere to an explicit, agreed-upon, and managed classification structure are known as “uncontrolled vocabularies.”

Taken together, metadata, controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri, ontologies, and other content classification structures provide a system for making statements about information objects – statements that allow things to be findable, manageable, and even interoperable. Ultimately, it’s all about getting your hands on that damned form. Or finally being able to curl up with a nice, warm Tractatus.

Citizen-Centric Portals

2009-11-17T14:15:00.010-05:00

I'm working on a citizen-facing, U.S. government portal in the early stages of becoming an exemplar for e-Government services. I did a peer review to identify other sites that also: 1) Steward and present content from across organizations, 2) Require close inter-organizational coordination for user authentication to deliver secure access to applications and data, and 3) Have to pull everyone involved up by the bootstraps to get the job done.

Here's what I found.

Commitment to eGovernance
Governments throughout the world are demonstrating growing commitment to the ideal of citizen-centric governance. The classic approach to realizing this via a portal is to develop one-stop, online access to an array of government services. This gets developed in stages:

Catalog of information, with links to content hosted externally
Catalog of interactive and transactional e-services, with links to applications hosted externally
Integrated platform for citizen engagement and collaboration
Integrated delivery of all government information and services
Integration of private as well as public services

User-centered Approach
The user experience on government portals is likewise seen on a scale of maturity:

Focus on defined citizen groups
Access to information and services organized around simple topics
Elaboration of information organization around “life events” and expanded topics
Focus on universal access through multiple language versions and accessibility to individuals with disabilities
Expanded focus to include, businesses, government employees, and interstate/international visitors

Game Changers
Visionary government portal projects tend to change the culture of government itself by their very existence. For instance:

Delivering a functioning portal at any level depends on successful back-office integration of information systems and business processes through a shared or negotiated infrastructure. This involves carrying out challenging inter-agency technical integration and process re-engineering.
A robust portal catalyzes the development of new electronic services that could not otherwise be made available.
By enabling more client-oriented, accountable, and effective government, a portal can be a powerful instrument for administrative reform, anti-waste, and anti-corruption.

Case Studies
Some outstanding examples of mature government portals are described below.

USA.gov (http://www.usa.gov) is an extensive database of links to information and online services on state and federal agency websites. Driven from search results via the usasearch.gov search platform, USA.gov categorizes content for browse and search by audiences, tasks, topic, agency, and other dimensions. However, it does not integrate transactional functionality within the portal.
Direct.gov.uk (http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/index.htm), Great Britain’s government site, provides single point of entry for all key government services, information, tools, and transactions (incorporating 18 government departments and 240 local services). Transactional tools are incorporated directly within the portal. Content is organized by subject, people, and other dimensions. The intention is to ultimately federate access to all public services online.
Service Canada (http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca) is a central point of access to Government of Canada information. The initiative provides look-and-feel directives to agencies, and the portal links to information and online transactional services. Categorizations include by life events, audience, and subject. It is a well-organized catalog, though it does not integrate functionality within the portal.
Gov.sg (http://www.gov.sg), the Singapore government’s portal, provides well-organized and comprehensive access to information and e-services. It’s segmented to serve citizens/residents, the business community, and non-residents with separate, tailored portals. For instance, the MyeCitizen section offers secure logged-in and non-logged-in access to an array of e-services integrated within the portal itself.
MyEGov (http://english.www.gov.tw) is Taiwan’s national portal. It consists of a catalog of links to resources to government sites, half of which offer online services, and provides user customization options and logged-in access to additional features.
Korea.net (http://www.korea.net) earned Brown University’s top spot among e-government websites. The portal offers over 800 e-services, an abundance of information and multimedia content, and interactive features including feedback forms, user customization, feeds, and mobile access.

References
National e-Government Portals Conference, 2007, World Bank http://go.worldbank.org/KEP92PFAQ0
Transparency and Open Government, GSA 2009 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Transparency_and_Open_Government/
Global E-Government 2007, Darrell West, Brown University http://www.insidepolitics.org/egovt07int.pdf

IA Summit in Second Life

2008-04-15T06:11:00.004-04:00

We simulcast three sessions from the 2008 IA Summit into Second Life. Here's Andrew Hinton delivering his closing plenary
"Linkosophy." Also simulcast were Jared Spool's opening plenary "Journey to the Center of Design" and Jason Hobbs' "Hotel Yeoville."

This was pretty easy and inexpensive to do. The stream was hosted through NetroMedia, who were super helpful throughout. The cost for the three-day conference, including setup, was $300, and we didn't come near using the available bandwidth. (Actually we had a month of service we could have continued to use.) Additional bandwidth, in case of massive interest in your programming, is pretty inexpensive, too.

Technical details - quick summary:
1) I captured video and audio via an external camera and connection to the audio board, sent to my Macintosh laptop. (If you have built-in video and audio in your laptop, you could also point those at the speaker and capture that way.)

2) I encoded and sent the signal to NetroMedia using the free Quicktime Broadcaster utility (there are equivalent ones for PC).

3) As a landowner in Second Life I set the media stream there to the URL provided to me by NetroMedia, and I created a large screen on which the media would be displayed.

Post a comment or contact me via LinkedIn if you want to know more details. Other snapshots from the experiment are on Flickr. At some point this summer I'll post video excerpts from the sessions as well.

Wayfinding in Second Life - An IA Puzzle

2007-05-21T20:26:00.001-04:00

The founders of the Nonprofit Commons sim in Second Life asked me for input on how to improve navigation for visitors to this 3D environment. The sim houses the virtual offices of more than 25 nonprofits, including CARE, Alzheimer Society of Ontario, AngelAID, Transgender Resource Center, Missouri Humanities Council, Techsoup, and the IA Institute.

What fun! The discussion is taking place on the NPSL wiki. Following an IA approach to a SL buildout, I suggested we determine the key scenarios, articulate factors that affect wayfinding, and then brainstorm possible solutions.

For instance, a first-time visitor might arrive at a main teleport site looking for a particular office; a return visitor might come just to explore; or someone could be at one office and want to get to another one.

Factors affecting wayfinding include signs that rez slowly and that visitors don't even recognize as signs; low awnings that obscure the storefronts from a flying position; and an orderly grid of buildings in which all places look very much alike.

Possible approaches include big navigational gestures that will register to new visitors even in a slow-rezzing environment (fortress-of-solitude arrows? a compass rose?); some way to distinguish the quadrants of the sim in a broad fashion (particles of color? memorable monuments?); and providing detail where called for (business names only on the main signpost, but logos on corner signposts?).

Other brainstorms include a single teleport hub to channel visitors through a designed wayfinding experience; a Welcome Center; street names; wearable HUD (heads up display); robot guides; and more.

Visit the discussion and please offer your own suggestions.

IA in Second Life - Redux

2007-05-13T08:00:00.000-04:00

The remixed Information Architecture in Second Life: Summit Redux slidedeck was presented this weekend to DCIA, the Washington, DC information architecture crowd. The deck summarizes observations of panelists Josh Knauer, Andrew Hinton, Lori Bell, Beth Kanter, and Sarah Dilling on 1) opportunities for information architecture work in Web 3D and 2) how IAs can use Second Life as a platform for collaboration and education.

Technical: Web 3D and Telepresencing

2007-04-25T07:43:00.000-04:00

Shared 3D virtual environments like Second Life can be used for group meetings. I know of three basic approaches. Each requires significantly more infrastructure than the last.

The simplest approach is just to meet in Second Life. This enables you to talk, share slides, and do things together.

The next most complicated approach is to augment a real life meeting with some Second Life participation using Skype as a streaming server. This can be done using items found around the home, but provides an awkward connection.

A true mixed reality event links all locations together fairly well. It requires more equipment and more setup, but allows participants to see, hear, and speak to one another from either real life or Second Life.

An argument for using Web 3D for telepresencing, and some tips on how to do it, are in my slidedeck Using Gaming Platforms for Telepresencing.

Technical: Real Life/Second Life Event

2007-04-09T10:20:00.002-04:00

I moderated a panel discussion on Information Architecture in Second Life at the IA Summit in March. It was a joint Real Life/Second Life event, and it worked rather well.

The technical objective was to enable conference attendees on the Real Life (RL) side to hear and see panelists on the Second Life (SL) side, and for panelists on both sides to at least hear each other and the audience. In other words, we needed the minimum conditions for panelists and audience to talk with each other, regardless of their physical location.

We accomplished this via a Skype conference call and a Second Life connection through a laptop in the room. The audio was amplified from the RL laptop through the room's sound system; the Second Life connection was shared with the room through a video feed from the RL laptop to the projection screen; and audio from the room to the remote participants was managed via the mic in the RL laptop. Also, the remote panelists and the panelist running the RL laptop all logged into Second Life and met at Info Architecture island. During the discussion a number of members of the audience logged into Second Life as well and joined the others at Info Architecture isle.

During a trial run we'd also managed a direct visual hookup between RL and remote panelists through Skype via the webcams in the participants' laptops. This caused a lot of lag, while affording remote panelists only a narrow view of the first few rows of seats, so we omitted this channel during the event.

This low-tech solution required no streaming audio or video server, which is good. However it was dependent upon the ad-hoc audio from the room being good enough for remote panelists to hear... which fortunately it was. And because there was no video feed from the RL room, remote panelists were blind to what was going on in the room. This setup was centered on the physical location of the conference, and would not enable people to participate as members of the audience from Second Life only.

Participating from Second Life were Beth Kavka (Beth Kanter) and Lori Bell (Lorelei Junot). Present on the Real Life side were Josh Knauer (Hayduke Ebisu, who also managed the technical arrangements and ran RL laptop), Andrew Hinton (Banjo Quonset), Sarah Dilling (Sally Linden), and myself, Stacy Surla (Stacy Narayan).

For a look at what we actually discussed, read Beth Kavka's blog entry about the session, or see the Information Architecture in Second Life (Redux) slideshow.

IA Exercise: Catalogs

2007-03-12T07:12:00.001-04:00

Browsing for things can be challenging in Second Life. Here are few examples of "catalogs" of various kinds.

These catalogs take the form of: a pile of stuff, a building as a container for the items of interest, books on shelves, books on a table display, a rolling index, and a wall display.

IA Exercise
Some SL catalogs take advantage of the unique 3-D nature of the environment. Some struggle with it. Some forms are useful for certain kinds of browsing. Others are frustrating -- or are frustrating at certain times. What are some great solutions to the 3-D catalog conundrum?

An IA Approach to a Second Life Buildout

2007-02-21T20:44:00.000-05:00

The IA Institute is preparing to build a SL presence. The team is defining requirements. We're also simply trying to get a handle on the enormous job of representing good IA practice while communicating the mission, values, and activities of the Institute in a Web 3-D environment.

I've suggested starting with scenarios, figuring out key elements of the virtual environment, conducting research, then building information structures that support the scenarios. But what approach would YOU take?

Scenarios
Who are the audiences? What are the 5 or 8 things people intend to do on Info Architecture island? For instance:
* Wanting to locate and visit to find out what’s on the island
* Wanting to attend a specific event
* Wanting to acquire a tour HUD
* Wanting to organize a meeting on the island
* Wanting training in how to make buildings
* Wanting to discover points of interest elsewhere in SL

Key Elements
Identify the key elements in the virtual environment that support or hinder people accomplishing their intentions. For instance:
* Finding things (geolocations, info repositories, events, objects...)
* Creating things (info repositories, events, buildings, applications...)
* Interacting with people (meet, hear presentations...)

Research
What research is needed before scenarios and key elements can be finalized? For instance:
* Participant observation
* Surveys of other islands’ solutions
* In-world focus groups or other interviews
* Literature review

Buildout
Plan and begin buldout of information structures that support the scenarios. For instance:
* Teleport hubs for the island with appropriate signage
* Outdoor meeting place with screens for presentations
* Sandbox for building practice and tutorials
* Kiosks or other structures for delivering objects
* Catalog solutions for providing access to information repositories
* Easy-to-use instructions on “how to hold an event”
* Library of relevant case studies—e.g. “IA Challenges in Second Life”
* Think of how to support the SL build with non-SL channels

IA Exercise
Does the focus on communication and information-seeking cover enough of the territory? Are the scenarios good ones? Are the key elements sufficient? What research is really needed? What information structures are sufficient?

IA Exercise: Finding An Event Location at the Second Life Library

2007-02-18T20:57:00.000-05:00

There are a number of in-world ways to find locations and events in Second Life. But let's say I'm a regular person. I've heard about an presentation scheduled at the Second Life Library on Info Island, and I want to find the outdoor amphitheatre.

The first thing I'd do is search for the library website and look for coordinates there. I happen to know that a "Slurl" will give me a jumppoint from the web to a location in Second Life. From the Info Island website, however, I have some difficulty finding the Slurl. But finally I do manage to get it. I find myself at the telehub.

Well, the signage and the view from the telehub has changed quite a bit since the last time I was here, many months ago. But hey, there's a reference librarian here. This is lucky -- she can just tell me where the event is being held.

However, let's imagine there is no-one at the reference desk. The signage at the telehub may tell me where the event is, but I'm having trouble interpreting all the posters. One thing I'd try is to just fly around and look for something that looks like an outdoor amphitheater.

Ah, here's one. I think I've been here before. This looks like an amphi- theater to me. But on closer inspection I see I'm on Cyberary City. I'll aim for Info Island and scan for the amphitheater. Let me check out the map -- which I can do by pulling up the map feature. This tells me I'm heading towards Info Island, so I just keep flying until I get there.

And just beyond a great big, brand new building is the Info Island amphitheater. Looks just like the other amphitheater. What a good idea! And beyond that, the telehub again.

IA Exercise
Where does the user experience start? In Second Life at the telehub? In Second Life's search feature, or at the map feature? Or before Second Life, at the website?

What should signage look like? What about live help? Should structures (like amphitheaters) resemble their functions? Can structures look really interesting and still work?

IA Exercise: Congress in SL

2007-01-09T13:48:00.000-05:00

Here's the U.S. Capitol in Second Life -- we can tell by the ghostly dome that floats above the House / Senate floor.

After flying over the Capitol grounds I come across a park surrounded by pavillions. Landing in front of one, I see it represents the National Security agenda for the 110th Congress.

It looks like I can find out the Democratic Plan by clicking the lectern. Fascinating!

But what about other parts of the agenda? I suppose they must live in other Pavillions.

Hmm, they're really far away.

Do I really need to walk across the park in order to find out what the Democrats are planning to accomplish? There must be a better way!

IA Exercise
The metaphor is too literal for the information-rich potential of this space. But this is a beautiful park, so I don't want to see billboards. I want to understand my information options at a glance, and for it to be easy to delve deeper. As an exercise in IA for 3D spaces, first steps would include inventorying the main functions, information types, and user scenarios for this space.