Things what I writ

I sometimes write nonsense about things to try and sound clever

the structure of everything

drops 1
drops 1 by Tim Caynes


we seek to make sense. we want to understand the structure of everything.

to deconstruct is to reconstruct. one creates the now in the reinvention of the was. so we intentionally destabilise and disrupt to explore the meaning of reality and question the order of the universe. because without question, we can’t and shouldn’t believe the reality we inhabit and experience. we’re driven, hopelessly and unapologetically to invent our own realities in order to give structure and meaning to the place we find ourselves, in terms we can own, reference and communicate. for within those realities, we define the context within which things exist. we determine viability of domains, entities, objects. we describe relationships, dependencies and maps. we define rules, hierarchies and constructs. we decide what makes sense, because we create the meaning through structures that we can confidently articulate. we become the arbiters of sense-making. and we determine outcomes through the definition of experiences. because ultimately, we’re deciding for others how the universe is arranged to provide the context within which others experience an experience. and in the decisions we make about the structures we define to make sense and provide meaning we pretend that we transcend the personal politic, but we can’t help but hope to reflect the beauty and artistry of everything in the universe as we know it, and create structure as a manifestation of all that we aspire to, to know what it is to be who we are.

and maybe a site map.

I’m an information architect. I choose to be that because of all the things I need to make sense of. my need is part visionary, part vocational. but mostly it’s because I have to make sense of things in relation to other things and describe meaning to others. I need to express what I mean in order to communicate what I think I need to do. I inhabit the dark, lonely places between discovery and definition. between understanding and articulating. between insight and design. I dig my nails into my palms, close my eyes and try not to repeat history. try to find something new.

I start with a blank canvas and a whole universe of information. which is, in reality, a piece of A4, a pentel r50 and a state of mind. paper and pen are my constraints in the physical world. context is my constraint in the metaphysical world. budgets are my constraint in the business world. and as these worlds collide I scratch meaning onto the whiteness of the page in two dimensions. boxes and arrows. unintelligible labels. epiphanies. entire back catalogues of things. enter shikari lyrics. dots. the universe. the most basic rendition of meaning that can be distilled from the constellations of all experiences that guide me. an exploration of space and time, the history of all existences, the subconscious self, why my pen has stopped working, investment products, life. but all I’m doing is reconstructing all that has been deconstructed. sometimes it’s useless. sometimes it’s Ulysses. beautiful, unique and impossible to deconstruct again. it only makes sense when experienced. but the relentless, maniacal pursuit of structure is, in of itself, the definition of the universe within with meaning can be derived by others.

consideration of the structure of everything could be described as the search for a framework for the the human condition. it could also be defined as making sense of every mess. it’s often just information dogmatecture. a way to establish credentials for thought leadership and a reason to use praxis and periphery in conference submissions. but it’s innate. when we consider the parts of information architecture we can’t help but consider the sums of the parts of information architecture. and because the universe is a perplexing subconscious constant, it influences every decision we make about how to describe who we are and how we are. we use that which is infinitely unstructured to frame our conversation about that which is uniquely structured.

which is why the structure of everything drifts further away from us as the boundaries of the information space expand. it’s information architecture redshift.

on pathways

sometimes I get all wistful about forest paths and the unloved tracks of forgotten intent. often that’s because I’m wondering where my dog is. equally often it’s because I wonder where my god is. which is to mean that I can’t begin to describe the realisation of paths less travelled whether I consider them in terms of dog or god. there’s no difference. all there is is the relic of some lost spark of curiosity manifest in the loose dirt and leaves of time.

for clarity, I don’t believe in a god. sometimes I don’t believe in my dog. but I do believe that these manifestations of chaotic traversals that scar this earth have more to do with synchronicity than we might imagine. those pathways in the forest are both the magic and the mundane. the structured and the intangible. the mirror and the well. the loved. the unloved. but above all, inextricable and beautiful. for every half-trodden pathway, there exists a sense of the terrible and wonderful history of the moments that make that path place. place where you, I, my dog, and an epoch of experiences come together in the half-light and a half-glance as we pass through time and wonder; what if?

whereupon someone’s jack russell jumps at the leg of time itself and the moment is lost in an apology and a god biscuit. but, just before that, as time stands still at the branch of life, where instinct begets choice and all history collides, we’re faced with the overwhelming sense that not taking that path might be to deny ourselves reward. reward for curiosity. reward for courage. reward for conviction. if we don’t take that path now, we’re just another part of someone’s else’s tomorrow. the tomorrow where they, their dog, and an epoch of experiences come together in the half-light and a half-glance as they pass through time and wonder; what if?

but the truth about these paths is that you can’t find these paths if you look for these paths. for they exist only in the blind spots of consciousness. you can only see them if you look away. and then only if you’re in the right place. at the right time. and only if the path is looking for you. and there’s a raven on an oak tree reciting the autobiography of edgar allen poe. or something. the point is, as we move through time and space on the bark and boards of our earthly existence, our sense of place is as much to do with the predictability of the path as it with the beauty of the unknown. and seizing the unknown may be our only chance to be lost to the forest forever.

there’s no parallel with findability or discoverability here, much as I’d like to bring it to a conclusion that has something vaguely to do with signposting and waymarking and user experience, it’s just something that’s occurred to me and I wrote some words about. maybe I could draw a parallel to information architecture or something. maybe not.

listening post: genesis – supper’s ready

the glorious IA summit

it feels like it’s been a lifetime since I returned from Baltimore after the glorious IA summit at the beginning of April. it’s the event that leaves you feeling like that when its over, like the end of a long hot summer where you gambolled through the shimmering and abundant fields of learning, dancing like a teenager with your new best friends dipping your toes in the stream of enlightenment and talking like you don’t know the words for the things you have to say, watching the proud and beautiful stags of truth barking atop the mountain as if to say THERE IS NO TRUTH, JUST THE ONTOLOGY OF TRUTHS, COME HEAR ME, FOR I AM THE STAG OF BEAUTY AND I SPEAK OF THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO MAKE AND BY THE WAY SINCE I’M A PHYSICAL MANIFESTATION OF ALL YOUR ENDEAVOURS I REALLY AM THE MISSING LINK BETWEEN THE COGNITIVE AND SPATIAL DEFINITION OF CONTEXT THAT DEFINES IT ALL. HURRAH!

or something like that. to be clear, there is a reason I allocate 100% of my available budget to attend this one event each year. it’s because I get a year’s worth of worth from it. I mean, I go to quite a few smaller events throughout the year and meet splendid and lovely people and see inspiring and challenging speakers and learn so much about things that are totally relevant to me. but the IA summit is quite different. without wishing to get weirdly evangelical and creepy about it (and not the dan willis kind of creepy), I believe it’s an event that changes lives. overstating it? maybe. but I know that attending for the last few years has changed me for the better. and I’ve spoken to many people who have attended, often for the first time, who are so touched and moved and surprised and enlivened by their attendance that they can’t quite express what it is that it’s done to them. I’m not about to qualify what ‘better’ means, because that’s not the point. I don’t do definitions. but what better means to me is what counts. the change for the better is what I recognise in myself and how I attribute that change to my attendance at the IA summit is up to me. nobody can alter that.

in the grand scheme of things, with so much going in the world, and so many demands and so little time and so much to do and so much to say and so many responsibilities and so on and so on it is perhaps easy to say fuck’s sake it’s only a conference for people who get weirdly obsessed about the structure of things and why are you getting so worked up about it there’s more important things to worry about but whatever. let me bark this at you. THIS EVENT IS AN OASIS OF AWESOME. IT CHANGES LIVES. I AM THE STAG OF TRUTH SO HEAR ME ROAR.

thank you to the beautiful people, old and new, that make the change happen. I love you. if anyone would like to tell me to calm down, don’t bother.

Yes I do that too

A continuing and repeated conversation at the IA summit in Baltimore this week is about knowing how to say what you think you can say about the things you’d like to say.

That can be having a bazillion drafts of blog posts that you think nobody is ever going to want to read, or wondering whether anyone in their right mind would sit through 45 minutes of you telling them how you actually have no idea what you’re talking about but that’s alright because you’re not about to change the world with your reimagineeration of practice fundamentals you just did a thing recently that included some of the stuff that everybody here also seems to be doing but you weren’t sure whether you were doing the right IA thing and actually you weren’t even sure it was IA at all but, like, it was just a good story about how I did a thing which you think is a bit like how other people do a thing and perhaps is would be interesting to other people to see how I did it you know like let’s understand how we actually do what we do with the things we know and see if we might learn something or validate an approach or find a different way to do it rather that necessarily trying to understand how calling something a fish means I’ve subconsciously induced a cognitive brain spasm which can be expressed as an inducement to a systemic failure in brain pattern structure mapping that is an unavoidable and not entirely unexpected relation of disentropy that exposes your failing as a labelling person to understand the role of that artefact in the ontology of the universe of stuffz.

We want to hear and read and see and discuss that stuff. We just want you to tell a story about what you’ve been doing. It’s pretty simple. I mean, we like the big crazy things, but there’s nothing like a good story, well told, about a personal experience, that helps us say YES I DO THAT TOO.

The trouble with context

At the Information Architecture Summit in Baltimore, I’ve just had the pleasure of a full day with Karen McGrane, considering content strategies for mobile which of course isn’t content strategies for mobile at all but content strategies for content which might somehow be consumed by 76% of us using some kind of hand-held device or other as the primary device that we use to consume that stuff because that’s our preference notwithstanding the fact that indeed for some 40% or other of the 76% or other that preference is actually the only option because using a smartphone to access the internet is the only way to do it and don’t forget that an ever-growing percentage or other of the new natives in the 18-24 age range just actually don’t see why you’d want to access the internet on anything other than your smartphone because, like, using a proper computer is what your dad does in the corner of the home office and I should know because that dad is me.

Which is to say, don’t get led astray by implied contexts of physical devices when considering the user needs and behaviours in relation to the structure and organisation of the content they may consume. There is no specific mobile use case that defines a content strategy when considering your options for creating a compelling user experience. There is only content. And the structure of that content. And the user experience of interacting with that content is what defines the context of use. It is a misappropriation of the term to hypothesise scenarios based on context, since context can only ever be undefined up to the point at which the manifestation of the moment of interaction occurs.

We can, of course, be pragmatic and facilitate a conversation about context by making some assumptions about likely renditions of scenes where actors follow a script to bring to life some awkwardly cinematic versions of potentially reasonably representative portrayals of the personification of a user need. These are the ‘what if’ propositions that at least enable us to align our thought gazelles behind a weirdly myopic vision of a real life event. It enables us to say ‘that might happen. what might we consider based on the knowledge acquired from that?’ And actually, we can write pretty good scripts. And we can develop pretty good personas.

But we’re just making it up. And we bring to that imagination every subtle or not so subtle nuance of our own limited experiences and assumptions to the point where we can imagine a whole sundance festival of what ifs but if the only person in the audience for the special screening of ‘a series of what ifs in the style of a seemingly disconnected robert altman style parable that ultimately defines the human experiences but coincidentally demonstrates the likely context of use for you the user’ just sits there slowly shaking their head muttering something like ‘they don’t understand. they don’t understand’ then we’re wasting our time.

I’m bored of this UX event

If this is you, get out of the way. I’m off to the IA Summit next week and it’s the highlight of my year. Honestly. If you want to bring your event-weary commentary along with you and bemoan the fact that it wasn’t like it was 10 years ago then if you don’t mind having that conversation with yourself that would be lovely. I don’t know if I mentioned, but it’s the highlight of my year. Some people never get to go to events at all.
 
Really, I’ve nothing wrong with some kind of constructive criticism of events and conferences, and that has appropriate channels, to make sure it gets back to the organisers. You know, the event organisers. That small army of people who took upon themselves 11 months ago to make the event in 11 months the most awesome event in eleven month’s time it can possibly be notwithstanding the fact that actually no we’re not getting paid to put this thing together and we possibly didn’t realise 11 months ago what a monumental task we agreed to be a part of and now it’s upon us we could literally weep with the joy and relief of letting loose the staggering waif of the fawny event calf as it teeters into the forest of discovery like some conference Bambi, slipping and sliding on the ice of enlightenment, growing, living, flourishing and maturing into that majestic stag of experience, standing proudly atop mount adversity, barking, or whatever stags do, I AM THE EVENT STAG, HEAR ME BARK, OR WHATEVER IT IS I DO. What you probably don’t want to hear at that point is “Yeah, that event stag isn’t as good as last year’s event stag. It’s a bit shit. I’m going #sightseeing. Who’s in?”.
 
If you really are having a bad experience at your event, conference, meetup, bootcamp, jam, summit, unevent, unconference, unmeetup, unbootcamp, unjam, unsummit, (unjam is a word? Who knew?), then I’m sorry about that. Not all events are as advertised. Not all events run smoothly. Not all events meet expectations. But it might be just you. Well, maybe you and a couple of others. Alright, maybe it’s really bad. But if you’re quietly snarking at the back, that’s fine, I can deal with that. I mean, it’s annoying and once I’ve noticed you doing that I can’t unnotice you doing that and you’ve already planted a seed of distraction that will grow like a triffid in my subconscious, like some venomous metaphor for something really distracting and vegetative. However, in a parallel universe-made-the-opposite-of-parallel, it’s now pretty much alright to do that snarking out loud. And when I say out loud, I obviously don’t actually mean out loud. I mean on the #backchannel, which isn’t a backchannel at all, but a Norwegian bridge that small children skip lightly across to get from #whatisthis?land to #Ilovethis!land with faces that radiate with pure delight, but being a Norwegian bridge, thereunder treads a recalcitrant troll, lobbing poo bags at minors squawking BLAH BLAH BLAH I’M BETTER THAN THIS. Even worse, some trolls have got so good at lobbing their poo bags of derision that they can make them stick when they’re not even at the event.
 
You take the joy out of it. Stop it. 
 

How I got found as a user experience designer

User experience design is a proper job. At least, user experience designer is a proper job title. It’s a job title I’ve given to myself for years and it’s worked for me to describe to others what I do, without necessarily having to describe to others what I do.

Three little words

More importantly, ‘user experience designer’ works as a job title when you want to be found. When I was hawking my freelance self around a couple of years ago, I made a decision on how I wanted to be discovered, and how easy I might facilitate that discovery. That decision was to bet the farm on 3 words – user, experience and designer – hopefully in that order. How I used those 3 words, and where I used them, was an important part of the strategy, but it is the 3 little words themselves that were to describe me to others.

Optimising for search

From the outset, I intended to capitalise on the visibility of those 3 little words and how they might somehow be associated with my own name. I thought at least having my name appear on the chunk of content returned by a search query would be a start. I like to think that the eye-tracking results would show a strong relationship between the user experience designer title and a real name in reasonably close proximity such that it fired some neural connection in the brain of the user that suggests I might be actually the embodiment of a user experience designer and therefore justifiably and majestically hoisted to the top of a mental list that someone is keeping.

There were a number of places I wanted that to happen:

  • My personal sites
  • CV/resume hosting sites
  • Recruitment sites
  • Job sites
  • Related sites (job title on flickr, linkedin, facebook)


Some of the searches I imagined were public searches, via google, bing, altavista, lycos, grep –r ‘user experience designer’ /theinternet, or something, for which I optimised on page titles, prominent usage in content blocks, page data, and so on. No black arts there. Others were more specialised, internal searches, such as cv/resume scans on recruitment databases, or paid-for searches on job sites. In these cases, I made assumptions about the data that was being interrogated, often based on the forms that collected the data, and tried to optimise based on that. For instance, I knew that no real person would actually read my uploaded resume until it passed at least round one of the keyword scanrobot, so if you’re not being specific about your job title, job categories and experience, then you stand less chance of rising to the surface, like Keanu Reeves does, when he’s dropped out of that slimepod into the machinespittle and chooses to breathe. I mean, a bit like that.

It takes a little patience to consistently optimise across multiple sites, with different search methods and black-box operational models, but the most important thing, as far as I was concerned, was to retain the focus on those 3 little words.

Maximising metadata

On its own, however, optimising for search using ‘user experience designer’ alone, was not enough. It got me closer to being discovered and considered, but I also needed something more unique that I could associate with the job title, that would filter the outputs to make them more about me.

Knowing that being found by virtue of someone looking at my own web site would be nice, but unlikely, I targeted those other sites that held my data, such as cv/resume sites and recruitment sites and picked a set of 3 attributes that I would bet my other farm on. Since these sites are largely form-based in their data-collection, and have reasonable overlap in their data sets, it is easy to pick the attributes you want to focus on and map that to the metadata they support.

The 3 attributes I picked were:

  • Location
  • Type (Freelance/Permanent)
  • Rate


It’s here that I had a special case, which was really the determining factor in being found. If I were wanting to stand out from a crowd of user experience designers, who had all optimised for search, and, for example, all lived in London, I’d be faced with a bit of a challenge. A user experience designer in London is like a bicycle in Beijing, right? They’re all over the place. Saying you’re in London doesn’t make you stand out at all.

Location, location, location, location

But what about if you’re in, say, Norwich? I mean, a user experience designer in Norwich is like a, well, I can’t think a good analogy for there not being many of them, suffice to say, there wasn’t. Which was to my advantage. Type and rate were pretty simple to define, more a case of setting a level of expectation and screening out derisory and pointless offers. Location, however, was my unique selling point. Except it wasn’t a selling point at all. When I moved out to Norwich about 8 years ago, with the support of a previous employer, I knew I’d put myself out on a limb. What I did (user experience design), just wasn’t done in Norwich, so, should I no longer work for that employer, I would have been pretty stuck. One day, I was no longer working for that employer, which is where this story begins.

Nevertheless, Norwich was where I was, Norwich was where I wanted to stay, and so Norwich was the location I added to my data set. And I stuck to it. Which is the point – pick your data, optimise, and stick to it, because if that’s what really defines you, that’s how you’ll want people to find you.

Results

What I’d really narrowed myself down to was:

Keywords:

  • User
  • Experience
  • Designer

Attributes:

  • Location:Norwich
  • Type:Freelance or Permament
  • Rate:£ A number larger than the last number I thought of


What I got out of it was emails and calls from recruiters and robots that were slightly biased in favour of user experience design, and more or less centred on ‘the south east’ (including London), but, since I also included a number of other attributes as part of any upload, application or registration process, I also got a large number of administrator, programmer, database, design and other jobs as well. I got lots. Which was nice, but things weren’t really narrowed down to the degree that I had hoped for. Still, I hadn’t expected to get a perfect match, since, well, there wasn’t one.

What I had bet both my farms on was that one day, there would be a job, and its title would be User Experience Designer, and its location would be Norwich. When that job came up, if anybody was looking for a candidate, I would be the top of their search list. And that search list would have one name on it. And that name would be mine.

I had to wait a while. I had to do freelance work in London for a while. I had to travel 3 hours, each way, every day, for a while. But one day I got a call from a recruiter. I got lots of calls from recruiters, but this one sounded interesting. They had a user experience designer role. Duh. It was in Norwich. I’m listening. It’s permanent. It meets my criteria. Am I interested?

Have a plan

That call was for the job I’m currently in at Foolproof in Norwich. This job is the only job I want to do in Norwich. It’s a perfect job. And, because I was so busy travelling and sleeping and working, I hadn’t even noticed when they’d put the job posting out. I’d pretty much resigned myself to a London commute, and was actually considering an offer of a permanent user experience role based in Hammersmith. Which would have killed me.

But my bet paid off. When the recruiter searched for ‘user experience designer norwich’, I was indeed top of the list. There are others in the list now, as indeed there are other jobs that have appeared in the last year, but when I really needed it most, my plan was good. Have a plan, people, and stick to it.

Building theme-based information architectures

There is often a temptation to dive into information architecture design based solely on acquired knowledge and a well-articulated business objective. It’s quite possible to produce meaningful taxonomies and content structures in this way, especially for discrete, closely scoped projects. However, some of the most effective structures evolve when iterative analysis of research findings and discussion outputs start to surface emerging themes.

I recently worked on the development of a new sales and investments channel for one of our financial services clients. A sales and investments channel in of itself is not a particularly unusual proposition and there is a depth of experience within the team that might predict some of the outcomes. We might even consider sketching out the concepts in our heads just to start the conversation, since the business objective is reasonably clear. In doing that, we might even get it done quicker than anybody planned, or budgeted for. I might even get home in time for tea.

How we really maximise the potential of the design phase is if we take the insights from a well-executed discovery phase, invest meaningful time to digest and analyse the messages we’re getting from customers, and we start to build up a picture of an ideal customer journey. I’m not talking here about spending a day in a dark room with a stationary cupboard’s worth of post-it notes and walking away with a full site map. All we should really be aiming for at the end of an initial design session is identifying those emerging themes and understanding how accurately they reflect the voice of the customer. Themes are really just a logical clustering of questions, statements and pain-points related to a customer’s interaction. Since they’re deliberately vague at the early stages of design, they’re not distinct categorisations with well specified hard attributes, but more of an expression of the customer needs and desires. If that doesn’t sound pompous enough, I’d also suggest that they often describe the soft attributes of the customer’s emotional engagement with the site, for example, ‘I’m worried about the future’, or ‘I need help on this’. Identifying these themes early provides a clear customer-centric reference when iterating into task-based journeys and navigation models.

Themes are also a great way to solicit empathetic feedback. It’s more meaningful to describe a potential customer journey to a client, for example, if they can clearly empathise with the customer. Using needs-based descriptions with more open language, through themes, it can be much easier to evaluate a customer journey than by simply referencing a label on a navigation entry point. Consider the difference between ‘Protecting my future’ as a theme and ‘Savings’ as a label. While one might not map directly to the other, there is still a much clearer expression of the customer need through a theme-based approach, which sets the context for discussion and iteration.

There are number of approaches to how we take discovery outputs and begin to build out information architectures that place the customer at the heart of the discussion. Using a theme-based approach is one of those that I rather like and it has proved successful in articulating the voice of the customer, particularly when talking with clients. While this has been a brief outline of the approach and some of the benefits, feel free to contact us to find out more.

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