As for our getting started, the timing was right; “information architecture” was just entering into its heyday here in San Francisco, and incorporating Carbon IQ was the natural thing to do, considering the growing demand. I was consulting with Circumstance (which became Rare Medium later on) back then, and another Circumstance consultant, Kevin Farnham, was starting up Method at the same time. We chatted about our similar goals: “How can you not start a studio at a time like this,” he asked, jokingly. That’s exactly how it felt. There was enough work to go around, fed mainly by larger interactive firms, and we had the luxury of working with companies who “understood” what we do. Boy, have times changed. (Smiles ruefully)

By the way when you talk about client education, you have to realize it works both ways. We also spend a lot of time learning from our clients. We can educate clients about their customers, but they educate us about their business. I think a lot of user-centered designers tend to start screaming about the user to the point they forget that most clients are not charitable intuitions—they are there to make a profit. Heck, a few businesses forgot that too… (Grins)

At about the same time, I did some freelance work for the university’s libraries porting their command line database onto the Web for the first time. This, I suppose, was my first encounter with designing a dynamic website…Okay, getting to the point, I came to San Francisco to teach because I was fairly sure that’s what I wanted to do. Instead I ended up finding a full-time job at a Phoenix Pop, which, at the time, was only two people. That was ’96. And when I left in 2000 I had grown to over 100 people and million-dollar projects. I guess those were the “glory days.”

The first was the exercise we organized to define and compare user types between Atom Films and Shockwave. We were able to derive a common understanding of how the user groups were similar and, more importantly, different. This brand model and the findings from the user research eventually drove our decision to keep the two brands separate instead of merging them.

We were also able to teach this client how to utilize a user-centered design process for future development. We made sure our primary contact was present during our test sessions and that he would be able to take over after we’re gone. It sounds funny, but we’re always working ourselves out of a job by training our clients to take the reins when we leave.

A good book for any flash designers is the very easy read, “the Design of Everyday Things.” Don Norman introduces this concept called “affordances” which is basically the idea that things are pushable should look pushable, things that look pullable should look pullable. A fork looks like it can be used for stabbing or scooping: it has good affordances. If you make your links look clickable, your scrollbars look like they can be scrolled, your dropdowns look like they will drop down your site will probably be usable. Although – as Noel recommends – you should still test your assumptions with real users. Humans are surprising creatures!

Let’s say we have a local magazine that wants a new website. Well we might say: okay let’s do a card-sort to understand how your users group content, and we’ll do a taxonomy so your directories jibe with your search, and finish with user-testing to make sure we got it right. Another client walks through the door about to build an online calendaring system. Well, let’s say we do a contextual inquiry: we watch users at work to find out how they use their current calendars, palms and daytimes and understand what their needs are. Next maybe we do a few scenarios to discover what a perfect product would do. Then we make some user-flows so engineering knows what happens at decision branches. Finally we might do a series of prototype testing: making paper versions of the product to test with users, before the engineers spend a bunch of nights staying up to four a.m. coding the wrong thing.

This toolbox gives us a lot of flexibility: let’s say the calendaring client comes to us and says “budget and timeline’s been cut in half” We can say, “okay we do a best-practices and prototyping, and throw out the contextual inquiry.”

It’s all about understanding the nature of the product and the business’s needs. We make custom solutions to create better products.

I don’t necessarily think that this pattern is all that specific to the past 18 months. I do, however, think that the fear is increasing, and 9 times out of 10 fear is what leads to poor decision-making.

In response, we’ve had to teach these clients user-centered design practices so that they both learn from this experience and have the tools to correct themselves. As a company, we have had to be much more careful when working with reactive clients. We illustrate best practices for actively dealing with changes or risks during a project so that we don’t get sucked in as well.

Information Architecture is another story. Most general web design books skimp on the important planning stage, and there is still only one great book on the art of IA: the polar bear. I’m talking to some folks about writing a book on it, but I have to ask myself if I want to lose a year of my life. Writing a book is hard! Heck, this interview is hard! (laughs)

1. Involve designers in the beginning of the project. They may not be the ones defining the strategy, but if they’re going to have a role in building the brand (and who doesn’t), which they will, then they should be involved in the dream stage just as the lead strategist and key stakeholders would be. If they’re going to visually reflect the essence of the company, then bring them in early on the conversation.
2. If you’re going to test your product iteratively (certainly there are ways to do this quickly and cheaply), let the designers help build the prototype — and make sure they see the actual testing that takes place.
3. If your design team uses wireframes, sitemaps, etc., let the visual designer play a role in that, so that no one feels their creativity has been squashed. Often designers seen a near-fully designed schematic and (rightfully so) feel that their job has been taken away from them by the information architect who designed it. That’s not useful — working together, the IA and the designer can develop a visual language and set boundaries that works for everyone and utilizes the team’s best collective efforts.

In any case, Noel is dead-on about involving designers in the IA process, and vice-versa. IA’s fear their work will be ruined in design, designers often feel their work has already been done for them. If an IA asks the designer’s advice frequently throughout the architecture process, the designer will often return the favor during design and a better product will result. I had the great pleasure of doing this when I worked with Mike Monteiro of biggerhand, and I think I did some of my best work collaborating with him—he made me work harder and he made my architecture much smarter.

Other than that, I’d skim the tertiary and look at other disciplines and see how they approach similar problems — we didn’t invent these approaches, just refined them. Starting points:

Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design by Paul Mijksenaar

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman

Any of the three books by Edward Tufte (or visit edwardtufte.com)

Why We By, or the Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud.

Traditionally, these are concepts that primarily biologists and library scientists concerned themselves with. With the emergence the Web, the needs to classify and retrieve information is ever expanding and so is the need to understand methods to design and leverage these taxonomies in order to create rich experiences.

Taxonomies can have explicit structure like the aisles in a store or sections of a newspaper, or implicit structures such as recommendation engines, also known as collaborative filtering. It’s when these structures are interwoven that they are able to reach their full potential and provide the most benefit to the end user. Do you wonder how Amazon is able to guess the kind of things you might like? It’s because they are getting a lot of use out of their taxonomies – explicit and implicit.

But seriously, I think that a common misconception is that an information architect is the person who just “makes those maps and stuff.” In reality, we are in often charge of providing clarity to the marketing message or testing the business model or even reconciling the product vision with the product requirements. We are often the voice of reason in a sea of visionaries and naysayers. Am I over-glamorizing it? Well, maybe.

Often information architects are misused and I feel that it breeds resentment as a result. “Don’t step on my toes! I’m the designer…I know where that button should go!” Absolutely right; less task-heavy products like mar-comm or promotional websites don’t necessarily need someone called “information architect” or “experience designer” because there’s generally less complexity. If information architects are used for the right reasons and project roles are defined clearly they can be invaluable to a project team.

1. Who are your users? You probably have three key sets of users: web designers, general web developers and curious onlookers.
2. What do they want from your site: They want to learn more about design online.
3. What do you want them to do: view as many pages as possible.

So let’s look at your site: While the front page engages and allures, once a user has chosen an article, and has read it they haven’t got anywhere to go. They want to read more, you want them to read more….scroll down to the end of Derek’s interview. You’ve just finished reading this interesting article about community, and you are hungry for more. We call this time “the susceptible moment.” The user can be guided if you take advantage of the susceptible moment you’ve created.

So what is the current page doing with the susceptible moment? It’s offering you a chance to go to Derek’s site, or read more about Nick, the interviewer. While I’m sure Nick is charming and intriguing man, the links doesn’t exactly scream “community.” The odds are the reader would probably rather read the other articles in this issues: Matt’s tutorial on community building perhaps.

You could put a set of links the bottom of the page taking the user to the articles in the issue. You could also offer past articles that relate to this subject, or other articles written by Derek on your site.

If you were a commercial site, this would also be a great moment to link to Derek’s new book on community and maybe make a few bucks from Amazon or whomever. There is a magical intersection between a user’s needs and desires and a business’s that an IA can help you take advantage of. It’s not a dirty thing when you make everyone happy.

The same principle applies to designing websites; chances are your website has more than one audience. So how do you meet the needs of your many audiences and users? Clump those categories of users together and prioritize your audiences, because you’ll never please absolutely everyone. However, you can please most of Audience 1, most of Audience 2, and some of Audience 3.

Other methods: there’s a lot to be learned from simple observation or contextual interviews. Observation is just what it sounds like: you watch how people behave in their natural environments and you draw conclusions about them (just make sure you’re quiet and out of the way or you’ll taint the results). Contextual interviews are also useful because you can interview folks in their regular workspaces or homes and have them show you their typical interactions. Of course, the main point to remember here is that users lie (again, we all want to impress), which is why a good researcher understands the difference between a true need and a stated need.

The downside of all this is that each interview can take an hour, so this can be a time-consuming effort. Of course (plug) at Carbon IQ, we have plenty of other guerilla-style methods of acquiring user information without taking up too much time or resources.

We also did three testing of iteration of a research site for another company. The site was supposed to e a vast repository of useful material for the visitors. In the first prototype not only could users not find anything on the site; they didn’t even understand why they wanted to use the site. In the second iteration—after implementing recommendations form the first round of testing—the users knew it was useful and were able to find some of the information they needed. On the third rev, they found a ton of useful information and said it would become a daily tool. Big difference.

What’s funny is that the “design” of the page didn’t change. The layout, typefaces and color palette experienced very little evolution. The biggest change we made was changing the labels of the links from cute marketing words to ordinary ones, and adding descriptions of the links. Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest difference.

Just as the Web is a valuable tool for communication and data presentation, it’s also a medium for artistic expression. Considering the project objectives and then make sure that they drive all of the decisions, including the creative ones. If you are designing a task-based tool to be utilized, chances are that its ability to be used is a critical criterion for the product’s success. If you are taking your viewer on an expressive journey, then let that drive your decisions. Just be conscious of why you make these decisions.

People assume that “art” is diametrically opposed to “usability.” And while this doesn’t have to be the case, many times on the Web they do conflict.

InfoDesign — clearinghouse for UE & information design links

IA / — good source for ia inspiration on a daily basis

International Herald Tribune — useful, usable, and thorough in its content.

McSweeney’s — fresh, creative writing on a daily basis.

Jeff at the House — they used to provide two minutes of fresh video every single day. That’s hard stuff. No one else had done that, and I’m guessing it will be a long time before anyone does.

WWOZ — streaming audio from New Orleans.

Google — searchy

I think it’s stating the obvious to point out that we’re all deeply shocked by what happened last Tuesday. I would like to hear your stories of that morning, and what’s been crossing your mind since.

If this is what it takes to be “hard,” I wanna stay soft, goddammit! I like living high on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs!

I can’t tell you how we resolved the problem for Knight Ridder because the product has yet to launch, but I believe CNN solved the same problem by taking down all its content once it received a story off the wire – it was essentially an empty site besides the critical stories related to the attack.

Contingency planning is one of those things that often gets overlooked because the scenarios are so remote. To some businesses it’s critical. To others, it’s less important.

Seriously, the web is much more secure than most ordinary exchanges: when people ask me if shopping on the net is safe, I ask, “Ever give your credit card to a waiter? It’s safer than that.” I think the changes we’ll see will mostly be in the dirt-world. I can’t say I’m looking forward to them.