Podcast appearances and mentions of Peter Morville

Peter Morville is a pioneer of information architecture. He co-authored Information Architecture for the World-Wide Web, the classic O'Reilly “polar bear” book on the subject. In our previous conversation, I interviewed Peter about a big change in his life. In this interview, we turn the tables: he interviews me about a big change to this show.See full show notes at:https://theinformed.life/2024/12/15/episode-155-peter-morville/

Peter Morville is a pioneer of information architecture. He co-authored Information Architecture for the World-Wide Web, the classic O'Reilly “polar bear” book on the subject. This is Peter's third appearance on the show. I asked him back because I wanted to learn about his decision to retire from IA consulting. This is the first of two conversations with Peter about navigating big changes.See full show notes at:https://theinformed.life/2024/12/01/episode-154-peter-morville/

Resources: Tools: Figma, Sketch, Adobe XD for wireframing and prototyping. InVision, Marvel for creating interactive prototypes. Books: "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug. "Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond" by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. Courses: Mentorship programs on UX Design & Online courses on platforms like LinkedIn Learning. Websites: Nielsen Norman Group (nngroup.com) for UX research insights. Smashing Magazine (smashingmagazine.com) for design articles.

Steve Portigal is an independent user research consultant. He is the author of Interviewing Users and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries. Steve and I both have new books, so we thought it'd be fun to compare notes on writing non-fiction. In this, the second of two episodes on the subject, we focus on the process of writing. If you haven't done so already, listen to our previous conversation, which focused on our motivations.Show notesSteve PortigalSteve Portigal - LinkedInPortigal ConsultingInterviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (2nd edition) by Steve PortigalDoorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories by Steve PortigalDuly Noted: Extend Your Mind Through Connected Notes by Jorge ArangoLiving in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge ArangoInformation Architecture for the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge ArangoScrivenerTinderboxThe Informed Life episode 99: Mark Bernstein on TinderboxFreeform on the App StoreShitty First Drafts by Anne Lamott (PDF)Jack Kerouac - WikipediaThe Informed Life episode 2: Gretchen Anderson on WritingShow notes include Amazon affiliate links. We get a small commission for purchases made through these links.If you're enjoying the show, please rate or review us in Apple's podcast directory:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-informed-life/id1450117117?itsct=podcast_box&itscg=30200

Steve Portigal is an independent user research consultant. He is the author of Interviewing Users and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries. Steve was previously on the show last year, talking about research skills. This conversation is a bit different: both of us have written new books, and we thought it'd be fun to compare notes about the process. We decided to split our conversation into two parts. This episode focuses on the motivations for writing, and the second part will focus on processes.Show NotesSteve PortigalSteve Portigal - LinkedInPortigal ConsultingInterviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (2nd edition) by Steve PortigalDoorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories by Steve PortigalThe Informed Life ep. 92 - Steve Portigal on Research SkillsLouis RosenfeldInformation Architecture for the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge ArangoBloggerThe Informed Life ep. 118 — Maggie Appleton on Digital GardeningMaggie AppletonAbout Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design (4th edition) by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, and Christopher NoesselWrite Useful Books by Rob FitzpatrickObsidianBuilding a Personal Knowledge Garden (Information Architecture Conference 2022 workshop)Show notes include Amazon affiliate links. We get a small commission for purchases made through these links.If you're enjoying the show, please rate or review us in Apple's podcast directory:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-informed-life/id1450117117?itsct=podcast_box&itscg=30200

Jorge Arango is an Information architect, author, and educator, and he's written a new book, Duly Noted, about the age-old practice of notetaking. If you're like me, you've been taking notes since your school days. Back then, we used notebooks, a Trapper Keeper, and sticky notes – anything that could help us ace a test, remember important tidbits, and consolidate ideas. Notes are an extension of the mind. But it was always a headache to organize them, synthesize them, and recall them at the right time. Enter the digital age – which tried to improve on the humble art of notetaking, but apps like Notes and Stickies tried to replicate digitally what we were using in the real world. Newer apps like Obsidian let go of real-world metaphors by utilizing three principles: shorter notes, connecting your notes, and nurturing your notes to build a knowledge garden that will serve you for the rest of your life. If you bring value to the world through your thinking, you have the responsibility to look after your thinking apparatus. Duly Noted will augment, magnify, and extend your capacity to think well. Externalizing your mental processes is one of the most powerful means we have to think better. If used well, the humble note will help you be a better thinker and a more effective human. What you'll learn from this episode: - A history of notetaking tools - Why notetaking is a personal endeavor - How digital notetaking tools have evolved - About Jorge's new book and how, upon reading it, you just might become a better thinker and increase your effectiveness Quick Reference Guide [0:00:12] Introduction of Jorge and his books [0:01:18] Introduction of Jorge's new book on taking notes and creating a knowledge garden, Duly Noted [0:09:47] Books that will make you a better knowledge worker [0:14:14] Design in Product Conference [0:15:35] Managing knowledge with computers [0:26:03] Knowledge as a garden [0:28:09] On tools for nurturing a knowledge garden [0:33:08] How Jorge uses AI with Obsidian [0:36:37] Jorge's gift for listeners Resources and links from today's episode: Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango https://www.amazon.com/Information-Architecture-Beyond-Louis-Rosenfeld/dp/1491911689 Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge Arango https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/living-in-information/ Duly Noted by Jorge Arango https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/duly-noted-extend-your-mind-through-connected-notes/ O'Reilly's book Mind Hacks by Tom Stafford https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mind-hacks/0596007795/ Tools for Thought by Howard Rheingold www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/ Design in Product Conference, November 29 https://rosenfeldmedia.com/design-in-product/ Roam Research https://roamresearch.com/ Obsidian https://obsidian.md/ The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul https://anniemurphypaul.com/books/the-extended-mind/ Figure it Out: Getting from Information to Understanding by Karl Fast and Stephen Anderson https://www.amazon.com/Figure-Out-Getting-Information-Understanding-ebook/dp/B085412Q1X Build a PKG (Personal Knowledge Garden) Workshop https://buildapkg.com

Heute begrüße ich meinen Gast, Rupert Platz. Rupert ist seit über 20 Jahren mit Leib und Seele UX-Mensch und hat von kleinen Start-ups über Agenturen bis Großkonzern fast alle Levels an UX Maturity erlebt. Er fragt sich übrigens auch, ob das oberste Level überhaupt irgendwo existiert. Ursprünglich war er Informationsarchitekt/Konzepter und dann UX Team Lead bei der Berliner Digitalagentur Aperto, und ist seit 2014 selbständig als UX-Spezialist für Analyse, Strategie und Lösungsentwicklung. Ab und zu hält er auch Vorträge auf Kongressen und Meetups - meistens zu den Themen UX und Marke, Konversions-Design, Problem Framing und UX-Trends.Rupert und ich besprechen, was die Dinge sind, die uns als UX Professionals frustrieren, warum sich UX Designer*innen oft unverstanden und übergangen fühlen und warum wir den Designprozess eigentlich immer rückwärts machen müssen. Ruperts LinksRuperts Website Ruperts BuchempfehlungenInformation Architecture - Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge ArangoUX Strategy - Jamie LevyJust Enough Research - Erika Hall SponsorEin großes Dankeschön geht an unseren Sponsor der heutigen Folge: HelloDesign. HelloDesign hilft Ogransiationen, Start-ups und Gründer:innen dabei mittels der Behavioural Design Methode digitaler Produkte zu entwickeln. Und zwar digitale Produkte, die Menschen zu gesünderen Gewohnheiten verhelfen. Was Behavioural Design ist und wie die Methode genau funktioniert, könnt ihr übrigens in der UX Heroes Folge 33 mit Fabrice Pöhlmann nachhören. Für alle unter euch, die noch tiefer in die Methodik des Behavioural Designs eintauchen möchten, hat HelloDesign ein besonderes Angebot. Exklusiv für unsere UX Heroes-Community gibt es jetzt die Chance, ein kostenloses Behavioural Design Poster zu erhalten. Meldet euch hier an und wir schicken euch das Poster kostenlos zu. Und ich verspreche euch, es ist nicht nur super informativ, sondern auch optisch ein echter Hingucker! Als Bonus könnt ihr sogar eine "Goldkarte" ergattern, die euch satte 500€ Rabatt auf ein Behavioural Design Training bei HelloDesign bietet. Ich hoffe, ihr fandet diese Folge nützlich. Wenn ihr auch die nächsten nicht verpassen wollt - abonniert UX Heroes doch auf Spotify, Apple oder eurem Lieblingspodcaster - ihr könnt uns dort auch bis zu 5 Sterne als Bewertung dalassen. Wenn Ihr Fragen oder Feedback habt, lasst uns doch eine Sprachnachricht auf ux-heroes.com da und wir beantworten sie mit etwas Glück in einer der nächsten Folgen.Ihr findet ihr mich auf LinkedIn unter Markus Pirker. Bis bald bei UX Heroes.UX Heroes ist ein Podcast von Userbrain.

Bio Jeff helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. He is the co-author of the award-winning book Lean UX (now in it's 3rd edition) and the Harvard Business Review Press book Sense & Respond. Starting off as a software designer, Jeff now works as a coach, consultant and keynote speaker helping companies bridge the gaps between business agility, digital transformation, product management and human-centred design. His most recent book, Forever Employable, was published in June 2020. Social Media ·         LinkedIn ·         Jeff Gothelf - coaching, consulting, training & keynotes ·         OKR-book.com ·         Twitter ·         Instagram ·         Jeff Gothelf - YouTube    Interview Highlights 04:50 Early career 16:00 Thought leadership 19:10 Outsource the work you hate, it shows 23:00 Defining a product 24:35 Product Managers as navigators of uncertainty 28:15 Succeeding as a Product Manager 37:25 Strategy, vision and mission 42:00 OKRs 48:00 Leading and lagging indicators 54:10 Do less, more often    Books and resources ·         Forever Employable - how to stop looking for work - Jeff Gothelf      ·         Best product management books - Lean UX, Sense & Respond... (jeffgothelf.com) ·         Lean vs. Agile vs. Design Thinking: What You Really Need to Know to Build High-Performing Digital Product Teams: Gothelf, Jeff ·         Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously: Gothelf, Jeff, Seiden, Josh ·         The role of a Product Manager: Product Managers are Navigators of Uncertainty https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/product-managers-navigate-uncertainty/ ·         Information Architecture, Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango ·         The Lean Startup | The Movement That Is Transforming How New Products Are Built And Launched ·         Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, Tony Fadell ·         The Creative Act: A Way of Being: Rubin, Rick Episode Transcript Ula Ojiaku Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. So I have with me the legend, Jeff Gothelf, who is an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, highly sought after keynote speaker I must add, coach and much more. So Jeff, really honoured to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast, thank you. Jeff Gothelf It's my pleasure, Ula, thanks so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. Ula Ojiaku Oh, good. Well, I usually start with a question for my guests to find out more about themselves as individuals. And during our pre-recording session, you mentioned something that was intriguing to me, that you actually played piano and you were part of a touring musical band, could you tell us about that? Jeff Gothelf Absolutely. I've played piano my whole life, my dad plays piano, there was always a piano in the house, and I had pretty big rockstar dreams as I was a kid growing up. It's really all I wanted to do. I can remember in high school everybody's like, what are you going to go to college for? I was like, I'm going to be a rockstar, figure that out. And, you know, I played in bands in high school, I played in bands in college, and towards the end of college I started playing in a couple of relatively serious bands, serious in the sense that they were decent bands, in my opinion. They were touring bands and they, you know, they made enough money to sustain themselves. They weren't jobs, they didn't sustain us as individuals, but they sustained the band system. And it's fascinating because, you know, at the time I was 19 and 20, I did this really until just about the time I met my wife, which, I was 25. And so I did it until about, I was about 25, and, you know, in hindsight you don't see it when you're in it, especially if you've never really done anything else. I'd always had jobs, but the jobs were always, you know, I delivered newspapers and I made sandwiches and I was a, you know, worked for a moving company, whatever, right? But in hindsight now it's clear to me that I was being entrepreneurial. In those days, the bands, each of them, especially the touring bands, were startups, you know, it's a bunch of folks getting together with a crazy idea, thinking that everyone in the world will love it, it's going to change the world, and doing everything they can and putting everything into helping folks realise that, and building that vision and, and executing on it. And, you know, scraping by and hacking things together and hustling and doing what you can to build a successful, in this case it was a musical group, but it was essentially a startup. And these days, not only do I look back fondly on those days and all those, all those guys that I played music with are my best friends to this day, we still talk almost every day, but I learned so many skills about being entrepreneurial, about experimenting, about learning, about failure, about iteration, about, you know, what's good, what's good enough, when do you call it quits, that's a really tough thing to do, you know, letting something go that you love is really difficult. And I know now, you know, 20 years later, that so much of that experience figures into my day-to-day work today. You know, even to this day, like if I get a new speech to give, if I get, a new client or a new, you know, assignment, I call them gigs. You know, I got a new speaking gig, I got a new consulting gig, I got a new coaching gig, that type of thing. It's impossible to remove that. And it's, it's amazing to me really, because at the time, you know, I could not have told you what I just said to you and, but in hindsight it's super clear to me what I was doing and what I was learning because I've put it to use over and over and over again in my life. Ula Ojiaku That's fascinating. It reminds me of what one of my mentors said to me, and he said, whenever you are given an opportunity to learn versus, you know, get more money doing what you already know, always choose to learn because there's no wasted knowledge. So it's more of tying it back to your days that, you know, as a musician, as a part of a touring band, you were learning and you're now using those transferrable skills, right? Jeff Gothelf Yes. Ula Ojiaku And would you, well, I don't play any instruments, but I used to be part of, you know, different choirs and my daughter also now does that, you know, kind of sings. But there are times when, you know, things would go wrong and you're finding yourself having to improvise so that the audience wouldn't know, okay, this isn't part of the script. Would you say that has also played a part in your experience as a band member did such? Jeff Gothelf I mean, the thing that comes immediately to mind is just comfort on a stage, right? Comfort in front of people and being able, you know, being comfortable in front of a room and performing to some extent or another. I think that that's, that came from that, the ability to, you know, hide or improvise, mistakes that happened. You know, I remember I was, we did this as a band all the time, and nobody ever knew really, unless they knew a particular song of ours very, very well. And you know, some things like that happen all the time when you're, giving a speech or teaching a class or whatever it is. I mean, I remember giving a speech in Budapest one time at Craft Conference in front of 2000 people, and the screen kept going out, my slides are up there in front of, and they kept flickering and, and going out. And it was just a question of, you know, what do you do? Do you just sort of collapse and be like, well, the slides are gone, I can't do anything, or do you keep going? And I think a lot of that drive and that ability to land on my feet in those situations came from being in that band and putting on so many shows. Ula Ojiaku And I'll say it helps that you knew your content as well, because if you had just read it 10 minutes before and you got on the stage, then it would be a different thing. Jeff Gothelf It would not have gone well. Ula Ojiaku Yes. Okay, now I understand you have a BA in Mass Communication and you also went on to do a Masters in Human Factors in Information Design, and in your previous life you used to be a software designer. Jeff Gothelf Correct. Ula Ojiaku How did the winding road go from band member, you know, through the academics, to Jeff we know today, I mean from software designer to now. Jeff Gothelf Yeah, it's interesting, it's a great question. The, look, the rockstar thing didn't work out, you know, there's a thousand reasons, but I think the bottom line is we just weren't good enough, that's, that's probably where it netted out, but… Ula Ojiaku  And you were getting married, you said you met your wife. Jeff Gothelf I was getting married, yeah. You know, and having no money doesn't, those two things don't really play well together, you know, and so the band thing was ending and, you know, the web was starting, so we're looking at the late nineties at this point, just to kind of date myself a little bit, we're looking at the late nineties and in the late nineties as the band was, the last band that I was in, was winding down, the internet was coming up and I'd always been prone, you know, to computers and a little bit of computer programming, just very basic stuff, you know, and I started building websites, basic, you know, brochure websites for my band and for other bands, and I taught myself HTML to be able to do that. And then as the band was winding down, web 1.0 was happening and, you know, back in 1999, if you could spell HTML, you could get a job, you know, and I could do a little bit more than that, I did a little bit of graphic design, a little bit of, of HTML, and so I got a job, I got a job because it was easy to get a job back then, they took a lot of risks on people, and we learned on the job and that's what kicked things off, that got me doing web design and shortly thereafter I moved into Information Architecture, which was a brand new term and a brand new field as defined in a book by Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville called Information Architecture for the Worldwide Web. And that book really changed my life because it gave me a sense that I, instead of just doing kind of the last step in the process, which was the markup and the design portion, I could move further up the waterfall, if you will, in the website creation process and do a lot of the Information Architecture, and that was great, and that was really, that really spoke to me and having sort of landed in that position, as the web evolved and became more interactive and Information Architecture expanded into, well, more fields showed up in interaction design, UI design, UX design, I expanded my skillset into that world. And then that really began the trajectory of starting to build design teams and then going into product management, eventually launching our own studio, our own firm, and then finally after selling that studio, going out on my own and teaching all this stuff. But that's, that's sort of like how I went from band, to the web and everything, and there's, you know, there's a lot, I skipped a lot of steps there, but that's the story in general. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that, Jeff, and I think you also told part of your story in your book Forever Employable, How to Stop Looking for Work and Let your Next Job Find You. Since we're already on this topic, could we just delve into that? So you said something in that book about, you know, in your job as a software designer, you know, Information Architect, I can't remember the exact role you had, but you had an aha moment where you felt you, quoting this in my own words, I'm not quoting your book exactly, but you felt like you could always be replaced in that role and you wanted to carve out a niche where you are always in demand. Do you want to tell that story in your words so that I stop butchering it. Jeff Gothelf Yeah, I mean, look, it was interesting, you know, I progressed in my career in the same way that, you know, most people progress in their career, the way that my parents told me the world works, you know, you go to college, you get a job. It took me, and there was a little, you know, band break in there for me, but, you know, I got my first job, and then you work hard for a few years and you get a promotion, and then you, maybe you move to another company and you get a raise and, you know, you just kind of move your way, you climb your way up the corporate ladder. And that's what I did, I did that for a decade and I, you know, I clawed my way up into middle management like everybody does, or like most folks do. And when I turned 35, on the morning, in fact, of my 35th birthday is how the story goes in the book, I kind of woke up in a panic. I was concerned, like you said, that this wasn't going to last. I was going to become more expensive, the number of opportunities available to me as you climb, available to anyone, as you climb the corporate ladder gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Right? Exactly. Right. That's by design, right? You want fewer managers and more people doing the work. And I was genuinely concerned that I was going to run out of, I was going to get fired, I was, there's, I was hiring people at the time and the people that we were hiring were younger than me, they were smarter than me, faster than me, they were better than me, and they cost a lot less than me. And so I was really worried, and I saw this with my friends too, I had friends who were maybe five years older than me who were struggling with this very thing. They were struggling to find a job or stay employed, and stay relevant. And I was terrified. I was terrified I wasn't going to be able to feed my kids, you know, that was the big thing for me. And so I made an explicit decision when I turned 35 that I was going to stop chasing jobs. Like, as the subtitle of the book says, How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You, I was going to stop looking for work, and I was going to create a situation where jobs were constantly finding me, where opportunities were finding me, because that way if something happens to my current job, well there's a stream of inbound opportunities available to me. And to kind of cut to the chase here, the way that I decided to do that, and the way that I write about it in the book, is through thought leadership. That's it. Like, that's the, you know, recognised expertise, personal branding, right, becoming somebody who people know and somebody who can help solve specific problems, and that's what I did. And look, it took me years, a lot of years, to really build up my reputation and my profile, and I've done it to an extent, and it's impressive to me today to see how many people are doing it so much faster than me. Now, you can credit it to the tools that's available to them, the nature of conversation online these days that's fundamentally different than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and these folks have just kind of nailed, nailed the system here. But it's thought leadership is what's worked for me to do that. Ula Ojiaku And I'll say, I mean, yes, there are people who might have done it faster than you did, but there is this saying that people are able, if I'm able to see as far as I did, it's because I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. I'm just saying it's credit to you for sharing your experience because it's helping us to know what to do moving forward. Jeff Gothelf Look, and that's, I think that that's the benefit here, right? I think I talk about this in the book, right? About sharing generously, giving back to the community, helping people avoid the mistakes that you made, helping them skip a step. And to me that's, you know, a lot of folks would see that as, well, aren't you enabling the competition? No, I'm helping the community get collectively better. And eventually I hope that if I get to a position of need, the community will help me, that's what I hope. I don't expect it, but that's what I hope happens. Ula Ojiaku So how, how did you go about setting up the systems then? Because you, you got this realisation, oh my gosh, I am going to be, I may be obsolete in my current role faster than I'd rather admit, so you said you now went, you said, okay, you're going to be a thought leader. How did you decide on what area to start from and how did you then go about setting up the systems and the structure you have right now that are helping you? Jeff Gothelf The first thing was really to decide what I wanted to be known for. You know, in the book we call it planting your flag, but it's a question of what is, if I'm going to be a thought leader, if I'm going to build a personal brand of some kind, if I'm going to be known for something, what is that thing? And, and you know, our natural tendency is to go for professional things. What do I know best at work? What do I do best? I'm a Project Manager, a Product Manager, I'm an agile coach, I'm a software developer, I'm a designer, but doesn't have to be professional. Could be personal, right? I told you I play piano and I happen to really love old vintage electric pianos. And I used to have a fairly large collection of vintage electric pianos. I could have built my thought leadership around vintage electric pianos, right, and it's viable to an extent, but the target audience here, so this is where kind of the product management hat comes on, right? The target audience is tiny. It's tiny. Like, even if you took all the keyboard players in the world, right? And, and then all those keyboard players who play vintage electric pianos, which is a subset, and all the people who care about this kind of stuff. I mean, it's still an infinitely smaller audience than say, web design, or product management, or even agile software development or things like that where I ultimately ended up. And so I chose that I wanted to be known for User Experience Design, and more importantly, UX design with Agile, because that's the problem that I was solving at the time, or solving for at the time, and nobody had a really good answer for it when we started solving for it, and that to me felt like an opportunity. And then that was what I, so then I started doubling down on that. And what that meant was starting to write, starting to share generously, speaking at conferences, getting on podcasts, things like that. And really starting to, at the very least, tell the story of the work that we were doing at the time, as I was the Director of UX at TheLadders in New York City at the time, and we were working on a daily basis, on a Sprintly basis, to tackle the challenge of good user experience design and agile together. So that's what I was writing about. And that eventually led to Lean UX, the book. But that's how it all started and that's where the focus was. Ula Ojiaku Okay. And how have you then set up the structure? Do you have a team currently or do you work in a lean manner? Jeff Gothelf So these days there is a system and there is a team. It's interesting, years ago I did a gig in the UK, see I said gig, comes out naturally like I told you. I did a gig in the UK for rentalcars.com in Manchester. And at the time, their Head of Product or Chief Product Officer, was this fascinating woman named Supriya Uchil. And she was a fantastic client. I really enjoyed working with her. And when the gig was over, she emailed me, she said, hey, would you like to hear some feedback about what it's like to work with you? No client has ever done that, by the way, not before, and not since. And I said, absolutely. I would love to get some feedback about what it was like to work with me. And she gave me a bunch of feedback, a lot of the work. And I took a lot of notes and I took a lot of post-it notes. One of those post-it notes has stuck with me for years now. It still sits here on my whiteboard, I still have it here, and it says outsource the work you hate, it shows. Right. And that's what she said to me. And she said, look, it's obvious to me that you hate doing sales. She goes, every time we had to have a sales conversation, you were clearly uncomfortable and not really into it. Right. She was right. I hate doing sales, I really do, and so over the years, as I've built this business, as it's grown, as it's become a, you know, a viable, successful business, you know, business of one per se. I have built a team of outsourced professionals to support a lot of the work that I do today. So, for example, I have a content marketing team. Now that team takes content that I create and they repurpose it across multiple channels, and they help me build, you know, my email newsletter and they help me build my LinkedIn presence and other things like that. It's my content, but they do all of that work. In addition to that, I've outsourced all my accounting. I have a fantastic accountant who works with businesses, only with businesses like mine, and so they understand my business and my way of working, everything's online, everything's digital, and that's super helpful. There is a woman that works for me part-time who basically handles the entire logistics of my business, scheduling, calendaring, travel. And then on top of that, she also handles BusDev and sales for me. And so that, to me, all that does is it removes all the things out of my way that I hate doing, and it leaves me with a tremendous amount of free time to do the things that I love doing, which is content creation and delivery. And that has made the ability to generate that content and distribute that content far more efficient and successful. And I'm super grateful to be able to, you know, to be in a position to be able to do that. And it supports the lifestyle that I'm trying to create and it allows me to, again, to focus on the things that I truly enjoy doing. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for sharing that, that's really insightful. Now, going back to something you said earlier about putting on your Product Management hat, there are some people in the audience who might be wondering, okay, what would you define a product as? Is it always something tangible or could we expand that word to mean anything that someone consumes, which might also be intangible, for example, going to a show, would a show be called a product? Jeff Gothelf That's a great question. The simplest definition that I've used and that I like for product is the way an organisation delivers and captures value. To me, that's a product. Now, that product could be a service, right? And I don't want to open up that can of worms. So if you're a band and you deliver a show, you cap you. that's how you deliver value. And if you capture value, like you sell tickets to that show, and merchandise, and maybe streaming revenue, then your product is the music and the show. So, yeah, absolutely, right, that's the way that you capture value. And so to me that's the simplest definition, the way an organisation delivers and captures value. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that definition, and this leads me to my next question, which is, so how does it relate to the discipline of product management? What does a Product Manager do then? Jeff Gothelf I believe that Product Managers are navigators of uncertainty. So a Product Manager's job is to take an idea, right, or, you know, the way an organisation delivers value, and to take it from concept, to market, to successful business. Now, the challenge with that is that we live in a continuously changing world. The pace of that change is increasingly faster, and this idea that you can confidently predict exactly what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and be right all the time is false. There's just too much change in the world. I mean, think back three years ago, right? The world was radically different three years ago than it is today. Radically different from 10 years ago, we could, we could not have predicted the things. I mean, I started my job at TheLadders in New York City, I talk about this, in October of 2008. Everything was going great in October, in the early part of October 2008. Right, we had a roadmap, we had plans, you know, in three weeks after I started my brand new job as Director of User Experience, Lehman Brothers melts down, and the financial crisis ensues, right, and we, you know, we're a job market site and all of a sudden the whole ecosystem's upside down. And so, and so I believe that the Product Manager is a navigator of uncertainty. They take a specific set of skills, a specific set of qualities, like curiosity and humility, and they build a process for de-risking the product idea and maximizing its chances for success. That's what I believe Product Managers do at a very high level. How that manifests will vary from Google, to Bank of America, to Boeing, to whatever, to, you know, I'm thinking, I'm trying to think of something like Cisco, the food service people or whatever, right? Like every organisation is going to do Product Management differently for a variety of reasons. You know, domain, industry context, corporate politics, blah, blah, blah, you know, technology stack, whatever. But at the end of the day, I think if you're looking at sort of fundamentally what a Product Manager does is they help a team navigate the uncertainty of product development. That's their job. Ula Ojiaku I dare say that even within a sector, even an industry, the way it's carried out could also vary from company to company, would you? Jeff Gothelf A hundred percent, yeah, I mean, a hundred percent. I mean, it's absolutely true. And so I think to say like, oh, I did Product Management at Google, so I'm a great Product Manager. Well, you might have been a great Product Manager at Google, congratulations, right? Does that mean that you're going to be a great Product Manager at, you know, Barclays, I don't know. You're going to bring that skillset to bear in a completely different environment, in a completely different industry. So I think if you've got the fundamentals in place, you'll do great. But trying to sort of copy and paste what you did at Google very tactically into a different environment, I don't think it's going to work. I mean, happy to be proven wrong, but I don't think it's going to work. Ula Ojiaku So what are the fundamentals then that a Product Manager would have that would give them a higher chance of success? You know, transferrable success from one area to one another. Jeff Gothelf I'm going talk about two qualities that are, I believe are fundamental to the success of a Product Manager, and then kind of four things to keep in mind. And I think those are, I think that to me, those are the fundamentals. I think that the two qualities that a Product Manager needs to have is humility and curiosity. I think all successful Product Managers are humble and curious. And those are really two sides of the same coin, let's be honest, okay. There's really, there are two different ways to describe a very similar quality in a person. Now, humility simply means, people misunderstand humility. People think humility is a lack of vision or a lack of conviction or a lack of ideas. Or being a doormat. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And it's not, humility simply says that, look, I have, uh, I'm going to use my expertise and my experience to come up with a strong opinion about what we should do. However, in the face of evidence that contradicts my strong opinion, I'm willing to change course. That's humility. That's saying, you know what? I was wrong about this. The evidence proves that I was wrong, so we're going to change course. The curiosity side of the story is the excitement in finding out if you were right or wrong, and to me, those two fundamental qualities of a person make for excellent Product Managers. Somebody who's willing to admit that they were wrong about their strong opinion, and somebody who's excited to find out if they're right or wrong about their strong opinion, and curious to see if maybe there's a better way, right? I think this is a good idea, but there's got to be a better way, no, let's go find it. To me, that makes for excellent Product Managers. So those are the fundamental sort of personality qualities. I think those are really hard to teach. I think you can train people to some extent but, you know, ego's tough and humility challenges the ego a lot. And so do the facts for that matter, facts challenge the ego a lot, the evidence you collect from the market. So then there's that. And I think the four sort of things to keep in mind for excellent sort of transferrable product management are customer centricity, agility, evidence-based decision making, and continuous learning and improvement. So a lot of agile concepts in there, you'll hear sort of a lot of agile concepts. You can argue all of them are agile concepts, although not exactly how all agile is implemented these days, but nevertheless, so customer centricity first and foremost, right? As a curious and humble Product Manager, your primary focus is making the customer successful, not shipping features, making the customer successful. That means understanding the customer, understanding the problem that you're solving for them, understanding what's getting in their way, understanding what they're doing today, understanding how the competition is solving this problem for people, understanding technology and how you might apply it to better solve this problem, understanding where the market is going so that you get ahead of it, you don't get caught behind, right? But it's all about understanding the customer. What are customers looking for? What are they trying to achieve? What's getting in their way? And really knowing them, not just quantitatively, but qualitatively, meeting them, talking to them, having regular conversations. To me, that's the first sort of key quality of a successful Product Manager. The second is agility, and that stems directly from those qualities of humility and curiosity. Agility is the ability to change course, it's the willingness to change course. It's the flexibility to say, you know, we started going down this path and I know we've spent a couple of Sprints heading down this path, but it doesn't make sense anymore, and so we're going to change course. And yeah, we burned two Sprints on this and that sucks, and I'm sorry, but we didn't burn two months on it, we didn't burn six months on it, right. And so we're going to shift to something more successful because of what we've learned in the past. And that brings me to the third point, which is evidence-based decision making. So those course corrections are being made based on data that you're gathering from the market, qualitative data, quantitative data that lets you know that, yeah, this is a good path to go down. Or, you know what, we really need to pivot here or to completely change course into something else, but you're making decisions based on data and not just opinion. And then finally, this continuous learning and improvement. This, again, this is that curiosity that says, we did a good job, we solved the problem, the product's successful, great. How do we make it better? How do we keep learning whether or not this still makes sense? Right? To me, that's what makes for successful Product Managers, right? Those multiple focus areas and two core qualities of humility and curiosity. I think that's what makes for good Product Managers. Ula Ojiaku That's awesome, thank you for that. And would you have, I mean you do, in your books, you've shared lots of war stories where you know, you had experience with product management or product leadership and to the audience, I'll say read the books, but is there any example maybe that comes to mind of someone who was a Product Manager that, you don't have to name names, you don't have to share like details, but that kind of brought to life all these personal qualities and focus areas and how that affected the work? Jeff Gothelf I mean, look, I've worked with a ton of remarkable folks over the years. I think I started really meeting folks who were working this way when I met folks like Janice Fraser who, in fact came up with the phrase ‘strong opinions, loosely held', which is exactly what I was just describing a few minutes ago. Janice has built multiple businesses and has really helped pioneer these ideas into sort of the mainstream. And I've seen her repeatedly do this. Eric Ries, you know, with The Lean Startup, really brought a lot of these ideas to light in a very easy to digest way, hence the success of his work in the past, and he lived this stuff in the businesses that he's built over the years. I had a colleague and co-worker and co-founder in a business named Giff Constable. Most recently, Giff was the Chief Product Officer at Meetup, but he's been a serial entrepreneur his whole life. Giff really embodied these ideas, like he's a smart guy, tons of experience, really great ideas, but he would test them all, and if he didn't get evidence that convinced him that they were right, he was willing to change course. And I learned a ton from working with him and building businesses with him. And it was inspirational because in many ways, you know, I appreciated his ruthlessness. You know, we all, it's hard, you know, this is personal stuff, this is my idea, all my ideas are great, I love my ideas, right. And he loved his ideas, but he was very, very good at separating emotion and evidence. And I really learned a ton from him as well. So those are three folks that kind of come to mind immediately. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that, it reminds me in terms of what you said about Giff being ruthless, I think is a term in journalism to “kill your darlings” because you could write an article or, you know, write your first draft and you're so in love with it, but by the time the editor brings out their red pen or something and starts striking it out, you have to separate emotion from the love. Jeff Gothelf That's exactly right, kill your darlings is the reality of this, of good product management. It's, you know, if the data doesn't prove it, and the data we're looking for is changes, meaningful, positive changes in the behaviour of the customers that we're serving. And if the data doesn't show it, then no matter how brilliant this idea was, how much you love it or how much you thought it was just revolutionary, it doesn't make sense to continue to invest in it, we've got to find, figure out a different way. Ula Ojiaku That's awesome. I'd love to get to your take on the terms, you know, vision and strategy. How would you define these terms would be my first question, and my second question, and I'm happy to, you know, share this again, is how would you then tie this to, you know, for example, product development? How would they, how should they influence product development? Jeff Gothelf Yeah, so look, a couple things. There are, I'm not going to lie to you, you know, I struggle a little bit with, you know, vision and mission. Strategy is clear to me, but differentiating between vision and mission, some will say a vision is like what will the world look like in five years or something like that? Or if you're successful, what changes will you see in the world? That type of thing. Whereas a vision is sort of like the big motivational, like what was it for Google? Cataloguing all the world's data, that was their vision. Right? Ula Ojiaku Can I give you my own take? So my understanding mission is more like, okay, what do we stand for? We're going to save the world? And vision is like, okay, in this amount of time, you know, this is how we're saving the world. So it's kind of a picture from the future, say if we travel five years into the future and we see our customers, what are, how are they behaving? You know, what exactly does the world look like for us? While mission tends to remain constant. That's my understanding anyway. Jeff Gothelf Okay. Yeah. And so to me, look, it's directional, right? In the sense of like, we are, you know, we're going to make sure everyone is clean drinking water, like clean drinking water for everybody, right? That's our, is that our mission or our vision? I don't know. But like, or maybe that, maybe that's the mission and the vision is, you know, a world where no one's thirsty. To me, those are like you, I think you need that in the sense that like, you need to know sort of at a high level what problem is the company solving for in the world? I think that's important, right? Because I think that inevitably there are going to be initiatives that seem to stray from that. At the very least, you can point and say, look, is it our mission to bring clean drinking water to everybody in the world? And why are we like investing in a sports website? Right, doesn't make any sense. So at the very least, it gives us that perspective. Strategy, however, and I think strategy is really, really, really important. Strategy is super important for aligning the organisation so that everybody is pulling in the same direction, so that everybody is clear on what the short term goals are for the organisation and it gives people, if done correctly, it gives people the freedom to experiment and learn to figure out the best ways to achieve the strategy, because I do believe that strategy is a hypothesis. Our hypothesis is that we want to expand into the North American market in 2024. Okay, great, let's figure out all kinds of ways where we might start to build some market share in North America in 2024. Right. And to me, I think that that is the true benefit of strategy. I think that it can also be misused, at least, for alignment, that's very specific. Our strategy is, you know, North American market share and we're going to do it this way. And you can get very prescriptive with that. Now everybody's aligned, everybody knows what we're doing, but it doesn't allow for the flexibility and that push and pull that ultimately reveals a better way to do something or is more creative or more innovative. And so I think strategy is key. It's key to articulate it clearly and simply, it's key to disseminate it clearly and simply across the organisation. And I think no team in the organisation should have their project approved if they can't clearly state how they believe this might help achieve the strategy. That's what I believe. Ula Ojiaku And on that note, so you said no project or team should have their initiative approved unless they can show how it helps move the needle towards the desired strategy, the direction of travel, the organisation, I suppose that's what you mean, the organisation's direction of travel or what they want to achieve. Now how, because one of the shiny new objects, or, well, not an object per se, but more like a buzzword is OKRs, objectives and key results. So how can we use that? Or, let's say, can it be used to help with tying strategy with the work that, you know, the lower levels of the organisation might be doing? Jeff Gothelf I think it's critical to be able to tie the pieces together. Now, I don't expect an individual contributor necessarily to be able to do that, but certainly their manager can say, hey team, we're working on this very tactical thing because it's a component of these five other tactical things that when you put them together, they roll up and they achieve this much more meaningful thing together. Right, and so I, again, I think that there needs to be a clear, and it's rare, look, let's be honest, right? Everyone in the organisation needs to understand what the strategic focus is for the next six months, six to 12 months. Okay. And again, if you can't speak directly to why you're working on the thing that you're working on, then your boss should be able to answer that question for you. Ula Ojiaku So it's really about, what I'm hearing you say is that there needs to be a strategic focus for an organisation at least that looks ahead six to 12 months into the future to say, okay, this is what we're going to be doing. And for teams, they have to find a way of articulating how they are contributing to that strategic focus, to the fulfilment of that strategic focus. Now, how can OKRs be used? I know you said, okay, individual contributors may not necessarily use that, but in the situations where you feel they apply, how could they be, and by they, I mean OKRs, objectives and key results, how could this format help? Jeff Gothelf OKRs to me, are the key to bringing this alignment. So if there's a clear strategy. Without a clear strategy, the OKRs don't help, okay. But if there's a clear strategy and we've set success criteria for that strategy, for that strategic hypothesis, then, or we can start to say, okay, great. We are, our strategic focus for 2024 is North American expansion, we'll know we've achieved it when, you know, we've got 10% market share, this much revenue and a, you know, new customer referral rate of 20%, something like that. Right. All of a sudden, the organisation knows what it's targeting, not only what the strategic focus is, but the actual behaviour change that we're looking for. So fundamentally, every team in the organisation can then start to say, okay, we work on X, and X is a leading indicator of Y and Y is a leading indicator of market share. Okay. So the objective, while it should be local to the team, as well as the key results, they function as leading indicators for the strategic goal, right? So let's try to make an example on the fly, right? So we're talking about North American expansion in 2024. Let's assume that we are in the, you know, online furniture business, something along those lines, right? And so if, maybe you work on a merchandising team, right? And so there, in order to do proper merchandising, you need access to specific suppliers, right? And so there is a team that does supplier and vendor relations. Right. That team understands that for the merchandising team to be successful, they've got to build these relationships with these vendors. So their OKR is going to be about building those relationships, right? Those relationships in turn allow the proper merchandising to take place, which then allows for the proper, you know, for market share to grow in the North American market, for example. So, but that connection can be, you can literally draw it on a board because people understand the strategy. And so objectives and key results become the, sort of the tactical strategic beacons for each of the teams. Each team knows exactly what they're targeting and why, and they understand, in theory, how it might help achieve the overall strategy, which again is a hypothesis, it might be wrong, but at the very least, they've got a shared direction. Ula Ojiaku Thank you for that example. There's something you said about the leading indicators. So I assume that would fall under the key results part, because we'd have the objective which is like the, you know, ambitious statements and then the key results are like, this is what success looks like in terms of achieving that broad statement, the objective. Now, would you, I've read articles from respected thought leaders who say, okay, yes, leading indicators are good, but there also needs to be, you know, the lagging indicators, kind of a balance of, will I say measures, you know, leading, lagging and quality indicators. I don't know if you have any, I mean, I'd love to hear what your view would be on this, because if we're only looking at leading indicators, there might be a temptation to just be short term in our thinking and not also try to measure the lagging indicators, like okay, the actual revenue of the profit that you get versus our likelihood of getting that revenue. Jeff Gothelf Yeah. So look, so short answer is both are important, I think, obviously, and I think both are required. Slightly longer answer is the lagging indicators in an organisation often tend to be the, what we call the impact metrics for the organisation, the high level measures of the health of the business, like you said, revenue, sales, you know, customer satisfaction, etcetera. Right. So yeah, those things need to exist. Typically, they exist at the leadership level, and so then whatever's happening within the teams, tends to function as a leading indicator ultimately to those sort of high level lagging indicators. Right? So we're going to, you know, I've got a team working on email marketing, and they're working on email market opening click rates, right? Those are leading indicators of eventual sales, and those sales are leading indicators of revenue, which is a lagging indicator of the health of the business. And so those, that's,to me, both are needed. Typically the lagging indicators tend to be at the strategic and the leadership level. Ula Ojiaku I read on your blog post that you have another book coming up, whilst we're on the subject of OKRs, and you're going to be, or you are in the process of co-authoring yet another book with your co-author Josh Seiden. Could you tell us about that? Jeff Gothelf Absolutely. So, yeah, so Josh and I have been working and writing together for a long time. We have been talking about outcomes and OKRs together for a long time, and we feel there's an opportunity in the marketplace to build, to write a tactical how-to implementation guide for all, organisations of all size. And that's what we're doing. It doesn't have a title yet, we do have a website at okr-book.com where you can sign up and learn a bit more about it and then kind of be on the mailing list when we do have more info about it. We're writing it right now. To be honest, I've been writing it in public for the last two years on my blog every week at 500 to 700 words at a time. All those just kind of getting those ideas out there and experimenting to see what works and what doesn't and what gets feedback and what doesn't, and that's been super helpful and I expect this to be a popular book, and I expect this to be a very helpful and tactical book for organisations who are going through the process of implementing OKRs and are trying to make them work both as a goal setting framework, but also truly understanding the kinds of changes to ways of working that come after you've implemented OKRs. Agility, or agile ways of working, product discovery, Lean UX, right? Those types of activities as well, to help teams build that evidence-based decision making that we talked about earlier. Ula Ojiaku Awesome. Is there any timeframe or do we just go to your, to the website you mentioned and sign up to get more updates on the book as they unfold? Jeff Gothelf okr-book.com - that's the website? Ula Ojiaku Yes. And when do we expect it to be released? Jeff Gothelf October. Ula Ojiaku This October, awesome. So that would also be in the show notes. Are there any books or materials that you have found yourself gifting or recommending to people that have impacted or shaped the way you think right now? I mean, that is in addition to your, you know, Sense and Respond book, Lean UX. Unfortunately, I don't have the physical copy of the Forever Employable ones and, but yeah, are there other books that you could recommend to us? Jeff Gothelf Yeah, I think so recently I've read Tony Fadell, his book Build, the Tony Fadell of Apple and Nest and various other fame, Build is a really good book and really interesting insight as to how he works and builds products, and most recently I just finished the new book by Rick Rubin, legendary music producer Rick Rubin, it's called The Creative Act, and I found that book to be fascinating and really inspiring. I mean, it's, you know, he is very like, listen to this, you know, get into the zone and just the flow and, you know, there's a lot of that fluffy guru kind of stuff in there too. But I agreed with 90% of what I read in there about creativity, about, you know, working with an idea, about developing an idea, about getting feedback on an idea, about letting an idea go, about changing context and constraints to create more creativity and innovation. And I really enjoyed it. So it's called The Creative Act, it's by Rick Rubin, and it's an easy read and I would recommend that if you're looking for that kind of motivation, I think it was really smart. Ula Ojiaku Awesome. Is there anything else you'd like to ask of the audience? Jeff Gothelf I just hope that if you've got anything you'd like to ask me, don't hesitate to get in touch via Twitter or LinkedIn or my website. If you're interested in OKRs, do sign up for my newsletter, and go to okr-book.com and sign up there. And beyond that, I hope to see you online or in person sometime in the future, because it's nice to meet people in person again these days. Ula Ojiaku Great. Thank you very much, Jeff, for these. Any final words of wisdom for the audience before we go? Jeff Gothelf The pithy phrase I'll close with is this, do less, more often. That's the phrase that I would recommend for you. Ula Ojiaku Wow. Do less, more often. I am going to be pondering on that statement. Thank you so much, Jeff. It's been an honour speaking with you, learning from you, and I hope we would get the opportunity to do this again, hopefully. Jeff Gothelf Thank you, Ula. This was amazing. Thanks for having me on the show. Ula Ojiaku That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!   

Is everything connected from code to culture? We're designing software, services, and experiences and intervening in ecosystems. To open our minds, and stop to repeat our mistakes we need to go deeper inside information architecture and systems thinking. It is true because, as Ted Nelson wrote "everything is deeply intertwingled”. This show will pass through some questions like: What is the importance of IA for the digital products industry? How much is finding patterns important for our work as designers? What is the impact on the future of design for experience leave the IA apart? For this, we invited Peter Morville a pioneer in the fields of information architecture and user experience. His best-selling books include Information Architecture also known as "the bible of IA" and "the polar bear book". He has delivered conference keynotes and workshops in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. —---------- The past year we decided to start this new project called Good Morning UX, an extension of another show called Bom Dia UX, with such special-international guests. Actually, we invited a lot of professionals who are references for us and that have so much history in our industry. Follow Morville on these links: https://semanticstudios.com/ https://intertwingled.org/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/morville/ Morville's book: Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond (English Edition) https://amzn.to/3ujUdu0 Search Patterns: Design for Discovery https://amzn.to/3y5hf9e Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything (English Edition) https://amzn.to/3a8UGbG Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals (English Edition) https://amzn.to/3aecAtI Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become (English Edition) https://amzn.to/3yBf9zs Internet Searcher's Handbook 2nded: Locating Information, People and Software https://amzn.to/3adfNK6 Related Links: https://uxmag.com/contributors/peter-morville https://www.uxmatters.com/authors/archives/2014/10/peter_morville.php https://stringfixer.com/pt/Peter_Morville https://semanticstudios.com/crisis-information-architecture/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxPxxQlkszQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tl3yReC77g ----------------------------- This is the Good Morning UX, a live show produced and launched on the Design Team channel every Wednesday at 7 am, in the Brazilian time zone.

Episode 072 of Underserved features Brian Durkin, Sr. Group Manager & Head of User Experience, Data & Analytics at BNY Mellon. Brian leveraged his art degree into some web design work but found his true passion was in information architecture. He came to this realization in the middle of an interview, which he politely asked to terminate. Instead, he was offered a new IA job the next day! Also covered: World IA Day, getting fintech to understand IA, and the fun parts of working for Nickelodeon.     Charles Zicari, Brian's first real IA mentor: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-zicari-90798/   IxDA: https://ixda.org/   UXPA Boston: http://uxpaboston.org/    World IA Day, Brian started the one for Boston: https://worldiaday.org/    Some of the past speakers of World IA Day Boston:  Peter Morville - https://www.linkedin.com/in/morville    Steve Portigal - https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveportigal/  Josh Seiden - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jseiden/  Abby Covert - https://www.linkedin.com/in/abbytheia/  Aaron Irizarry - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaroni/  Todd Zaki-Warfel - https://www.linkedin.com/in/zakiwarfel/  Dana Chisnell - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-chisnell/  Christina Wodtke - https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinawodtke/ 

Many in the UX world are familiar with the likes of Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen, Peter Morville, Lou Rosenfeld, and Richard Saul Wurman, but are you familiar with others who helped pave the way for the discipline? For the 100th episode of The World of UX, Darren takes time to pay homage to several pioneers of the discipline, especially many who have been tremendously impactful, but overlooked by the masses. Tune in to hear who's on Darren's list of special UX pioneers."#ux#eq#podcasts#cxofmradio#cxofm#realuxtalk#worldofux#uxhomageCheck out the new World of UX website at https://www.worldoux.com.Visit the UX Uncensored blog at https://uxuncensored.medium.com. 

Power of Ten is a podcast hosted by Andy Polaine about design operating at many levels, zooming out from thoughtful detail through to organisational transformation and on to changes in society and the world. My guest in this episode is Jorge Arango, a consultant, author, speaker, and educator and host of The Informed Life, a podcast that explores how people organize information to get things done on which I was a guest. Jorge is the co-author of the famous “polar bear book”, Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond, that he wrote with Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville. More recently he published Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places. We talked about organising information, personal knowledge management systems and why gardens are the best metaphor for working with complexity. Show Links Episode page & transcripts  Jorge Jorge's website The Informed Life podcast Jorge's talks Jorge's CCA page. Jorge on Twitter Jorge on LinkedIn Andy Subscribe to Power of Ten Subscribe to Andy's newsletter Doctor's Note Andy's online courses Andy on Twitter Andy on LinkedIn Polaine.com Suggestions? Feedback? Get in touch!

Dan Klyn is co-founder of The Understanding Group, an information architecture consultancy based in Michigan. Dan has also created useful and influential IA frameworks, and in this conversation, we focus on his latest: the BASIC framework. If you're enjoying the show, please rate or review it in Apple's Podcasts directory: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-informed-life/id1450117117?itsct=podcast_box&itscg=30200 Show notes Dan Klyn The Understanding Group The BASIC framework Chris Farnum Peter Morville Louis Rosenfeld Andreas Resmini Richard Saul Wurman Bob Royce Edith Farnsworth House Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Kimbell Art Museum Louis Kahn Renzo Piano Brian Eno Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Dan, welcome to the show. Dan: Thank you. Jorge: It is such a pleasure to have you here. As I was telling you before we started recording, you're one of the people that I originally thought of having as a guest on the show, when I first conceived of the show. I am constantly inspired and just amazed by the contributions you've brought to our field of information architecture. And I'm honored to have you on the show and looking forward to hearing about you. In particular, about a framework that you've been sharing recently. About Dan Jorge: But before we get into that, I'm hoping that you will tell us about yourself. Who are you, Dan? Dan: Sure. Let's see... I was a fat baby. I think the reason that I have the pleasure of talking with you today... we can blame Chris Farnham, who is an information architect in Southeast Michigan. I went to a conference about information architecture in 2009. My first professional conference had ever been to in any field, and I didn't know if I was particularly welcome or fit well into the field of information architecture, but I had a mentor who encouraged me and that was Peter Morville. So Chris Farnham and Peter Morville, these two guys from Ann Arbor are the only people I thought I knew at this conference, which was true for about five minutes. And as we were walking to the opening reception, Chris said, "Hey, those two guys walking in front of us... those guys are architect-architects. Like, you know, like what you're interested in, Klyn!" Because even back then, the architecture part of information architecture is what I was mostly interested in. And walking in front of me on the way to this opening reception at the IA Summit, as it was called back then was Jorge Arango and Andreas Resmini. And I never talked to Chris again for four or five years, I think. And I have held fast to Jorge and Andreas ever since. And I'm so grateful to have had... I've been given by you guys permission to be as excited as I am about the architecture part of information architecture. Which is so different than my experience with other professionals in the built environment. When I started enthusing about information architecture and the ways that I think what makes places good for people in the built environment has something immediately relevant for us to learn from, as people who make digital products and services.... they're not into it. They scold me for not having consulted the correct sources. Or having the wrong opinions about some buildings or what have you. And you and Andreas both welcomed my amateurism, at a time when you could have just, you know... I don't know! So that's why I'm here. Hi, my name is Dan Klyn. I'm an information architect and I am fascinated by — I am on fire about — the ways that architecture in the built environment can teach us how to do things with digital products and services. And any second now, metaverse-icle products and services and such. So that's what I'm interested. I'm interested in the spatiality of meaning. That is a mouthful that nobody wants to hear, but that's how I say it sometimes. And I have drawn most of my ways of thinking about and seeing this from an increasingly intensive pursuit of Richard Saul Wurman from a biographical standpoint. I figured if I could learn everything that he knows about information architecture, then that would be pretty good. So I've been trying to turn him upside down and shake him, and catch what comes out of his pockets for about seven years or so now. So, that's what I do. Jorge: That's a great intro and I feel like this episode is turning into the Jorge and Dan mutual appreciation society. But I think that we can't wrap up the intro without also naming the fact that you are a co-founder of The Understanding Group, Dan: right? The Understanding Group Dan: That's right. Yes! And Mr. Wurman having been so essential to the founding of our company. Bob Royce and I, when he... he as a serial entrepreneur was in the school of information and library studies at the same time that Peter and Lou were back in the day. And so, as somebody from a business development background standpoint, interested in information architecture, his interest in it went all the way back to Richard Saul Wurman. And the first time I saw Richard in person was a speech that he gave at the University of Michigan and the only person that I knew in the audience and we sat right next to each other right in the front row is Bob Royce. So yeah, together, our enthusiasm for information architecture, digital strategy... whatever ways that we can apply architectural thinking to usually large-scale software and information systems, that's what we wanted to start a company to focus on. And certainly we were inspired by and got to learn through their advice. Peter and Lou having operated the world's first really large scale information architecture consultancy, which was called Argus, which operated back in the late 1990s and disbanded, about the same time that a lot of things did in March of 2001. Yeah, there's probably a way that you could have a business that focuses on information architecture and that... we want it to be that. So, that was 10 years ago and TUG continues to be among the... if you were to say, "Hey, who should we get to help us with information architecture?" people would probably say, Jorge Arango, Abby Covert. An aspiration that we're just pleased that we are often in that same sort of three or four things that you would just know about when it comes to taking on significant information architectural challenges in software and digital products and services, yeah! That's what we've become. "The spatiality of meaning" Jorge: I want to circle back to this phrase, "the spatiality of meaning." And you referenced being inspired by Mr. Wurman. And you also talked about "Being on fire about the architecture of the built environment," and talking about gravitating to Andreas and myself at that first information architecture summit. And one thing that the three of us have in common, the three of us being Mr. Wurman, Andreas, and myself, is that our background is in building architecture. But that is not your background, right? Dan: Correct. Library science over here. Jorge: Library science. So, I'm wondering what drew you to the architecture of the built environment? Dan: It's gonna sound... it's exactly... think of the most boring cliche way to answer your question and that's the answer. Since I was a little boy, I had a Crayola drafting set of a T-square and a triangle. And big paper. And my parents got me a tilty desk. Like it was the only thing I knew that I wanted it to be until I didn't think that I could because I was bad at math. So, for as long as I can remember, I wanted to make the shapes that I make on paper turn into an experience that people could have. Especially me, but other people may be also. And since then, and especially since becoming a consultant who travels a lot, I have had an extraordinary opportunity to go to buildings. And I have had my cognition, my heart rate, my pulse, my skin temperature... I have been physically changed by every different kind of place that I've been to. And by doing that on purpose, that's where the BASIC Framework comes from is an awareness that I developed at some point that what these buildings do is they are machines that uniquely change our human experience by changing our blood pressure and our cognition and our pulse. And the effects that it uses are both, you know, the physics of the earth, the density of the walls... if you're in a crypt of a cathedral and the density of the walls is two feet thick and it is granite, the air pressure changes in there make what your body can... what's possible for you to experience has been concrete-ized literally in ways that are just extraordinary. And so, by putting myself in so many of these different places, and yes, I've catered to my list of initially is canonical buildings that architects who control what is considered to be a good building in the Western tradition, right? But that's the kind of list that I started from. And by going to as many of these places as possible, continually re-energizing and re-believing in reifying the reality... not some neat-o idea that I choose to have, but an actual experience that is undeniable that the way that these places have been set up through the arrangement of material and space and through the arrangement of the information that is either encoded in that material or inscribed on that material, the situatedness of things in space changes how we... how we experience things. The radical architect, Christopher Alexander — people scoff! Like, spit their coffee out when he says stuff like that he knows how to make God appear in a field. But that's... I think also a part of why I've been so interested in this is having been raised in a deeply religious context and hearing about power that people can have access to and experiences with and transformation, transfiguration, transubstantiation, immanence... that I've had those experiences. And they're not so much with sermons of words — it's sermons in stone that really changed my whole life. So, now I seek out experiences in places so that I can understand better how to somehow transfer or remember at a minimum, all of the different ways that I've been made to feel through experiences with architectures. And then, how can I tap into that at some other time for some other purpose. That's how I've been trying to rationalize such the luxurious experience of going to so many kick-ass buildings. Jorge: Well, that was beautifully put and I'll reflect it back to you. What I heard there is that this phrase, "the spatiality of meaning," at least part of it, has to do with the fact that buildings play a functional role in our lives, right? Like they keep us dry and warm — you know, safe from external conditions. But there's this other role that they can play — at least some buildings can play — which has to do with somehow moving us, reminding us of perhaps higher states of being somehow. And the question is... you and I both work on architecting experiences that people have mostly within the confines of the small glass rectangles that we carry around in our pockets. And what's the connection between these — if any — between these transcendent experiences that you have when walking into a special place and the sort of experience that you can have through a digital artifact? Back to screens Dan: Well, I'm trying to think about it in terms of the last thing that I worked on or some real case in point. And I'm thinking about an app that I've been working on that has all kinds of different functionality. And there are ideas about what does prominence mean? So, imagine that this app that has all sorts of different kinds of functions, that there's a giant global organization, and there are people who are mapped to those functions and that they all feel like their thing needs to be the most important and therefore the most prominent or vice versa. So, there's a space race, or there's a competition for the most opportune positions on screens in this screen-iverse that they operate. And finding an order that both works from the, "I'm a brain in a jar," and there are semantic categories and there are things... there's knowledge in the world, not just in my head. And on the basis of knowledge in the world and on figuring things out from a sense-making standpoint, there's no right way. But there are good ways. And so what I'm trying to learn from the built environment, every location in the built environment is special. So, it's not so much that I've been to special places and then, "oh crap. What do you do when you're working on something quotidian? Something that's just every day." It's the idea that every place is charged with wonder. Every... everything is amazing. Because look at it! There it is! People made that! And so, trying to help this organization, this global organization with all these poor people who are, you know, if their thing is high up on the screen, then they win. Trying to posit order for how to situate all of those things in space that's both good for the organization that they can continue to operate as an organization and as a business. It's good for people who have to use it because it isn't like, "oh! Where is the blank?" And also then the trifecta is: and could all of this be key to our embodiment as human beings? And so, we came up with a way to position proprioceptively. Imagine yourself looking at your phone screen. There's left, right, up, down. To make left and right and up and down mean something, other than "most important," "least important," or "most prominent" and "least prominent." So, things of this nature you can expect to find them over to the left. Things of that other nature you can expect to find those to the right. And governance... a way of working with the organization to help diffuse the person with the highest tolerance for discomfort wins, for there to be reasons for belonging and space and place that everybody can understand, and that, when people follow it, it creates more wellbeing and prosperity. It sounds like fantasy, but that's really what we get to do when we're doing it right. And it's great! And I couldn't do it if I didn't have these experiences in my own body and have felt and believed in the pleasure and the learnability and the... to reliably be able to reach over here and get something because you know it's going to be there. And on what basis, other than, "well, that's where it always was." Jorge: What I'm getting from what you're saying there is that in both cases, in both the physical environment than these information environments, there is the possibility of a higher level of order that might bring coherence to what might otherwise be forces that are pulling the experience into different directions, that make it incoherent, right? Dan: That's right. The BASIC framework Jorge: And with that in mind I wanted to ask you... during your career, you've shared a few frameworks that have been influential and helped us see the type of work that we do in different ways. And recently you've shared a draft of a framework that is new to me at least, called BASIC. And it seems to me to be an effort in this direction of providing kind of a framework for order and coherence. Dan: Yes. Jorge: And I was hoping that you would tell us about the BASIC framework. What is it? Dan: I am learning along with everybody else what it is. That's one of the risks! When you put something out there that isn't done yet, that's the reason to do something like that. And so, having put it out there not entirely baked, and then asking for and eliciting feedback... one of the first most powerful pieces of feedback that I got after presenting it for the first time at a meetup online was from a colleague in the UK who posited that what BASIC is, is it's about where you as the designer... it gives you five vantage points into the problem space. It's like, "where should I stand to see the thing that would be good to notice?" So, that's one way to start explaining it is: it's an easy-to-remember acronym that gives you five ways to have a posture vis-a-vis some kind of a complex system. And if you stand in these five places, and if you ask some of the questions that I've provided with each of those postures, then possibly you will see the architecture of the thing. So, that's really the goal. And one of the ways that I came to make it, was a friend of mine... we went on a field trip. We went to the Edith Farnsworth house in Plano, Illinois by Mies van der Rohe. And we were so lucky! It was in the winter and we were the only ones on the tour. So we had a whole hour with the docent. Couldn't go in because it was winter, have since of rectified that. Have been back with the same friend and we got to go inside. But first time we're just outdoors, in the snow, circling the Edith Farnsworth house. And then afterward, I shared the photos that I took. And my friend noted that... he looked at the photos that he... we went to the same place, we took many of the same pictures. But that there was something going on in the pictures that I was taking that he wanted to know about, because it seemed like I was accessing different parts of the same experience. And whether it was just purely on the basis of the otherness of the what... something that somebody else is doing it in the same place, you wonder what that is? It's not... I don't believe it's because I have superior aesthetic judgements or anything like that. I think it has to do though with having developed a set of postures for when I'm trying to relate to buildings first of all, in order to see the right stuff. By my own internal compass, the right stuff. And then, talking this out with my friend and then him encouraging me to do something with it because it seemed like it could be learnable. Like, if I stood there and if I cocked my head that way, I would see it too. So, that's what it is. It's postures that you can use. Questions... So, the first one is boundaries. And if you didn't do any of the other elements, if you found a way to perceive the boundaries... and where was the boundary before where it is now, and who gets to move the... just some really dumb questions about boundaries and where one material stops and another begins is an especially potent thing to notice in buildings. But whether it's buildings or an intranet, the boundaries. How did they get here? Where were they before? Is there a plan to make there be different boundaries? Do you see any evidence of, you know, the ghost traces of where things used to be, or where they're fixing to go? And then you can go right on down the line. And the second one, let's see, what is the second one? You've got the book there, you tell me! Jorge: There is a little booklet that you can print out and I'm holding one in my hands. So, the first one is boundaries. The second one is associations. Dan: Yes. Perfect! So, what do we associate a stepped gable with in the built environment? I'm Dutch. If you go to Holland, Michigan, nearby where I live, there are these buildings that were built within the last 20 years that have these stepped gables not because they serve any functional purpose, but because they remind everybody who lives there, that many of the people here have Dutch heritage, and that that's how the buildings look. So there are direct associations like that. There are more diffused associations, like the kind... does it link to a PDF? You associate that differently than if it's to HTML page, then if it's a video. So just associations. The A, S... Situatedness. Why is anything where it is? If you go to the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas — which I encourage you to do — there has been an expansion to that museum. It was originally by Louis Kahn opened in 1972, the year I was born. An expansion to the museum was done by Renzo Piano in the nineties. You now enter the Kimbell from the back, relative to where the architect imagined you would enter the building. So just little... why is anything where it is gives you access to so many architectural decisions that were made in the environment. And then the last two are twinned. And probably I'm too in love with BASIC because it's so easy to remember and I want it to be basic like food-hole, air-hole, dumb-basic. But the last two are invariants. So, what are the forces in the environment that don't change or that seem like they don't change? Brian Eno has wisely said that repetition is a form of change. So you have to be careful with this one. And that's why it is paired with cycles. And those two postures, those two places to stand relative to some complex system... if you were able to perceive what was invariant in the environment, that would explain to you why it shows up the way that it does and each of these elements in the model has a building that I've been to. They're all in the United States so far, and the example cartoon of a building for invariance is a garage I saw in Seattle. Where I live in Michigan, the roofs are a pointy, peaked roof, like kids around here would draw a picture of a house. But in Seattle, there's a shape of a roof that is inverted to catch the rain because it is on a steep hill, in a microclimate that is a rainforest basically. So, it's an invariant. There's so much water there, you're going to change the shape of the roof to rise to channel those forces better. And that was the consequence... consequence to that, a million other decisions about the building. And then cycle, the last one, you can plug that one into what's invariant. In Michigan, we have four seasons. In Seattle, they have maybe two. And so, by looking at what has the system done to anticipate cyclical change in the environment that it's in... put all those five postures together, ask a question from each one, and I feel pretty good that you're not talking about the design so much as you're talking about the architecture of the system. Jorge: What attracts me so much about this framework is that it takes a systemic lens at examining the... or a set of lenses, right? To your point, these are different vantage points from which you can examine the system. And although it is grounded in architecture, as in built architecture — and like you said, the booklet includes drawings of buildings as illustrations of these various lenses — they seem applicable to other types of things that might be architected, right? Like this notion that you can examine the system through the perspective of what distinctions does it manifest, versus what perhaps memories, cultural or otherwise, it triggers, right? Like those are very different perspectives that are part of architected systems, regardless of whether they are buildings or what have you. Dan: That's right. And the caveat here with any methods that I've developed, if you're trying to apply them, it has to be in an architectural context where the nature of the change that is expected or at least possible? Is more than an increment. It can be executed incrementally but the nature of the change... if you're looking for recommendations about how to change the architecture, it should be safe to presume that those kinds of changes are harder to do, possibly take more time, and are more costly because they are more consequential. And so, if people are just making shit, then this framework won't help you because there isn't a reason for everything that was done. And that is... I'm so glad that we've got to here and maybe because of time, we might land here or start landing here, is: the built environment is such a terrific teacher because almost always, except now, every decision that was made is because of a reason. And the traceability of every move that is made to a reason, you need to do that in design too, if you're doing it right. But when you're talking about architecture what that means is that it's being taken on and thought of systemically. And if the thing is being made in a way where it doesn't care about being systemic, then these lenses won't help you because it just is the way that it is because it is. This all presumes total accountability for every move that you make as a recommender of changes to an environment. And I've recommended changes to a digital environment that have made it so that people's jobs went away. I'm glad that I haven't worked on products and services where the changes I've recommended have caused harm to people, that I know of, but it's certainly possible. And as we enter into this metaverse time of everything being part of the experiences that we work on, I think having a framework like this is also helpful because it might check an impulsive feeling of, "oh, I get it." Or, "I've seen it." Or, "I know what it is." Or, "clearly the solution is..." Maybe this framework would help you go slower and not move with so much certainty. Maybe these are five ways to undermine the decision that you were about to make. And I would be good with that, in most cases. Jorge: How do you keep that from paralyzing you altogether? Because when you say you have full accountability over a thing, like... Dan: It all depends on having extraordinary clients. Without clients who are willing to work in that fashion... I mean, whether you want to take maximum accountability for your recommendations or not, Jorge: I can see what you mean, but I can also understand how that sense would or could paralyze you as a designer, right? So, how do you keep the dance going? Responsibility Dan: It's a two way street and if the client isn't playing along and giving you that accountability and that responsibility, then you're not actually... you know, it's not actually happening. So, I think it absolutely depends on having the right clients and TUG has been so fortunate to have not prospered enough to have clients that aren't the right kind. It's weird to engage with information architects to affect change to complex digital products and services. And I think we show up... weird enough, where we've scared away the ones who wouldn't be a good partner with us in wanting to have that level of accountability, that level of traceability for the recommendations that we make. Because it requires that the stakeholders be super accountable to what they want, because you're going to get it, right? Like, that's what I'm saying is, as your architect, if you show me your intent, if you let me make a model of your intent and then the model is more or less correct, then I can make a whole bunch of decisions about the situatedness of things in your space that will deliver against that intent. So God help you if you don't know what you want. Because I need that in order to make decisions on your... with you, not on your behalf. When we started TUG a long time ago, we decided the word agency must not be the word for... We don't want to borrow anyone's agency for money for a couple of months and then give it back to them. They need to keep their agency all along the way to keep instructing us and intending back when we make our moves to make sure that things stay good. So, yeah, it's all about having the right clients and quite frankly, it has a lot to do with my own personal choices over the last year or so to get away from consulting as much as I personally can, and be more in the mode of scholarship and writing because I don't know how much longer the client world is going to be able to make room for the kinds of work that I personally want to do. Closing Jorge: Well Dan, I would love to hear more about what that might be. And I would like to extend you an invitation to do another recording with me, if you are open to it, to explore that and the notion of architecting the thing that architects the thing, somehow, right? Because that's what is implied in what you're saying, I think. But for now, where can folks follow up with you? Dan: Well, I think maybe BASIC would be a good way to start. So if you go to understandinggroup.com/basic, you can download a PDF of the most recent version of the little mini booklet. I've created an instructional video for how to cut and fold said booklet so that it has its maximum booklet-iness for you when you make it. And from there I... yeah, I'm omni-available, except through Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram. Jorge: You're not going Meta. Dan: I would accept money from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to research the potential for harm to human beings, through what they intend to do in the so-called metaverse. But I'm not willing to use their products. Jorge: It sounds like that might yet be another reason for us to have a second conversation here. But I'll just allude to it because I'll include links to the stuff that you've been discussing on the show. And, I'll just reiterate that the booklet is beautiful, simple, useful. I have one printed out and keep it on my desk. So, I encourage folks to check it out. Thank you, Dan, for... Dan: The only thing better than that for me Jorge, is if I could be little and be there on your desk instead of the booklet, but that's... I'd love that. Jorge: I can see you on a little screen here. On a little window in my screen, so... it's not the same, but it's... it'll have to do for now. Well, thank you so much for being with us, Dan. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. Dan: Let's talk again.

In this two-part episode interview, Lisa and Andy talk to information architect and author Peter Morville. In part 1, they discuss Peter's recent move to a farm in Virginia—and the steep learning curve of becoming a farmer.  In part 2, Peter offers his perspective on information architecture and discusses his methods for tackling I.A. projects with clients. He also considers some of the challenges that a new generation of designers and information architects face in building impactful digital experiences. Episode transcript   About Peter Morville Peter is a pioneer of the fields of information architecture and user experience. His bestselling books include Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Intertwingled, Search Patterns, and Ambient Findability. He has been helping people to plan since 1994, and advises such clients as AT&T, Cisco, Harvard, IBM, the Library of Congress, Macy's, the National Cancer Institute, and Vodafone. He has delivered conference keynotes and workshops in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. His work has been covered by Business Week, NPR, The Economist, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. His latest book is Planning for Everything. Peter lives in Virginia with his wife, two daughters, and a dog named Asha. He blogs at intertwingled.org.

In this two-part episode interview, Lisa and Andy talk to information architect and author Peter Morville. In part 1, they discuss Peter's recent move to a farm in Virginia—and the steep learning curve of becoming a farmer.  In part 2, Peter offers his perspective on information architecture and discusses his methods for tackling I.A. projects with clients. He also considers some of the challenges that a new generation of designers and information architects face in building impactful digital experiences. Episode transcript   About Peter Morville Peter is a pioneer of the fields of information architecture and user experience. His bestselling books include Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Intertwingled, Search Patterns, and Ambient Findability. He has been helping people to plan since 1994, and advises such clients as AT&T, Cisco, Harvard, IBM, the Library of Congress, Macy's, the National Cancer Institute, and Vodafone. He has delivered conference keynotes and workshops in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. His work has been covered by Business Week, NPR, The Economist, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. His latest book is Planning for Everything. Peter lives in Virginia with his wife, two daughters, and a dog named Asha. He blogs at intertwingled.org.

Conversations about Information Architecture Dan Brown talks with Peter Morville about the Lens of Descriptors and Exemplars

No guest in this episode. Instead, I answer listener questions. If you have a question you'd like me to address on the show, please email me at live@theinformed.life or tweet to @informed_life. Listen to the show Download episode 67 Show notes The Informed Life episode 17: Rachel Price on Improvisation The Informed Life episode 65: Sarah Barrett on Architectural Scale A brief history of information architecture (pdf) by Peter Morville Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman David Macaulay Alexander Tsiaras Why Software is Eating the World by Marc Andreessen (WSJ paywall) Dave Gray The Information Architecture Institute How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango The Information Architecture Conference World IA Day Information Architects Facebook group UX Design Information Architecture LinkedIn group Mags Hanley's Information Architecture Masterclasses Jorge Arango's Information Architecture Essentials workshop Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript A question from Vinish Garg The first question comes from Vinish Garg. And I apologize if I have mispronounced that. Vinish is based in Chandigarh, and he writes, "the design agencies with around a hundred plus headcount have big and experienced teams in user research, interaction, design, and UX design. But many of them don't have an information architect. How do they see the need of a specialist IA and make space for this role?" And he adds a postscript, he says "those who have an IA, I spoke to many of them, but they are doing wireframes or card sorting without really understanding anything of taxonomy or findability. This is misplaced IA." All right. So, let me take the question first. Information architecture in general has withered as a job title. In the last 20 years, we've seen fewer and fewer people signing up to become information architects in organizations, not just in internal design teams, but also in agencies. In fact, I don't know many organizations that still have internal information architects. One notable exception — and I'm just calling it out because we've had two of their folks in the show — is Microsoft. Rachel Price and Sarah Barrett, both former guests of The Informed Life, are information architects within Microsoft. So, that's an example of an organization that still has the role internally. But I think that the more common scenario is that there is someone with another job title. It might be a UX designer or interaction designer or something like that, is tasked with structuring the system somehow. Sadly. I think that the even more common scenario is that no one does this explicitly at all, and they're just basically painting screens. I suspect that is the more common scenario. And it's a shame, because information architecture is very important, especially if you're dealing with a large complex system that presents a lot of information to end users. I want to comment a bit on the postscript. I think that it may be the case that there are people who, as Vinish points out, are practicing what they call information architecture, but they're doing it very superficially. And I encounter this most often in the confusion that people have between site maps and information architecture. I've seen folks draw up an outline in the form of a site map and basically call it a day. A site map is a useful artifact for communicating structural intent, but there's much more to information architecture than making a site map. And for many interactive systems, a site map might not even be the most appropriate artifact to communicate intent. Site maps tend to be very hierarchical, which is something that is more appropriate for some systems than others. I expect that, given the waning of information architecture, as I was saying earlier, much of what is practiced today under the rubric of information architecture is kind of cargo cult IA, where folks go through the motions of doing something like putting together a site map without understanding the reasoning behind the decisions they're making or why they're even making the artifact at all. And this is not something that's unique to IA. There are a lot of other areas of practice, other disciplines, where folks adopt the superficial trappings of the practice without really understanding the foundations. And in the case of information architecture, the foundations have to do with making meaningful distinctions. So, setting things aside in categories that are recognizable to the users of the system, that allow them to relate to the information in the system in meaningful ways, with the goal of ultimately making the system easier to use by making information easier to find and understand. Now, Vinish asked specifically about the context of agencies. I don't know much about the Indian market, but here in the U.S., the role of agencies in the design process has also waned as compared to 20 years ago. A lot of the work is happening internally in organizations, and that might be part of the reason why the role has waned as well. Because I think that people think about information architecture — if they think about it at all — when there's a major system change, when there's a redesign or a new product is being built and not so much during the day-to-day operations of the system. Again, there are exceptions. I called out Rachel and Sarah, who are part of a team that has ongoing responsibilities, because it's such a large system where so much content is produced. But in many cases, folks only need to do this sort of thing when they're making a major change, when they're implementing a new system or redesigning a system, as I said before. Which would lead me to expect that it is a role that would be more appropriate for design agencies, if, for no other reason, because design agencies do deal with more projects at the beginning their life, as opposed to the operational phase of the project. But alas, as Vinish points out, the role has also been waning in agencies as well. I don't know how they see the need for IA specialists. I don't know that they'd see the need for IA specialists. I believe that more likely they are experiencing the pain of not having an information architect in the team. Peter Morville has written of the "pain with no name" in reference to information architecture, this idea that people in the team might know that there's a problem, but they don't know how to name it. And they don't know that I'm more careful distinction making our structuring of the information in the environment might be part of the solution. And the net result is that frankly, information architecture isn't as popular as it used to be. And that may be a failing on the part of us who practice IA. We simply haven't been very good at explaining why it's important, why it's needed and why teams should consider having folks look after this stuff. That said, I know that there are people doing it out there. They just don't have the job title information architect — or at least that's what I would like to be the case. A question from Jose Gutierrez The next question comes from Jose Gutierrez; I think Jose is writing from Costa Rica. He writes, "I'm curious about what subjects does IA impact, but people normally don't associate with." These days, most people who think about information architecture — at least the few that do — think of it in relation to user experience design or digital design. But when I first learned about information architecture, I did so through Richard's Saul Wurman's 1996 book Information Architects. The impression that I got from that book was that IA was much, much broader. The very cover of the book has three definitions of what information architects are, and the first one says, "the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear." There's nothing in there about digital anything. We encounter patterns inherent in data and complexity in many different parts of reality, not just in digital systems. In fact, while the book touches on digital design, it's remit as much broader. It profiles folks like author David Macaulay, who has produced a series of wonderful books that explain how things work, or Alexander Tsiaras who works in medical imaging. And there's also cartography and illustration and yep, also some digital design, like structuring websites and that sort of thing, which is what we today, mostly associate with information architecture. And this isn't surprising because as software has eaten more of the world — to use Marc Andreessen's memorable phrase — more and more of our information is digital, and we experience more of the information that we deal with in digital environments. But structuring information to ease findability and understandability is much older than computers. I remember seeing a presentation many years ago by Dave Gray on the history of the book as an artifact, which really opened my eyes to this. Before there were books, we would write down information in things like scrolls. And what we know of as books — the form of a book, what is called a codex — was an innovation. It allowed for greater portability and random access to the information in the book, because you didn't have to unroll the whole thing to get to a particular section. Those were all innovations, right? But the very first codexes didn't have things like page numbers or tables of contents or indices or any of those things, and those were all innovations that allowed readers to find information more easily in books. I think that those are examples of information architecture, and they are many centuries old. So, any time that you're trying to make things easier to find and understand — whether it be in a book or a built environment or a medical image, or an app — Information architecture can help. As I said, in response to Vinish's question, I consider the essence of information architecture to be about making more meaningful distinctions. And this is something that applies to all sorts of aspects of reality. In fact, part of the intent for launching this podcast was precisely because I think that information architecture manifests in so many different fields. And I'm very interested in hearing from folks about how structuring, categorizing, organizing information more mindfully helps them get things done. A question from Elijah Claude Finally, here's a question from Elijah Claude. And again, I hope that I am pronouncing your name properly. I believe that Elijah is writing from Atlanta. He writes, " what are some of the best ways to learn good information architecture outside of school and work. In other words, how do you do personal projects where you can practice real information architecture? Great resources for IA books, podcasts, videos, et cetera." This question has two parts. So, there's a part that has to do with learning IA. And there's another part that has to do with practicing IA in our everyday lives. I must note upfront that I personally don't like to draw hard lines between life, work, school and all these things. I think that you can practice information architecture at any time. Information architecture is as much a mindset as it is a practice. And it's a mindset that has to do with looking beneath the surface of things to the way that things are organized and structured, and the ways in which we create shared meaning in how we organize and structure things in our world. That sounds a little abstract, so I'll give you an example. When we moved into the house that we're currently living in, my wife and I had a conversation about where we were going to store the various objects in our kitchen. So, we had boxes with things like plates and cutlery and food items, spices, and such. There are many categories of food items. There are dry foods, and there are big bulky foods that take up a lot of space, things like sacks of flour, rice and stuff like that. And here we are in this new house with a different layout than the one that we're used to, and many places in which to put things. And we had to coordinate where we were going to store things. Because if not, we would make it very difficult for each other to find things when we need them. And that's something that happened somewhat organically. We had an informal conversation saying, "Hey, maybe the cutlery can go in this drawer. And maybe this cabinet close to the stove would be perfect for things like spices and so on." Some things were obvious where they should go, others less so — and the arrangement has evolved over time. Over the time that we've been living here, we've occasionally moved things and found better ways to organize our kitchen. So, it's an ongoing thing and we talk about it. I think that it would be different if either one of us was organizing the kitchen for ourselves as individuals. When you must consider that at least one other person is going to be sharing the place with you, then you must take into consideration how they are going to be able to navigate the environment to find the stuff that they need. And I consider that to be an information architecture challenge. I'll give you another example. And funny enough, this one also has to do with our kitchen. Recently, we discovered that we have a minor problem. This is something that has emerged in the pandemic. It used to be that before the pandemic, I would often work outside of the house. And of course, with the arrival of the pandemic, more of us have been working from home. And as I've started working from home — and I tend to wake up very early — I would find that some days I would feed Bumpkin, our dog. I would feed bumpkin. And then, later in the morning, my wife, who normally feeds Bumpkin, would come along and would feed him not knowing that that I had already fed him. Bumpkin can be very insistent if he's hungry. So, if he comes knocking on my home office door, I will feed him because that's what gets him to stop knocking. And my wife and I have been prototyping a system to let each other know if Bumpkin has eaten or not. I wrote two sticky notes, one that said, "Bumpkin has eaten breakfast" and the other one said, "Bumpkin has eaten dinner." And we put it up on the cabinet where we keep his food. And the idea was that every time that she or I fed him a meal, we would place the appropriate sticky on the outside of the cabinet door. And that kind of worked for a while. But the glue the sticky started wearing out after switching them around so many times. So, we tried something else. We tried another sticky, this one on the refrigerator door with a checkbox. And one checkbox says, "Bumpkin has eaten breakfast" and the other checkbox says, "Bumpkin has eaten dinner." And we have a little magnet that we move between them. And what we discovered with that new prototype is that the sticky is much more resilient, because we're not moving it around, but it's in the wrong part of the environment because we're normally not looking in the refrigerator when we're feeding Bumpkin. So, we often forget to move the magnet. And I'm now thinking about the third rev of this thing, which would combine the two. And this will probably involve putting some kind of magnetic board on the door where we keep the dog food. And I consider all of these to be information architecture problems. On the one hand, clarifying the distinction between what was the last meal that Bumpkin had eaten, that's information architecture. And another is the location of this marker in the environment. Like I said, we were having a lot more traction when we had the sticky on the door that had the dog food in it than when we put it on the refrigerator door. And the only reason why we did it, there was a completely technical reason, which is that the fridge is already magnetized. So, these are examples of information architecture or architectural thinking at play in real-world problems — admittedly a very simple one. But it's not unusual. It's not unusual for us to apply that kind of mindset to organizing the real world. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we structure our environments so that we can get things done. And it doesn't just happen in information environments, it happens in physical environments as well. So, that's with regards to the practice question. The learning question is a bit tougher, because as I have said in the previous questions in this episode, interest in information architecture has waned over the last 20 years. So, resources are less plentiful than they used to be. The Information Architecture Institute, which was the preeminent place that I would point people to who wanted to learn about IA has seized operations. It feels to me like the discipline is in something of a state of transition. I am sure that there is a robust future for information architecture, but it's hard for me right now to point to any one definitive resource and say, this is what you should check out. There are books. That is the first thing that I recommend that folks check out. And Elijah, given the fact that you asked about non-work or school related contexts, the number one book that I would recommend for you, if you haven't seen it already, is Abby Covert's How to Make Sense of Any Mess, which is a primer on information architecture. It's a beautiful book in that it really articulates the core issues that transcend digital in a very useful way. Another book — and this one is, alas, a bit self-serving — is the fourth edition of the polar bear book, Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond. And I say it's self-serving because I had the great privilege of having been invited to coauthor the fourth edition alongside the original authors, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. And that book is more specific to digital information environments, but I still think that it's one of the best places to learn about IA. There are also conferences. The two most prominent are the Information Architecture Conference and World IA Day. Both of those happen in the spring. The IA Conference is global. It usually happens in one city and folks fly from all over the world — or at least they did in the before times. The last two years, it's been virtual because of COVID. But it's more global, and it's a central gathering for IAS and the IA-curious. If you are interested in learning more about IA, I would recommend that you participate in the IA Conference. World IA Day is more of a localized initiative. It's a single day event and many cities participate around the world. It's driven by the communities in those cities. So again, super local. And it's a great way to meet people who are interested in information architecture in your own community. So, those are two events that I recommend: the IA Conference and World IA Day. There's also social media. There is at least one group on Facebook that is dedicated to information architecture. I know that there are also groups in LinkedIn. I haven't participated much in either of those, but I know that they exist. If that's what you prefer, you have those options. And then there are also courses. I know that Mags Hanley has a course on information architecture and by the way, a little bit of a spoiler: Mags is an upcoming guest of the show. We don't get in depth into her course, we talk about other subjects, but I know that Mags has a course that she does online and that may be worthwhile checking out. And then I have a workshop that I've done several times called Information Architecture Essentials, which is designed to introduce folks to the discipline. And I'm in the process of turning that into an online course as well. And by the way, if you are interested in that, I would love to hear from you, because I'm in the process of crafting that now. I'm also interested. If you have suggestions for folks like Elijah who want to find out more about information architecture. I would love to learn about other resources I might've missed, so please do get in touch. Closing So, there you have it, the first listener question episode of the show. I have other questions that folks sent in, but we didn't get a chance to get to them. So, I might do this again. Please do reach out if you enjoyed this episode, if you think I should do another one, and most especially, if you have a question yourself that you would like me to answer on the show. You can find contact information on the show's website at theinformed.life. That's also where you can find show notes and a transcript for this episode. For now, I want to thank Vinish, Jose, and Elijah for their questions. And thank you for listening. As a reminder, please rate or review the show in the Apple Podcasts app or in the Apple podcast directory. This helps other folks find it. Thanks!

Peter Morville thoughtfully unpacks the lessons he's learned in his 25 years in the field, and calls for the community to unite and make the world a better place. Highlights include: - Is UX compatible with capitalism? - Are we misusing our gifts as UX and product people? - Peter's advice for those of us trying to be perfect practitioners - How do we most effectively get stakeholders onboard with our work? - Can we fix the systems that have been used to classify and divide us? ====== Who is Peter Morville? Peter is a pioneer of the fields of information architecture and user experience, and the author of five best-selling books, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (also known as the Polar Bear Book and the IA Bible), Intertwingled, Search Patterns, Ambient Findability and Planning for Everything. Before setting up Semantic Studios in 2001, Peter was the CEO of Argus Associates, where - along with Louis Rosenfeld, whom he also co-authored the Polar Bear Book with - he led to be the foremost IA consulting firm in North America. Peter is also the Co-Founder and Past-President of the IA Institute, and has worked as a strategic advisor for many other organisations over the years. ====== Find Peter here: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/morville/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/morville/ Website: https://semanticstudios.com/ Blog: https://intertwingled.org/ ====== Thank you for tuning in! If you liked what you heard and want more ... ... please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen). You can also follow us on our other social channels for more great UX and product design tips, interviews and insights! LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-space-in-between/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespaceinbetw__n/ ====== Host: Brendan Jarvis https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/

Grace Lau is an information architect and user experience designer based in the Greater Los Angeles area. She's the co-president of World IA Day and one of the program chairs of the 2021 IA Conference. In this conversation, we discuss those professional community events, and why you should participate. Listen to the show Download episode 52 Show notes Grace Lau @lauggh on Twitter Grace G. Lau on LinkedIn My Disney Experience UCLA ASIS&T ALA SLA The Los Angeles User Experience Meetup World IA Day San Gabriel Valley UX Meetup The Information Architecture Conference Vito Discord Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Grace, welcome to the show. Grace: Thank you very much for having me. It's an honor. Jorge: No, it's an honor to have you here. For folks who might not know about you, can you please tell us about yourself? About Grace Grace: My name is Grace Lau. I'm a designer and information architect and a product designer and community organizer based outside of Los Angeles. I'm originally from Boston, though I've been in LA for about 20 years now. I started my past in library information studies. I was an IA at Disney where my claim to fame is having worked on the top-secret project for My Disney Experience, in the early days. And most recently I was a product designer at a healthcare startup in Santa Monica. Jorge: Wow. I did not know that you were at Disney behind that product and I'm a big fan and I would love to talk to you about that, but that's not what we're going to be talking about today. You described yourself as a designer, an IA and a community organizer. And I'm especially interested in the overlap between IA and community organizations. Can you tell us a little bit about your career as a community organizer? Grace: I have to say that it really started in my grad school, at the library school. At UCLA, there's a library school program and it is heavily in the archives and library studies. And there's a small number of people who were into the informatics track. During that time period, when I was there — we were just before the boom in 2007 or 2008 — and we were all scrambling to learn, like, "how do we design websites? How did we get database? And what does all that stuff?" So, I started doing a lot of event organizing as part of the student clubs, the student groups there. I was part of the student chapter for ASIS&T, ALA, and SLA. And so, we did a lot of organizing there. So, it really started from there as just hearing what people are learning, or are anxious about, and it's trying to find ways to pull people together and move resources together to help each other learn the skills needed to get into the job force. And once I left... once I graduated from there, it wasn't until the last, I'd say five or six years, that I really got back into trying to build a community. Meaning, like actually hearing what other people are worried about. Because, at Disney, that was kind of, when we first started the IA Meetup group — the older people in the LA area would know this as IA-55, and so now it's the LA UX Meetup group now that has over 6,000 people — but in the early days, it was like trying to get people together to learn about: what is IA, what is UX, what is design? And it was a great community! But over time, it got really large and it was hard to feel that sense of closeness to learn together because once events get really large, it's really hard to find that sense of... that safe space that you can go, meet people, and learn about things together. It turns into events where you have lots of people who are talking, but you're not really learning that much. And so I kind of found that space where I want to do more of that. And I did that through being involved with World IA Day in Los Angeles. And then most recently I had started a smaller UX meetup in Los Angeles called the San Gabriel Valley UX Meetup and we had much more smaller events. And we had speakers who are either very new at speaking, or still learning about products or learning about design and it was more of a learning cohort or a place where we can learn together and speak together and be able to have a platform for us to do that. Jorge: It sounds to me like you were part of organizing a meetup in LA and then you organized another meetup. Is that right? Grace: So, I was part of the World IA Day in Los Angeles. I did some of that event organizing and then I also started another one where it is a small local meetup. So as part of the LA Meetup — it's the large one where I'm a member of, which I didn't organize. Scale and scope Jorge: Oh, I see. What I'm hearing there, Grace, is that there is something about scale that changes the character of communities. Is that right? Grace: Yes, definitely. Because the bigger the platform, the bigger the audience, it's harder for new people to break in, right? So, if you go to a large space and you're hearing all these people are using jargon or terms that you don't understand, it's harder for the introverts or the wallflowers To really jump in there and be part of it and engage in more active ways. And so, having smaller events makes it easier to learn, because then you're free to ask questions and you're free to be closer to the topic at hand. Jorge: So, what I'm hearing there is that the aspect of scale that you're focusing on here has to do with how easy it is for newcomers. It also sounded to me like the communities that you're talking about have at least two factors that define them. One is kind of an area of interest, right? Like you talked about IA, UX, which is I would guess like a career or discipline area of focus. And the other one that you spoke of was geography, where the larger meetup that you talked about, seemed to me to be like LA as the geographic region, which is a huge area, right? It's a very large population. And then the second one that you spoke of sounded to me like it has a smaller geographic scope, is that right? Grace: Yeah. We call it the San Gabriel Valley UX Meetup, because we're located right outside of LA. We're a little bit East of LA. It's a very, minority-majority populated area where there's lots of Latinos and Asians in that area. And so, whenever we need to say, "want to go to a UX meetup?" It usually tends to be in the main LA area where you have to drive through the LA traffic and deal with parking, you know back before normal times. We had to deal with an hour, an hour and a half just to get to a meetup, right? It wasn't very convenient for people who are living in the 626 area, which is the San Gabriel Valley. So, my thought was like, "well, we can start a new meetup, it's closer to home, it's closer to the food that we love to eat." So, we have easy access to good food, free parking, good Boba... All these things that are important for a good meetup. And then we could be free to talk about it, we can spend hours socializing and talking about things. It's not as, I guess, as...I don't know... well, put together maybe as some of the more official UX meetups out on the West side of LA. Jorge: these things that you're talking about — food, parking, Boba, "all the things that make for a good meetup" — those all sound like they're characteristics that were applicable in the "before times," right? Grace: The before times, yeah. Jorge: So, how are you all dealing with that now? Are you still doing meetups? Meetups in the age of Covid Grace: We're taking a sabbatical, a hiatus — because of the holidays and because we're all getting ready for World IA Day. Some of the meet up organizers and also part of World IA Day as well. So, that's why we are taking a sabbatical. But we've been doing lots of happy hours. And then in the early times when we were in lockdown, we were doing lots of co-working sessions. So, lots of co-working having Discord or Zoom open, and we'll be like working and chatting at the same time, reminiscing about the good old days when we could go out and get woven together, all that stuff. Jorge: I'm asking you, because I've spoken with other folks who also run events and especially regional events... a great part of the motivation for folks coming together is like, "these are my neighbors." You know, these are the people that are part of my... not just my community of practice, but my community, right? And one of the effects of the pandemic has been the... I'm not going to use the word "erasure," but these geographic distinctions have become less relevant. I've been invited to speak at meetups in far-flung places around the world that I would not have been able to be invited to if I had had to fly there, for example. And so, it's something that is changing. And part of the reason why I wanted to speak with you on the show is because you are a community organizer, like you said, driving this local event in the San Gabriel Valley, but you've also alluded to World IA Day and you're also one of the program chairs for the 2021 Information Architecture Conference. So, I think that you're quite active in community building and in trying to bring folks together, especially in the information architecture community of practice... bring them together during this time when we cannot meet in person. And I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about these more global events... World IA Day, Information Architecture Conference. Why don't we start with what's your role in each of those? Information architecture events Grace: So, with the IA Conference, my role is as one of the program chairs. I'm one of four. So, there's myself, Cassini and Teresa and Claire. And I am specifically working on the marketing and communications part of the conference. So that means getting people together to understand like what's going on. I [also] do the volunteer updates. Whenever we get emails about like, "oh, I want to volunteer!" I try to get them to coordinate with the people who are leading those particular circles. It's really more around like the attendee and volunteer experience before the actual conference starts. Right now, at least in this phase of the planning. At the same time, I'm also inserting myself with understanding what are the good platforms that we might be using to run the conference. What are different ways that we might want to include as many people as possible, to attend a block. And so also working with the diversity, inclusion, and equity chair as well on creating more diversity at the conference as well. So, there's a lot that I'm doing there, but I guess it's not something that I can summarize in a short way. Jorge: It's worth noting for folks who might not be familiar with the IA Conference, that this is a volunteer-driven event, right? Grace: Yes, it's all volunteers. I spend at least 20 hours a week trying to get things together, trying to, get the website up or working with other volunteers to work on these things. As IAs, we tend to question a lot of what's going on and the words that we're using. So this particular year, we're focusing a lot on clean language and making sure that we're not using jargon and things that might alienate people from understanding what this conference and event is about. And of course, you know, having the name "Information Architecture" can be a little bit of a hard hurdle to run over. Jorge: Why would that be? Grace: I think it's because information architecture can be a very hard term to understand. When people hear "user experience," they're like, yeah, I got it! You know? Because UX is good, right? But then when you say, "oh, IA," because if you're seeing good IA then it's invisible. So, it's not something that is top of mind for most people. But when there is bad IA on a site, on an app, on an experience, you hear all about it. But then people want to know that the reason behind it is that it's because it's a bad IA. Jorge: All right. That's the role you're playing in the IA Conference. What about World IA Day? Grace: World IA Day, for people who don't know what it is, it's like a global awareness day. It's one day where we have local events all over the world, having talks and discussions about what IA is, what IA means. And we have a global theme every year, a new theme. This particular year, for World IA 2021, it's about curiosity. So what does curiosity have to do with information architecture? And so, this might be another way for people to understand what IA means, through the plain language way of understanding what IA is. Like what is this, what is that? How do you structure? How do you understand something? And that in itself is IA. With World IA Day, it's more globally focused. You have local events everywhere. In the past with World IA Day, it's been heavily North American and European. We have lots of events in Europe, like 20 or so in the United States, 20 events or something in Europe. But this past year, or this past summer, we've been focused on growing areas in Latin America, growing more locations in Arabic speaking countries and locations. We've been developing I guess... growing the global board of directors. So, not having just people in North America who happened to be leading the leadership, but also people from Italy and Colombia and Egypt to be part of a team as well, to understand what are the different needs of people in those countries and regions. Jorge: Great! And what is your role in helping them come about? Grace: My official title is "co-president." And my role right now is like... well, we want to do more! So, we trying to nail down sponsorships so that we can support the local organizers in hosting their local events. So right now, we just secured a sponsorship with Vito, the Vito community. They're able to provide a good platform where we can set up and help put up virtual events in a more professional way. It's really more about building community as well. We're happy to partner with Vito because they're also very community focused. They want to build community around topics of interest. We want to build a space where people can get together and learn more about IA, and how we can support that, and how can we like help with transcription and understanding the information and content that is normally just available in English or Spanish, but also in other languages too. So, we're also doing more around translation, transcription, trying to figure out what kind of platforms are out there that we can help I guess coordinate these types of efforts. Again, World IA Day is also all volunteer, all not for profit. So, it's difficult because lots of the local organizers also have full-time jobs. As someone on a global leadership team, you have to figure out how can we best support them without overwhelming them with lots of event planning logistics. So, we're trying, on the global team... we try to make it easier for them to manage their day as well. Jorge: It's worth noting the dates for these things. World IA Day, I think, is in February? Grace: Yeah! World IA Day is February 27th. We're also trying to organize regional roundtables for World IA Day. Just so we can help, you know, build more exposure to what IA is, and also to build communities in those regions. And then the IA Conference is in late April. The difference between World IA Day and the IA Conference Jorge: I've participated in both World IA Day and IA Conference for a long time. And the distinction between them has been fairly clear in my mind. The IA Conference — previously IA Summit — was a yearly gathering of folks from many parts of the world, mostly North America, but many parts of the world, who would come together for a week or so to discuss the discipline, right? And try to move the discipline forward. World IA Day was one day a year and it was more local. The intent was to have it be more regional and encourage folks to develop the community of practice in their own geography. And I'm curious now in the times that we're living in where everything is happening virtually, what happens to the distinction between these two events? Grace: That's been a very tricky question because the IA Conference has always been where people can continue their education. It is one week a year that people get together. But at the same time, it's also one of the cheaper professional conferences that are out there. So, I think before the pandemic, it's been, I don't know, at least $900, $800, to attend a conference in North America, and you usually have to pay airfare and lodging, and you actually go to a place, right? For World IA Day, it has always been either free or low cost depending on where you are. And all the local organizers have the burden of trying to find local sponsors. It's more about elevating the local community as well. So, finding local sponsors to sponsor the event and then being able to be more affordable to people who live in that area. Right now, in these times, you still have the benefit of being regional because it's in your time zone. So, I mean, ideally... yeah, you could wake up really early in the morning, like, five in the morning for me to attend events in Europe. But at the same time, that's one great advantage of it being in these times, that you can attend any of the events. But you still want to be able to maybe... you know, on some faraway date when people can meet up in person again, you can say, "Hey buddy who lives across the street, can you be my mentor? And we could talk about job hunting around here." I think still having a local community still counts a lot, because we're still navigating in our current spaces — even though having a wider global mindset is important. There's still a lot of attachment that people feel comfortable and familiarity around, like, what's around us. So for me, being able to connect with the world's IA community, is very important. At the same time, it's also important for me to build a community around me locally because it's more of a grounding effect. Jorge: What I'm hearing there is that World IA Day still has very much a local focus, where it's about building this local community of practice. I'm wondering, given your experience with doing that in the San Gabriel Valley... and also, I think that you're a local World IA Day organizer, right? Grace: Yes, I work with that, yeah. Remote regional events Jorge: So, given the times that we're in, where so much of this kind of stuff is happening remotely... Like, I have in my mind a clearer picture of how a more traditional conference, like IA Conference, how that can play out remotely, but how does a remote regional event infrastructure work? Grace: With the local events, we're still trying to promote local speakers, right? So, it's still providing more opportunities and platforms for our new speakers to get into the speaking circuit, learn about how to speak in online events. It's still a launching point for people to learn, to get used to and then before they start speaking at larger regional conferences or international conferences, even though, anyone from anywhere can speak. If people say from Atlanta want to speak at an event in Singapore, that's still very possible. It's more about time zone, right? I think the local impact is still about... it's providing an audience. People still find affinity towards, "Oh yeah, I'm going to go to the one in LA because that's still my family. That's still my community of people that I want to be touch with." Whereas when you have like a global IA day, and you have like a IA event where it's including people from all over the world, it might be intimidating for some people to reach out and to talk to people. Jorge: Does World IA Day provide frameworks or infrastructure or advice on... like I'm thinking like very tactically. It's like, what do we do? Do we set up a new Discord site to have these discussions? Like, how do folks... and I'm thinking now, like I'm putting myself in the situation of a listener who might be hearing us talk and thinking, "you know, I might want to organize something like a World IA Day Meetup in my community." What would the experience be like for those folks? Grace: So, the call for locations still open because our success criteria for organizing an event is very low. I mean, if you can get a group of people just talking about IA, then that's an event already. We have a call for location open on the website board at worldiaday.org. You can apply, we'll go through it and see you know if you need any additional support, you get set up with a location page. We'll set you up with an event page. You get access to our Discord. If you are an organizer, then you'll get access to the secret organizing channels. But if you just want to learn about what IA is, you can also get access to the same Discord server as well. We have lots of channels and topics talking about like accessibility and language and how do we want to organize a content repository to help support the events next year? Jorge: And you said it's still open. And just for folks listening in, we are recording in early December. When would that window close? Grace: Hopefully, maybe in January. Jorge: Okay, so there might still be a little bit of time left then for folks to do that. Grace: Yeah! We're not really closing it per se... I mean it depends on how much energy people have to put together a call for speakers and things like that. Why you should participate Jorge: In the last few minutes we have left, I'm hoping that you could tell folks why they would want to participate in either or both of these events. Grace: Being part of the IA community has been really grounding for me. And I think it's really easy to find a family outside of family. For me it's been... so, even if I don't see them in person we've been meeting irregularly, it's been a really great way to get motivated and be mentored and guided through, working with a group of other volunteers. A lot of the volunteers are also veterans in the IA field and in the UX field so there's a lot of researchers, a lot of designers as well, who participate and volunteer their time as part of World IA Day and the IA Conference. So, just being a volunteer just brings you that much closer to the great names of Jorge Arango, Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld. So, it's a really, really great networking opportunity as well too to just be a volunteer. Jorge: Well, I'm flattered. Thank you for including me in that august group! That's as far as volunteers goes, but what about folks who might just want to tune in? Grace: It's also just really great to hear like, "Oh yeah. So that's what IA means. And there's a name for something that you've always been doing." Whether or not you are actually practicing IA or its just you learning or being productive... those are all IA things. I think just learning on its own — whether you're listening to podcast or reading from a book — that's also IA work that you're doing. So, I would say, "Come! Come learn with us. Come participate and contribute." It's a great way to meet other people. It's a great way to network. It's also a great way to feel a part of another larger community of people. Closing Jorge: Well, fantastic, Grace. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing to help make all of this happen. Where can folks follow up with you? Grace: You can find me on Twitter; @lauggh it's laugh, with two g's. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Grace G. Lau and you can also find me on my website, graceglau.com. Jorge: Thank you so much. I'm going to include those and also links to both World IA Day and the IA Conference in the show notes, so if folks want to follow up with the conferences and meetups, you can go there as well. Thank you so much, Grace. Grace: Thank you.

Presentadores: Lluvia Liliana Atilano Sanchez, Manuel Alfredo Barraza Gonzalez, Susana Barrón Franco y Dora Luz González Bañales Temas a abordar: Introducción a arquitectura de información: ¿Qué es Arquitectura de Información? ¿Quién es Peter Morville? ¿cuáles son los tres componentes de la Arquitectura de Información? Intro a arquitectura de información: ¿Qué es un bread crumb (migajas de pan) y por qué son útilies en la experiencia de usuario y la navegación en páginas web? ¿Tipos de miga de pan? ¿Beneficios de la miga de pan? Intro a Arquitectura de Información: ¿Cuáles son son las 7 facetas de experiencia de usuario del panal de Morville? ¿por qué son importantes dichas facetas? Fuentes: https://blog.acantu.com/que-es-arquitectura-informacion/ https://www.staffcreativa.pe/blog/migas-pan-experiencia-usuario/ https://blog.ida.cl/experiencia-de-usuario/factores-influyen-la-experiencia-usuario/ https://semanticstudios.com/user_experience_design/https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2017/11/20/a-beginners-guide-to-information-architecture-for-ux-designers.html#gs.jg9vtj Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxPxxQlkszQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-y3dZEsD7U Fotografía: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/information-architecture-seo/187149/#close

My guest today is Peter Morville. Peter is a pioneer in the discipline of information architecture. Among many other distinctions, he co-authored with Lou Rosenfeld Information Architecture for the World-Wide Web, the classic O'Reilly “polar bear” book on the subject. This is Peter's second appearance on The Informed Life podcast. I asked him back because I wanted to learn more about his recent call for practitioners to emancipate information architecture. Listen to the full conversation Download episode 47   Show notes Peter Morville on Twitter Semantic Studios Intertwingled.org Information Architecture: for the Web and Beyond, by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango The Informed Life episode 10: Peter Morville on Seductive Information Emancipating Information Architecture by Peter Morville Don't Think of an Elephant! by George Lakoff Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star Pema Chödrön Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commissions for purchases made through these links. Read the full transcript Jorge: Peter, welcome to the show. Peter: Hello, there. I'm very happy to be back. Jorge: Yeah. I usually start shows by asking guests to tell us about themselves, but you have the distinction of being the second repeat guest to The Informed Life podcast. The first was our friend Lou Rosenfeld, and I think it's appropriate that as the two co-authors of the polar bear book, you are two of the folks I most want to hear from. And part of the reason that I wanted to talk with you again is, when you were last on the show, you talked about what was next for you. I actually have the transcript up here and I'm going to quote back to you what you said. You said that… well, I'm going to paraphrase first, but you said that you had this not completely formed plan to buy some property and start an animal sanctuary to create a place that can be helpful to people and animals. And now I'm quoting, “and that comes from that deep questioning of what do I want to do with my remaining time here on planet earth. And while I get a lot of intellectual satisfaction from consulting with big organizations, I'm not sure as I look forward to the next 25 years or so, that that's going to fulfill my need for a real sense of purpose and meaning.” Peter: That sounds like me. Jorge: Yeah, it does, doesn't it? And now you've written a blog post where you update us on how that is going. And I'm looking forward to talking with you about that here on the show. Peter's blog post Peter: Yeah, the blog post was called “Emancipating Information Architecture.” Freeing information architecture from the shackles I helped to forge, so that we can use information architecture to free minds. That's the general gist. And on the personal side, since we last talked, we have moved from Michigan to Virginia, which is the place that we're planning to buy property. But we're currently renting, so hopefully 2021 will be the year that we buy the property and get some goats and chickens to get started. Jorge: So, I want to find out more about both of those, but why don't we start with this idea of emancipating information architecture. That's some pretty powerful language. What is keeping information architecture bound? Peter: So, in the article I take some credit or blame for that state of information architecture. And I think back on those early years in the 1990s, when Lou and I were working together to build our company, Argus Associates, and to evangelize this new practice of information architecture, and I was driven by fear. I had spent a year unemployed — sort of — and not really knowing what I wanted to do and feeling lost in the world. And then, ambition, because I had now gotten a taste of entrepreneurship and felt strongly that there was something here with information architecture that I can grow into a career. But you know, it was very dicey. We were paying the bills month-to-month early on. And so, there was a values-based side to my passion for information architecture. I was incredibly excited about the potential of the internet and then the worldwide web to enable us humans to share information all around the world and to become smarter and better. And so there was a techno-utopian side to my passion. But ultimately, I was trying to figure out, how am I going to be able to live in this world? How am I going to be able to pay the bills? So, there was a very strong orientation towards situating information architecture in the business context. How do we make money doing information architecture? How do we turn it into a job, into a field or discipline? And really, the community that grew up around information architecture was predominantly people who were figuring out how do I do this as part of my work in a business context. There were people from nonprofits and education, and there were folks who were more academic and were interested in the intellectual ideas. But 80% plus were folks who were figuring out, how do we do this as part of our work? That really is, I think, where information architecture has been centered. If you look at most writing, most conferences, it's been centered in business. Jorge: What I'm hearing here is that what you're looking to emancipate information architecture from is being bound to these business contexts. Is that right? Peter: Yeah, and I make the point in the article. It's not that information architecture isn't doing good in the business world and can't do more good. So, it's not an abandonment of business at all. But I think that there's so much potential for the ways that we think, the ways that we practice information architecture, particularly In the areas of language and classification — how we use language, how we define or design labels, how we structure and organize conceptual spaces — those skills are so useful beyond business, whether we talk about social or political or environmental areas, I think that part of what is holding us back as people are archaic words and structures: language and classification systems that we have inherited from the past that we're having a hard time getting beyond. What is different about Information Architecture? Jorge: There are other fields that think about this stuff as well. I'm thinking of George Lakoff's book, Don't Think of an Elephant! — I think that's the name of it — where he dives into this subject of labeling and distinctions in the realm of politics, specifically. What is special about information architecture? What is different about information architecture that would make it a good agent for change in this realm? Peter: Yeah. So, as I was working on the article, George Lakoff came to mind. He's one of the few people out there that I know has engaged in these issues in really interesting ways. There are also other books that come from outside of our discipline; Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences comes to mind as a fascinating exploration of the impact of language and classification in all sorts of contexts, for instance, in the kind of the hospital and nursing context. So, as I was writing this article, I was not under the impression or trying to portray the notion that we have a monopoly on these ways of thinking. In fact, in the article, the examples that I provide, one is focused on topics in and around LGBTQ+, gender and sexuality and all of the labels and classification systems around them that. And that work is being done by people who would never identify as information architects or don't even know our field exists. There's so much that we can learn from the work that people are doing out in the world. But I think that the folks who have spent the last 10-20 years thinking about information architecture, learning about information architecture, have a skillset and a talent that could be used beyond business. And I'm really trying to get our community to just at least question, “am I practicing in the contexts where I can make the greatest impact, given where I want to see the world go in the future?” For some people, the answer might be, “yes! I am super passionate about helping to grow this business, and this is what I want to do.” For other folks, they may say, “I need to do this work in order to pay the bills in a business context, but maybe I could volunteer some time and evenings or weekends to help folks work through issues around, how do we present ourselves? How do we label and organize our information so that we might be better understood, or so that we can make a bigger impact?” Jorge: When I hear you talk about the particular skills and talents of practicing information architects, what came to my mind is that information architects put these ideas of classification and distinction-making through language into action, right? It's one thing to think about it in the abstract, in theory, but we are very much practitioners making things in the world, right? Peter: Yes. Jorge: And as such, we are in a position to make these distinctions more palpable, perhaps or more tangible? Peter: Yeah. There's an interesting dance between the abstract and the tangible that we do. Very often, whether it's as in-house practitioners or consultants, we're hired more for the tangible stuff that we do. Most people are able to understand the tangible side of what we do. So, it's very often almost their own secret that the most important work that we do is pretty abstract and hard to explain. It's like, as a consultant, I go into an organization and I immerse myself in their world, in their language and classification system, in their domain, their area of expertise, their content, as well as all their challenges and goals and so forth. And I always go through this journey of initial excitement then feeling completely overwhelmed. Like, “oh my goodness, there's so much here. It's such a mess. How can I ever make a difference?” And with experience, I've built up the confidence to know I will get to the other side and I will start to come up with some models, hopefully some elegant models of how we can move forward. And the highest level, those models are sufficiently abstract that very few people appreciate them. It's when you take them to the next level and they start to become tangible and you can sort of see them, you've got a diagram or a wire frame or sketch, and people get it, and you start to get people behind this shared vision. So, I think you're right in the sense that we have that experience of grappling with the abstract stuff that's really hard to even talk about and then moving it into some tangible artifacts which then eventually move it into the world and it becomes the digital place. It's a website, it's a software application. Or in the physical world, right? It's how the grocery store is organized; it's how the airport is organized and the signage. Whether you talk about digital or physical places, then those end results start to shape how people think. So, that's the part that's interesting. We create environments that then shape people's perceptions, right? I mean, you go back to the Winston Churchill quote, if it was really him, “We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us.” That's very true, whether you're talking about buildings or digital places or classification systems, and once people get used to a certain structure, it's hard to shift; it's hard to get people to think differently. And that's the challenge I think is interesting. But it's different in every domain. Is a website going to help make this shift or a book or do people need to be teaching this in elementary school? Where are the levers for effecting change in people's minds? Top-down vs. bottom-up structure Jorge: There's a distinction between molding information structures, structuring them, giving them shape, and spotting patterns in the ways people use these systems, that result in emergent structure. And I realize that sounds a little abstract, so I'll give you an example. The hashtag emerged in the use of Twitter. It's not something that was designed into Twitter from the get-go. And I am noticing in the world such structures coming into being, and I'll give you an example — and this one is related to what you wrote about in the article, and I'm hoping that we will get into this — but I've started seeing more and more people appending to their name, on social networks, a description of the pronouns that they want to be described with. You will usually see the name and then parentheses, “he/him,” right? And there's no space in that information system for you to describe your preferred pronouns. So, the users have kind of hacked the system by appending it to their last name field, or what have you. And that came to mind as I was reading your article, because you did get into the — I think you called it the “architecture of identity” — that we do seem to be living in a time where that is becoming more and more of an issue for folks. And I'm wondering what our role is as information architects, with regards to this top-down versus bottom-up spotting of these patterns and enabling their use in our systems. Peter: Yeah, I love that example. And I think, yeah, there's a couple of different directions to go there. One, I think that that notion of identifying patterns and then deciding whether or not to try to spread them, to embed them in infrastructure or to squash them, that is something that I think we should be more aware of our potential to play a role there. When we talk about information architecture, it's easy to think that we are the creators of structure, that it has to come out of our heads. But, as the Twitter hashtag idea suggests, many of the best innovations come from a user, one person who has an idea and tries it out and then other people see it and copy it and it starts to spread. And then, there's an interesting point there where in that case, the team at Twitter had to decide, “do we embrace this and embed it in infrastructure? Does the hashtag become part of Twitter?” And they decided, yes, right? And, the issues around pronouns are so tricky. They're difficult. I guess I'll make a confession that there have been times where I've been irritated by this kind of injecting pronouns into various contexts. Like, I was at a meeting a couple of years ago. The purpose of the meeting was really to focus on helping undocumented immigrants in Michigan. It was hosted at the University of Michigan. And at a certain point, we were all asked to introduce ourselves and to introduce our pronouns. And at an introductory meeting where we didn't even know if we were ever going to see any of these people again, it seemed like that was kind of forced into the conversation. And when I experienced that irritation, number one, I tried to moderate it, like, “hey, there's a plus here. We're really trying to make sure that as we're talking to one another and referring to one another, we're using the right words, right? We're using the words that people are comfortable with, as their identification.” But I also try to grow a little compassion for the people who are on the other side, right? The folks who have very little tolerance for the LGBTQ+ folks, because, the thing that's really interesting in here is I think that there's this little part of our brains that — I'm sure there's a spectrum in terms of like how active this is across the population — but there's a little part of our brains that just gets annoyed at added complexity, right? Like, “oh, now I've got to worry about whether I say you know, ‘he or she,' or ‘they or theirs'? My life's hard enough already. I'm just keeping my head above water. That just annoys me.” Right? And I think that little irritation may be the source of so much conflict, and unnecessary suffering in our society. And the flip side is — which for the most part, is how I feel — is, I love difference. I am so bored by the sameness. Living in a world where there's people of all different sort of races and sexes and genders and people who have different customs and do things differently. I love that. But I have a brain that loves learning, and I also have the privilege of a certain level of stability in my life and a certain amount of confidence that I'm sort of ready for the next thing. “Hey, I want to learn something new! Tell me more about what it means to be trans, right?” That's a new wrinkle; tell me about that, I'm interested. But I think that little kind of irritation is something that probably would be good for us all to be mindful of. We all probably feel that at different points about different issues. The need for progress and leadership Jorge: I can relate to that, Peter. And I'm also thinking again, in the spirit of — you used the word “compassion” — to try to empathize, perhaps with folks who might be irritated by this. You used the word “archaic” to refer to the traditional words and structures. And again, that's a very strong word. It might be read as “obsolete,” you know? And I imagine, and that there might be people for whom there's a counter argument there, which is, these distinctions that you label “archaic” have served us for a long time. What would you say to those folks? Peter: Yeah, that's a great point and I agree. It's a provocative word. So, to explain my perception… why I use a word like that. I am somebody who kind of lives in the future. Like, too much maybe, for my own good. I'm always thinking about what's next, where are things going? Which is helpful for being an information architect and planning ahead. But [it] has its costs. It takes me effort to live in the present a little more, right? To be aware of what's going on today. How am I feeling? To take time, to enjoy just being alive. And I don't spend much time reflecting on the past. And I think to a certain degree, I've missed out a lot on, positive emotions, like nostalgia; looking back at how things were. I think I miss out a little there. But my current mental models — my sense of trajectories and where things are going — is that human civilization is really approaching a very dangerous moment. We are in a very dangerous moment, where we are not only causing incredible destruction to other species and to the environment, but we're doing it to the extent that we're on the verge of destroying ourselves. And so, at a time where I see this crisis, like we're in it and it's getting worse, I feel that we need to be more progressive. We need to move faster. The structures that have served us well, served us well in a different world — in a past world that's not coming back. And so, I think that we need to be more open to change, to embrace change. And I say that knowing, especially just based on how you phrased that question, that that's really scary to a lot of people and very difficult for a lot of people. And I'm not sure what the answer is to that other than, to me, in order to deal with change — especially rapid or dramatic change — what's needed is great leadership. It's times like these, where we need great leaders. And at the moment, at least in this country, we don't have that. And so, we're all feeling lost. We're struggling. We're seeing parts of this crisis unfolding. We probably all see it differently, but, what's needed from great leadership is the ability to say, “hey, we have to move from A to B.” Whether that's physically moving from an island to a mainland location, whether it's moving from the use of fossil fuels to renewable energy. A great leader can get people to think in a more positive way about the challenges ahead to recognize, oh, this is going to be hard, but we can actually do something valuable and meaningful with our lives. We can be the generation that made this change, that sacrificed for future generations. And to view it less with fear and more with a sense of adventure and curiosity. I'm hopeful that at some point in the fairly near future, we will get that kind of leadership because I think that we can make tremendous progress. You and I in our careers, we have been part of the internet revolution and we know that one thing humans are good at is technology, at like being incredibly innovative and moving really fast and doing things that were previously viewed as impossible. We just need great leadership to harness that in the right direction. Jorge: For context, we are recording this before the US election. I'm saying that because we don't know what's going to happen, and people might be tuning in after the fact. But I want to call out that this brings us back full circle to where we started the conversation. You mentioned the fear you had when you were starting out at Argus and we've come full circle back to fear. And I wanted to bring things to a close by asking you about what's making you hopeful today. You are now in a different modality from the last time that we spoke. You have started your sanctuary or in the process of starting your sanctuary. And, I'm wondering, how you are, vis-a-vis how you were at the time of the founding of Argus? Peter: Yeah. I think that one difference is that, I'm sort of on the other side of my career. With Argus, I had no real savings, so, I was living month to month. You know, paying my rent with my paycheck. And so, my fear was very focused on job and career and how I made money. I didn't really have time or emotional space to think about all the other things that could go wrong. I wasn't worried about getting sick. I just… that couldn't happen! I couldn't get sick. Now that I have a little more financial security, and I'm older, I'm more aware of a much wider array of things that can go wrong. I've had had an extra 25 years of having things go wrong. And that's where for me, learning about Buddhist philosophy, listening to tapes from Pema Chödrön, really trying to be more at peace in a world and in a body where so much can go wrong — and will go wrong. Things get better and then they get worse and then they get better and then they get worse and that's life. We can't control those ups and downs all that much. So, with Sentient Sanctuary, with this vision that I have to create an animal sanctuary, it's exciting for me and fun for me to imagine it and to begin to work towards it. But I'm not attached in a kind of negative way to its fruition. I'm not…. you know, if I die tomorrow, it's okay. I've had a great life. I've been really fortunate. And, I think that there's a danger with visions, with plans, with hope, that we cling to an outcome. You know, 25 years ago, that was much more me. “I've got to make this work. It has to work!” And now I'm more comfortable with saying, “you know, I can put in my best effort.” When I trained for the Detroit marathon, that was very humbling in the sense that, you spend six months working as hard as you've ever worked for something. And every day, you know one wrong step and you twist your ankle and your dream is done. And you've got to have a bit of sense of humor about that. Otherwise it'll destroy you. And so, that's where I am today. I wouldn't say I'm incredibly hopeful for the future of human civilization. I just don't know where we're headed. I feel really fortunate, given the life that I've lived so far and where I am right now. And I have some fun, exciting things to work on for the future. I'm starting a new consulting project next week that I'm excited about and I'm actively learning about how to raise chickens and goats. So that's great stuff. Closing Jorge: Words of wisdom, Peter, thank you for sharing them with us. Where can folks follow up with you? Peter: So, my websites are semanticstudios.com and intertwingled.org. And I am Morville on Twitter. Jorge: Well, thank you so much. We look forward to hearing more from you as Sentient Sanctuary evolves, and best wishes with all that you have going on. Peter: Thank you. And thanks for having me.

En esta entrevista platicamos acerca de Arquitectura de la información con el presidente de Semantic Studios, Peter Morville, y su último libro llamado "Planning for everything: The Design of Paths and Goals". Hablamos acerca de la planeación a futuro y como sentirse cómodo con ello, y cómo esto puede impactar en una escala global.

My guest today is Christian Crumlish. Christian has led product and design teams in organizations ranging from startups to large tech companies. In this conversation, we delve into the relationship between digital product management and information architecture, and how we might be more empowered as users of these systems. Listen to the full conversation   Show notes Christian Crumlish (mediajunkie.com) Dungeons and Dragons Paladin Yahoo! Design in Product Slack community Richard Saul Wurman Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture by Andrew Hinton Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences by Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati Reframing Information Architecture by Andrea Resmini (Editor) Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge Arango Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, Second Edition by Marty Cagan Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters by Ryan Singer Basecamp Objectives and key results (OKRs) Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr Amazon Kindle Matte Scheinker Airtable Asana Tinderbox The Informed Life Episode 6: Beck Tench on Tinderbox Notion Wikis From UX to Product (Christian's video series in the UIE All You Can Learn Library) The Information Architecture Conference Web Directions Product Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the full transcript Jorge: Christian, welcome to the show. Christian: Thanks Jorge, I'm happy to be here. Jorge: So, for folks who don't know you, would you please introduce yourself? Christian: Sure. My name is Christian Crumlish. I'm a writer, product and UX leadership consultant, information architect and I guess I do other things too, but that's plenty. Jorge: I've been privy to the arc of your career over the last, I would say 15, maybe 20 years? No, 15 years. And you're one of the folks out of several that I know that have focused on product. And I was hoping that you would tell us a little bit about that aspect of your work. Christian: I'm glad it's only been 15 years, because sometimes the spans of time are starting to freak me out a little bit. But I think for me, a lot of what my title has been and what sort of roles or jobs I've done in companies and at other times as a consultant or you know, agency designer or strategist, the titles have evolved over time or changed. And in fact, when you mentioned that arc to my career, I thought like, if only you had my career had been in the shape of an arc, that would be so cool. Cause it's been more like a zigzag down or up, you know, along some rapids or something. I feel like I've shifted gears a number of times. I was talking to a D&D… A person who also had played D&D as a kid, and we were talking about the paladin-type character that you have to cross-train in like several different… You know, you have to learn, like to be a religious person and also a night and there's probably a third thing, and how it slows you down in a sense. You know, you don't do that. Like people who knew they wanted to go to med school when they were six and have stayed on that straight path their whole lives. My career has been like a path of discovery. But along the way, I've been given a lot of different titles, or I've asked for or invented titles as needed. And so, I was a content strategist back before that was almost even a thing, around 2000. And I was an information architect, and that was my title for a while. And I was a director of strategy, and I was in an interaction designer, and I was a design pattern library curator, or pattern detective, as I liked to say at the time. And along the way I started noticing that the frame of a product — that talking about what was being made a software as a product — was a fairly dominant kind of lens that was being used in the businesses I was working in. And I think I first really came to my attention at Yahoo when I was there for about three or four years. And the product organization was sort of on a par with the tech organization, the UX part of the shopper, UED as they called it, was itself really just a subdivision of the product organization, and ultimately always reported up to people with product management titles. The deep history of that at Yahoo was that they had people called “producers” early on, and in certain nineties in the web, if you made content there was often more of a television medium terminology and so producers of content. But half the people who had producer titles at Yahoo became front end developers because they'd actually been making the content, and the others evolved into the product management role. And that also took from a program management role at Microsoft. There's a lot of antecedents to this. But ultimately, the first thing I saw was that at least in these larger companies, user experience design was at the table, but they're sort of the kiddy table. And that they had these parents called product people. And so that made me think just from the desire to get close to the decision-making or to be able to make an impact, I thought, “I have to learn more about product, or why it's called product or what product management is.” Along the way, these practices have continued to evolve and in relationship to each other. I think there's a very active conversation right now, about the boundaries or the intersection between product and UX. Enough so both, I witnessed this conversation and I have it come to myself personally when I speak, or when I'm out there connecting with people. So, I actually ended up setting up a community on Slack called Design in Product, just really to have a place to discuss that. And for some people that means kind of following this career path I've been on, of going from UX design or UX management roles to product management or product leadership roles. And other people deciding they don't want to do that, or they want to come back in the other direction. And a lot of negotiation over what is the shared common ground of those roles and where are their responsibilities and their points of view quite different. My roots go back to this information architecture tribe and people who have a point of view. And you and I have been friends for a long time, but I'm also essentially a student of your writing and your thinking and that of a number of other people who've really shaped my thoughts about information architecture. I don't know if other people call it this, but I sometimes call it like “third wave” information architecture, with the first being, of course, the initial… Spacing on the TED Talks fellow… Jorge: Wurman? Christian: Yeah, sorry. You know, that's literally an architect saying, “Hey, making maps is really important,” essentially. And that maps are going to be important information as well. And that they all sort of a share a semantic and kind of wayfinding and meaning-mapping kind of frame. And so, I think he kind of coined or crystallized the concept of initially. And the second way was sort of the world-wide-web-filtered application of information architecture, and just some often very tactical or pragmatic, but even then, with sort of this big-IA kind of dream of being the overarching backbone of things. And then what I think it was the third wave, is this sort of academically kind of sound and intellectually very rich notion of information architecture as still a way of mapping meaning and, and, and crafting spaces that are information, but I think less bound to some of the literal artifacts of the seventies or the nineties. And I don't want to do short shrift to other people who thought long and hard and debated these things. You kind of need to go to the books and read Andrew's books and yours and Andreas's and a number of other people to get caught up in that conversation. But I feel, again, that that conversation has a lot to say about product. And it's not just through UX. I mean, I think information architecture is a thing UX designers need to think about and be good at and use in their work. And UX then as a way of influencing the product management or product strategy and the product practices of companies. But I think IA is also a tool in the toolkit of the product manager herself. It's not just something that they should let designers mediate for them. I think they should be firsthand users. You know, architects of information — people who think about the way the information and the meaning and the knowledge and understanding and the positioning of people's bodies and of spaces made out of information are going to play out in the product that they're building. If you were redeveloping the waterfront and putting hotels up and walkways and places for cars to drive, you know, you're thinking about how are human beings going to flow into the space? What kind of experiences are they going to have? What is it going to do to the economy? What secondary effects are going to happen? You know? And that's an architecture, traditional built architecture. And I think that when you're making software, particularly the kind of social software that I've typically been involved with… It's a metaphor, but it's not simply a metaphor. It's literally the same thing. You're going to build an environment. People are going to flow into it. They're going to have experiences. There are going to be secondary effects that you didn't anticipate and systematic ecosystem effects. And you need to do information architecture or have someone who's a really good information architect at hand, I think to get a grip on that. Or you make it sort of like primitive, you know, “We're just going to put the waste affluent in the river kind of kind of building.” You know? Without thinking about the larger picture at all. Jorge: You talked about how information architecture could inform the folks who are managing and designing products and building them. Because I'm on the IA side of things, I'm interested in the converse, which is about learning about product and learning how those roles work and how the process works. And in the past year. I've read a couple of books on this subject, and I have a specific question that I'm, I'm teeing up with saying this one is the second edition of Marty Cagan's book Inspired and the other is Shape Up by Ryan Singer from the folks at Basecamp. And one thing that struck me in reading both of those is that… And by the way, I'm not claiming that the latter uses anywhere near like the same framing as the Inspired book. Christian: Right? Almost by definition it wouldn't. Jorge: But I just bring them up because I see them as examples of what I see as advocacy for a type of approach to the work that is very much bottom up in my perspective, in that you're working within a relatively small problem space and you iterate on that. And you may be doing that in parallel to a lot of colleagues who are working in other projects of similar scope. And the question that I had in reading both of those books was, “Where within this framework is there place for looking after the coherence between those things? Right? Like especially if they're part of some kind of ecosystem or family of products. Eventually those things need to cohere at some level. Christian: So, one thing about Marty Cagan is, anybody interested in product management should be familiar with Marty Cagan and should read his books and also follow him. He teaches, he's out there still influencing people. Silicon Valley-style product management is done in his image. It's done essentially in a framework that he established. It's also important to understand that he represents kind of a reforming notion of what product management should be from an earlier, slightly more, I'd say kind of enterprise, kind of static-MBA style product management. So, he represents the school of thought of, get outside of the building, and iterating on small things. Basically, in line with the lean and the agile trends that we all have probably been around and been part of it had been grappling with how do you do UX? How did you research? How did you plan? How do you think big or system systematically when things are being done often in these small incremental bits, as you asked? A big part of the product manager's role is actually connecting those levels of meaning, or those levels, those scales. There's this almost fractal-like scale of decision-making that goes on. And one great thing to know about product management as it differs maybe from UX and UX roles or your jobs, is that it's very much a decider role. You make decisions constantly. I don't like to stereotype people or professions or anything, but having been in them, maybe I'm a little bit more allowed to speak, you know, to tease ourselves. But what UX designers like to say, “it depends.” They don't want to get things wrong. They want to figure it out correctly. They want to apply the proper techniques. They want to take time and do things well. And I think that that's an important set of values and forces to have represented in the process. I think product managers or product management does not always value all of those things as much and believes that you get diminishing returns and that being decisive sometimes with less than complete information is sometimes more important than being 100% sure about what you're deciding. And that comes from having to make decisions all the time. If you make, if you make 15 decisions in a day, you can't fool yourself into thinking that they're all 100% right and perfect. You have to know that you're going to have an error rate, and hopefully you keep it manageable and you're good over time. Just to go back to this. Those decisions can sometimes be, “Is it okay to ship this next release with a bug, with this bug? We haven't fixed it, but you know, we really want to ship. Or is this bug a showstopper and we can't release it until this particular one is fixed? What we built, does it meet the requirements adequately enough to move forward or not?” You know, those sorts of decisions that are sort of tactical, but tied into important, larger overarching questions, up to the next level is sort of, “What should be in the next sprint? What's the next thing that we should work on?” And there you're at the level I think you were asking about, where things seem to happen very iteratively and without too much regard to the bigger picture, but just kind of down in a trench trying to polish a local maxima or run some tests or ship a feature or something like that. And those decisions also have to be made. Again, they can't be theoretical. Something's in the sprint or it's not, and either the last sprint went well, or it didn't, and stuff fell into this sprint from that. What I mean, you're dealing with a tangible reality all the time, and then the buck stops with that product manager. But those decisions again should be made with reference to, well, “What are our goals this quarter or in this time period? And why are we building this feature? And how many people will be affected by this bug? Is for those people, giving them a bad experience, an acceptable price to pay towards the larger goal?” So, there's a sense in which often the product manager is the person in the room who's supposed to be looking levels and levels above the current moment to figure out a decision. In some ways you'd say the UX person is doing that in a different sense: they're going out to like what people think or what we know from our users or they enlarge the question in a different way. But I think the product manager says, “Well, the company's strategy is this. And that's informed the product strategy, which I'm familiar with. Because either I'm the head of product and I own the roadmap or I'm on a well ordered product team and the head of product has communicated the roadmap and my portion of it to me well, and I have autonomy to execute my part of the roadmap.” So, there are actually these tools and mechanisms that that ladder up and down from like the very biggest picture of the company's dreams and yearly goals and quarterly goals down to what should we ship? Now, like any of these kind of project management or information management processes, like a roadmap or a sprint planning process where you're relying on a person to kind of make all those times connections, it is vulnerable to becoming kind of just a thing on autopilot, where it's just all happening, but nobody is really saying, are we on track? What's the meaning of all of this? Does this add up to anything? And I'm not some sort of spotless paragon myself. I've found myself sometimes leading a product team, doing lots of things well and correctly, and still taking a step back at a certain point and saying, we're off track. We've gone off track, and enough of these yellow flags have now… Or funny feelings in my tummy have added up to the point that, you know, if we continue like this, we're not actually achieving our goal. And they're none of my official signals yet say that we're off track, but the fact that I did step out of the day-to-day and look at a different timescale or a larger question that we were supposed to be answering has woken me up. And there's this danger sometimes of getting too attached to these techniques and processes, but at best they do help things stay in a line. And if you have a healthy team and you're reporting up and down the line, and there's somebody with authority who is watching the biggest goals, I think there already are methods that can work, you know? But you have to assess the kind of health of that on any product team, how well they do that. I know you're more interested in the product management side than the IA side, but you could say sometimes a lack of that… That no one's written down a map. Like we talked about it, we have our OKRs, blah, blah, blah. But no one's really done that IA work of saying, “And this is what it's going to look like,” or “This is the part where we're in, this part of the map now, and we're trying to get over here.” And helping to kind of do that communication to everybody so everybody can agree on what the mission is. I think maybe that's like a lymphatic system that's missing, so that you've got a circulatory system, but somehow, it's not a healthy creature, you know? Jorge: Yeah. As you were describing this up and down reporting structure and things like goals, it made me think of another book that I read last year,  Measure What Matters, by John Doerr, which is about OKRs. And one of the things that I got from that book was that there are mechanisms to scale OKRs up and down the organization. And my sense is that the goal there is to make sure that everyone is pointing in the same direction. And I guess the concern that I have is at a different level of granularity, and you called it out; the information architecture per se. My favorite example of the lack of such a thing is Kindle. I've been using Kindle for a while to read books, so I should be familiar with it. And I use Kindle in three very different device platforms. I have a dedicated Kindle reader, I have Kindle on my iOS devices, iPad and iPhone. And I also use Kindle on my Mac, and I find things like navigation structures to be different in all three Christian: Navigation within books or between books? Jorge: More so within books. I recently upgraded to a… I had a very old Kindle device and I recently upgraded to a newer one. And the operating system has changed a lot between the two versions… Christian: You're kind of… Okay, I'm going to sort of defend imaginary product people or UX people or tech leaders in companies like this. Some of this is a big company problem. You know, like big enough that you have teams that… The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, or they have their own agendas. So, in theory, they're all the same experience. And there should be someone saying, “Hey, we have a fundamental experience and you can express it differently, but we all agree it has to XYZ in common.” There are usually efforts to do that. And when I was doing the pattern library stuff, that was a version of that kind of thing. Nowadays, design systems are a version of that kind of thing, but often they're still about the interaction and not how it all fits together or how it works. But there are natural tensions. Teams are going to say, “Yeah, but that doesn't work for my device,” or, “But I have reasons for this,” or “It's always been this way on our sub platform. You bought us and now you're trying to make us be part of you.” It's non-trivial — especially in a larger organization — to just, you know… Everything's constantly shifting. It's a system. You could gradually maybe bring it into harmony, but I think you just have to have some tolerance, therefore. The consumer has every right to expect it to be perfect. But I, know, from being inside the sausage factory, how much that can almost never happen, especially in large organizations that have probably completely different orgs making those things, and maybe not enough cross team alignment. Every big organization I've ever been in is literally either in the process of becoming a little bit more decentralized or more centralized, or it's finished doing one of those things and it's about to start doing the other one. And they never find the perfect amount of decentralization and centralization for all these different overlapping things. So, you get matrix reporting. I have my boss, but I also have my practice leader. And then one day my practice leader is my main boss and I'm embedded in a team and we're a service bureau. And it's like, none of these models are right or wrong, but they produce software like that or experiences. And this has definitely been… And I'm sorry to rant like this, but this has been like a hobbyhorse for me for a long time, particularly when I started doing mobile and cloud type stuff, which was what I was calling holistic UX. Meaning that you don't do the UX of your Kindle on the Mac and you don't do your UX of your Kindle on the Kindle and your UX of the Kindle on the iOS, on the iPad or whatever. Kindle should have a UX, you know, and Kindle should have an information architecture that is one big map. And then everything should be some articulation of that or some expression of that. And yes, there will be compromises, but they should always be the sense that… But “should” is easy to say. When I was at AOL, I think, working for a fellow named Matte Scheinker, who taught me a lot about product, I remember telling him like, “There should be information architects, like that should still be a job.” I was having that old argument, like, should that even be a job title? And I'm like, “Yeah, there's some people they should just do it.” And he's like, “Well, how many? How many do you need? How many IAs does this company need?” And I was like, “Well, at least one.” You know, and maybe it needs to be the chief IA or the one person who just sits there near the CEO or the CPO or whatever and is just making that big map on some level and communicating it. Yeah, I feel like that's lacking. But again, that sounds utopian to me. Nobody understands that they need that in some sense, or it's hard to prove that having that is going to help some team meet its quarterly goals. Jorge: I think it's pretty clear that that's what's going on. And in fairness to the Kindle teams, the individual apps in the different platforms are coherent internally. It's this… I think you put your finger on it, it's the talking between them that seems to be not happening as much. Christian: But were you pointing out… Somebody online was recently pointing out that Kindle also gives you no way to organize your library. It's just a giant list of everything you either have downloaded or ever, unless you delete things, I guess. And there's no grouping, or if there is, it's hard to use. I'm not quite sure what the story is on that. Jorge: Yeah, I remember that tweet, and I think it was around the ability to do so in the Kindle devices themselves. And the reason I remember that is, I actually posted in reply to that that I could easily see how that could be the case, because — to your point earlier about the constraints in different form factors — there was a generation of Kindle devices that didn't have keyboards, and you had to type by moving a cursor around with a four-way pointer thing, which made it really awkward. Right? So, you did not want to be editing a lot of texts, so it made a lot of sense in those to not have it. And perhaps the newer ones, which have touchscreens, don't have it either because it's an artifact from that time? I don't know. Christian: I also think sometimes you get into the difference between power users and ordinary users. So, I've worked on software where we burned a lot of cycles at times thinking about how to make the switching between your two accounts' experience better, or the managing your multiple accounts. Until somebody looked at the data and saw that only 2% of the users have even the second account, let alone multiple. So, I hate to say it, but maybe the long tail of Kindle readers don't have more than one screenful of books or whatever, and investing in a great system for organizing your huge Kindle library just isn't going to satisfy big enough fraction of their user base. Jorge: Yeah, that makes sense. Folks have got to make choices, right? And at least my experience in working as a consultant with product organizations, there's always more to be done than there are resources and time to do it. Christian: I think that goes back to like, what are the incentives? And you say, of course, Amazon doesn't have an incentive to focus on that problem. They've got so many other, you know… Or Kindle, or whatever sub-team you're talking about. But somebody out there could be making it so that ordinary people have a lens they can put in front of anything they're consuming and organize it for themselves. And that may take different forms and it could be a plugin or an add on, or it could be another app you use instead, or it can… There's a number of different ways to give people bookmarklets or things that put a little more power in their hands. And I think this is a longer-term agenda that I've always been fascinated in, which is like, “Where's the Excel for data or for information or for lists, multi-dimensional lists and nodal, you know, nodally-connected things?” There's a lot of tools out there, but there's not sort of like this universal structure that people start to learn as a literacy thing. So, I feel like people are overwhelmed by their information as soon as it becomes more than one list, or have has to be managed dynamically, or anything like that. I actually would say, to be honest, I think something like Airtable is the closest I've seen, not to endorse a product specifically, but when I've used that, I've thought this is giving people who aren't database architects the ability to create structured data with relationships in a very copacetic way. And so, I'm hopeful about that. But you know, to just kind of go off a little bit more on a tangent, I've had this side project, hobby horse of mine that I returned to whenever I get some free time, which fits that model of sort of ideally being something that you could put in front of any other list or any other, you know, like a to-do list or a project list or something like that, which I call “One Job.” My shorthand for it is one job, like “you had one job.” But the log line of it, and you can see this'll date to when I first had the idea, originally, I would describe it to people as “Tinder for tasks.” You know, basically meaning that even… Personally, like I'll use Asana, I've used it as a project management tool in jobs, but I've used it for my own personal to dos kind of convenience. It's a nice kind of just sortable list, but with recurring things. But I still find psychologically that looking at any large group of things — and this could be the backlog for the product that I'm planning the next sprint for or the accumulated ideas that have piled up in my road mapping tool, or my personal list of just, you know, household tasks I want to do — that it's kind of anxiety-provoking to see anything you ever thought of and anything you might consider doing or, or might get to if you get to it. You know, if you do 10 things, do they, here's the 11th thing. Like, that's a lot to have on your screen in front of your face and trying to get your attention. And so, the original idea for this One Job thing was just that you have a stack. You know, essentially you can only see one thing and either that thing is the most important thing on your list, so just do it or, you know, swipe it away, put it to the bottom of the stack and look at the next thing. But eventually you should hit a thing where you're like, “Oh, I can call mom. I could do that now.” Or, “No, I don't feel like calling mom.” You know, whatever it is. And if you get all the way to the bottom of the list and you're back at the top, then you've got to start doing your psychological work. But more generally, I feel like, how can we be empowering end users rather than leaving it in the hands of the businesses to always give the information the exact way everybody wants it. You know, like, I think this has gone back and forth in the browser world. You know, in the early days it was like controlling your own layout and look, I want this type face, I want this backdrop. And eventually that kind of didn't work as it would break the magazine design of the website, you know? So that kind of fell by the wayside. But I think you get that more with people maybe wanting to have more control over their privacy or how their data is going to be used, and there's a market maybe to give people the tools that come between them and the mess kind of product and help them manage the relationship with it better. Jorge: Yeah, I agree. There is a gap in the market. You've already pointed to Airtable, that's one that immediately came to mind as a possibility. Another one is perhaps Tinderbox, which we've highlighted in a previous episode of the show. Christian: I've tried to use that, and I think for me… I have sort of like a law of personal information management systems or whatever, which is that you have to go all in. And no matter how good or bad the system is, they only work if you go all in. And if you partially commit, and continue to partially use other systems at the same time, then you don't get any of the relief that it's all in one place, and that you can stop worrying about it, and you'll have more and more and more systems to track and manage. Jorge: Another product that that came to mind, I don't know if you've had a chance to play with it, is Notion. Christian: Oh, you know, I've been reading about it a lot lately, and I've seen people promoting it, but I'm not quite familiar with how it works. Jorge: My sense is that — and I have not used it extensively, I've kind of played around with it — but from the videos and tutorials that I've read, it strikes me that it that Notion is to something like your notepad as Airtable is to Excel. Where in Airtable and Excel the primary information objects that you're dealing with are some kind of a table-based structure, Notion is much more freeform and more text-centric. But the principle seems to be fairly similar, where you enter information and allow the structure to emerge as you gather more of it and start tagging it on the fly. So, it's intriguing. I do think that there are gaps in the market for such tools. Christian: Yeah. I see it kind of plays into the wiki paradigm too. I used to use a personal wiki, and for a long time, that was another great, infinitely malleable, networked thing. But again, I think these things work if you just commit to using them there's an expression in 12-step programs that is, it works if you work it. You know, physically like if you go all in and embrace the system, you can make almost any system work for yourself. Jorge: That seems like a really good place on which to wrap our conversation. And I feel like we have much more to talk about, and perhaps we will at another occasion. But for now, Christian, where can folks follow up with you? Christian: Well, you can always check out my personal website, which is mediajunkie.com. And if you're near Richmond, Virginia in February, I'm doing a workshop there, but this may not be out by then. I've got a series of videos coming out with UIE, with Jared Spool's website, in their all-you-can-learn library on product management for UX designers. So, people who are coming from a UX design background and want to understand product management better, may want to consider making career in product management or kind of a hybrid product design career, might find some value in those videos. I hope they do. If you have a chance to make it to the IA Conference in New Orleans, which is in April, I'll be giving the closing plenary there. So, some of the things you and I have been talking about, and probably a couple of other things reflecting on social software, mental health, vulnerable populations, things like that, that relate to my recent work. I'll be talking about those things as well. And if you're in Australia, I'll be in Melbourne in late June, early July at a Web Directions Product, giving a keynote there. So that's probably a lot of ways to find me in the near future. Jorge: Well, fantastic. I'll be in New Orleans at the IA Conference, so I look forward to seeing you and hearing your presentation. Christian: Great. Can't wait to see it then. Jorge: Thank you for being on the show. Christian: You bet. Take care. Thanks for having me.

My guest today is Andrew Hinton. Andrew has worked in the digital design field for two decades. He's one of the founders of the Information Architecture Institute and author of the book Understanding Context. In this conversation, you'll learn about the foundations of information architecture and why Andrew thinks of himself as a “radical information architect.” Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/the-informed-life-episode-26-andrew-hinton.mp3   Show notes Andrew Hinton Helix (database) Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture by Andrew Hinton The Information Architecture Institute The Information Architecture Conference The Informed Life Episode 21: Vanessa Foss on Event Planning Shared Information Environment: let's unpack that, shall we? by Andrew Hinton MUD Interactive fiction (e.g. text adventure games) World of Warcraft O'Reilly Media Peter Morville Ecological psychology James J. Gibson & Eleanor J. Gibson Phlogiston The Copernican Revolution Cartesianism Play-Doh Contextual inquiry Service design Ecosystem Map Bodystorming Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) The Informed Life Episode 15: Jeff Sussna on Cybernetics Norbert Wiener Claude Shannon Due app Apple's Reminders app Steve Jobs: “Computers are like a bicycle for our minds” The Mother of All Demos Doug Englebart Read the full transcript Jorge: So, Andrew, welcome to the show. Andrew: Great. Hey, Jorge, thanks. Very glad to be here. Jorge: So, you and I have been friends for a long time, but for folks who might not be familiar with you, would you please tell us about yourself? Andrew: Yeah, sure. I'm Andrew Hinton. I have been in the design community, in doing digital oriented design things for probably 25 years now, if we count things I was doing before I was being paid full time for it. But definitely 20 years solid now for actually this being my “job” job. And information architecture is kind of my, I don't know, I consider that sort of my home turf. My origin story in all of this really, I think is, is information architecture story. The first community I really kind of bonded with and got connected with was the early IA community, back in the late nineties. Since I started doing this, I've worked roughly half and half, as an internal in large organizations as well as an external consultant, or agency style person. but even then, typically it's very large like… Early on, it was manufacturing in the Southeast. That was like most of our clients in the company I was with then. So, I've worked with a lot of different, big companies and IT organizations and things like that. Nonprofits, profits. But before I got to doing all this, I was more of a humanities person and I still am, I think, at heart. Was a philosophy major, went to seminary briefly as a way to get a theology and philosophy graduate education, but then left because the seminary started getting weird. And then I went into literature and got a masters in that and then ended up with a Master of Fine Arts and poetry. Mostly all of this was just a avoid the real world until I was about 30. But then I had to get like a real job, and it turned out that this fixation I had on the internet, was something that people would pay for more than poems. So, I got into that at that point. But before then, I had really done odd jobs and things where I think a really early formative thing for me was early nineties working in a doctor's office while I was in grad school and all they had was a typewriter and a phone. And I had seen a demo and a Mac user group of something called Double-Helix, I don't know if you remember that. It was later called Helix. But it was just a sort of a drag and drop style way to make a relational database. And I was like, “Ah, we need a database for all of these clients, you know, all these patients, and their accounts and things.” So, they let me do that. And I had to teach it to other people who work in the office and kind of figure out how the interface would work. And really it was sort of this crucible for figuring out how to make things on screens that people could use. And I sort of went from there. Yeah, that's in a nutshell. I ended up writing a book, which just turned five just a couple of days ago, called Understanding Context. and I've been involved in the IA community for a good while, was one of the co-starters of the erstwhile Information Architecture Institute. And I'm looking forward to hopefully being in New Orleans, with my, the IA community, which I really think of like a family reunion for me, honestly. Jorge: I recently had Vanessa Foss on the show; she is one of the people who runs the IA Conference. And that notion of that event as a family reunion came up. It definitely feels like that to me as well. Andrew: Well, and it feels like a family is growing too, which is great. Like I used to worry that it was just a bunch of, you know, old hands getting together. But every year I see these new faces and voices who are stepping in and doing things, you know, and loving the community too. So, in spite of some of the ups and downs, with organizations and whatnot, I'm very optimistic about the community's health. Jorge: And the community is a community in part because of your work. Thank you for the efforts that you've put into the information architecture community over the years. You said that you had studied fine arts and poetry as a way to avoid the real world. And I will say this, you entered the real-world with a bang. I remember myself entering the information architecture community and being influenced by your writings. I remember one piece in particular about the centrality of hyperlinks and how that was different about this work. And then the book that you brought up, Understanding Context, which I consider an important book in the information architecture field. And I was hoping you would tell us a little bit more about that. Andrew: Sure. The challenge is that… A little bit of a qualifier: it's always hard to know where to start. But, really, I think where it came from was really, I think, very early on in my involvement in the IA field, as it was starting to get going as well in the web IA community, I guess I should say. I had already been online, doing things on the internet since right out of college. And I was fascinated with how something like — if our listeners are not familiar, there were these things called — and there are — these things called MUDs, multi-user domains, or multi-user dungeons, because some of the earlier ones are really more like online D&D games, like text-based adventure games, but made in a way where multiple players can be in the same place at the same time. And a precursor to things like World of Warcraft and stuff like that. But there were bunches of these, with different code bases. And it was just one example of where it felt like you were in a real place with people. Like there were emotions involved, there were social interactions and meaning being created. I mean, it really, it mattered. It wasn't virtual in the sense of somehow non-corporeal. It was real. People had bodies who were interacting with one another in this environment. It was just mediated through language, but it felt different than just a conversation. Right? It felt like you were in a place because there were structures, and those structures felt like they affected those interactions, and they mattered. So anyway, that and some other things just had me thinking for a long, long time about what is it that makes this feel this way and work this way? I didn't have this way of saying it then, but now, how is it that language can be environment in that way? So that's always been in the back of my mind. One reason why information architecture was so fascinating to me is because to me, it's never really been especially a metaphor. It's really been just a different way of making structures that people live together in. So, from that, I also was curious, “Okay, we were doing this thing called information architecture. What is it that we're making? Like what do we mean by that?” So, the architecture part is, you know, it's sort of clear, but then the information part is not so clear. I just really wanted to go deep on understanding; what is my material if I'm an information architect? And if we're going to have this discipline, then we need some kind of grounding. Don't we need to really understand what it is we're doing, at a very fundamental level? And I had this hunch that something about digital technology was changing the way human experience worked in terms of how context worked, because anything as simple as just accidentally hitting “reply all”, a button that looks exactly like the “reply” button, except for some minor differences, having a wildly outsized effect, compared to the actual action you're taking. As opposed to in physical life, right? If you want to talk to 10,000 people or whatever, instead of just one person, there's a massive physical difference in what you need to do. All you have to work with is just physical stuff, right? Nothing technological. All the way up to the way Facebook was, clearly, essentially, you know, even early on, basically almost phishing people to get at their information and to trick them into connecting to more people and inviting more people in ways that were manipulative. These were all really preoccupying to me. But also, I really cared about the IA community and what we were doing. And I thought, we need to understand what it is we're saying when we say this information architecture thing. Because I was willing to let go of the label entirely if it turned out it really didn't mean anything different that was important. But I was just so convinced — and still am — that there is a thing that we need, and we need it to be good that other phrases about things like interaction design or user experience and these other labels, they don't quite get at. So, all of those things together. I went on this, I thought, “Hey, I'm going to write this little book about context. I'm just going to… I've got some thoughts. I'm going to put them down.” Somehow, I talked to O'Reilly about doing this with me, and thankful to Peter Morville for helping me make that connection. And it just morphed. And I'll end with this bit that — and you've heard me say this before — I think I wrote 100, 150 pages of just all of these ideas and thoughts I've had from talks and writing, some things I've already done. And then I just got into this part where I was like, “Okay, well I need to address what information is.” And I just didn't know, having some [inaudible] academic background, I was like, “I need to make sure I'm really researching these things and being clear.” So, I asked around, and I asked some of people we know, who teach in universities, about information. And I asked them, and I could not get a straight answer. And I thought, well, that's interesting. And, anyway. Ended up finding out about this whole other way of thinking about information that comes from ecological psychology, the work of James J. Gibson and his wife, and how that was influencing embodied cognition as a theoretical approach. And it just kind of went from there and it blew everything up and I had to kind of start over. And then I ended up writing a much bigger book than I believed. But that was sort of the story behind like why I even got into it. And what it's done is it's really rewired the way I think about the way people interact with their environment. Even just me saying it that way is an artifact of that rewiring, right? I tend to talk about environments rather than just individual devices or things or websites and whatnot. Anyway, it just really changed the way I think about what I do, that I'm still really coming to understand. Jorge: You said that a part of your pursuit for writing the book was coming to an understanding of what the material is that we're working with when we are working on an information architecture. Can you speak more to what that material is or where you've landed on that? Andrew: The material, it turns out to be material. And what I mean by that is, I think early on I thought… So, I use this analogy sometimes. You know how early science and alchemists would use this term — “phlogiston” — to talk about some substance or thing that they knew must be there because they could see the effects of what was going on? They treated it as if it was a thing, even though it isn't really a thing. It was multiple things and processes and whatnot, that we now have names for. But to me, that's kind of how I was using that word “material” early on. It feels like we were using information in a material way, but I really couldn't explain what that meant. Now, after going through all this, I've come to realize, well, actually it isn't material like it's, it's stuff. It's our bodies — and our brains are part of our bodies, so I just say our bodies — are interacting with the environment around us. And the environment around us has stuff. You know, it's objects and surfaces and all of that. And that's where information comes from, and everything else is really sort of this linguistic construct that we've created, or in a human sphere of language-meaning. But all of that is ultimately grounded in our bodies and the way our bodies interact with the world, the physical world around us. So, it's really more of a continuum for me now between something like knocking on the table I'm sitting at right now — that's physical — to, if you go all the way to the other end of the spectrum and saying the word “table” and all the meanings that that can have. But ultimately, the only reason that those meanings can be there is because in some way, whether it's three or four or 10 degrees of separation, it's connected to that kind of meaning. So, to me it's about the relationship between the creature, of the human, interacting with that material world. And then when you add language to that, then you get this really interesting material that can be very slippery and hard to pin down because language is like that. But it's in that interplay between our bodies and our environments and the way we talk about our experience and communicate with one another. That's the material. Jorge: One of the challenges that many of us face — many of us who think of ourselves as information architects, primarily — is that the stuff that you're speaking about is stuff that we take for granted in our day-to-day lives. I think that it's in your work that I read about this analogy with fish and this old trope about fish not being aware of the water they're swimming in and somehow, we are swimming in language. And because we are dealing with architecting structures of language that change how people perceive the environment they're operating in — that's a fairly abstract notion. And I'm wondering, for you who have worked, like you said, part of your career internally in large organizations and also as a consultant, how does one make this palatable or actionable to the folks who need this perspective as part of their work? Andrew: So, one of the real challenges of trying to write about this and teach this is that very thing. And part of the challenge of that is, there's a sort of a Copernican shift that you almost need to be able to make, to see it differently. Meaning, you know, the Copernican revolution /[that was/] basically a complete reframing, right? Where it's like, no, everything doesn't revolve around the earth, all these planets revolve around the sun. And it changed… It simplified astrophysics, astronomy. But it was a really hard shift to make because people's just ingrained idea of their experience, where it was not that. And this is really coming from this undoing of Cartesian thinking around body-mind separation and things like that that's sort of been an increasing part of the conversation in the sciences over the last 20 some years, I guess. People are so… It's so ingrained to think about, especially the West, I guess it's, it's so ingrained to think about things in a certain way you know, this idea that you could take your brain and put it into a vat and it'd still be you. But, well, no… Your brain only knows what it knows because of your body and vice versa. That part it feels like it's, to really get a lot of this, you have to get to that, but I'm realizing too that like, well, I can't sit people down and get him there every time. So, the way I've been teaching the workshop, for example, it has been just starting off with just grounding people in a substance or an object and building up from there. Just getting them grounded in, “I have a body,” and so I use Play-Doh in the workshop. So, everybody gets their own Play-Doh and you have to hold the Plato and you have to write down things about like how your body's interacting with it. You put it back in the container, you cover it. You have to think about right now, okay, what is your body experiencing with the Play-Doh now? Well, you can't see it. You can't touch it, but you can see and touch this container. And these all sound like very simplistic, primitive questions. But that's the whole point, to ground people back in simplistic, primitive way of thinking about how bodies and environments interact with one another. Because ultimately what we're trying to get to is all of this abstraction we've created around ourselves, all this information-sphere, all these other things, our bodies want those things to be as straightforward as being able to squish some Play-Doh in my hand or to pick up a hammer and hit a nail. And so that's kind of how I've been framing it is, is getting rid of some of the theory at first, and just grounding people in, “Okay, you've got a body, you're experiencing things,” and then gradually trying to get to the point where we're talking about now, how does language function on top of that? And in what ways does language complicate that simplicity. And then when we add digital, there's a whole other realm of complication or complexity. But it's building up to the abstract, I think helps. It's what I'm ultimately trying to do, is to get at the root. That's why lately I've been calling myself a “radical information architect.” I felt silly that I didn't know this until just recently, that, that radical — the root — really, the root of the word “radical” is the word “root” or the same root. But basically, radical's meaning really comes from this idea that you're changing something at the foundations, right? You're rewiring what's underneath. And I feel like that's what I'm trying to do with this. So if I get people to get out of abstract-head and out of information-head, the way that we typically think of information and start with, how do we understand our physical environment and interact with it in the same way lizards and spiders interact with their environment. The principles are basically the same. And then build from there. That's how I can teach this. Now, if I'm working with just colleagues on the fly in the middle of a project, or I'm talking to my colleagues here at work, I don't go into all that. I mean, I've been here six months and I have yet to go into all that. But what I do is try to slip in this grounding and kind of draw on the whiteboard. Here's a person. Here's some things that they're interacting with. Here's how that might change over time. I'm always trying to locate it into like, you've got a human in an environment doing stuff. Because ultimately that's what user experience brings to the table. There's a human being, and we have to make all this other stuff we're making compatible with that human being. So we're creating new parts of their environment that we want them to use and understand, right? So, in my day-to-day that's just how I started and it's been helpful that we have methodologies like contextual inquiry and service design and things like that where you have some tools, with things like ecosystem mapping and whatnot, that if you really put some pressure on them to make sure you're staying very grounded with a human, with a body doing a thing, that really helps to get people there with you. Things like bodystorming can help too, but it's hard to get engineers to do bodystorming or others. So that's not as common for me. Jorge: You said that this line of thinking has changed how you work, and I feel like we're getting a little bit into that with this conversation, in your interactions with your team. I'm wondering how, if any, it has also influenced the way that you manage your own information and get things done? Andrew: Yeah. I kind of inadvertently learned a lot about myself and the way that I interact with my own environment. You know, another thing about me is, it wasn't until I was in grad school that I was diagnosed with ADHD. And that's something that plagued… I was going to say plagued. That's maybe not the best way to put it. But until I knew what was going on, it was — and you'll hear this from a lot of people who were diagnosed as adults — I really had a lot of challenges that, that really got to the core of myself as a person from that, because I really couldn't trust myself to behave in ways that I wanted to behave in the world and things done and understand things and to keep track of things and all of that. And in fact, just writing a book with one of the scariest things I could even consider. That's one of the reasons I felt like I had to do it, was because it's just very, very hard to marshal… People talk about a train of thought. And for years I've made this joke that I've really got this sort of a Beijing-full of rickshaws of thought. Like, I don't have a train, just these things bouncing around. Understanding this more has helped me to understand so much better that I have to design my environment around me so that it can supplement and help me. Right? And you mentioned earlier before we started recording, you talked about how in one of your podcasts you talked to Jeff Sussna about cybernetics. And honestly, that's a topic I wish I had gone deeper in when I was writing the book, although then I would've had to make it even longer. So, I don't know. But Norbert Wiener and the people who were working in cybernetics, they were really getting at something that the more abstracted Shannon information science, in-theory world, wasn't quite getting at, which was this very ground, that idea of how our bodies and our environments are, are very symbiotic. But it's taken a long time for mainstream thinking to catch up with us. But now I have no shame in creating crutches for myself. So, for example, I use an app called Due on my phone. And good Lord, if this developer ever stops making or updating this, I'm going to be in terrible shape because it works just the way it needed to, which is any little thing that I go, “That feels like something I'm not going to remember.” I put it in there and then it bugs me until I do something about it. Right? So, it allows me to snooze it in a way where I can snooze it in small increments of time or big increments of time of time. For me, it's much more successful than Apple's Reminders, for example, which are too calm for me. And in fact, I think it's the thing where it's like, if it comes up more than a certain number of times, it goes away. I've yet to even figure out what the rules are around Reminders; I find them untrustworthy. Whereas Due, I have this love hate relationship with, because it just nags the hell out of me. But it does it because I told it to. So that's for things in the moment or things I need to remember this at this time. One thing that I really love about Reminders on the iPhone is the location-based thing. So, I take the train to work, which in Atlanta is sort of like winning the lottery to be able to take the train to work. And there are things that I know I need to do as soon as I get to the station near my house, but I know I'm going to forget them because — and it turns out there's research about this, and I write about this in the book — that changing physical environment, affects what you're able to remember. The thoughts that you're having on one room can just disappear when you go to the next room and things like that. And it's not some magical problem. The problem is that your body, your whole cognitive system, is using your environment as a partner in the way that it is making thoughts and thinking through things and remembering things. So, anyway, I can set it so that it's going to remind me of something as soon as I get to the train station. And sure enough, every damn time, it turns out I have forgotten the thing. And I'm thankful that I had told my phone to remind me when I got to the train station. But that's helpful because it's variable. I never know exactly when I'm going to get there when I set the reminder. So, there's things like that I have to do, and I'm in it and it still feels like I'm treading water most of the time, but at least I'm not drowning. And I have other things I do too, but that's just an example of one of those things I've had to do. Other things like routines, where I put my keys, where I put my wallet, where I put my badge for work, I have to do it exactly the same way every day, and if I don't, or if I do this thing where — and again, this is an embodied cognition thing that I understand better now because of that way of thinking — if for some reason, I have some other object in my hand on the way out the door — and this is probably true for a lot of people — like if I've got a letter, I'm trying to mail or something, or especially if it's in any way the shape of another object that I always carry, I'll often forget the thing that I'm always carrying because my body is just sort of halfway paying attention and just assume it's like, “Oh, I've got everything.” Right? So, there's leaks that can happen, but I'm always trying to plug them. Jorge: One of the benefits that we've gained from having these digital things in our lives is that they can augment that relationship between the person and the environment in ways that give us perhaps a little more control and that make it possible for us to suit it better to our needs. Would that be fair? Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. And it's that augmentation again, the thinking around cybernetics, the original work was very much about, right? Which was, let's not create this whole separate alien thing. Like this is all environment, it's all human. So, let's use it to supplement. And even in AI circles, that's one of the big — I don't want to say tension points, but one of the big dichotomies — I guess is it's sort of the school of thought of, well, let's replace certain kinds of human labor using AI or certain human activities or behaviors or whatever versus let's use it to supplement humans and humans supplement it in this more symbiotic kind of a relationship. So, I think, I think that theme, that augmentation theme, I mean, even Steve jobs, right? The bicycle for the mind. I mean, this was, and I think he borrowed a lot of this thinking from… Sorry, his name is escaping me, but the mother of all demos, you know? Jorge: Doug Englebart? Andrew: Yeah. So, this idea of augmenting human needs with technology in this way, it's got a long tradition. But the devil's in the details, right? It's as to how, how do we arrange those things? How do we make them really good for us? You know, rather than things that somehow turn against us, or other people can turn against us. Jorge: Well, thank you. I want to thank you for your work and for helping us be more aware of those relationships. And thank you for being on the show. Where can folks follow up with you? Andrew: I'm online; andrewhinton.com is just sort of my home site and it's got the ways to ping me. There's a contact form, all that stuff, and links to my book, which people are still apparently buying it, because I still get a little check every now and then. So, I'm super happy to know that. I'm starting to feel self-conscious about, about some of the content cause it's getting a little old. But I feel that hopefully the principles are still stable. So contextbook.com is the home site for that. So, you can find me either one of those ways. Jorge: Fantastic, and I will include both of those in the show notes. Thank you so much for being on the show, Andrew. Andrew: Thanks, Jorge. This is great. It was great to catch up and an honor to be on your show.

> Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.firsthuman.com/being-human-newsletter/In this episode, I talk with Peter Morville. I first got to know Peter's work through his 2014 book Intertwingled, which beautifully illustrated the complexity of our world and how we shape the information around us as it shapes us. In this episode, we explore his latest book 'Planning for Everything' in which he makes the case that we should be consciously designing how we plan depending on our context.We talk:- His STARFINDER framework for planning- His dream for Sentient Sanctuary, a place for healing for animals and people- How his voluntary work has shaped in thinking- His plan for Part 3 of his life- How he was inspired General McChrystal's approach for defeating the TalibanEnjoy!Links:https://intertwingled.org/https://semanticstudios.com/

> Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.firsthuman.com/being-human-newsletter/In this episode, I talk with Peter Morville. I first got to know Peter's work through his 2014 book Intertwingled, which beautifully illustrated the complexity of our world and how we shape the information around us as it shapes us. In this episode, we explore his latest book 'Planning for Everything' in which he makes the case that we should be consciously designing how we plan depending on our context.We talk:- His STARFINDER framework for planning- His dream for Sentient Sanctuary, a place for healing for animals and people- How his voluntary work has shaped in thinking- His plan for Part 3 of his life- How he was inspired General McChrystal's approach for defeating the TalibanEnjoy!Links:https://intertwingled.org/https://semanticstudios.com/

> Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.firsthuman.com/being-human-newsletter/In this episode, I talk with Peter Morville. I first got to know Peter's work through his 2014 book Intertwingled, which beautifully illustrated the complexity of our world and how we shape the information around us as it shapes us. In this episode, we explore his latest book 'Planning for Everything' in which he makes the case that we should be consciously designing how we plan depending on our context.We talk:- His STARFINDER framework for planning- His dream for Sentient Sanctuary, a place for healing for animals and people- How his voluntary work has shaped in thinking- His plan for Part 3 of his life- How he was inspired General McChrystal's approach for defeating the TalibanEnjoy!Links:https://intertwingled.org/https://semanticstudios.com/

Healthcare industry involves enormous resources, but has always been "playing catchup" when it comes to software. Our guest today is Chris Kiess, a user experience designer and author. You'll learn about his unique story within the industry, different areas of healthcare UX, typical use cases, professional challenges, and how to pave your own path in healthcare design. Podcast feed: subscribe to https://feeds.simplecast.com/4MvgQ73R in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play Music. Show Notes Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond — a book by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville & Jorge Arango Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — a Wikipedia article Epic, Cerner — some of the popular out-of-the-box solutions for hospitals HL7 — standards for electronic health information Healthcare Design Is About More Than Aesthetics UX Ecosystems: Designing a Patient’s Path to Health Care Healthcare: The other UX design Healthcare UX: a journey just begun Design for Care: Innovating Healthcare Experience — a book by Peter Jones UXD Healthcare, Connected Health Conference — popular healthcare UX conferences Follow Chris on Medium Follow Chris on Twitter: @chris_kiess Today's Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Gusto. Gusto offers modern, easy payroll and benefits to small businesses across the US — they were even named best online payroll by PCMag. As a listener, you’ll get three months free when you run your first payroll. Sign up and give it a try at gusto.com/uibreakfast. Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here. Leave a Review Reviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here's how.

My guest today is information architecture and user experience pioneer Peter Morville. Alongside Lou Rosenfeld, Peter co-authored Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, the first of several books Peter has produced that explore how we deal with information. In this conversation, we discuss a more mindful approach to dealing with the information in our lives. Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/the-informed-life-episode-10-peter-morville.mp3   Show notes Peter Morville The University of Michigan's School of Information Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond, by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango Search Patterns: Design for Discovery by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become by Peter Morville Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything by Peter Morville Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals by Peter Morville Trello Apple Watch Lawrence Lessig Muse headband semanticstudios.com – Peter's consultancy intertwingled.org – Peter's blog twitter.com/morville Read the full transcript Jorge: Peter, welcome to the show. Peter: Hello, I'm happy to be here. Jorge: Well happy to have you. So you and I have known each other for a long time, but for those folks listening in who might not be aware of who you are, can you tell us about yourself? Peter: Sure. So my academic background is in library and information science. I went to the University of Michigan's program back in the early 1990s. And then with Lou Rosenfeld I built a company and wrote a book known as the polar bear book on information architecture and we, you know, we essentially helped to build what became known as the field of information architecture. And since about 2001 I've been doing independent consulting, helping a wide variety of organizations with their information architecture and user experience challenges. Jorge: Lou was the very first guest on the show and I had the opportunity to say on air just how important the polar bear book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, has been to my career. So I want to thank you as well. Peter: Thanks for saying that. Jorge: Like you were saying, you've had a varied career where you've done the running of a consulting company and you've also been doing independent consulting and you're also a very prolific author, right? Peter: Yeah, it's about five or six books. Jorge: And all of them highly recommended. I'm going to put all of them on the show notes for this episode. The latest one is about planning, which is a subject that I think a lot of people think about, but don't delve into. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Peter: Yeah, so I wrote the book partly because I realized that I'm a professional planner, right? Information architects help organizations plan their websites and software and experiences. Partly because I realized that I've been kind of addicted to planning and thinking about the future since I was a little kid. I've always been someone who is kind of focused on what's next, what's next. And yeah, I think planning is something we do every day and it's immensely important to our lives. And yet most of us never take a course in school about planning, so I think it's under studied and kind of misunderstood. Planning doesn't need to be just the big upfront planning and then kind of rigid adherence to the plan. It can be very flexible and involve improvisation as part of it. Jorge: I think that when a lot of folks hear that a book is going to be about planning, they think that it's going to be very hands on and tactical. “This is what you should do and these are the tools you can use and this is an approach for doing that.” And the book definitely has very specific suggestions of things you can do, but the thing that I love the most about it is that it also provides a framework that, at least for me, prompted asking the question “what are you doing this for?” Like why? Why are you doing this? You know? Peter: Yeah, yeah. The way I defined planning in the book is that planning is the design of paths and goals and you know, I very much believe that we need to think as much about the goals and the beliefs that underpin those goals. Our belief that if we achieve this goal we will be happy or successful or what have you. We need to question the goals and the beliefs every bit as much as the path or the specific steps to achieve the goal. Jorge: I remember feeling very much like the book was an invitation to contemplate what you are planning for. Right? Like this idea of delving a bit deeper and I was hoping that we would focus our conversation on that. Like are there ways that you have discovered to do that? Peter: Yeah and I think that ties into the theme of your podcast, the informed life, right? Because if we think about the questions around, you know, how we manage information, what tools do we use to manage information for our personal and professional interests, and then we try to apply metrics or evaluation, am I using these tools efficiently and effectively? Are these the right tools? It begs the question, the right tools to achieve what? Right? You know, is it just about productivity, right? Am I being efficient in my job or is it about learning? Right? Are these tools and the way I'm managing information leading me in a positive direction where I'm learning and changing? I don't think we asked these questions very often, but I think that if we want to sort of talk about the tools that we use to manage information, we have to be mindful of what is the purpose behind that. Jorge: I think that when we use the word tools, folks can assume that we're talking about things like software or a notebook or like some objects, some artifact that becomes the fulcrum around which your productivity function works. Right? But I think that tools, when you're talking about tools, you're also talking about patterns or mindsets or techniques rather than artifacts. Is that a fair statement? Peter: Yeah, I think our brain and our body and our environment are the most important information management tools. The, you know, the mindset that we bring to prioritizing what information am I going to pay attention to, what information do I want to completely shut out? That starts in our brains and then we can use more traditional tools, software or pen and pencil and paper to implement those sorts of strategies that come out of our brains. But you know, I think of the sort of the technological tools for information management being secondary, right? So what I use to manage information and manage my day are things like my email inbox, my calendar. Basically, it's like a list in a calendar. And I use Trello a little bit, but I wouldn't be too upset if I couldn't use Trello because really everything I'm doing could be managed in a little black book. So I don't, the one big step forward in my lifetime that I am very aware of in terms of how I interact with information is the world wide web and the fact that I have access to nearly unlimited information at my fingertips so that when something new pops up, I see a word that I have never seen before or an acronym or something I feel I should learn more about, I can immediately do that. And that's not how it was when I was a kid growing up with a very limited set of books. Jorge: This idea that technology impacts brain, body and environment is something that I want to poke at because I suspect that there are ways of mindfully managing your information to be more productive that do not rely on technology and tools in the traditional sense. Peter: Yeah. And let me go on a sort of an odd direction for a moment because I think it'll tie back into this. So before we talk about how to improve our information management, I think it's worth talking about how we avoid making it worse because that's part of what I see going on in our technology saturated world today. At one extreme, you have folks who are on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram all the time. Constant state of interruption and distraction, embracing the internet of things in the smart home and Amazon Alexa, you know, using voice to turn on and off light switches and then a device I know you're fond of the Apple Watch, right? You're strapping technology onto your body where you can have a 24 by 7 interaction with people and data. All of that stuff in the media sphere is kind of spun as positive, as exciting as, you know, we need to keep people feel that they need to keep up with technology and you know, don't get left behind. Most of the stuff that I just talked about, I tried to keep it arm's length. I don't think it'll make me more productive or happier, but there are seductions around that. So I actually think the first challenge in living in today's world is not to get worse at information and managing information. Jorge: Well, that's a provocative statement right there. Peter: Yeah. Jorge: Can you unpack that? Peter: Sure. Yeah. And I think that it's all about trade offs, right? There's absolutely value in having more instant information, instant access to information and knowing what's going on now and being prepared to respond to that. But I think that we like to live in a kind of a dramatized world where we think that we're going to save our lives or save our loved ones with this text that comes in on our watch and we respond quickly. But for the most part, what we're sacrificing with that instant access is the ability to think deeply, to reflect, to be more mindful of priorities, what really matters, what really needs to be done today. And so I think that we've revved ourselves up into this really fast paced way that work, in our work and living environments operate that isn't particularly healthy or productive really. And I see it in the organizations where I consult, but also just in people's personal lives, you know, watching our teenage girls interact with technology. It's hard for them to read a book because they're so used to speed and interaction. Jorge: Yeah. I have certainly noticed that in myself. Like it's becoming harder for me to sustain the concentration needed to read long things. Because we're used to this 280 character snippets of stuff. Now, it sounds to me like what you're advocating for is kind of eschewing information technologies altogether or at least reducing your exposure to them kind of on a permanent basis. Is that right? Peter: I think it's, in the end, it's all about balance. I did delete Facebook, but I'm still on Twitter. As I said, I value immensely my ability to access the web and learn about things or keep up with news on a daily basis. But I do think that we're living in a society where there are seductions that are not good for us. So talk about food for instance, right? We're living in a society where we have almost 24 by 7 access to fast food, right? Like, “Hey, it's midnight and you should get McDonald's or Burger King and get your fix, get your sugar and caffeine and fat.” And that's not good for us. It's not healthy for us. And our society is getting sicker because of people's diets, right? People do things that aren't good for them because it's hard to resist these seductions that didn't exist for most of human evolution. We're not prepared to resist. We don't have the discipline. And I think the same is happening with information. You know, the stuff that's been going on politically exposes the degree to which people don't know which sources to trust, who to believe. And we have polarization where folks at both ends of the spectrum are believing some pretty crazy stuff. And it's like we're living in an environment that we did not evolve for and we haven't figured out the personal or societal defenses to protect us from ourselves. Jorge: Yeah. And in both cases, this analogy between fast food and… I don't know if to call it fast information but this, kind of seductive information as you're describing it, one of the challenges with it is that they, in many cases, are designed to provoke that response in you, the whole keeping you engaged in the environment. That's something that doesn't happen accidentally. It happens by design. Peter: Absolutely. For quite some time, I followed the work of Lawrence Lessig or Larry Lessig and he introduced me to the concept of the root striker, right? His organization for awhile, it was called The Root Strikers. And it came from, I think it was a Henry David Thoreau quote that thousands of people are striking at the branches, right? To things that are closest to them and most visible. But if you really want to solve the problem, you have to strike at the root. And in my opinion, the root of a lot of problems that are going on in society today is kind of a corrupted form of capitalism. And what's coming from that route are perverse incentives, right? And so organizations have incentives to take advantage of people, right? To sell them the fast food even if it's not good for them, to make the bigger burgers, bigger sodas. And again, the same is going on within the information world, the incentives that Silicon Valley companies like Facebook and Twitter have or that media organizations have, are not in line with the long-term interests of people. I don't know how to solve the problem, but I believe that without striking at the root, without kind of getting to the source, you can punish Facebook for bad behavior, but they will repeat it as long as the incentives stay in place. And all of this trickles down into the information environment that we live in. Jorge: I love this image of the root striker and as I think through my friends, I consider you one of the most thoughtful people about this stuff. Someone who is looking at dealing with the root of these problems. And I'm wondering if you have any practices, any tools, albeit conceptual ones perhaps, that help you do that? Peter: Yeah, so partly it is mindset, which is a word you mentioned earlier. So when I wrote Ambient Findability back in 2005, that was a fairly techno utopian book. And so that, I sort of see that as the end of my kind of unquestioning positivity towards information technology and the direction of human civilization. What I wrote Intertwingled a few years later, I made a conscious decision to lean the other direction. To question culture more, to question technology more. And for better or for worse, that has stuck. You know, that was a decision I made for writing that book that has then had consequences for me beyond. And so I think the first step in protecting yourself from the information deluge, is to understand and accept that nobody's looking out for you, that you have to protect yourself, that it's not all good. You're not going to take any steps to protect yourself unless you feel that you have some something you want to protect yourself from. So once you have that shift in mindset, then I think it's just a matter of being mindful of your practices and not letting yourself get sucked in too deeply. There was a period for me after the 2016 election where I got sufficiently sucked into the political sphere and that I think I went overboard. My family was getting upset with me for being too emotional about what was going on and so I actually took a social media break for I think three months, something like that. And I think that was really healthy. I needed that at that point in time. And when I came back I was able to be a little bit more calm and sort of selective about how much I pay attention to what I pay attention to. I think meditating is super helpful for learning to be mindful and questioning your own behavior and your own habits. Jorge: Are there any particular meditation practices that you can recommend for our listeners? Peter: I'm still such a beginner with meditation. I meditate for about five minutes a day. I just try to focus on my breathing. I aspire to getting more serious about meditation, but even that five minutes a day I feel has been really helpful. And I also read quite a lot about Buddhism and meditation. I feel like there's the practice of meditation, but there's also a really wonderful, rich body of wisdom that has been written over the last few thousand years surrounding Buddhism and meditation that helps me think about thinking. Jorge: That's the key, right? Think about thinking. Thinking this shift in perspective where you are not somehow caught up in what's going on, but you can step back and see how the immersion into that space is happening. Peter: Yeah, and what's funny is I'll kind of correct myself a little here. I love the word sentience or sentient because for me that brings together thinking and feeling, right? A sentient being is a being that engages in some combination of thinking and feeling. As a child of Western civilization, I'm prone to focus more on the thinking side at the expense of really connecting with feelings and I do think that that's part of meditation and mindfulness. And also getting better at managing information is being in touch with your emotions and recognizing that they actually play a much larger role in our behavior and in our planning than we often are aware. Jorge: Yeah. That's one thing that as a parent has really come home to me like, pardon the pun. I've become really conscious of that sometimes one of my kids will be super cranky and just being “difficult,” right? And when I stop to think about it, it's like, “Oh, you know, he or she hasn't had breakfast yet. And this is not necessarily something conceptual that is angering them. This is their body is low in blood sugar.” Right? Peter: Absolutely. I mean, sleep and diet and exercise are probably the top three tools for better information management. Jorge: Well I'm glad you mentioned that because I want to go back to the Apple Watch. Peter: Okay. Jorge: And I'm glad you called that out. O ne of the reasons I like the Apple Watch so much is that it does open up my body as a source of information and I can… I know how many steps I've walked and how many calories I've burned and with the latest version, there's this idea that it's monitoring my heart rate. And I also am going to bring this to the conversation and just let you be horrified. I also have a device that I use for meditation that does the same for the meditation practice. So it's a headband that measures brainwaves while you're meditating and it turns the meditation practice into a quantified experience somehow. And I'm wondering sometimes when I do that both for the Apple Watch and this headband thing is like, am I completely just missing the point of this? You know, by trying to turn it into an information exercise. Peter: Yeah. So I'm not horrified. This is where I feel a bit of a division between my own thinking and feeling from an intellectual perspective. I think the Apple Watch and the sort of biofeedback headband that you're talking about are fascinating and professionally I feel some, you know, some drive to be a little bit more of an early adopter and really understand what's possible so that I can better help my clients take advantage of things. From a feeling perspective, I've always been sort of drawn more towards the natural world than the artificial. And so I don't really, I don't wear any watch or any jewelry other than a wedding ring. I don't like to attach things to my body. And I'm also just, I guess I have just a certain wariness of the kind of second- and third-order effects of having this information. And I guess finally I'll just say over the past 10 to 15 years, I increasingly got into running as a form of exercise and to eating healthy and I, through some combination of discipline and just enjoying exercise, I have no need to measure my steps or to provide other external incentives. But you know, I appreciate that other folks get value from that sort of quantified self piece of this. And as I was thinking about this interview and this notion of the informed self, it occurred to me that there's a first impulse to try to explain how the way that I manage information as the right way, right? Like, you know, we all have to some degree this, take pride in how we do things and want to share them with the world. But I think in some ways how I manage information is the result of privilege. For instance, I rarely answer the phone unless I know who's calling and actually, I never answered the phone unless I know who's calling. And you know, I don't have a boss. I'm not in a situation where I just need to open myself up to the world in that way. And I'm aware that other folks aren't in that situation. You know, some folks have to answer the phone for a variety of reasons and that's a huge… That could be a huge interruption in your daily life. So one size doesn't fit all, right? Like we all have to figure out what works best for us given our preferences and our context. Jorge: That's why I love so much this idea that you've brought up of the root striker. I'm parsing that as an invitation to think, to examine more broadly your life situation. And it's not just about managing information, it's ultimately what are you doing? You know, why are you doing and what are you doing and what is it in service to? Peter: Yeah. And as you and I have talked about before, I have this not completely formed plan to buy some property and start an animal sanctuary and create a place that can be helpful to people and animals. And that comes from that deep questioning of what do I want to do with my remaining time here on planet earth? And while I get a lot of intellectual satisfaction from consulting with big organizations, I'm not sure, if I look forward to the next 25 years or so, that that's going to fulfill my need for a real sense of purpose and meaning. So I'm kind of looking at a fairly large shift in my life in the future that comes from that reflection and thinking about, you know, root causes and what's really going on. Jorge: I'm hearing what you're saying as an invitation to step out of the melee and really examine whether the life you're living is aligned with your values and if not then to adjust course. Peter: Absolutely. We, as far as I know, we only get one chance at this and we're not here for that long. So you know, again, there's a certain amount of privilege in being able to switch gears at this stage of life. But I think we all have more freedom to choose our own path and goals than we often admit. Jorge: Well, that's a beautiful place to wrap this conversation, Peter, thank you so much for that invitation. I consider it an invitation to self-examination. Where can folks find you and follow up with you? Peter: Well, my websites are semanticstudios.com and intertwingled.org and as I mentioned, I'm still on Twitter. Jorge: And don't try calling Peter. We already know that. Peter: That's right. Don't try calling. Jorge: Well thank you so much, Peter. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. Peter: I enjoyed talking with you, Jorge. Thank you.

Daniel and Ciaran take a closer look at planning with an in-depth interview with Peter Morville, the father of information architecture and the author behind the book Planning for Everything: The Design Of Paths and Goals. Peter walks us through the principles and practices of great non-linear planning, which he uses to help both himself and his clients build a better future. In today's world, almost anything is possible, but to achieve it, you need to know how to plan and how to adjust the plan to fit the rapidly evolving landscape we all live and play within.  If you hate planning, Peter would argue you're doing it wrong. Fortunately, planning is a skill, everyone from playful improviser to rigorous planner can significantly improve if they are ready to learn. Discover what better planning might do for you, and your organisation. Listen in and be inspired by learning, adjusting and refining how you approach planning and implementation of your plan. Peter's principles are an excellent springboard to take your ideas and future to a whole different level. Jump on board and see where they take you. Useful Links Semantic Studios Peter on Twitter: Planning for Everything By Peter Morville Information Architecture By Peter Morville Eric Ries: The Lean Startup Charles Snyder: The Psychology of Hope Pema Chödrön Peter Drucker W. Edwards Denning  

Mike Atherton Mike Atherton applies insights from information architecture to help content strategists develop domain models. These models help align content stakeholders and create a powerful way to organize, discover, and display content. Mike and I talked about: his discovery in the late 1990s of the field of information architecture (solving what was then known as "the pain with no name"), via Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld's book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web how his work on the media archives at the BBC led to the development of the practice of domain modeling the origins of his domain model in Eric Evans' book Domain-Driven Design book how domain modeling is essentially a research project, a way to pick the brains of stakeholders and help them (subject matter experts, designer, engineers, et al.) come to agreement how a domain model gives you a place for any/all content you have in that domain how domain modeling can work as a forcing function to figure out which content belongs in a digital product his definition of content marketing: "You're not making content about your product. You're making content about the things that matter to the people who buy your product." how the ability to target users and customers is more advanced than the personalization and other techniques attempting to address it (here's the DrupalCon talk on personalization he mentions) how well Dyson executes its content marketing program, mapping out a complete 1,200-day customer journey the need for a grammar for new practices like personalization the use of interactive narrative as an intermediate practice on the way to full-on personalization the difference in perception, definition, and application of "content strategy" between product content strategists, tech comms strategists, etc. - and how they can still be tied together how he and his co-author Carrie Hane strove in their development of Designing Connected Content to empower non-technical people to apply technical concepts in their content strategy work how interface design decisions should be informed by the stucture of content relationships, as described in a domain model how domain modeling permits more organic cross-linking and other navigation opportunities his thoughts on content marketing, for example, on poorly executed programs: "Doing a thing badly doesn't make that thing bad." how content marketers would benefit from shifting from a campaign mindset to "thinking about what's useful for the long term" and how this can help "brands can become that ambassador for their subject domain" Mike's Bio For over 20 years, Mike Atherton has been connecting people to content. A specialist in structuring information, he has chunked, pushed, presented and linked compelling content for the BBC, Huddle, and, in a different age, Playboy TV. Now a content strategist for Facebook in London, he collaborates with product specialists to build experiences from the terminology up. He recently co-authored the book Designing Connected Content. Video Here's the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/djwfsLmB3Do Thank You, Moz We recorded this episode in a conference room in the Moz offices, a few blocks from Mike's hotel. Thanks, Ashlie, Ida, and team! Transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 44 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Mike Atherton. Mike is best known - the reason I asked him on the show is because of his book, Designing Connected Content. I'll tell you a little bit. Mike has- like a lot of us old timers in the field, he has a broad background. I'll let him articulate his current role, but I was interested in your information architecture background and how you elegantly stitch that into the content strategy profession. How did you come to do that? Mike: Hey Larry. Thanks for letting me on the show.

Mike Atherton Mike Atherton applies insights from information architecture to help content strategists develop domain models. These models help align content stakeholders and create a powerful way to organize, discover, and display content. Mike and I talked about: his discovery in the late 1990s of the field of information architecture (solving what was then known as "the pain with no name"), via Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld's book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web how his work on the media archives at the BBC led to the development of the practice of domain modeling the origins of his domain model in Eric Evans' book Domain-Driven Design book how domain modeling is essentially a research project, a way to pick the brains of stakeholders and help them (subject matter experts, designer, engineers, et al.) come to agreement how a domain model gives you a place for any/all content you have in that domain how domain modeling can work as a forcing function to figure out which content belongs in a digital product his definition of content marketing: "You're not making content about your product. You're making content about the things that matter to the people who buy your product." how the ability to target users and customers is more advanced than the personalization and other techniques attempting to address it (here's the DrupalCon talk on personalization he mentions) how well Dyson executes its content marketing program, mapping out a complete 1,200-day customer journey the need for a grammar for new practices like personalization the use of interactive narrative as an intermediate practice on the way to full-on personalization the difference in perception, definition, and application of "content strategy" between product content strategists, tech comms strategists, etc. - and how they can still be tied together how he and his co-author Carrie Hane strove in their development of Designing Connected Content to empower non-technical people to apply technical concepts in their content strategy work how interface design decisions should be informed by the stucture of content relationships, as described in a domain model how domain modeling permits more organic cross-linking and other navigation opportunities his thoughts on content marketing, for example, on poorly executed programs: "Doing a thing badly doesn't make that thing bad." how content marketers would benefit from shifting from a campaign mindset to "thinking about what's useful for the long term" and how this can help "brands can become that ambassador for their subject domain" Mike's Bio For over 20 years, Mike Atherton has been connecting people to content. A specialist in structuring information, he has chunked, pushed, presented and linked compelling content for the BBC, Huddle, and, in a different age, Playboy TV. Now a content strategist for Facebook in London, he collaborates with product specialists to build experiences from the terminology up. He recently co-authored the book Designing Connected Content. Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/djwfsLmB3Do Thank You, Moz We recorded this episode in a conference room in the Moz offices, a few blocks from Mike's hotel. Thanks, Ashlie, Ida, and team! Transcript Larry: Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 44 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Mike Atherton. Mike is best known - the reason I asked him on the show is because of his book, Designing Connected Content. I'll tell you a little bit. Mike has- like a lot of us old timers in the field, he has a broad background. I'll let him articulate his current role, but I was interested in your information architecture background and how you elegantly stitch that into the content strategy profession. How did you come to do that? Mike: Hey Larry. Thanks for letting me on the show.

My guest today is Lou Rosenfeld. Alongside Peter Morville, Lou wrote the seminal book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web — also known as the polar bear book. In 2005, he founded Rosenfeld Media, where he and his team amplify user experience expertise through conferences and books, including my own Living in Information. In this conversation we talk about how Lou manages information to effectively coordinate the various workstreams at his company, including the upcoming Enterprise Experience conference. Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/the-informed-life-episode-1-lou-rosenfeld.mp3   Show notes Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond (4th Edition), by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango Rosenfeld Media Gmail Apple Stickies.app Sanebox Facebook Andrew Hinton on Twitter Zoom Enterprise Experience 2019 conference Enterprise UX community

This is episode zero of the show, which means I don't have a guest. Instead, I talk about what we're going to be doing here: what this show is about and why you may find it valuable to tune in. I also tell you a bit about myself and how I got into this topic, and what I'm planning to do with it. Hope you enjoy it! Listen to the full episode https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/the-informed-life-episode-0-intro.mp3   Show links Jorge Arango's blog Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond (4th Edition), by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places, by Jorge Arango Image by David Swayze, via Flickr

Subscribe to the podcast using: iTunes | Stitcher | SoundCloud   This episode features an interview with Peter Morville of Semantic Studios. Brought to you by our sponsor: Fluxible 2018 00:00 Intro Theme 00:11 Introductions/Interview with Peter Morville of Semantic Studios. Links / topics mentioned: Shetland Sheepdog Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and Goals […]

In this episode, Aaron Mangal explores the concept of User Experience (UX) with Vitalik Demin, Software Program Manager, and Information Architect at ZenCash. Vitalik Demin, Software Program Manager, Information Architect at ZenCash "My passion is to fix and improve processes and technologies that are broken and not intuitive to use. I see process end-to-end and drive inefficiencies out by re-engineering the flow, building technology solutions, and ensuring the user experience is impeccable." User Experience (UX) and design are separate (albeit greatly related) disciplines. The science of UX has not always been as obvious as it seems today and has shifted into such force that it has it's own specialization and job role in today's startups. According to usability.gov, a website on UX maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services: User experience (UX) focuses on having a deep understanding of users, what they need, what they value, their abilities, and also their limitations.  It also takes into account the business goals and objectives of the group managing the project. UX best practices promote improving the quality of the user’s interaction with and perceptions of your product and any related services. Peter Morville, veteran UX and information architect made a User Experience Honeycomb to visually explain the concept: User Experience Honeycomb We greatly enjoyed learning about this super important yet often overlooked construct not only within Cryptocurrency but the digital (web) experience as a whole.  We hope you enjoy learning more about the philosophy and principles behind User Experience (UX). After listening to this episode you will learn: How Vitalik first learned UX and developed his craft The origin story of Vitalik discovering ZenCash and how he decided to work for them (due diligence process) What some great (and not so great) examples of UX are What ZenCash is and what they do The connection between ZenCash and IOHK The difference between designers and User Experience professionals Why brands should maintain control end-to-end for their marketing (see Samsung S9 phone ad example) Best practices and other insights around approaching User Experience (UX) For show notes and more please visit: LAB Radio

Episode 22 highlights: - Peter’s new book “Planning for Everything” and what led him to decide to write a book about planning - What we can learn from the U.S. Marines about planning better design and research projects - Peter’s framework of S.T.A.R.F.I.N.D.E.R and how to use it for better planning of your ux, design and research projects - How Agile development process can help...and hinder your design and software project planning - Are you OVER-planning? How to determine if you are and if so work at getting better at improvising - Tips for convincing your stakeholders to do (or do more) user research - Systems thinking and how it applies to UX design and product management - Ways to be more self-aware in the design, features and decisions we make in our work as UX designers, researchers and product managers more here: https://blog.aureliuslab.com/peter-morville-interview-on-ux-user-research-and-design-planning

UX and IA pioneer Peter Morville, founder of Semantic Studios and author of four major design books discusses his latest, Planning For Everything, with host Jeffrey Zeldman. When Peter Met Lou, “Peak chaos,” belief bubbles, why the dichotomy between planning and doing is false, how to plan a family vacation swimming with sharks, striking a balance between planning and improvisation, and more. Links for this episode:About Peter MorvillePeter Morville (@morville) | TwitterSemanticsAmazon.com: Planning for Everything: The Design of Paths and GoalsBrought to you by: An Event Apart

UX and IA pioneer Peter Morville, founder of Semantic Studios and author of four major design books discusses his latest, Planning For Everything, with host Jeffrey Zeldman. When Peter Met Lou, “Peak chaos,” belief bubbles, why the dichotomy between planning and doing is false, how to plan a family vacation swimming with sharks, striking a balance between planning and improvisation, and more.

Fans of libraries and information architecture will love hearing from Ann Arbor District Library executive director Josie Parker and information architect Peter Morville. Read more »

Insa tells the story of her odyssey to eco-social design.

Karl connects planning to IA, AI, UX, and robots.

Jeff explores research, planning, and leadership in the context of Agile and Lean.

Jim explores strategy, learning, and integrated planning for colleges and universities.

Micah and Jonah reveal how to integrate research, design, and planning with agile software development.

Martin connects chemistry and trust to the planning of intranets, funerals, and weddings.

Lindsay talks Scrum from story brainstorming and sprint zero to backlog grooming and working software.

Tony explains why K-12 students need maps, how he helps artists find time, and where to look for organizational improvisation.

How do you plan a move to Africa? Why might you pivot from management to coding? Livia connects the dots from imagination to improvisation; and explains how to make planning fun.

Christina talks about teaching, sketching, OKRs, and the beauty of a good fail. And she explains why most people are wrong about planning.

Planning isn't just a leadership skill. It's a superpower. And information architecture isn't just for websites. It's for org design.

Rachel argues that both the plan and the change need to happen, and explains why this paradox challenges Western linear thinking.

In this conversation about prototyping as a form of planning, we talk about sketching in code, the Apple Watch, Christopher Alexander, and the Apollo Space Program.

Drawing on her personal experience with the devastation of tropical storm Sandy in 2012, Amy explains why a natural disaster is an information architecture problem.

Can we get better at planning? Jessica Hall says "Yes" and explains the tools and tactics she uses for structuring tasks and preparing her mind. Also, we learn what went wrong at Disney World.

Lou visits with old friend Peter Morville for a discussion of the evolution of the internet, what they expected for the internet twenty years ago, and guessing at what we may see twenty years down the road.

Jeffrey Zeldman's guest is Abby Covert, Information Architect; curator of IA Summit; co-founder of World IA Day; president of IA Institute; teacher in the Products of Design MFA program at New York's School of Visual Arts; and author of How To Make Sense of Any Mess, a “brilliant introduction to information architecture” (Peter Morville) that is frequently purchased at Amazon with Don't Make Me Think and The Design of Everyday Things, the two classics of usable design. Discussed: why IA matters now more than ever, the difference between IA and content strategy (IA is building the vehicle, CS is putting fueling it and making sure it won't run out of gas), writing and designing a book, building agreement among stakeholders, “not having opinions, not having ideas of one's own,” IA's origins in language and structure, the fun of the IA Summit, the creation and growth of World IA Day, the joy of teaching, and more.

Jeffrey Zeldman’s guest is Abby Covert, Information Architect; curator of IA Summit; co-founder of World IA Day; president of IA Institute; teacher in the Products of Design MFA program at New York’s School of Visual Arts; and author of How To Make Sense of Any Mess, a “brilliant introduction to information architecture” (Peter Morville) that is frequently purchased at Amazon with Don’t Make Me Think and The Design of Everyday Things, the two classics of usable design. Discussed: why IA matters now more than ever, the difference between IA and content strategy (IA is building the vehicle, CS is putting fueling it and making sure it won’t run out of gas), writing and designing a book, building agreement among stakeholders, “not having opinions, not having ideas of one’s own,” IA’s origins in language and structure, the fun of the IA Summit, the creation and growth of World IA Day, the joy of teaching, and more.

What does quality and craft look like in the Enterprise UX world? Kendra and Lou take on the unique challenges of designing software to meet the needs of a constantly changing world. Craft Amid Complexity is a key theme at the upcoming Enterprise UX 2015 conference, where Kendra will deep dive into the topic along with fellow experts David Cronin, Uday Gajendar and Peter Morville. @kshimmell http://www.cooper.com/people/kendra_shimmell @enterpriseUX www.enterpriseux.net

Learn how Peter Morville got started in Information Architecture and began to create a connection between the physical organization of library information and the online world.

"From Information Architecture to Ambient Findability to Intertwingularity: An Inspiring Conversation with Peter Morville

" Recorded June 18th, 2012 at IUE2012. Peter Morville (above, left), best known as a founding father of information architecture, co-authored the profession's best-selling book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. That was 1998. Since then, Peter continues to be a prolific author, practitioner, and thought leader for our industry and profession amidst this ever-expanding and reinventive internet landscape that continues to provide communications, information, and commerce to the world. To most effectively tap into Peter's current and historical thinking, he was interviewed live and interactively with the audience by Design Critique's Timothy Keirnan. Visit Peter's blog and more at http://semanticstudios.com/

It’s the end of the first morning here at #uxlx and we’ve got our first workshops under out belts. James took part in David Gray’s Gamestorming session whilst Per took part in Peter Morville’s Cross-Channel Strategy workshop. Here’s our initial thoughts from right after lunch… (Listening time 9 minutes)

In this episode of the UIE Book Club, Jared Spool interviews Peter Morville about Search Patterns. Peter offers great insight on the role of search inside a successful web site and discusses why it can be hard to get executives and stakeholders to make gr

Peter Morville joins Timothy Keirnan to discuss the keynote presentation at Internet User Experience 2010 and his new book, Search Patterns, co-written with Jeffrey Callendar.You can find Peter at his company's website:http://semanticstudios.com/And his blog is athttp://findability.org/

In this podcast, Jared Spool sits down with Peter Morville to answer many excellent questions from the recent Leveraging Search and Discovery Patterns virtual seminar. Even if you did not attend, there's a lot of great information in this podcast.

Even the best design teams, methods, architecture and tools are no match for a project beset with political infighting, divided priorities or unfocused goals. To truly make an impact, product teams need to have business buy-in and a shared understanding of the project’s direction. Often, it’s up to designers to smooth the way and facilitate this consensus. By greasing the tracks in the early stages of a project, designers can gain the much-needed support of business stakeholders, avoid wasted effort, increase their influence (within their teams and the company at large), and make a more meaningful difference with their work. The key is to bridge competing viewpoints, develop a common vision and break through project roadblocks. And it all starts with the right combination of tools and techniques. In this session, you will: * Discover how to bridge competing viewpoints, develop a common vision and eliminate roadblocks on your next project. * Explore the ways in which your existing design skill-sets can be expanded to improve communication within your team and throughout you company. * Learn facilitation techniques to help engage business stakeholders and manage the conflicting priorities and lack of direction that so often derail a project. About Jess McMullin Since 1997, Jess has focused his career on understanding and developing positive user experiences for his clients and their customers. Drawing on sources ranging from social sciences and behavioral research to gaming, market analysis and future trends, Jess generates client insights that drive innovation and create better customer experiences. Jess often speaks at conferences focusing on user experience, design thinking and innovation, topics he also writes about on a regular basis. His ideas have been featured in several user-experience books, including Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Ed. and Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience. In 2003, Jess founded nForm User Experience, a boutique consultancy that counts Comcast, Ancestry.com and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute as clients. Jess also organizes CanUX, the annual Canadian User Experience Workshop in Banff, Alberta, and he is the cofounder of the international Information Architecture Institute. For Jess’s latest thoughts on business, design and innovation, visit his blog, bplusd (business + design).

A talk show on KZSU-FM, Stanford, 90.1 FM, hosted by Center for Internet & Society Resident Fellow David S. Levine. The show includes guests and focuses on the intersection of technology and society. How is our world impacted by the great technological changes taking place? Each week, a different sphere is explored. This week, David interviews Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability.. For more information, please go to http://hearsayculture.com.

Main Topic: Interview with Peter Morville. News: NGTOC update, Leica 9.0, Stardust project