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Thanks for all of the comments at the conference on my "Fun with faceted browsing" presentation. My UI-focused view fit in very nicely with other presentations in that track. You would have thought it was all planned, but we all worked separately and there was no master plan to sync up as well as we did. But it was amazing to see my work referenced and so quickly assimilated into the other presentations. I think that is a sign that something is up with this faceted browsing thing.
Here is the link to the web page about my presentation - http://user-experience.org/uefiles/facetedbrowse/
I just updated the page (on March 3rd): adding a PDF of my slides (2 per page, not 6, so that you can read them).
June 22 update - Only 4 months after the conference, I "finished" the page.......
I attended Joseph Busch's excellent talk on taxonomies during the last presentation session of the day (had to miss the IA slam, that sounded like a lot of fun as well). One of his key points was that content producers are going to have to create metadata, because it is not possible to hire enough librarians to do it all. Information architects can provide simple rules to the content creators for categorizing information. This led to a great dialogue about how to incentivize content producers so that they create metadata.
Here is a URL for his presentation (in PowerPoint): http://www.asis.org/Chapters/asispvc/feb_10_2004/ASISTPVC021004.ppt
Please share your thoughts!
The first 2 days here have given me a renewed sense that, in a funny way, the most important people aren't here: the people FOR WHOM we're designing sites. Listening to George Olsen's excellent presentation on personas, it struck me that IA is following a perilous path, similar to that travelled by librarians at the turn of the 20th century. And that is the path of trying to understand the "typical user" of our systems.
The peril does not lie in the task, but in the way one approaches it. Charles Cutter, back at the end of the 19th century, argued that controlled vocabularies should fit "the public's habitual way of looking at things." People can argue with that idea: what about outliers? What about marginalized groups? etc. But when we let our hair down and permit ourselves some self-honesty, we all aim to do the best we can for the greatest number of people, and identifying a persona, or a "typical user" is a necessary task.
The peril comes in the way you establish that typical user. In the early days of controlled vocabularies, we tended to assume that we somehow "could guess" who these users were, what they wanted, what they liked, what they disliked. Our ideals (admirable ones) were linked to poorly-executed constructions of these users. It so often seems like "common sense": but the last 2 days have been full of accounts that surprise us: log files that reveal things we never expected, accounts and research and tests that showed us just how off base our common sense might be.
IA, it seems to me, is very properly reiterating the need for research into what users want, need, like, dislike, etc. The practitioners and the researchers may not always agree on the desirable level and detail of that research. Nonetheless, there seems to be a sound and effective realization that without listening to the users SOMEHOW, our constructions of the "typical people" will not serve our real people.
Taking a look at open-video.org as A Case Study of Redesigning a Digital Video Digital Library. It's in the LIS-oriented track, but it's really a good blend of the library science things as well as the UCD and interaction design things... talking about how identifying the high-level tasks and how users bounce between the stages.
Slide 22 (hopefully these will be available online) has some good examples of how different personas and high-level tasks map to the specific stages identified. "Not an exhaustive list ... typical paths to understand how users use the site." Then they extrapolate some specific criteria at each stage that are important.
The presentation isn't over, but I can see how this would be a very good intro case study that could be used to explain the value of UCD and IA in (re)designing a site. We're glossing over some of the details here, but for those used to requirements-straight-to-code, with some more detail this would be a great introduction to UCD and IA.