Orientation Notes

• Infocamp: Power to the people.  Enable the user to use technology (but what’s technology?)
• Disciplines represented: IA, Libraries, HCI, usability, user centered design, technical communication.
• 2 days, 45 minute presentations - we can react to stuff happening NOW (WaMu)

Keynote - Jacob Wobbrock

• Degree in HCI
• dub: University of Washington HCI/design group, stands for “design, use, build” - combines computer sciences, info school, technical communications, school of arts
• Disability: contrast w/ ability.  Contrast standard parking handicapped sign with other graphics
• Accessibility: not just for people in wheelchairs, curb cuts: bikers and strollers assist as well.  Curb cuts if built from the beginning save money.  Anticipating accessibility saves money in the long run.
• Person pushing cart through sliding doors: situationally impaired
• accessible design: talking about everyone, in different circumstances (situational components)
• accessibility is usability for all.  It’s not about disability, it’s about what you can do.
• We have a standard interface for computing that presents challenges to someone with non-standard abilities - we usually adapt the user to the technology, creating specialized technologies.  The assistive technology is a mediator.  But why?  Why not design smarter or adapt existing everyday input devices?
• EdgeWrite: creates a limited input area to assist with drawing letters
• Can leverage the properties of edges for more than just text entry - playing with using different input methods along edges of mobile devices, trying to aim for a specific spot in a screen
• Isn’t the stylus dead due to multitouch?  Weellllll….
• Reading screen with finger is much different than actually using a screen reader
• “Why can’t my computer just do the right thing when I type?” - person with peripheral neuropathy
• Demo TrueKeys: live spell checking as typing occurs.  Challenge: How do you allow someone to not have to verify that a corrected word was done properly?  Is there a way that you can always correct a miscorrected word without feeling pressured?
• Let’s burden the machine: SUPPLE++ - can we automatically generate UI customized to a person’s individual abilities?  Yup.  Issue low-level tasks, model it, then generate an interface that minimize cost and user errors.
• Forgotten input device: the microphone!  It can be used in creative ways.  Person painted with his voice using Dragon NaturallySpeaking and MS Paint!
• Vocal Joystick - voice/vowel map so that vowel sounds force cursor to move in a specific direction.  Can map pitch or loudness.
• Angular deviation for cursors: create larger or smaller targets for clicking as people use the computer.
• Why don’t we see targets that expand as we approach them, gravity wells, “slippery slope” guidance to common targets?
• “The world is a button” - Jake Wobbrock
• “What if the world was a switch?”  Buttons we need to acquire a confined area - switches, not so much - we can overshoot a switch, it doesn’t change the interaction so long as the interaction crosses the plane of the switch.  The world we’ve created is all totally fake when it comes to technology.
• Can we get rid of pointing and use something called “goal crossing”?
• Why do we have to assume desktops are x/y grids?  What about polar coordinates or reels?
• Start from center, when crossing an icon, bring up specific interactions
• “Flipping the burden”/ability-based design - allow software to adapt to people’s ability.  Think about accessibility as a potentially better design for everyone.
• Challenge: it takes a company with developers and infrastructure to really push stuff out!

Session 1: Help Me Turn Data into a New Design (Kristen) - Room 106

• Wanted to learn what problems people were trying to solve using library web site and tried to figure out how to find that out
• Used chat with a librarian feature transcript to get feedback on current layout
• Generated lists of tasks performed and problems people encountered (tasks: locate something vs. searching for something, access a specific database, search for specific piece of information, etc.; problems: people can’t find information, people don’t know what they want, did not understand a policy or service, library doesn’t own resource, etc.)
• Possibilities: tweak search results and training curricula for searching databases, federated search, map out “task paths” for the most common ways of doing certain tasks, overview of resources available, come up with vocabulary based on chat transcripts, make the main page more visual - MORE WHITESPACE!  If people are stuck, give them an “out” - a way to get help.  Create profiles of users so that professors can “target” content to users that they want to see used.

Session 2: Knowledge Management (Room 102)

Topics:

• Research (gleaning new ideas)
• tacit KM - preserving knowledge in the workplace
• expertise location
• knowledge sharing
• knowledge boundaries
• information verification and security
• capture verification
• value page
• Jeff Smith: How track experts and make findable, not just a tool?  How expose what you don’t know that you wish you knew?
• defining wwdk
• data visualization
• personalization - tailoring how people receive or record knowledge

Notes:

• some of the items in the list above could be treated as inputs into the knowledge management process - information verification, security
• what is a knowledge management system?  It may not be a system at all…
• What is a knowledge management system, really? It may not even be a “system” per se - it may be an interaction between elements.
• In fact, knowledge management isn’t systematic - capturing it is, but knowledge management is CULTURAL.
• KMS are now just generic systems trying to model particular things.
• explicit knowledge: universal, tacit knowledge: something that’s inside, can’t be vocalized/translated
• sometimes we need to be able to push knowledge into the background, but it still needs to be accessible and actionable
• KMS: what these systems try to achieve can be done much more efficiently by changing the culture to allow a daily interchange of information
• Knowledge needs context
• “Modern Society is Document Decadent”
• knowledge management talked about in the context of organizational goals
  
• Knowledge Management Maturity Model: http://www.kmmm.org/model.html
• what is the difference between information and knowledge, or do we actually even care?

Session 3: Flat File vs. CMS (Room 106)

• wants something simple and easy to maintain
• plone - cms, has problems with web host providing it
• task: figure out whether to stay with flat files or to move into cms
• what’s the difference between the two methods?
• theory: a lot of people want to be able to create and maintain content - what to do with volunteers?
• “flat”: one HTML page per site
• CMS: more refined management structure
• 10-12 pages
• sections of site may be more dynamic
• 2-3 days reasonable turnaround time on changes
• 3-4 people updating
• consider using templates

Another simplified CMS/Flat file:

• time consuming to maintain and update
• 12 pages not dynamic
• 3-4 people updating
• jobs - HTML templates
• knowledge of HTML
• Seamonkey - HTML Mozilla editor
• richer experience = more admin time
• social media
• users are STC, other orgs
• share resources
• timely info and info update problem - users news and events and jobs
• updates w/o CMS

CMS:

• WYSIWYG editor
• easy to change
• anyone can do updates
• events: time/place fields
• content control and security control
• set permissions correctly
• CMS outlive person or person outlive CMS?
• Instructional overhead/longer learning curve
• CMS doesn’t necessarily imply web 2.0
• content and system lives on
• organizational commitment
• institutional memory/institutional history of docs
• distributed users***
• resource limitations: time, $

Cross-boundary considerations:

• Google Analytics
• Culture of content sharing
• Overall vision
• users have certain expectations
• Free stuff? Open source?
• Do I need this NOW or forever?

Session 4: Structured vs. Unstructured Data (Room 102)

• Goal of product: search through metadata, find metadata in certain systems and create different views of the information out of the system
• Created series of products that allows metadata findability, but doesn’t work for unstructured information
• Structured v. unstructured information definition: structured: database has fields and tables and schemas, the Sematic Web, etc.; unstructured: info that you don’t have access to or that isn’t ordered - photos, video, etc.
• http://www.sapdesignguild.org/editions/edition2/sui_content.asp
• Types of unstructured data: photographs (inc. print), sound files, text, user input, files, logs, video, animation
• Structure has to have meaning to someone; something can be very well structured, but if you can’t make sense of it, it’s useless.  You need to be able to UNDERSTAND information.
• Context makes a big difference on how information ends up being structured.
• Transforming physical unstructured data: requires physical interaction with objects to add structure on top of the physical data
• virtually all user input is unstructured unless you can limit inputs

Inspired by an xkcd comic, NP-Complete, and also because I was buying some DVDs from Amazon anyway, I decided that I wanted to place an order from Amazon that was as close to $100 worth of merchandise as possible after tax and shipping.

The rules:

• The order must be as close to $100.00 as possible, including tax and shipping charges (note: using free shipping options is not considered cheating).
• Items in the cart at checkout must be things that the buyer wants and will use. You cannot?????? simply select something that will round out the price tag.
• All items must be sold by Amazon.com, not their resellers (this is because resellers tack on extra shipping costs for certain items).

This took a bit of work, especially since I already had three DVD box sets in the cart that I was buying via one of Amazon’s TV DVD sales. Values as follows:

• Stargate Atlantis - The Complete First Season; DVD; $24.99
• Stargate Atlantis - The Complete Second Season; DVD; $25.00
• Eureka - Season One; DVD; $25.00

компютри втора употребаI tried first throwing stuff in from my wish list, originally throwing in a paperback copy of Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous. After that, I realized that I had been looking for either a spork or a set of stainless steel chopsticks for home/travel use. I was able to add in a set of stainless steel chopsticks fairly cheaply. With the chopsticks, the book, and the three DVD sets, I got to $98.29 after tax and shipping - roughly $1.70 short.

I spent a bit of time trying to figure out if I could fill that extra $1.70 by buying something small, useful, and cheap - apparently Amazon doesn’t believe in selling individual packets of Post-its or M&Ms or something trivial like that (at least not without going through a reseller, which would break the rules).

I finally managed to get it to $99.75 total with free Super Saver shipping after swapping Weinberger’s book out with another book on my wish list. The breakdown looks like this:

• Stargate Atlantis - The Complete First Season; DVD; $24.99
• Stargate Atlantis - The Complete Second Season; DVD; $25.00
• Eureka - Season One; DVD; $25.00
• Serves One: Simple Meals to Savor When You’re on Your Own; Toni Lydecker; Paperback; $11.53
• Global Decor Stainless Steel Chopsticks, 4 Pairs; Kitchen; $4.99

  Subtotal: 91.51
  Free shipping and handling
  Estimated Tax: $8.24
  Total for this Order: $99.75

This is actually an interesting exercise because it exposes information about what Amazon does and does not sell, and also gives some hints as to the usability of the site overall. While I was doing this, I was instant messaging a friend of mine that’s currently serving in Iraq (and coming home in the next couple weeks, I might add) - I originally described this as an “intellectual exercise in consumerism”; he shot back that this is actually interesting social commentary.

This was after calling me a geek/nerd/dork/weirdo/etc.

Zach Hale points out that my RSS feed only publishes post summaries.  Whoops.  I’ve changed it (I hope) so that it properly pushes out entire posts.

For all two of you that might follow this blog using something other than the web site :)

Inspired by Nick Cernis and his blog post on Inbox Heaven, I’ve decided that I’ll try a partial implementation of his system:

1. Attempt to remove messages from my Gmail inbox as fast as possible.  Star items that need immediate followup and delete items I’ll never reference again.
2. Check the “Starred” list daily, at minimum.
3. Use labels to track messages that are of interest to me that I may want to reference later (which is what I was previously using starred messages for).

Reading the Inbox Heaven post inspired me to go on a deletion binge and remove a few thousand e-mail messages from my account (most - if not all - of them list messages from back when I monitored Prius e-mail lists).

Alas, this won’t apply to my UW accounts, since the UW uses IMAP for mail retrieval.

As some of you are probably aware, Sean Rees and I are both co-founders of Energy Soapbox, a web site dedicated to promoting sustainability and environmental awareness. This blog features posts that focus on diverse issues from the meaning of sustainability to sheepwalking (though I have slowly become the sole contributor as late).

With Dennis McDonald’s post on creating blog-based microcommunities, I actually wonder if we might have approached the Energy Soapbox project the wrong way. In a nutshell, McDonald has been working with another blogger to have a shared conversation posted on both their blogs. They then combine their RSS feeds on the topic and present them as a single page (with each blogger having his own copy of that page on their web site).  Would this have been a better approach for Sean and I to use - establish a common tag or category that would synthesize all of our posts together?  That’s not to say we couldn’t also use the Energy Soapbox domain for its current purpose of displaying a running record of the conversation, but the sort of split McDonald describes would denote the ownership of the ideas better and empathize that Energy Soapbox is merely an additional platform (or - ahem - an additional soapbox).

That said, there is still an important question here - when is it better to “spin off” these sorts of projects into their own space, rather than attempting to combine disparate resources to represent a conversation?  There aren’t any real criteria that answer this question, and that may well be for the best, but this still seems like an important conversation to have overall.

Hmm, if it weren’t in the middle of the second or third week of Spring, this would be freaking awesome. Registration would be fairly cheap, since I happen to have recently become a student member of The Information Architecture Institute.

Something quite interesting popped into my head, and thus prompted this post.  As most know, I do a lot of reading as a part of my masters studies, and have done a lot of reading in the past regarding a host of different topics, particularly during my undergraduate work at Evergreen.  Oddly, when I’m doing academic work, I almost never like to read anything else, since my energies tend to get a bit drained from having to keep up with the academic stuff in the first place — there’s residual effect as well in that I seem to not like reading much for time periods after the academic year has ended.  Regardless, I find myself in a bit of a quandary; I’ve done a lot of reading on the subjects of sustainability and information management, but I really have no method as it stands of referencing all of that information or even recalling where something in particular cropped up.

This is a big problem, and spans a lot of different resources: textbooks, class notes, handouts, technical articles, magazine articles, programming code snippets, old web site designs, even in-line notations on whatever I’m reading.  I come up with ideas for projects that (no pun intended) peter out (cough) after a while, either for lack of motivation or for lack of appropriate reference material - in general, it tends to be more the former than the latter, but lack of reference material also rears its ugly head occasionally.  This isn’t because I lack the information; it’s because I’ve seen it somewhere but can’t find it again!

I’m not the only one.  Not by a long shot.  Everyone faces this.  I have a slight advantage in that I’m beginning to recognize some of the ways that this is solvable, but at a slight disadvantage in that I am not quite as involved with stuff like social tagging or folksonomies — though I should note that Wikipedia has it wrong; folksonomies and social tagging are not the same thing, and saying they are is misleading.  Anyway, the main reason I have a problem is that I don’t have a quick way of finding any annotations or relevant readings for a particular topic.  If I wanted to remember a bit about economics, for instance (a highly relevant subject for me at the moment because of PB AF 594), I don’t have any way of knowing what articles I’ve read related to the subject or where my books are that cover that subject or what I might’ve taken as notes in classes three or four years ago that talked about the subject.  This is partly lack of time to look all this crap up.  This is also partly because that requires locating things - like my ink in my last blog post, I may not know it’s already around or may think I loaned the book on the subject to someone else.  I actually thought I had loaned one of my economics books to my mother (don’t ask me why I thought this) until I spotted it going to bed one night on a bookshelf directly across from the bed!

I’ve tried recently to reduce the amount of stuff I hang on to that makes it harder to find things.  I’ve started a “clippings binder”, where I rip out magazine articles that I think might be useful for future reference and recycle the rest of the magazine.  I can’t bring myself to do this for my copies of eco-structure, since those are just pure gold, but most of the other magazines I have floating around succumb to this sooner or later.  I can’t do this to books (and won’t - my father, who is doubtlessly reading this, would about have a conniption and ban me to the seventh or eighth layer of hell).  Last year before moving to Seattle, I donated a bunch of (admittedly mostly fiction) books to Olympia’s Goodwill branch to reduce the number of books I had sitting around.  But really, this hasn’t done much - I still have a lot of books I want to be able to reference.

There’s an extra dimension here - not only is there stuff I have read, but there’s stuff that looks relevant that I want to read, but can’t find the time.

It seems like the only really good way of doing this would be to start creating additional notes on every single book I read that might be relevant to future work, but that in and of itself is a lot of additional work.  Would it increase my ability to look for and find information?  Probably, especially if it were implemented correctly (I’d guess a wiki system with some sort of tagging grafted on would work quite well for this).  Perhaps I’ll take a sabbatical in 2009 after I graduate and spend the summer reading and making notes and putting them into some coherent system.  Yeah, right.  So how do we organize all these resources that we personally find relevant?  There are answers — maybe — and those answers are (fairly) likely to be relevant.  But in the meantime, if I want to remember all I’ve seen on sustainability, I’ll have to read it all over again, or at least spend a copious amount of time reading over whatever notes I made in the margins of books or on paper somewhere in a binder buried in my closet.

That’s assuming those notes existed at all, and that’s a whole ‘nother problem.

This was a presentation given by Benjamin Chiao from the University of Michigan - he’s currently a PhD student at their Information School, but also has an economic background, which is where much of this talk was couched.

• What’s the point of solving spam problem? Less time sorting spam, less economic cost for blocking spam, customers spend less money
• $10 billion/year spent on spam related technologies
• What is uncensored/open channel? keep inbox filters, no filters in special folder, guarantee delivery of messages into folder
• Properly tagged messages will automatically be assigned to a folder/label
• No new technological infrastructure required and fully reversible
• Existing mechanisms to prevent spam: legal punishment, filters
• Proposal of the open channel: decrease benefits of spamming by decreasing the number of recipients
• Economics: micro-economic model shows open channels increase benefits to recipients, advertisers
• This is not a unique mechanism - Chiao compared it to TV shopping channels: you don’t have to watch, but the information is constantly there
• Open channel is like web sites - anyone can post
• Not excluding the possibility of search within the open channel
• Sender tags sent messages (as being part of the channel? This wasn’t clear in the talk)
• The definition of spam used here specifically targets unsolicited commercial mass e-mails - no other message types are considered here
• Current spam volumes are between 80-90% of total network traffic - 40% advertise medications, 19% is adult content, 41% other (according to Evett 2006
• Spammers continue because they are economically supported - there’s a point where the supply of spam must meet demand
• Why do we need open channel? Why not just search for the content via existing search engines? Sites selling these products disappear too quickly: 30% of domains created die within a day (according to MessageLabs 2005)
• Spammers need to keep pushing information to inboxes because they must move rapidly due to legal reasons
• 60% of spam messages are sent by zombies - computers hijacked for the explicit purpose of sending spam
• The CAN-SPAM Act has essentially legalized spamming
• The open channel proposal separates the current e-mail ecosystem into two ecosystems - one “open” (the proposal) and one “traditional” (the current model)
• Audience observation: this system assumes that EVERY e-mail system implements the open-channel concept
• Current technology already partially implements this idea (sort of)
• Spammers might be happier on open channel! :D
• This is still a theoretical idea
• Essentially create two channels: one open and one censored (I’m not clear on whether the “channels” are analogous to the “ecosystems” mentioned above)
• E-mail recipients opt in to the open channel in order to maximize their own utility
• The sender gets its current revenue from the advertising charge times the number of mails received
• The sender’s current cost is the constant reestablishment of sending channels (zombies)
• The open channel attempts to establish equilibrium between advertisers and receivers of spam (note that advertisers, senders, and receivers are independent parties)
• There is not just a supply curve but a demand curve for UCM
• The open channel method induces UCM to move out of the current e-mail system

I’m not sure Benjamin gave sufficient background to make any of us fully appreciate the idea - there’s two problems with it that I can see: first, it exists within the reality of economics, not the reality that we commonly deal with. Thus, it’s governed by the same economic laws that give me such a headache in PB AF 594, and understanding the concept requires a suspension of our own realities in order to appreciate the laws that govern the proposal. The second problem is that it’s not clear how this can be implemented within the current system. Is this a system that merely adds a tag to all messages that identify it as open-channel or “traditional”? How do you physically separate the two ecosystems without actually modifying the current e-mail structure, and how do you enforce proper usage of both ecosystems? An honor system in which we assume that the senders, the receivers, and the advertisers are all working to maximize their own utility (basically their net happiness) is perfect in economic theory because economic theory establishes that everyone will strive towards some theoretical maximum benefit, but in reality, it just doesn’t seem possible.

There was one thing that I want to follow up on - Benjamin mentioned the Attention-Bond Mechanism (Loder 2006) in his talk, so I’ll have to look up exactly what that entails (it’s a concept related to the acceptance or rejection of e-mail messages).

The iSchool held a panel of practitioners in the field of Information Architecture as part of iCareer Week at the beginning of the quarter. These are my notes from that panel (interpreted without quite as much of the fresh context in my head as I usually like, I must admit).

• Recommended courses: 530/540 (taxonomy/technology); project management; research methods and analytical skills; coollaboration/teamwork; 580s; User Centered Design (UW Extension/UW Educational Outreach)
• When in class, always ask the question: “What’s the point of this?’ Also ask, “How can I communicate the value of this to someone not familiar with the concept?”
• What kind of information architect do you want to be?
• “What other value can I add to the degree?” (ask this)
• Mike Crandall: What functional subspecialties are there in IA? What is IA?
  • metadata, user experience, user research, usability, analytics, wireframes, data modeling, interface/interaction design, evaluation
  • Major groupings within IA: taxonomy, HCI, design (visual and interaction)
  • There are also “innies” vs. “outies”: internal and external consultancies in IA. The contrast here is one of a mother who takes care of the kids and an ER doc who does triage. This is the contrast between a consultant for a company and a consultant for an agency.
  • If you want to get into programming as part of the MSIM degree, go for concepts, not languages
  • It’s difficult to be a developer and an information architect.
  • It’s important to be able to talk to people who understand how the system is built - hence why programming can be important.
• Mike Crandall: What kinds of tools do you use?
  • Outlook/Excel/Office, mind mapping software, Illustrator (some), InDesign, workflows
  • “We’re consultants first” - need to be able to advertise and deliver IA. How to express that? “Deliverables, wireframes…”
  • “Tools were not a big concern [in work] - I had the underpinnings.”
• Mike Crandall: Looking for a job - what did you do in your job search? How did you find IA-related jobs?
  • Join a professional organization related to IA and stay informed
  • Look for a job using your own personal network - go through the people you know
  • Make your own projects while you don’t have a job and build it. Create your own portfolio.
  • Get into a company that needs what you want to do and do it (note that this may not match your “official” job title!)
  • Brush up on resumes and cover letters
• Audience question: how do you present stuff that’s not really done?
  • Get to the level of “I feel good about this piece of work” and give the context of the assignment
  • Depends on the type of IA you want to do
  • You’re attempting, in your portfolio, to show how you synthesize a large amount of work
  • Mike Crandall: process is the important thing: you sell the process, not the work.
  • Don’t be afraid to say you don’t do something because it isn’t your strength!
• Mike Crandall: What is your next career step?
  • CEO! Getting more of the science behind the ideas, getting more in front of clients, practicing current work, “getting good”, balance design with working with people, create a collaborative process, start their own company, become web director, learn business skills, learn team management, work on motivation (self and others), get more management/oversight experience, work on client/account management
• Audience question: What do you hate?
  • Being rushed, repetition, wireframes (sort of)
• wireframes are breaking down - high level of interaction
• Special Interest Group lists are valuable
• Audience question: when did you finally feel confident?
  • When working with first client
  • Focus on the user is your selling point
  • Fake it - say stuff with confidence, even if you have no clue what you’re doing
  • Know how to figure things out

information professional: someone who has the ability to make decisions with regards to information.

– Joseph Tennis, IMT530, January 31, 2008