The IA Summit (and information architecture) enters adolescence

The first IA Summit was held April 8-9, 2000, in Boston, MA, and was titled Defining Information Architecture. Now, fast forward to this year’s 13^th IA Summit held April 3-7 in Baltimore, MD, in which the Summit entered the awkward teen years against the slogan “Observe Build Share Repeat.”

Taking the slogan to heart, a number of Summit workshops, sessions, keynotes, and discussions focused on reframing information architecture as a practice and as a field. Granted, IA is closer to 40 in chronological age (many date back to Richard Saul Wurman’s 1976 declaration “I am an Information Architect,” though personally I subscribe to Andrea Resmini’s Brief History timeline), but it is also experiencing adolescence thanks to a rapidly transforming digital landscape that makes puberty seem pretty innocuous. Consider, for example, the proliferation of:

• Big data and open machine readable datasets (e.g. DATA.gov, and AWS Public Data Sets)
• Content syndication, especially approaches like COPE (Create Once Publish Everywhere)
  • Plus increased use (and occasionally understanding) of taxonomies and metadata
• Free and open-source:
  • Blogging and content management systems like WordPress
  • Content management frameworks like Drupal
  • Design tools like Twitter Bootstrap and hosting services like GitHub
• HTML 5 and CSS3 with their improved capabilities especially around design and media
• Mobile devices and technologies
• Responsive web design in its various approaches and permutations

Like a teen whose body is changing faster than it realizes, so too is information architecture stretching and growing and developing. But information architects (at least most of them) have gone through puberty and should be able to adapt their practice and usher their field through this tectonic change.

Remaking information architecture

Coming of age is always difficult. It requires patience and introspection. It is uncomfortable, unpleasant, awkward, and is in many ways unending. But, it offers a unique opportunity to remake and improve information architecture in the face of change and to prepare for the next tools, technologies, and even modalities altering both the digital and physical landscapes.

This means making hard choices and invariably suffering missteps and setbacks. But when the IA community comes through it, it’ll be older and wiser with a better understanding and control of its body (the practice and field of information architecture). Then IA can start realizing the unmet potential of its youth. So what is the path ahead?

Define information architecture not as a concept, but as a practice and a field

For me, the highlight of the 2013 IA Summit occurred before the opening keynote. It was the pre-conference workshop, Academics and Practitioners Round Table: Reframing Information Architecture, moderated by current Information Architecture Institute president Andrea Resmini. The all-day session consisted of 30+ information architects working to identify the requirements that would lay the foundation for a common language, grammar, and poetics for IA.

While the proceedings of the workshop will be published in the Journal of Information Architecture, the real work will begin when the larger community comes together to define and formalize itself. This necessarily includes:

• Defining what is and is not information architecture
• Identifying and documenting the major IA schools of thought
• Mapping out and understanding how IA relates to sibling (such as usability, information design), parent (such as architecture, library science) and extended-family (such as psychology, linguistics) fields
• Agreeing on a basic timeline for information architecture’s intellectual history, including formative events that pre-date the emergence of the field as well as key technological and cultural events that shaped it
• Codifying information architecture best practices and developing standards around key artifacts
• Formalizing the requisite background, training, skills, and certifications for practitioners and then defining the various roles within IA, noting which overlap with other fields and how

Here it should be noted that individual IA practitioners, organizations, and programs have made strides in addressing the above. But until there is a confluence from across the information architecture community, these will be little more than outposts in the wild and may even promote schisms within the community.

Accepting some basic truths about the practice of information architecture

The larger discussion around remaking information architecture also includes coming to consensus around some important concepts that every information architect needs to understand. These are discussed in my April 17, 2013, Aquilent (my employer) blog post 2013 IA Summit Themes but are summarized here:

• You cannot control device usage. Device usage will change and evolve faster than we can keep up, and it is a fool’s errand trying to predict or determine how users access content.
• You cannot control content. Syndication and content reuse ensure that content takes on a life of its own, so it’s essential to understand and leverage taxonomy and metadata.
• You cannot control meaning. It is not inherent or discrete and can’t be turned on and off; information architects can only share meaning and should consider a meaning-first approach.
• To serve the users you must serve the content. Understand and leverage syndication, promote content longevity and usefulness, and consider targeted, accidental, and future audiences.
• Sometimes you’re the architect, but often you’re the builder. We cannot always do dramatic and innovative work, but remember, the best information architecture is invisible.

There are, of course, many other concepts that are essential to the practice and field of information architecture will be identified and defined as its adolescence continues.

The time is now…

With the IA Summit turning 13 and information architecture in a time of adolescent turmoil and transformation, it seems clear that the timing is right to define and formalize both the practice and field of information architecture.

Heading into the 2014 IA Summit, members of the community need to open their minds and roll up their sleeves for the difficult, awkward, and emotional work ahead. And they should do so knowing that once information architecture enters its adulthood, it will open up new world of influence and opportunity.

Put another way – and paraphrasing B&A founder Christina Wodtke – be bold, take risks, and fail spectacularly. Now is the time to clearly define and state the communities’ vision for information architecture then set out to realize it.

Go ahead and give it a look. Read your last job description. It’s impressive, right? Chances are, you emphasize your accomplishments, your ability to create stunning deliverables, and your extensive knowledge of the user experience practice.

Now, think back to your last project. But, ignore the deliverables and design ideas. Forget the budgets and timelines. What are you left with? Aside from a handful of sharpies and post-its, you’re left with the daily conversations and experiences you had with your team. What were they? Did you have to persuade somebody to see your point of view? Was there frustration, misunderstanding, or even a heated argument? Or, did things just “click” and everybody worked in harmony right from the start?

Most of us never stop to wonder why certain projects flow effortlessly while others feel like we’ve entered into a cage match. The truth is that most of us ignore the very stuff that determines if our human interactions are a success or a failure. Most of us ignore soft skills.

What are soft skills?

Everybody has his or her own definition. Some people call them “social skills”; a popular movie scene shows a man humorously screaming, “I’ve got people skills!” at his interviewer, and there are countless books on the subject. I define soft skills as the interpersonal abilities and sensibilities we gain during our journey from children into social adults.

Whatever label you prefer, taking a look at what soft skills are and how you apply them can have a huge impact on your work performance. This holds especially true for us in the UX field where we constantly strive to redefine boundaries, achieve consensus, and persuade others to see our point of view. The road isn’t always smooth, or even paved, and it’s our soft skills that will get us to our destination.

Soft skills applied

Let’s look at three scenarios where soft skills are put to the test. Whether these scenarios are familiar to you or not, ask yourself what you would do in each situation. Ask yourself how you would apply your soft skills and what result they might achieve.

Scenario 1: You say tomato, I say UX.

It’s 12:10PM, and the rumble in your stomach confirms that it is indeed lunchtime. Instead of waiting for your favorite noodle dish to be served, you are waiting in the conference room wishing your pencil were an appetizer.

Finally, the door bursts open and Don, the marketing manager, enters the room. “Hey sorry to keep you waiting! I was chatting with Susan about my landing page, and she was saying how busy you guys are! Thanks for taking the time to meet with me about this UI stuff.”

Did he really say “UI”? Okay, it’s an honest mistake. You decide to return the smile and politely respond, “It’s actually user experience, or UX. There’s a separate group handling UI design.”

He pauses a beat and shrugs his shoulders, “Hey – UX, UI, it’s all the same, right? Now, I was thinking about my landing page design last night and I made some sketches. I know you are probably a wizard at Photoshop, so try not to laugh…”

What would you do?

Option 1: Put him in his place.

You respond, “First of all, UX is not the same as UI. I design experiences, not just interfaces. Secondly, there’s a lot of thinking that goes into it that you are unaware of. I start with something called discovery…”

Outcome: You may have succeeded in educating him on what you do, but you did it in such a way as to leave him few options but to be offended or embarrassed. Regardless of what he says next, Don won’t be coming back to you with the same openness and enthusiasm as he did today. Chances are, he might be asking your boss for somebody else who is “easier to work with.”

Option 2: Respect and be respected.

You smile and say, “Don, you know how your job as the marketing manager involves creating these great strategy plans for the year and outlining each campaign to make sure it aligns with a goal? Well, user experience is similar in that we look at the objectives for a project and strategize on how best to design the system to match those needs. UX…”

Outcome: You’ve avoided bruising Don’s ego by sidestepping the fact he doesn’t know what UX is. You show respect by stating the value of his role and you speak his language by drawing parallels with your own. By pivoting from a head-on posture to side-by-side, you have a much better chance of him accepting what you have to say and forming a new partnership.

Scenario 2: I don’t buy it.

It’s Wednesday morning and you’re ready to present your wireframes. You flip through your presentation even though you know it like the back of your hand. Your diagrams are polished, but not too high fidelity. Your annotations are thorough but concise enough to be digestible. You’ve memorized the talking points and are anxious to present the design to the entire team.

You begin smoothly enough by thanking people for their time and quickly settle into your regular cadence. The butterflies in your stomach perk up as you talk about the ever-contentious homepage redesign. People begin to nod in agreement with your strategy and you sigh in relief since the hard part is nearly over. You pick up the pace and mention the new slider design and how it can handle multiple business priorities. Suddenly, you notice a frown on the CEO’s face and your throat dries like a towel. Here it comes.

“I don’t like sliders. Get rid of them,” says the CEO.

Just like that, your presentation grinds to a halt and all eyes are on you. Even the butterflies want to know what you’ll say next.

Option 1: Dig in.

You fold your arms and say, “Well, I think the slider is the best way to go.”

Outcome: Besides the soundtrack from a spaghetti western, this head-to-head approach yields both a winner and loser. And since it’s the CEO you’re facing, the end credits will reveal you were the latter. You want to avoid win-lose scenarios as much as possible because not only will they undermine somebody’s credibility, they promote a culture that values strength over merit.

Option 2: Just the facts.

You adjust your glasses and respond, “Well, I did try different options but this one seems to be the best fit for our users. People are accustomed to using sliders in our other app and analytics shows they actually look at all of the messages before exploring.”

Outcome: The best way to deal with emotional arguments is by sidestepping the emotion. You can’t rationalize somebody out of a personal design preference. So, defer to the facts of the design. Make it about the users and business goals, not you. You are not your design.

Option 3: Turn the critic into the collaborator.

You nod and reply, “Yeah, the slider is a tricky element on this page. I explored a lot of other options but I’m open to new ideas. Let me walk you through my thinking and maybe you will see something I didn’t.”

Outcome: It’s far easier to criticize a design than it is to create a solution. Engaging people in the design process will let you be seen as a person who wants to make the work great, not someone who craves credit for every decision. Plus, by drafting critics into becoming problem solvers, you minimize on the amount of unconstructive noise without risking confrontation.

Scenario 3: There’s a storm brewing and it’s going to be a doozy.

“I don’t care about rational arguments and I don’t want to talk analytics. I don’t care what you say. I want it designed this way and that’s the way it’s going to be!”

I couldn’t believe I heard these very words during an internal design review. What started out as a simple discussion quickly escalated into a heated debate. Well, only one of us was heated, but we were clearly both debating. Unfortunately for me, he was the project owner.

Conflict is inevitable. People go to war, they fight in court, and there are small disagreements between people all the time. When faced with conflict, think about your options. There’s more than the fight-or-flight response.

Here are your options when dealing with conflict:

1. Flight. Someone might be having a bad day and are looking for a confrontation. If you think it’s best to avoid it altogether, do so. There is no shame in knowing when to pick your battles.
2. Fight. If you think you are in the right and don’t mind making it clear that you are to be the winner and they are to be the loser of an argument, fighting for your position is what you want to do. Just be mindful of the potential repercussions.
3. Give in. When push comes to shove and you don’t have a solid position, you will falter. Giving in is one way to quickly end a conflict and please the other party.
4. Ask for help. Some situations are too difficult to face ourselves, so we call in somebody bigger and stronger to do it for us. That’s how it works on the playground anyway. In the office, we can call on our boss to handle things beyond our capability.
5. Compromise. While it sounds like a good thing that a mutual agreement has been reached, compromise is never satisfying. Neither party gets what they truly want. And, the compromise looks a bit like design-by-committee, which always looks ugly to everybody not on the committee.
6. Consensus. This is the holy grail of conflict resolution. You work through the material and everybody agrees the solution is a “win.”

Reading these scenarios and carefully choosing your option is a bit like living with telepathic abilities. Many times, we make choices in the heat of the moment based on our emotions, our instincts, or honestly the need to be “right.” I suggest we take a page from our own design playbook and first begin with exercising empathy. Even when you don’t know the “right” answer, thinking about what the other person is experiencing will make it far easier for you to decide how to react and have the best outcome.

What about you?

As your resume grows and you travel further down your career path, your may find yourself relying on your soft skills more and more. I’m of the mind that one’s work is never finished. In practice, there is no perfect. And, even the smoothest and most charismatic of us can use a little work. Here are three steps to getting on the path to improving your soft skills.

Step 1: List your work activities that require soft skills. For example, let’s say your list includes “Give presentations.”

Now, imagine the best presentation you’ve ever seen. Maybe it was watching a Ted Talk, your CEO, or even a colleague who works in the next office. We’ll define that performance a “10.” Now, list what skill level you think you need in order to do your job well and be satisfied.

Step 2: Write down your current skill level in another column. This takes some honest self-reflection. And remember, cheating only hurts the cheater. Unless you are delusional, in which case, I say go for it.

In this example, maybe you feel nervous and freeze up during presentations. Or maybe you lack the ability to go “off script” and exude the confidence and charisma you saw in your CEO. But, you still get your point across and nobody really complains. So, you think you’re about a “5.”

Step 3: You knew the gap analysis was coming up next, right? Well, calculate the gap between what you need to be at and your current skill level.

What do we do when we see a gap? No, we don’t go shopping. We bridge it. Here are the bricks:

Make a Plan to Better Presentations

• Brainstorm and talk to colleagues on how they honed their skills.
• Look for speaking opportunities and practice religiously.
• Join Toastmasters and refine your speeches along with your listening skills.
• Try an improv class to boost charisma and trust in yourself.

Whatever the soft skill you are looking to improve, don’t forget it takes both learning and practice. Be creative and most important, approach soft skill development with the same tenacity you do with the hard skills we hone everyday.

Level up

Developing your soft skills will yield improvements both in yourself and your relationships with others. Contentious meetings will run smoother, your opinions will be heard (and valued) more often, and you will win the employee of the month award. Okay, the award might be a stretch, but others will recognize you for your ability to handle difficult situations and influence outcomes. And best of all, you will be doing it in a way that feels natural.

Take a look at your resume again. What is the next job description you will be writing? For many of us, the UX path can wind from practitioner to leader. The transition can happen slowly, but as your responsibilities and leadership duties grow, so will your reliance on the soft skills you have developed.

Soft skills are the leader’s hard skills.

My work involves helping people to understand how to best plan circumstances in which users are engaged and satisfied with their experience. Yet, I do not call myself a user experience designer.

I am an information architect. I work on clarifying information and the structure it should take to best enable understanding. I create maps, controlled vocabularies, diagrams, flows, hierarchies, and statements of truth to facilitate groups towards a goal. I do my own research. I use interviewing, contextual inquiry, and usability testing most often.

• I am not an interaction designer. I do not explore, define, and refine the interactions that a user has with an interface and/or service.
• I do not code, or render what a user will actually “see” through visual design.
• I am not a content strategist. I do not extend structures and derive templates in order to propose governance and process flow for the creation of new information and the retiring of old.
• I have done all of the above at one time or another.

I don’t think it is worth arguing about whether you can or should have a job in which you do all of these things. But I fear that the widespread adoption of “User Experience” has had adverse effects on the clarity of our process. It has made concepts like information architecture, content strategy and interaction design harder to explain, to teach and ultimately to learn about. In my humble opinion this umbrella is obscuring others’ view of our reality.

Our hindsight is clear, but our foresight is clouded

I am afraid that there is a shortage of specialist jobs, and it isn’t because those specialities aren’t needed. I believe it is because the value of those specialities, and the impact of not considering each carefully, is in too many cases not clearly called out to our clients and partners.

A simple test of this is asking, “If a UX fails, which part is to blame?” Is it a problem with the information architecture? The interaction design? Or maybe the content strategy? Maybe it is indeed all three or none of those three. Maybe it was badly produced or written? Maybe it has technical issues? Maybe the branding is off or the marketing didn’t drive the right people to do the right thing?

In picking apart an experience, the differentiation of terms suddenly offers tremendous value of focus. In focusing on a specialty we don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We suddenly have lots of dials to play with in formulation of a strategy for improvement.

Our process is being reduced

In my experience when “UX” is the term sold-in, the resulting project plans are less likely to reflect the points at which various specialities will be relied upon to progress the team. Often prescribing a stacked to the gills list of tasks reduced to the nebulous “Design the User Experience” on the Gantt chart. The makers of these types of plans leave it to “UX Designers” to divide the time they have amongst the various specialities of a “UX” and arrange their time against it.

If you have a great generalist who is also a great salesperson, this model can work well. But more often I fear that we are putting our industry in a bad position by generalizing when communicating about these specialities with others. I hear designers say “I’m doing the UX” far too often when describing the value that they bring or the part of the process they are in.

The worst case scenarios result in teams jumping right to wireframes, prototypes and documentation. I see far too many UX designers that have become wireframe machines.

This approach is directly contrary to the truth of how things get made properly:

1. You must define the why before the what.
2. You must define the what before the how.

In other words, defining a solution before you understand the goal and prioritized requirements is often a wasted effort and a distraction. Whether you define everything on your own and work through the various specialities required is really not my point at all, my point is that these questions and these specialities are always needed and in some cases they are answered by different people.

Our specialists are struggling

I work primarily on large scale, systems-based projects. I am good at the defining the Why and the What. But when it comes to defining the How, I prefer to work with others more dedicated to that craft. Sometimes the user experience designers I work with struggle to understand and champion the value of information architecture. Sometimes they feel like I am taking away their fun. But in moments when they need the information architecture to be clearer, they are able to demarcate it clearly and ask me for what they need. After a few of these moments the process gets easier for all of us and consensus is more easily reached.

Why would I ever have to defend the value of IA on a team of like minded umbrella dwellers? Why do I see important steps skipped in favor of moving right to defining the How so often? I don’t think it is because I am working with the wrong people. I think it is because our industry has a long history of land grabbing of titles, processes, deliverables, and value.

Our road has been paved over by many, and driven over by many more

In the past year I have been told to change my title to product manager, design thinker, strategist, service designer, interaction designer and of course user experience designer.

The convergent nature of this industry has made our road a hard one to name, and I respect that deeply. But I don’t think the right strategy is giving up on naming it, stealing a name, or settling for a name that doesn’t quite fit.

I think this is about hunkering down and creating consensus. We need to define ourselves and our value. We need to learn to sell ourselves and the expertise of others under this umbrella. We need to remember what it is like to not understand these concepts. We need to create ways of explaining what we do that make sense outside of our silo. Lastly and maybe most importantly for our own sustainability as a field – we need to give permission to generalists to specialize.

These are important steps forward as we continue to become a legitimate field of practice. Our students, clients, heroes, and our peers deserve these levels of truth.

Our future is bright

Regardless of what you call what you do, it is a great time to be alive and contributing to this time of our industry. My greatest hope is that this is still fun to talk about when it is all said and done.

I am an information architect. One day I may be something else. For now, I see a need, and I want to keep on filling it.

A couple of years ago, I was asked to speak about “design thinking” at a web conference. The conference-speaking part was nothing new, but the topic certainly was. With the “design thinking” wave having just recently peaked, I had yet to even come up with a clear definition of the term. So I accepted the challenge and went about the business of putting a wrapper around the idea so I could map it to our work as strategists and designers.

What I found was a bit of a joke. The few snake-like definitions I was able to charm out of the depths of the interweb with magical flute-playing were no better, no worse, and no different than definitions of “interaction design,” which were in turn no different than definitions of “problem solving,” which we as a species have been doing since the dawn of humanity. So what was the big deal about design thinking? Well, the big deal was that some designer douchebag decided one day to rebrand “user experience,” presumably to bring his agency a few new dollars. Leader of IDEO or not (I’m talking to you, Tim), rebranding a profession for no good reason is not a noble nod to semantic precision, but an exercise in self-importance.

Besides this, it bothered me that those among us who spend our time fighting the good design fights were acting like we had nothing better to do, as if the world would solve its own problems while we were over in the corner deciding what to call our particular brand of ice cream. And it was at this point that I decided I no longer gave a fuck.

It doesn’t matter one bit what you name the band, it matters how good the music is. The reputation you build around the name will outlive even the stupidest, most drunkenly attempts at a moniker cool enough to guarantee future rock god glory.

And most importantly, while we were all busy debating syllables and word pairs, the world at large caught onto the moniker we’ve been using all along. On a near-constant basis these days, the term “user experience” is used by people whose expertise is in raising kids, or selling insurance, or milling sugar. It’s used by people who have no business even knowing what “user experience” means. It appears in dinner table conversations. It appears in write-ups about apps, devices, and gadgets galore. It’s in magazines, on television, and online.

“User experience,” as a term, is weak, ineffective, and inaccurate. But although I am among the many in our profession who believe this sad title we’ve assigned ourselves becomes less potent with each utterance, I happen to also believe we should guard it with our proverbial lives. “User experience,” like it or not, has become a household name. And the best chance any of us has at legitimizing a profession that invariably begs further explanation and qualification is to make it as easily recognized and banal as “carpenter” and “motorcycle mechanic.”

“User experience” either is or isn’t the best term to serve as the concrete beneath our careers. And we either give a fuck or we don’t. It’s our choice.

Let’s stop talking about what it’s called and start solidifying the world’s understanding of it. Some people build cabinets. Some fix motorcycles. We design sites and apps. It doesn’t matter how we do it. It matters how easy it is to accept that it’s real, it matters, and is a sound career path to describe when you meet your girlfriend’s parents over Thanksgiving dinner.

Fuck title debates. “User experience” has momentum. Let it roll, and get back to work.

When Boxes and Arrows was founded a little over ten years ago, there was nothing quite like it online. There were peer-reviewed journals, and basic how-to articles. A List Apart was much more concerned with the CSS behind the interface back then, and UX Matters, Johnny Holland and Smashing Magazine were not even a twinkle in their creators’ eyes. So a bunch of scrappy volunteers gathered together and pushed to get the stories we wanted to read online. We were struggling to figure things out in our day jobs, and we created a place where we could learn from each other. Boxes and Arrows did much better than we could ever have imagined, surviving transitions over four chief editors, thirty-nine editors, and today it holds four-hundred-and-forty-one articles written by three-hundred-and-nine members of the community at large.

But it was always a volunteer organization. It lost money for the first five years of its life, and for the next five barely paid for hosting and conference coverage. This allowed us to podcast the IA Summit for the first time, and paid to have those podcasts transcribed. Jesse James Garrett’s incendiary talk on User Experience is captured because of the passion of those volunteers, and the kind sponsors who made it possible. Our history is written because of the amazing volunteers of Boxes and Arrows. Wireframes were defined and debunked here, Design Patterns explained and complained about, career advice given out and career transitions documented. Boxes and Arrows was the best of us, and we like to think it inspired our many peers who now make it so easy to share inspiration and knowledge.

But as often happens with volunteer efforts, the volunteers’ lives changed. Some people left the field, some people took on jobs that required long hours, and some people made babies. Some people did all three. The people who used to have spare time, didn’t.  They didn’t even have time to notice what was happening. And through spam and neglect, the magazine started to wither. And the torch didn’t get passed. And lacking oxygen, it started to flicker. And now, some say, the light is gone.

But rather than dead, let’s say it is sleeping. Boxes and Arrows is old for an online magazine, and with age comes some advantages. One is SEO: with no new article published, it still gets 5-7K pageviews a day. A bad day for Boxes and Arrows is ten times most blogs’ best day. Which means Boxes and Arrows is still a site with reach. It means it is still a place where a voice, having something important to say, can be amplified. That voice could be yours.

And so, facing retirement or resurrection, we’d like to ask you, reader, what should be the fate of Boxes and Arrows? Is there a new generation of designers out there who wants to take the power of this magazine’s reach and use it to talk about the next generation of user experience design? Will you define it? Will you defend it? Will you debunk it?

If you would like to take over Boxes and Arrows, speak up. We have moved it to a new platform. We have reached out to new writers. We have breathed a little oxygen on to that torch, and the flame begins to catch. We’d like to pass it to you.

If you would like to to volunteer to create the next Boxes and Arrows, please leave a note below. Say what you would like to do, and this magazine is yours.

Again.

As it always was.

As it should be.

Addendum: So grateful for the outpouring of support!  Please join this mailing list where the next generation of B&A begins to plan for the future…

Obviously I don’t stand alone in finding the term useful, or at least useful enough. Yet we find ourselves endlessly discussing this and and other terms for what we do … trying to describe what we do … disagreeing vigorously … and at the same time complaining about getting mired in an argument about semantics. Can’t we just get on with the work?

I don’t think we can. We cannot get past this argument about language just yet because I don’t think we really have an argument about language. We have an argument about what we do, a genuine and profound disagreement.

Looking at where the term “user experience design” comes from, and how we actually use it, I have a proposal for what we can take it to mean: design which includes interaction design but is not only interaction design.

People who think of interaction design as just one among many UX specialties may consider that a surprising overextension of that specialty’s relevance; I hope to show why it makes sense.

Trouble with the definition, not the word

I don’t much care which words we ultimately choose. Yes, it would help to use language which no one could mistake or confuse, but we cannot seem to find that and don’t strictly need it anyway. Consider the ugliness and inappropriateness of the term “industrial design.” We understand it not because it suits what industrial designers do, but because we already understand what industrial designers do and can attach the name to that generally understood meaning.

In “user experience design,” we don’t have that. We lack a clear meaning to which we can attach the term. Until we find one, the grumbling over names will continue.

Grandiose UXD

Some people like the grand implications of the term “user experience design.” They include anything where one plans what experience people will have, including not just websites but interior decoration and customer service scripts and theme park rides and kitchen knives.

I feel uncomfortable with the language of “user experience design” because I don’t think we need a name to describe all of those things. At that point, why not just “design”?

Looking back at how we came to talk about UXD in the first place, that large world of design problems didn’t give rise to talk of “user experience design.” The web did.

The web gave us UXD

The term “user experience design” came as a response to the shock wave created by the emergence of the web. For most people in the field, “user experience design” means, in practice, “design for the web … and other stuff like it.” So what is the web like?

Some people with a background in graphic design tend to think of web design as visual design plus a bunch of other Design Stuff. For a long time, a lot of web designers made a binary distinction between visual design and information architecture, effectively defining IA as “all the Design Stuff for the web which isn’t visual design.” These days, most define IA more crisply than that, distinguishing between information architecture as the organization of content and “interaction design” as … well … that gets a little tricky.

For some web designers, I suspect “interaction design” represents the frontier of web design as IA once did; having accounted for visual design and information architecture, “interaction design” means, in practice, the design on the web which ain’t either of those. Others have a more specific conception of what constitutes “interaction design.”

Interaction design

Over in the software development universe, people have long discussed “usability engineering” and “human factors” and “user interface design” and a host of other names for the same essential work. All of those terms have their problems: philosophical, rhetorical, political. You can locate me in the era and tradition I spring from by knowing that, in circles where I can expect people will understand me, I still prefer to call myself an interaction designer rather than a UX designer because I consider it a more usefully precise term.

When one encounters a computer, or a device, or any other system which has software in it, one enters into a dialogue with that system, a cycle of action and reaction. This includes both cycles of action between individuals and the system itself, and also cycles between different people as mediated by the system. Inter-action: action between people and systems, action between people and people. Systems containing software involve categorically more complex interactions than anything else we make, which gives those systems a unique character that calls for a distinct design discipline. Hence “interaction design.”

Back in the late ’90s the term “interaction design” got tangled up rhetorically because traditional advertising and design agencies used the term “interactive media” to describe the brochure-ware they made for the web.

More recently, many people have taken “interaction design” to mean only the pick-and-shovel work of wireframing and specifying workflows, not the fundamental product or service definition which lies behind the specific interaction behaviors.

Once upon a time I wanted “interaction design” to become the term which included all of this work defining new interactive systems. Things didn’t go that way.

Disciplinary distinctions

Interaction design. Information architecture. Visual design. Information design. Social interaction design. Service design. We have people who find these disciplinary distinctions very useful, believing that they represent well-defined types of work with reasonably well-developed methods. We have people who see talking too much about these distinctions as territorialism and semantic games that get in the way of just doing the work. Some among those have a deep skepticism that these distinctions mean much at all: compared to the classical disciplines of graphic design, industrial design, et cetera, we do not — and perhaps can not — have well-established methodologies for the new problems which designers face today. They talk in terms of a kind of open-ended design sensibility and developing an eclectic toolkit of specific techniques.

We should not minimize the differences between these philosophies. When we do, the disagreement displaces itself into discussions of language. Rather than ask what “user experience design” really means — a question with no answer — we should ask instead what problem we use it to talk about.

“User experience design” creates an uneasy truce

The term “experience design,” originally proposed by people who rejected disciplinary distinctions, has acted to paper over the disagreement.

These early advocates saw “experience design” as a way to name a new era in which the old disciplinary distinctions between design problems had broken down and become less relevant. They talked excitedly about UX design in its grandiose sense.

Then Jesse James Garrett drew his famous diagram of “The Elements of User Experience,” name-checking several different classes of design problems and suggesting a way of looking at their relationships, writing “user experience” in large letters on the diagram as a name for the whole. People who valued disciplinary distinctions could look at the diagram and see them represented there. People who wanted to transcend disciplines could look at the diagram and see the implication that each lived as part of a greater whole, incomplete on its own. So that diagram exemplified conversations which brokered an implicit truce under the banner of “user experience design.”

But we still need to understand and talk about This Thing That We Do, and we still do not agree about it. If UXD means “Designing Stuff like the web” we have to ask what we mean by “like the web.”

Interactive systems, not just the web

The 800-pound gorilla that is the web confuses our thinking. Web-ness per se did not produce the need which gave birth to the term “user experience design.” It didn’t come from people making simple websites with static pages, it came from people making web applications. And now we see it adopted by people making desktop software and mobile apps and more. What do those have in common? The network? Static websites involved the network … and we also see people talking about UX design for stand-alone desktop computer applications. So no, the network does not unify these UXD domains.

Software ties these things together. The Thing The Web Is Like is software, and in fact that statement says it backward. Better to say many things derive their nature from software, for example the web. What makes software special? What makes it different from the artifacts created with industrial design? From the images created with graphic design? From websites of static pages?

Interactivity.

More than just interaction design

One might call this focus on interactivity chauvinism on my part, since I come from interaction design.

Let me underline that I do not claim that interaction design constitutes the most important component of all UXD. Let us recognize service design and information architecture and visual design and social interaction design and all the other specific design disciplines we employ in solving UX design problems. Indeed, let us notice that in many cases other design disciplines outweigh the importance of interaction design in solving a UXD problem.

One may have a big retailer’s website and mainly need information architecture to organize the vast set of pages and visual design to make the pages appealing and aligned with the brand, with just a little bit of interaction design for the search and purchasing tools. One may have a member service process for an HMO which involves sophisticated service design and classical graphic design for communicating to members and just a little bit of interaction design for things like appointment setting tools.

I don’t want to make interaction design dominant over UX design but I do want to name it as essential to UX design. The presence of interaction design usefully defines “user experience design.” The term “user experience design” did not emerge from an encounter with the need for service design, information architecture, visual design, social interaction design, or any of the other problems we talk about in the UX design world. It emerged from the encounter with complex software behaviors and the interaction design challenges they present.

It makes no sense to ask what “user experience design” really means; it means whatever we use it to mean. We can ask what we need it to mean and how we already use it. I submit that we need a term for “designing systems that include interaction design”. And we already use “user experience design” to mean that now.

If we could agree on that, I might stop feeling so bad about calling myself a “user experience designer”.

For too long have we pandered to the user-centered orthodoxy at the expense of beautiful 1,200px wide images crafted for CSS gallery websites. How can we be expected to turn a small corner into a 400x300px snapshot that looks good on Dribble.com whilst having to worry about user personas? How can we expect Patterntap.com to accept our gorgeous, beveled navigation system if we have to spend time considering things like reassurance, orientation or SEO?

We are forced by project teams to worry incessantly about requirements: the user’s, the business’s or even, heaven forbid, the client’s. Our KPIs continually push us to sacrifice our design flourishes at the alter of ‘simplicity’ or even ‘usability’, whilst paying no heed to fulfilling our fundamental needs as frustrated Fine Artists or Filmmakers.

So in response to this I propose a new way of thinking about our practice. A revolution if you will. Set your iPhone lamp to ‘on’ and let it illuminate the darkness of agile prototyping methodology toward a shining new revelation:

h3. Portfolio-Centered Design

“I’m with you!” you tweet, “but how can we blindly follow you with no manifesto?”. Fear not; using my own process I have carefully crafted a ten-point system (because ‘ten-point’ always sounds best, regardless of how many cogent points I can actually come up with) for a designer to keep in mind. Consider these a checklist that will help you achieve the pinnacle of a shining portfolio, and get that all important job in an interactive marketing agency, turning above-the-line advertising into social media campaigns.

1. First and foremost, context is nothing

For a designer to have to think about a portfolio that is anything more than a series of images accessed by menus of thumbnails is absurd and not worthy of consideration. After all, if it’s good enough for art galleries then why not for us? We have to remember that our designs are essentially a series of pictures: to be looked at, commented on and copied in a suitably reverential setting.

Only this way can they truly ‘breathe’ as we want them to. Only then can we see their true aura, stripped of superfluous information, context or brief. Only then can they be evaluated without reference to requirements or KPIs, changing digital landscapes or touchscreen shapes and sizes.

2. Don’t pay too much attention to testing

How can users meaningfully assess your designs? They might have no prior knowledge of the system. Surely the best-placed person to decide if a series of pages works is the person who designed them. It’s obvious that only they really know what each item means and are best placed to understand the design decisions behind it.

Too often do I hear designers overruled with questions about users’ comprehension. Too often have I heard arguments citing Cognitive Psychology. Too often have principles of human behaviour and capabilities trumped good, solid layout decisions.

If the designer has seen the problem solved by their favourite app on their iPhone, which was approved by Apple, then it must be the best process and the users will eventually just learn how to use the system.

3. You can never arrive at a solution too quickly

If you can re-write a brief with as many solutions upfront as possible, this will significantly cut down on research, iterations, and those frustrating workshops with the wider team, clients or users. You are not a business consultant and this approach will free you up for the important jobs, like deciding which Smashing Magazine social icon set best reflects current design trends.

This also allows you to fill the gaps in your portfolio. Missing an AJAX carousel? Seen a good example of one? Simply set up the brief so the project needs a carousel (there has to be an explanation for them existing).

Finally, that portfolio needs a current, on-trend solution? Simply find yourself one (preferably popularised by industry gurus) and retro-fit the project requirements later. You can have these two for nothing: embedded fonts or responsive design (will work for about another six months or so).

4. Content is not your job

We cannot be expected to be storytellers; it is not our job to guide people through our sites. This is the job of the content strategist or copywriter and can be done right at the end. Taxonomy, nomenclature and so on, these are simply not as important as getting the colour pallet nailed.

There is a great tradition of using dummy Latin text in advertising. So why not stick to it? It makes us look like our fledgling field has roots in an older and more accepted field like advertising layout.

5. Considerations of technology – somebody else’s job

Do not collaborate with programmers. Keep as far away as possible, do not let them stifle creativity. Only the ‘Creative’ team is really qualified to come up with UX solutions; they’re the ones who went to Art College after all. Maintain a good ‘over-the-fence’ relationship with the technical or engineering team, and none of their prototyping or agile methodology will get in the way of your blue-sky design thinking. This leads us neatly to –

6. Collaboration, not exactly a dirty word, but a bit icky

Again, advertising can be our paradigm here. Silos keep things simple. Strategy is best left to the strategy team, user research and engagement to the IA team, and so on. Demand polished wireframes (think ‘scamps’) to colour in.

Client management? You know where the account team is. Keep your engagement to carefully planned walkthroughs, making sure the number of solutions to be presented is pre-arranged so there are no surprises. If in doubt, just remember headphones can be a designer’s best friend.

7. Accessibility works best as an afterthought

This is what the principle of ‘degrade gracefully’ was invented for. Always design for the highest spec users. This allows you total creative freedom, unencumbered by limitations of contrast, plug-ins, browsers, user’s disabilities and so forth. It is self-evident that only this can produce the most creative design solutions.

Then simply allow the site to ‘degrade gracefully’ and everyone who doesn’t sign up to your setup can simply enjoy an experience more suited to their system, or their personal limitations.

8. Photoshop: let that be where responsibility ends

If you can fill your folio with the initial designs, it ultimately doesn’t matter to you how it turned out in the browser, or whether KPIs were achieved. Sticking to your goal of beautiful pictures above all else allows you to keep your involvement ring-fenced to the early phase of the project and avoid the difficult responsibilities later on.

This keeps you free to make sure you always have your ear to the ground for the next portfolio-worthy project to work-up in Photoshop and get onto your site.

9. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

Don’t be afraid of filler content to fit a nice pre-existing pattern. As I said ‘ten-point plan’ sounds better than ‘nine-point plan’. Whether the site experience works as a flow over multiple pages is not evident from portfolio grabs, so don’t worry, you are safe.

10. Don’t throw your net too wide

You’re crafting visual designs, so restrict your influences to that field. You can’t be expected to have time to absorb other mediums, have other interests or think about how they could relate to the problems we are trying to solve.

Your influences should come from within digital and possibly graphic design. What can film or games design teach you? Architecture is about buildings not websites. They are fundamentally different disciplines and will only confuse the design purity. Remember: “if it’s not Swiss, give it a miss.”

Keep all these in mind, and that award-winning portfolio could be yours!

Just don’t send it to me, that’s all I ask.

This year marks the 11th annual Information Architecture Summit. Our theme is meant to inspire everyone in the community—even those who aren’t presenting or volunteering—to bring their best ideas to the table.

As busy practitioners, we rarely have the chance to step back and think about the future of our field—we’re too busy resolving day-to-day issues. By gathering and sharing practical solutions for everyday challenges, we can create more breathing room to plan for what’s to come.

Subscribe to the Boxes and Arrows Podcast in iTunes or add this page to your Del.icio.us account:

iTunes     Del.icio.us     2010 IA Summit theme music generously provided by Bumper Tunes

Keynotes

| “Day 1 – Dan Roam“:http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-10-dan | “Day 2 – Richard Saul Wurman“:http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-10-richard | Day 3 – Whitney Hess |

Full Program

| Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 |

In her keynote closing the 2010 IA Summit, Whitney asks if our work is just our job or our passion. To really make the difference we seek, our practice needs to be our calling. The UX community is united because of a common mission:

We empower people to become self-reliant and more resourceful, organized, social, and relaxed. We don’t do it for them, they do it for themselves.

Most designers don’t make the things that people use; we’re ideas people. We’re nothing without the visual designers, developers, copywriters, and business managers with whom we work. It’s time we focus our energy outside the UX tribe, to these people that bring our ideas to fruition.

Ms. Hess implores us to stop feeling so disenfranchised and misunderstood, to stop isolating ourselves and strive for the influence to bring about the change that drives us to do what we do. Defending “perfection” will defeat us; instead, she calls us to have the audacity to fail spectacularly and then move upward from those moments.

In the end, she asks us to consider our legacy. Do we want to be a footnote in a technology textbook, or do we want to “cross the chasm” and embody the change that we talk about amongst ourselves.

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Contribute as an editor or author, and get your ideas out there. boxesandarrows.com/about/participate

Transcript of Whitney Hess Closing Plenary Address of the 2010 IA Summit in Phoenix, Arizona.

Announcer: In the closing plenary of the 2010 IA Summit, Whitney Hess discusses her experiences within the IA community, and calls for greater inclusion, leadership, and the necessity to embrace failure as a fundamental aspect of our discipline’s growth, without which we cannot get a seat at the board room table.
I hope everyone enjoys the podcast. Cheers.
Whitney Hess: Before I jump in, I just want to take a moment to thank all of you, to thank each and every one of you, for being here in this room right now. I know there are a lot of other places that you could have been. I know that you could have booked your flight to leave already, and so it means a great deal to me that you’re here right now and allowing me to speak to you. So thank you.
Let’s begin at the beginning. The truth about me, just me, and all of my vulnerability. That might be what Jennifer was talking about a little bit.
I’m amazed at the position that I find myself in today. I know I’ve said this to you, each of you individually, perhaps, or you may have seen me write about this. Standing in front of you here today is quite frankly, incomprehensible to me. It’s a complete out of body experience. It doesn’t even feel like I’m living it.
When Jennifer Bombach and Livia Labate contacted me and they invited me to give this closing plenary, I just sat down on my couch and I cried, and that’s the honest truth. I just cried.
So for those of you who don’t know me, last year’s IA Summit was my first ever public presentation. Sure, I had given presentations to clients and colleagues and whatnot, and shown my deliverables in presentation form, but I’d never stood on a stage by myself until a year ago right now.
The year before that, the IA Summit in 2008 was my first ever summit. So you can get a better picture, maybe, knowing this, of why this moment is just so insane for me. These are the past few IA Summit closing plenaries. What the fuck?
[laughter]
I think it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that the people who have held this position prior to me have been considerably further along in their careers and have contributed far more to this community than I have so far.
So, for the folks who have an issue with me standing up here today, I don’t need you to tell me how green I am, okay? I’m 27 years old. I graduated from school a little over five years ago. I became self‑employed a little over a year and a half ago. So, yeah, I’m not nearly as experienced as pretty much everyone else in this audience. I’m probably not as smart as you, either. But I’m standing here, so move on with your life.
[Laughter, cheering]
Thank you.
Synchronicity brought me here and I am not unclear enough that I don’t realize this. I didn’t plan this. I didn’t even particularly want this for myself in my career. But a remarkable series of events has landed me in this position. Some of it with luck, some of it was just my personality, some of it was timing being in the right place at the right time. I realized all of those things but that is life and you never know what is going to happen so here I am.
I’ve been on this incredible journey. There’s a huge gap between who I am and who I want to be and the journey between those two points is what I consider to be my pursuit of happiness. Two and a half years ago, I identified something in myself that I didn’t like. I was closed off and my inner introvert was preventing me from living to the fullest. And I could already tell even a few years out of school that it was going to negatively effect my career. So, I reached out to this community slowly but surely and my life changed forever.
The price of sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care. I made this conscious decision to no longer be a sheep, but I never expected that the alternative would mean being a wolf. I have felt lonely at times. I am not going to lie. I’ve gotten attention that I wasn’t really comfortable with. And it made me feel different than I had felt in my life previously. But it may have felt lonely, but I have never felt alone.
Every wolf has her pack and this is mine, the tribe, our tribe. Look around you. You are not alone. You will not find another profession in which the community of practitioners is disconnected, is this loving, is this dedicated to each other’s success and happiness. We are truly each other’s kindred spirits. There are very few egos in this community and I discovered that two years ago, I was at the interaction conference formed by AXTA in 2008. It was their first conference in Savannah.
I had booked my ticket to leave a little late so the conference would’ve ended and I was hungry and I decided to send out a tweet to see if anyone would grab a dinner. And I got a response from someone named @mediajunkie. Now, I had kind of met him at the conference but I didn’t entirely know who he was and in his reply, he said that he and @cb were going to take a walk and grab some dinner and I was more than welcome to join them.
So I said yes and then I went on Google to figure out who these people were because I felt so new and I didn’t want to embarrass myself. And so I discovered that @mediajunkie was Christian Crumlish who is the curator of the Yahoo design pattern library. And @cb is Chris Baum, the editor‑in‑chief of Boxes and Arrows. So, after I crapped myself and then pulled myself together, I was like, “Okay, I guess this is it. I am going to go out and have dinner with this people.” We took a walk around Savannah.
They asked me about me. They asked me what it was like to be involved with the community for the first time. They asked me some opinions about being a younger practitioner and things that I see in the community or things that I don’t see in the community because of that and the rest is history. They were so warm and treated me with such equality that I never expected, that it really had a profound impact on me.
Chris Baum’s not in the room today. Christian Crumlish is, and I’m sorry to single you out. I have a lot of stories that are very similar with a lot of people in this room, and I just felt like that was the beginning, and I really owed it to them to tell you all publicly.
So people have asked how I have gotten here in such a short period of time. The only answer I have is this. This is a community of giants and I have felt like I have stood on all of your shoulders, and I’m eternally grateful for that. So I have to ask, “Who’s your mentor, and who calls you their mentor?”
I grew up feeling like I didn’t really have a lot of role models. I was kind of a loner. I was very self‑reliant. I didn’t exactly respect my elders. Now I find myself surrounded by a bunch of inspirational people, and I’m lucky to call many of them my mentors.
But what’s forced me to grow even more has been through sharing my experience and by mentoring others and giving my time to other people’s growth.
It’s very rewarding and it’s very humbling, and I feel that it’s being on both ends of the equation, having the mentor and being the mentor that has given me this incredible sense of belonging.
The prolific Peter Drucker wrote, “Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person, hard‑working and competent but otherwise mediocre, into an outstanding performer.” Because of this tribe, my life has become outstanding.
Everything that I do, and all of my motivations are from a single point, and that is love. Because it’s all about love, and love is the differentiator, and love is everything, and love is why I’m here right now.
This is my mantra that I live by. Do what you love in the service of people who love what you do. It was written by a man named Steve Farber in his book, “The Radical Leap.” And when I saw it on the page, it leaped up at me and I realized that this is me. This is how I want to live my life.
Everything that I do springs from love or I don’t do it, quite frankly. I serve a higher purpose than myself. It’s about affecting other people’s lives, and ensuring their appreciation, and getting that feedback, and making sure that it’s a cyclical process, and that’s why this statement means so much to me.
So I have to ask you. Let’s be honest. Is this your job, or is it your passion? Are you passionately driven to make a difference here? Is that why you’re here? Why do you care, and why are you here in the first place? There are so many other places you can be, and there are so many other professions that you can have. Why this one?
There’s work, and then there’s life’s work. I think what we do is pretty hard to call work. I think our passion is so deep and so persistent that it’s much more accurately classified as “life’s work” because frankly, this isn’t a job. It’s a life calling. I’m not doing this to please my parents or to follow in their footsteps. I’d be pretty surprised if any of you had parents that did this, and that’s why you got in the profession in the first place.
[laughter]
I’m not doing this to become rich, though that would be nice. I do this because I have this unwavering internal impulse that this is what I meant to be doing for a living. And it is not a living, it is life. This is what I meant to be doing. And yet, for many of us, the job description doesn’t begin to describe what we do or what you can do.
So, everything that you can do and what your job description says. We all have different job titles and different responsibilities but we are united for a single reason. And that is what I consider our common mission. Now, I’ve struggled with how to communicate this. It may not feel right at first but hear me out. I believe that our common mission is that we help people and has their own lives. And I chose this language very carefully. Thank you. Thank you.
We empower people to become self‑reliant, to become more resourceful, more social, more informed, more organized, more successful, more relaxed. But we don’t do it for them. They do it for themselves. We design systems that allow people to make those choices and make those changes in their life. Let us be honest. Our work isn’t that momentous. We believe in the power of the butterfly effect. That if we make small changes, that they will have enormous impact.
We need that to operate in order for us to be successful. We dream of causing this wide‑ranging positive change. I know that we all do but really, it’s because of something so much deeper and that’s we want to change the world. And I really, really believe that everyone of you is here because you want to be part of something that is bigger than yourself. You want to change the world and maybe not the world but your world whatever it is that you defined it as. I defined it as something different than you may… Each of us may define it differently but it’s about having that really wide impact.
Not just on the users that we advocate for but on a much greater purpose. It is not just about creating more usable, useful desire of products. That might be your tag line. We like to communicate that but it really is something much bigger and I think that many of you know that there is something bigger here. So, there is this line in Sister Act two that just popped into my head. If you want to be somebody, if you want to go somewhere, you better wake up and pay attention.
And I think we do have to wake up. We can’t possibly have the lights matter of fact that we dream of if we’re only relying on the other members of our tribe. The world isn’t just going to change for us because we think it should. We are going to become increasingly disappointed with our progress if we just keep doing all of these back slapping that we’ve become so accustomed to. Now, I don’t mean that as negatively as it comes across because I think that the bond that exists in this community is unparalleled. And it is important that we support each other.
But there is something much bigger going on. And I think we are missing the big picture. So, the wakeup call, real world is calling, time to pick up. It is not about you or us especially not about us. We are not the most important part of the equation here. We design systems that enable people to have more successful behaviors, but we do not make them. We do not make them. That is the dirty truth. We are not creators. We’re influencers. We don’t actually make anything. Hugh McLeod said, “Like so many brilliant people, we believe that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains. Ideas show where bulldozers should go.”
We’re ideas people, and we’re nothing, nothing without the visual designers, developers, copy writers and business managers that we work with.
[applause]
They’re the makers. They’re the ones who bring our ideas to fruition. Their creations are ultimately what our users use, not our creations. They’re not ours. And we’re really doing a really shitty job of showing them that we understand that.
So here’s my plea. I think it’s time that we need to need to focus our energy outside of the UX tribe to become recognized leaders to makers and management. We really need to grow up and stop feeling so disenfranchised and misunderstood, and recognize that the real role that we play in all of this. We need to reach out to the greater tech and business communities far more than we have been, and we have really completely isolated ourselves, and it’s time that we stopped doing that.
So what we have is influence. What we have is influence, and we need to figure out how to gain that influence over our companies, our colleagues, our clients and the larger communities that we work within. But this the hard part, and we don’t have a choice. If we want this profession to exist in the next ten years, we’re going to have to get used to doing some seriously hard work. Winston Churchill said that the price of greatness is responsibility, and I think we’ve been shirking our responsibility in a lot of ways. We’ve been shirking the responsibility that it takes to change the world.
We are exasperated by the lack of understanding and common sense of the people that we work with, the way our users are mistreated, and we are so focused on fixing these immediate problems that we recognize that we neglect the bigger picture. And we’re all responsible for that. That’s how I see us.
[laughter]
And I say “us” because I’m just as guilty of it as anyone else.
So what’s holding us back? What is holding us back?
This is the 11th year of the IA Summit, and I’d venture to guess that the folks who were here on year one, they thought we’d be much further along by now.
So what’s holding us back? I have a few ideas.
Firstly, I think we heroize the tools. And this is something that I was actually surprised to hear coming up in a lot of sessions this weekend. I wrote this beforehand, and I didn’t realize that it was something that a lot of people were feeling.
Omnigraffle. Axure. Post‑It notes. White boards, and card sorting, and Ensel models, and we use all these tools, and I use them too.
I rely on them just as much as everyone else does, but we spend so much energy promoting the tools, and so much energy promoting our use of them that we neglect to feature the people that are using them, and that’s us.
A fancy tool is just a pillar to hide behind and putting the focus on the tool acting like they are these magic items that allow us to do our job. It gives the tool more power than you. The tool doesn’t have the power. It is what you do with it. It is the understanding that you create by using it, it is your thinking not the tools capability.
Doctors don’t give this kind of praise to their stethoscopes so why are we spending so much time talking about the things that we use to do our work? Secondly, I think we limit ourselves. A good friend told me don’t judge yourself, the world will do that for you. And it’s really hard for me to internalize but it’s true. Sure, most of us don’t have MBAs, most of us don’t have MFAs, most of us don’t have any formal education in this at all. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t deserve to have a sit at the war room table.
We accommodate out of guilt. We attack out of anger and we avoid out of fear.
When we present our work, we are in absolute mess. Either we let our teams roll right over us or we slip out when they don’t understand our logic and our thought process so worst of all, we completely avoid true collaboration because we are afraid of people taking away the little power that we have. I also think we are afraid to be wrong. I think somehow we got into our heads that we always have to have the right answer and maybe because we convinced our designers and or developers that they need our help and that is where this comes from.
And we feel that with every wrong answer, our future hangs in the balance and that is simply not true. You screw up every day and everyone already knows it. But do you admit it? We are human and we are wrong all the time. Everyone is but most of us don’t own up to it. I mean how often really do you proclaim your fuck ups? I mean something that Jerry was just talking about. Do you celebrate them? Probably not. I know I don’t. So, I think it’s time that we celebrate fear.
Fear is good. Fear is great. Fear is growth. Fear means you are doing something right. If we aren’t tackling the things that scare us the most, then we aren’t striking ourselves enough. Love hurts. We are in love with what we do and we have this calling. Aren’t we lucky? But no one said it would be easy. So, if you are finding it easy, you probably aren’t doing enough. Love hurts. It’s suppose to hurt because it matters. And that’s the honest truth.
So, living pursuit of the OSM. That is “Oh Shit Moment.” This also comes from the C Fiber book that have a big impact on me called: “The Radical Leap”. Seek out the experiences that will really make you scream, “Oh, shit!” It gives you be visceral like when you take that glass elevator of the hotel from the top floor down to the lobby and it drops and you feel your stomach go, that’s the feeling that you should get. It should have magnitude and there should be a high likelihood that you’ll fail. And when you do fail, fail magnificently.
Fail big. Like really fucked up. Okay? Because only then that you are going to know that you are living. The bigger the ocean moment, the bigger the failure but at least you’ll know that you are taking your responsibility seriously. Not doing it when you know full well you had the opportunity that hurts far more than any failure and I think a lot of you can relate when I say that my biggest regrets in life are not the things that I did but the things that I didn’t do.
The intersection of failure, thinking and determination: a success layer. Who doesn’t believe that’s true? You can’t succeed without failure, and we’re a lucky bunch, because we have oodles of determination and oodles of brainpower.
Perfection doesn’t equal credibility. I think a lot of us get stuck up in this mindset that it does, and it’s just not true. It’s critical that we believe this. It’s critical that we believe that perfection doesn’t equal credibility. The more perfect you try to appear to your teams, the less they’re going to trust you.
Right now, this is my biggest “Oh, shit!” moment. The last few months have been absolute Hell for me.

[laughter]

I’ve probably given myself an ulcer, and I’ve definitely driven my boyfriend crazy. But my sense of responsibility to do this, to our shared mission, far outweighed my personal fear. That’s why I’m here.
I think another thing we really need to do is promote and include. Some people protect themselves from fear by surrounding themselves in an exclusive world. The less they have to share themselves, the less they risk. We keep trying to convince ourselves that we’re special. But, if we keep this tribe so isolated, we’re going to lose.
Recognize the destructive impact of your words in dealing with others, especially your colleagues, the makers and the builders that lift us up, who bring our ideas to fruition. Beware of the language that you use in imparting your criticisms.
Yes, they may have created something that’s hard to use, or that isn’t useful for your specific users, or is just plain weird. They’re not necessarily going to have the right answers, either. But instead of feeling the need to prove them wrong, teach them how to be right.
If you try to dominate people, you’re already defeated. We like to think of ourselves as saviors. I think we have the sense that we’re this organized and very committed group of people, and very headstrong, certainly. But we don’t always have to prove our value. We’ve been undervalued for so long that I think we’ve got this chip on our shoulder, and it’s really time to put that to bed.
We need to be assertive without being aggressive, and there’s a big difference between the two. Being assertive shows confidence. Being aggressive shows insecurity. So, be aware of not just what you say, but how you say it.
This is one of my favorite quotes by Peter Drucker, who wrote many tomes on leadership and management: “Your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance.”
What that means to me is, that by thinking we’re the most important piece of the puzzle, and by failing to gain knowledge in other areas, like programming or visual design or business management, we’re just further isolating ourselves. If we want them to better understand us, we need to do a lot more to better understand them. Because all human beings have the basic need to be recognized.
We shouldn’t think of ourselves as saviors with all the answers. We need to be better facilitators, and ultimately, leaders. We need to lead. Now, this leadership stuff is tricky. It’s very amorphous. I realize that, and I can’t tell you all to go out and be leaders, and suddenly the user‑experience field gains recognition and standing in the business world. I know that.
But I can only tell you what leadership means to me and hopefully that sparks something in you. Firstly, it means having Chutzpah. For those of you don’t know what Chutzpah means, it is essentially audacity. It means being able to walk into the room and say exactly what needs to be said. No letting fear hold you back.
We need to have the courage of our convictions and knock back down when we get pushed showing our coffins through the consistent behavior, not wavering. We need to have adaptability. We need to be able to roll at the punches and try new things and adapt to the circumstances and the people that we are surrounded by. Not having a fear of newness. And when all those fails, we have to act as if…Don’t expose the people that you need to be leading to your insecurities and your worry.
Act like the leader that you want to be and suddenly you will become it. Ultimately, the true mark of a leader is someone who inspires others to lead and that is what we need the most. Your Chutzpah, your conviction, your adaptability will become contagious and that’s when real changes going to happen. So, our legacy… It concerns me greatly. So, some say they have twenty years experience when all they really have is one year experience repeated twenty times and all that age. Each of us has to force ourselves to move beyond the supportive tribe that we found ourselves in.
To become business leaders ‑‑ in the face of fear, lead the people that we work with, the people that we collaborate with in order to achieve our common mission. We keep focusing on our site maps and our wire frames and our prototypes like that is all there is. Then we aren’t really advancing the profession as a whole. So, I have to ask you a tough question. Can your company succeed without you? And if the answer is no, are you proud of that? You have to ask yourself if your DNA, the shared belief system that we all hold so dear, the things that you have heard in the past weekend is that coursing through the veins of your company?
Are you just doing stuff or are you transforming stuff? So, what is our legacy? Is it outside this room? I love this room. But it is not enough for me. Let’s not be a footnote on technology textbook. I don’t want to look back thirty years from now and when a really talented, really brilliant, caring group of people almost change the face of technology forever but just couldn’t figure out how to cross the line. Our legacy rest on all of our shoulders. Thank you for listening.
[applause]

This article will also outline what to expect from researchers and some ways to recognize when you’re working with a good one. These are indicators, not standards, based on what we’ve found to be effective. There are many ways to do research and every research study is different so it doesn’t mean that a researcher is incompetent if he or she doesn’t conform to these indicators. One sign of a strong researcher is that he or she will educate you throughout the process so that you know what to expect. With that in mind this article is ultimately intended to provide a useful starting point.

Recruiting

One of the most critical and time-consuming elements of test preparation is defining the right target audience and recruiting participants. Participant recruiting is usually conducted by professional recruiters who typically consult databases of potential participants. Sometimes researchers will do the recruiting themselves, but it’s usually more cost effective to use a specialist.

Recruiting will almost always take two weeks or more depending on the number of participants and the type of research, so make sure that you get started early enough for the recruiter to have enough time to find the appropriate participants for the study. Recruiting for phone interviews may take slightly less time and any kind of home visit will likely take longer (ethnography or contextual interview). Your researcher should be able to provide you with an estimate at the time of initial engagement.

A week for recruiting tends to be difficult and any less than that is pretty much unthinkable. Short-changing the recruiting could result in participants that don’t properly fit the target market segment, don’t provide quality feedback, or just don’t show up at all. All of these can have a negative impact on the data. Even if it is possible to get participants faster, it’s usually better to take the time to ensure that you are getting the right people. Your researcher should know all of this and recruiting participants is where he or she will start after getting a basic understanding of your product and schedule.

A recruiter will need a screener to get started. A screener is a description of the target user with open and close-ended questions about the participant that will help the recruiter to select the right people. What you can do to smooth the process along is to have a prepared concept of your target user. This does not need to be a full market research report—just an outline of the types of users that will use your product.

Your researcher should dig deep with questions that include more than demographic information by asking behavioral questions. Behavioral questions can include such topics as TV watching behavior, purchasing behavior, internet use, etc. Typically behavioral questions will give you a stronger understanding of those who are being recruited than demographics alone. These are important elements of market segmentation that are sometimes organized into profiles called personas.

Personas are useful because they create a consistent concept of the intended market segment that can guide the design process through multiple iterations. Personas can also be adjusted following deeper discovery research, such as in-depth interviews, as more information about the intended user comes to light. Within a few days, the researcher should present a screener that includes behavioral questions as well as demographics.

Scheduling

When creating a schedule for data collection, the researcher should know that you cannot run participants back to back. It’s generally not feasible to squeeze in 8 one-hour sessions in a single day, because of all of the activity that must occur between sessions. In an eight hour day, a researcher can perform four (maybe five) one-hour sessions but any more than that will take more time. Here are the reasons why:

One-hour sessions rarely go exactly one hour, some are shorter and quite a few will run longer. This can be due to a variety of reasons such as the product malfunctioning, the participant arriving late, or the participant providing lots of feedback. My rule of thumb is to allocate 50% of the session length as a buffer between sessions to allow for overrun, not including time needed to set up for the next session.

For sessions at an office or lab, some participants will arrive 10-20 minutes early, at which time they will need to use the restroom, sign NDAs and consent forms, and generally get comfortable. Comfortable participants give useful feedback, while uncomfortable participants tend to clam up and provide short, unemotional responses.
The researcher needs to set up and get ready. For usability or experience testing, the test will need to be reset, notes and documents need to be filed and new ones prepared. For any kind of home or location visit, the researcher will need to pack up all equipment and travel to the new location and set up equipment again.

Thus for every one-hour usability or experience testing session, there’s forty-five minutes to an hour of buffer and setup time. Home visits can take much longer.

Test Plan

A test plan should take no more than a week to develop and the researcher should give it to you for review and approval before being finalized. The test plan should specify the research and business goals associated with the project. During this period the researcher will need a significant amount of time with the product, either with a prototype or available concepts, while writing and checking the test plan. The better the researcher understands the intended final product, the more valuable the information he or she can get from the participant.

For usability or experience testing, the researcher will test the tasks with the product prior to a pilot test. He or she will need to make sure that there are no glitches, no unexpected areas under construction, and nothing giving away future tasks when performing each of the tasks with the product. With that in mind, it’s important to give the researcher a stable product or prototype and avoid drastic changes to the product prior to the test.

You should receive a well-written and organized test plan that details each research question and how it will be addressed. For usability testing this will include a list of tasks, what each task is intended to examine, approximate wording for the task (avoiding leading language), and detail on how each task will be scored or evaluated. For discovery research, it will include a list of topics to be addressed such as processes, environment and context, and expected pain points and needs.

Data Collection

When the data collection starts, it’s important to let the moderator work. During this time, the participant should feel comfortable enough to open up and provide honest feedback. In order to do this, it’s important to try to minimize observer impact during the testing session.

If you don’t have a separate place to watch the session (e.g. behind a two-way mirror or through a video feed), don’t make it obvious that you are paying close attention. Think about bringing in a laptop during the session to make it look like you’re doing other work. One way of doing this is telling the participant that you are also a researcher but you’re just going to be taking notes.

When you’re observing, remain objective and don’t make judgments based on one or two participants. It’s not uncommon to see a couple participants have a completely opposite reaction to a product compared to ten other participants. The researcher’s job is to sort through all the noise and report the real trends in the research. Take what you see with a grain of salt and listen to your researcher.

At the same time, it’s important to try to observe as many sessions as possible and give your researcher feedback between sessions if there are certain aspects of the user experience you want to know more about. The researcher should put the participant at ease and extract a great deal of information, including details that might have been overlooked or emotions that the person experiences. Different researchers will tend to achieve this in different ways as everyone has their own style, but you’ll notice by paying attention to the participant and seeing if they feel relaxed or nervous throughout testing.

Findings

Frequently, stakeholders will want to make immediate changes to a design, product, or prototype and won’t have the time to wait for the researcher’s final report. People have schedules that need to be met so it’s understandable that a project can’t always wait for the final report but the researcher should be able to provide you with quick findings within 24 hours of the last session.

For usability research, these quick findings should consist of a couple of short paragraphs including problems in the interface, possible solutions to these problems, and participants’ general reactions to the product, its look and feel, and expected usage. For ethnography or other forms of discovery research quick findings will tend to consist of expected usage of the product, expected value, high and low value features, and general trends about the intended user. Quick findings aren’t comprehensive and come before the researcher can get a complete look at the data, but it will provide you with the overall themes from the study.

When you do get the final report, make sure you take a look at it. It will tell you two things:
* Detailed findings regarding the interface, product, features, and intended user
* The quality and clarity of the report will tell you quite a bit about the quality of your researcher.

There’s one other thing to keep in mind when you are processing the findings from a usability test. The participants will tend to focus on the more obvious problems with a product or interface. There could be other, smaller or more abstract problems that are not identified in the first pass of usability testing. It’s usually a good idea to perform another test on the product after making changes to ensure that the changes you made were effective and identify any additional issues.

Summary

In summary, here are the most important points for non-researchers to know about the research process:
* Recruiting will almost always take two weeks or more.
* For every one-hour usability or experience testing session, there’s forty-five minutes to an hour of buffer and setup time, home visits can take much longer.
* The researcher will need a significant amount of time with the product (prototypes or concepts) while writing and checking the test plan.
* Try to minimize your impact during the testing session.
* Remain objective and don’t make judgments based on one or two participants.
* Ask your researcher to provide you with quick findings within 24 hours of the last session.

Any comments, feedback, or suggestions are very much appreciated.

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IA Summit 2009 Podcasts

The IA Summit was held in Memphis, TN from March 20-22. Boxes and Arrows captured many of the main conference sessions (see schedule).

| Preview | Keynote | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Closing Plenary |

The IA Summit Closing Plenary

Jesse James Garrett is a noted figure in the IA community, not only for his ground breaking book Elements of User Experience, but for the essay that galvanized the community in 2002, IA Recon.

In this IA Summit Closing Plenary, given without slides while wandering amidst the audience, Jesse examines what he has learned at the conference, he thoughts on the nature of the discipline and the practitioner, and gives bold, perhaps even shocking advice for the future direction of information architecture.

The following is an outline of some of his key points; please download the audio or watch the video for the complete experience.

Looking Back

Jesse revisits the turbulence of the first IA Summit in Boston, lamenting that he does not see this same turbulence in the IA community right now. Warning that “the opposite of turbulence is stagnation,” he looks back at the Great Depression and compares our grandparent’s feelings of scarcity to the community’s continued reliance on categorization in its various guises (e.g. taxonomy, thesauri, etc.) for its identity.

Moving On

Thanking IA leaders and the organizations that have nurtured Information Architecture, he declares that it is time to move on from the past. Leaders in IA, including himself, are notable based upon what they say about their work, not by their actual work and asks, “Do you know good IA when you see it?”

He is surprised that we don’t have schools of thought around IA. We have many ways to talk about our processes, but not about the “product of our work, a language of critique.” Until we can talk about the qualities of IA, we cannot judge the quality of the work.

No Information Architects

One of the desires of the IA community is to command respect. However, the overall value will take time to manifest itself, only reaching critical mass when “someone from this room” ascends to be CEO of an organization and creates a culture that respects the user to decimate the competition.

Jesse then puts forth his declaration that Information Architects and Interaction Designers do not exist. “There are, and only ever have been, User Experience Designers.”

He continues by breaking down UxD, examining how each element implied in the title illuminate his hypothesis – that the ephemeral and insubstantial CAN be designed independent of medium and across media. The web is just clay, he implores, and we can use many materials to create experiences.

Synthesis & Cohesion

Engagement is paramount, within any medium and across mediums. “Designing with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as a specific goal is unique in human history.”

The varieties of engagement (e.g. the senses, mind, heart, and body) and other elements that influence the experience (e.g. capabilities, context, constraints) create the environment in which we work. UxD produces experiences that cross all of these elements, and mapping these experiences is incredibly challenging. The main goal is to synthesize them and create cohesive experiences that honor them.

Discovery, not Invention

With perception covered by visual designers, sound designers, and industrial designers, cognition and emotion are the manifest destiny of IA. User experience is not about information, rather, it is always about people and how they relate to information.

By structuring the information, User Experience Designers structure the tools that humanity uses. And, as a result, we influence how people think and feel. The final result is that those tools, in turn, shape humanity. We should embrace that responsibility.

Jesse predicts that UxD will take it’s place among fundamental human crafts. He posits that we are discovering the realities of people, their tools, and experiences rather than inventing them. With only ten years under our belts, we’ve only just begun that discovery, and he hopes that there will always be more.

Transcript of the closing plenary address delivered March 22, 2009 at ASIS&T IA Summit 2009 in Memphis, TN.

This address was written to be read aloud. I encourage you to listen to audio or watch video of the address if possible.

I recognize that being chosen to deliver the closing plenary is an honor, and I do not intend to repay that kindness by giving you a product demo.

I will not be participating in five-minute madness this year. You may consider this my 45-minute madness.

This is a different kind of talk for me. First of all, I have no slides! I kind of feel like I’m working without a net here. I can’t throw in the occasional visual pun to keep you guys paying attention. Secondly, I have no idea how long this talk is. I just finished it just before this began, so basically when I’m out of things to say, I’ll stop talking. Hopefully that will be sooner than you expected, and not later. Third, I’ve decided not to take questions at the end of this talk. My preference would be that if you have questions, don’t pose them to me. Pose them to each other. Publicly, if you can.

So if I run short, we’ll just go straight into five-minute madness and then we’ll all get to the bar that little bit sooner.

Okay, now: first-timers, please stand up.

[audience applauds]

I don’t think we do enough to recognize the importance of new voices in this community, and at this event. Those of you who were here last year may recall my comments from five-minute madness last year, where it seemed like maybe I was a little bit too hard on the first-timers for not being more active participants. What I was really trying to do was scold the old-timers for not doing more to make the first-timers feel welcome, and so I hope that those of you who are first-timers this year have been made to feel welcome by this community.

Now, before you sit down, I want to apologize to all of you, because there’s a great big chunk of this talk that is not going to mean very much to you — because I’m a ten-timer and I’ve got some things to say to my fellow ten-timers. So I’ll just get that out of the way. I hope you’ve enjoyed the rest of the conference — and now you can sit down.

So yeah, in case you guys haven’t heard, this is the tenth IA Summit. I don’t know if word got around about that. This is my tenth IA Summit. Anyone who was at that first Summit will recount for you the strange energy in that room: academics and practitioners eyeing each other warily, skeptical of what the other had to contribute. There was turbulence. (Hi Peter!) But it was productive turbulence.

I can’t say I’ve seen much turbulence at these events since then. Which ought to make all of us nervous, because the opposite of turbulence is stagnation.

In his opening keynote, Michael Wesch quoted Marshall McLuhan: “We march backward into the future.” When I saw this quote, it reminded me of the old quip that generals are always fighting the last war — which is why I think we’ve been stagnating. What war is the field of information architecture fighting?

The war we still seem to be fighting is the war against information architecture itself as a valid concept, as a meaningful part of design practices.

Almost everything you see about the IA community and IA practices — the mailing lists, the conferences, the professional organizations, the process models, the best practice patterns — they’re all optimized to answer two questions: Is this stuff for real? And is it valuable? And the answer to both questions is always, invariably, an emphatic “yes”.

IA is real. And IA is good. And that’s what we all agree on: some IA is better than no IA. But is there such a thing as “bad IA”? I mean, is it possible for an information architecture professional to do a thorough, responsible job, following all the agreed-upon best practices, and still come up with a bad solution?

I don’t think anybody knows the answer to this question. Because we’re still fighting the last war. We’re still trying to defend the answer to that question: is IA good? Is IA valuable?

Now, if you are about my age (and most of you seem to be, which I’ll come back to in a minute), your grandparents grew up in the Depression. And if your grandparents are like mine, this was an experience that shaped their behavior for the rest of their lives. They save everything: any little bit of leftover food, or a loose scrap of fabric, or a button or a screw. They save everything, because the notion of scarcity was deeply imprinted on them when they were young and became such a fundamental part of their worldview that decades later they’re still hoarding all this stuff even though the Depression’s been over… well, it took a break anyway.

Here are some of the most common terms from past IA Summit programs: taxonomy, thesaurus, controlled vocabulary, metadata, faceted classification, navigation, content management — and then there was that one year with all the talks about tagging. Like my grandparents, we cling to these things because they are what saved us. They are the tools by which we proved that yes, IA is real, and it is valuable. But that war is over. We won. And now it’s time to move on, because those comfortable, familiar things represent only part of what information architecture can be.

So it’s time to leave the nest. Thank you, Lou and Peter. Thank you, library science. For getting us off to a great start. For giving us the tools and knowledge to win a place for IA in the world. There will still be a place for library science in IA, but it’s only a part of our larger destiny.

Thank you to ASIST. Thank you to Dick Hill, and Vanessa and Jan and Carlene. This field would not be where it is without your efforts at these events, year after year. But I’m curious — show of hands: who here has ever been to any ASIST event other than an IA summit? [audience raises hands] Who here is an ASIST member? [audience raises hands] A smattering at best. ASIST has been sort of a benevolent host organism for the incubation of IA, but the relationship between ASIST and IA beyond IA Summit hasn’t really gone anywhere.

Okay, I’m debating how to do this… Name the five best-known information architects. [audience calls out various names] Now: name a work of information architecture created by one of these people. [silence] Is that a sign of a mature profession?

The names you know are notable for what they say about their work, not for the work itself. They’re not known for the quality of their work (and I’m including myself in this category).

Moreover, do you know good IA when you see it? And can different people have different ideas about the qualities of a good solution or a bad one, based on their philosophical approach to their work?

One thing I’m really surprised we don’t have yet, that I had expected to see long before now, is the emergence of schools of thought about information architecture.

Will there ever be a controversial work of information architecture? Something we argue about the merits of? A work that has admirers and detractors alike?

We have lots of ways of talking about our processes. In fact, if you look back at these ten years of the IA Summit, the talks are almost all about process. And to the extent that we’ve had controversy, it’s been over questions of process: Is documentation necessary? If so, how much? Which deliverables are the right ones? Personas, absolutely essential, or big waste of time?

What we don’t have are ways of talking about the product of our work. We don’t have a language of critique. Until we have ways to describe the qualities of an information architecture, we won’t be able to tell good IA from bad IA. All we’ll ever be able to do is judge processes.

Another thing that you’ll notice from looking back over ten years of the Summit is that talks are ephemeral. I was at all those summits, and I remember maybe a tenth of what I saw — and I saw less than half of what was on the program. I’m known for being down on academia a lot of the time, but they do have one thing right: you have to publish in order to create a body of knowledge.

I think I’m pretty good at what I do. But you guys are going to have to take my word for it. Because you don’t know my work. You only know what I say about my work.

I think I’m pretty good at what I do. I hope I’m getting better. I hope that my best work is still ahead of me. But I’m not sure. And I’m not sure how I would know. I’ve been coming to the Summit for ten years, and I’ve been doing this work, in some form or another, for close to 15. And as I’ve watched my professional peers settle down, get married, start families, become managers, I’ve found myself wondering about creative peaks.

In the field of mathematics, they say that if you haven’t made a significant contribution by the age of 30, you never will. It’s a young person’s game. 33 is young to be publishing your first novel, but it’s old to be recording your first album.

When do information architects hit their creative peaks? Let’s assume that I’m at about the median age for this group. Just assume most of you are my age, and there are about as many older than me as younger than me.

Now, if I’m at about the median age for an information architect now, when will that change? Will the median age keep going up, as this group of people ages? Presumably, at some point I’ll be one of the oldest guys in the room.

Alternately, what if information architecture is something that you don’t really get good at until you’ve been doing it for 20 years? Then we really have something to look forward to, don’t we?

Here’s another thing I thought we’d be hearing more about by the time of the tenth IA Summit:

You guys heard of this thing called neuromarketing? Man, this stuff is cool. They take people, they hook them up to MRIs — you know, brainwave scanners — and then they show them TV commercials. And they look at what parts of their brains light up when they watch these TV commercials. Then they do a little bit of A/B testing, and they can figure out how to craft a TV commercial that will elicit things like a feeling of safety. Or trust. Or desire.

So yeah, my first reaction when I saw this stuff was: Wow, I gotta get my hands on some of that! We’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with eyetracking and the marketers have already moved on to braintracking! But then my second reaction was: Wait a minute. What are we talking about here? A process designed to elicit specific patterns of neural activity in users? Back in the 50s, they called that “mind control”!

Now in a lot of ways, we’re already in the mind control business. Information architecture and interaction design both seek to reward and reinforce certain patterns of thought and behavior. (Just ask anybody who’s tried to wrestle any 37signals app into functioning the way they want to work, instead of the way Jason Fried thinks they ought to be working.)

So there’s always been an ethical dimension to our work. But who’s talking about this stuff? Who’s taking it seriously?

I don’t hear anybody talking about these things. Instead, what everybody wants to talk about is power, authority, respect. “Where’s our seat at the table?” Well, you know, there are people who make the decisions you want to be making. They’re called product managers. You want that authority? Go get that job. Don’t ask them to give that authority to you.

“When are we going to get the respect we deserve?” I’ll tell you how it’s going to happen. Somebody in this room, right now, at some point in the future is going to be the CEO of some company other than a design firm. They’ll develop all of those right political and managerial skills to rise to that level of power. And they will institute a culture in their organization that respects user experience. And then they’re just going to start kicking their competitors’ asses. And then gradually it will happen in industry after industry after industry. That’s how it will happen. But it will take time.

I had the thought at one of these summits a few years ago that we would know we had really arrived as a profession when there were people who wanted to sell us stuff. Because, you see, I grew up in the United States, where you don’t exist unless you are a target market.

And here at this event this year we have companies like TechSmith and Axure and Access Innovations and Optimal Workshop. And we thank them for their support. But where’s Microsoft? Where’s Adobe? Where’s Omni?

We aren’t a target market for any but the smallest companies. The big ones still don’t understand who we are. We’re still a small community, struggling to define itself.

In 2002, in the wake of the last bubble burst, I wrote an essay called “ia/recon”. In that essay, I tried to chart what I saw as a way forward for the field out of the endless debate over definitions. In the essay, I drew a distinction between the discipline of information architecture and the role of the information architect, and I argued that one need not be defined by the other.

Seven years later, I can see that I was wrong. The discipline of information architecture and the role of the information architect will always be defined in conjunction with one another. As long as you have information architects, what they do will always be information architecture. Seems pretty obvious, right? Only took me seven years to figure out.

But that’s okay, because what is clear to me now is that there is no such thing as an information architect.

Information architecture does not exist as a profession. As an area of interest and inquiry? Sure. As your favorite part of your job? Absolutely. But it’s not a profession.

Now, you IxDA folks should hold off for a moment before Twittering your victory speeches — because there’s no such thing as an interaction designer either. Not as a profession. Anyone who claims to specialize in one or the other is a fool or a liar. The fools are fooling themselves into thinking that one aspect of their work is somehow paramount. And the liars seek to align themselves with a tribe that will convey upon them status and power.

There are no information architects. There are no interaction designers. There are only, and only ever have been, user experience designers.

I’d like to talk about each of these three words, in reverse order, starting with “design”. Now, this is a word that I have personally had a long and difficult history with. I didn’t like this word being applied to our work for many years. I thought it placed us in a tradition — graphic design, industrial design, interface design — where our work did not belong. I also saw the dogmatism endemic to design education as poisonous and destructive to a field as young as ours. I still find the tendency of “designers” to view all human creative endeavor through the narrow lens of their own training and experience to be contemptible and appallingly short-sighted.

But I’m ready to give up fighting against this word, if only because it’s easily understood by those outside our field. And anything that enables us to be more easily understood is something we desperately need.

Now, let’s talk about that word “experience”. A lot of people have trouble with this word, especially paired with the word “design”. “You can’t call it experience design!” they say. “How can you possibly control someone else’s experience?” they demand.

Well, wait a minute — who said anything about control? Treating design as synonymous with control, and the designer as the all-powerful controller, says something more about the way these designers think of themselves and their relationship to their work than it does about the notion of experience design.

“Experience is too ephemeral,” they say, “too insubstantial to be designed.” You mean insubstantial the way music is insubstantial? Or a dance routine? Or a football play? Yet all of these things are designed.

The entire hypothesis of experience design (and it is a hypothesis at this point) is that the ephemeral and insubstantial can be designed. And that there is a kind of design that can be practiced independent of medium and across media.

Now, this part makes a lot of people uncomfortable because they’re committed to the design tradition of a particular medium. So they dismiss experience design as simply best practices. “What you call experience design,” they say, “is really nothing more than good industrial design.” Or good graphic design. Or good interface design.

This “mediumism” resists the idea that design can be practiced in a medium-independent or cross-media way. Because that implies that there may be something these mediumist design traditions have been missing all along.

If our work simply recapitulates what has been best practice in all these fields all along, why are the experiences they deliver so astonishingly bad? And let’s face it, they are really bad.

One big reason for it has to do with this last word, one which I think has been unfairly maligned: the word “user”. You guys know the joke, right? There are only two industries in the world that refer to their customers as users. One is the technology business and the other is drug dealers. Ha ha, get it? Our work is just as dehumanizing as selling people deadly, addictive chemicals that will destroy their lives and eventually kill them! Get it? It’s funny because it’s true.

No, it’s not. I’m here to reclaim “user”. Because “user” connotes use, and use matters! We don’t make things for those most passive of entities, consumers. We don’t even make things for audiences, which at least connotes some level of appreciation. The things we make get used! They become a part of people’s lives! That’s important work. It touches people in ways most of them could never even identify. But it’s real.

Okay, time for another show of hands: who here has “information architect” or “information architecture” in your title, on your business card? Raise your hand. [audience raises hands] Almost as many as we had ASIST members.

Okay, now let me see those hands again. Keep your hand up if there is also someone in your organization with “interaction design” or “interaction designer” in the title.

[hands go down]

Almost every hand went down. I see one hand, two hands. Three, four… five.

This is what the interaction design community recognizes — and what the leadership of the IxDA recognizes in particular — that the IA community does not.

In the marketplace, this is a zero-sum game. Every job req created for an “interaction designer” is one less job req for an “information architect” and vice versa. And the more “interaction designers” there are, the more status and authority and influence and power accrues to the IxDA and its leadership.

They get this, and you can see it play out in everything they do, including refusing offers of support and cooperation from groups they see as competitors, and throwing temper tantrums about how other groups schedule their conferences. Meanwhile, the IAs are so busy declaring peace that they don’t even realize that they’ve already lost the war.

This territorialism cannot go on, and I hope the IxDA leadership sees an opportunity here for positive change. These organizations should be sponsoring each other’s events, reaching out to each other’s membership, working together to raise the tide for everyone.

There is no us and them. We are not information architects. We are not interaction designers. We are user experience designers. This is the identity we must embrace. Any other will only hold back the progress of the field by marginalizing an important dimension of our work and misleading those outside our field about what is most important and valuable about what we do. Because it’s not information, and it’s not interaction.

We’re in the experience business. User experience. We create things that people use.

To use something is to engage with it. And engagement is what it’s all about.

Our work exists to be engaged with. In some sense, if no one engages with our work it doesn’t exist.

It reminds me of an artist named J.S.G. Boggs. He hand-draws these meticulously detailed near-replicas of U.S. currency. It’s gotten him in trouble with the Secret Service a couple of times. They’re near-replicas — they’re not exact, they’re obviously fake. They’re fascinating and they’re delightful, in and of themselves, as objects.

But here’s the catch: For Boggs, the work isn’t complete until he gets someone to accept the object as currency. The transaction is the artwork, not the object that changes hands. As he sees it, his work is not about creating things that look like currency it’s about using art as currency. It’s the use — the human engagement — that matters.

Designing with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as an explicit goal is different from the kinds of design that have gone before. It can be practiced in any medium, and across media.

Show of hands: Who here is involved in creating digital experiences? [audience raises hands] Okay, hands down. Now: who’s involved in creating non-digital experiences? [audience raises hands] More hands than I thought.

Now, do we really believe that this is the boundary of our profession? And if we don’t, why are there so many talks about websites at conferences like this one?

Don’t get me wrong, I love the web. I hope to be working with the web in 10 years, in 20 years. But the web is just a canvas. Or perhaps a better metaphor is clay — raw material that we shape into experiences for people.

But there are lots of materials — media — we can use to shape experiences. Saying user experience design is about digital media is rather like saying that sculpture is about the properties of clay.

That’s not to say that an individual sculptor can’t dedicate themselves to really mastering clay. They can, and they do — just like many of you will always be really great at creating user experiences for the web.

But that does not define the boundary of user experience design. Where it really gets interesting is when you start looking at experiences that involve multiple media, multiple channels. Because there’s a whole lot more to orchestrating a multi-channel experience than simply making sure that the carpet matches the drapes.

We’ve always said we were in the multimedia business. Let’s put some weight behind that. Expanding our horizons in this way does not dilute our influence. It strengthens it.

So if we’re all user experience designers, and there are no more information architects, but there is still such a thing as information architecture, what does it look like?

Well, let’s take a closer look at engagement, and think about the ways we can engage people. What are the varieties of human engagement?

We can engage people’s senses. We can stimulate them through visuals, through sound, through touch and smell and taste. This is the domain of the traditional creative arts: painting, music, fashion, cooking.

We can engage their minds, get them thinking, reasoning, analyzing, synthesizing. This is where fields like scholarship and rhetoric have something to teach us.

We can engage their hearts, provoke them in feelings of joy and sadness and wonder and rage. (I’ve seen a lot of rage.) The folks who know about this stuff are the storytellers, the filmmakers, and yes, even the marketers.

And we can engage their bodies. We can compel them to act. This is the closest to what we’ve traditionally done studying and trying to influence human behavior.

And that’s really about it. Or at least, that’s all that I’ve been able to think of: Perception, engaging the senses. Cognition, engaging the mind. Emotion, engaging the heart. And action, engaging the body.

Mapping out the interrelationships between these turns out to be a surprisingly deep problem. Every part influences every other part in unexpected ways. In particular, thinking and feeling are so tangled up together that we practically need a new word for it: “thinkfeel”.

There are a few other factors, sort of orthogonal to these, that influence experience:

There are our capabilities: the properties of our bodies, the acuity of our senses, the sharpness and flexibility of our minds, the size of our hearts. Our capabilities determine what we can do.

Then there are our constraints, which define what we can’t do. The limits on our abilities, whether permanent — someone who’s having a hard time reading because they have dyslexia — or temporary — someone who’s having a hard time reading because they’ve had five bourbons.

Finally, we have context. And I have to admit that I’m cheating a bit on this one because I’m packing a lot of different factors up into this one category. There’s the context of the moment: babies crying, dogs barking, phones ringing. (Calgon, take me away!) Then there’s personal context: the history, associations, beliefs, personality traits of that individual. And there’s the broad context: social, cultural, economic, technological.

But these three — capabilities, constraints, and context — are really just cofactors, shaping and influencing experience in those big four categories: perception, cognition, emotion, and action.

Our role, as user experience designers, is to synthesize and orchestrate elements in all of these areas to create a holistic, cohesive, engaging experience.

So how do we create user experiences that engage across all of these areas? Where can we look to for expertise? Where’s the insight? Where are the areas for further inquiry?

Perception is already pretty well covered. We’ve got visual designers and, sometimes, animators. In some cases we’ve got sound designers. We’ve got industrial designers, working on the tactile aspects of the products we create.

Action, again, is pretty much what we were doing already. I defined action as engagement of the body, which may sound strange to many of you when I say that we’ve really been doing this all along. But if you think about our work, when we talk about behavior, we are always talking about some physical manifestation of a user’s intention — even when that manifestation is as small as a click. (And the interaction designers claim to own behavior anyway so I say let them have it.)

Because the real action is in these last two areas, cognition and emotion. This, to my mind, is the manifest destiny for information architecture. We may not have fully recognized it before because the phrase “information architecture” puts the emphasis on the wrong thing.

It’s never been about information. It’s always been about people: how they relate to that information, how that information makes them think, how it makes them feel, and how the structure of that information influences both things. This is huge, unexplored territory.

We must acknowledge that as user experience designers we have a broader place in the world than simply delivering value to businesses. We must embrace our role as a cultural force.

Here’s Michael Wesch quoting Marshall McLuhan again: “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.” Think about that for a second. “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.” When McLuhan said “we”, and when he said “us”, he was talking about the entire human race. But not everybody’s a shaper, right? The shapers are the people in this room, the people in this field. We shape those tools and then, the experiences that those tools create shape humanity itself. Think about the responsibility that entails.

I believe that when we embrace that role as a cultural force, and we embrace that responsibility, this work — user experience design — will take its place among the most fundamental and important human crafts, alongside engineering and architecture and all kinds of creative expression and creative problem solving disciplines.

At last year’s five-minute madness, I said that the experts who give talks at events like this one were making it up as they went along. But, I said, that’s okay, because we all are.

I take that back. We aren’t making it up as we go along. This is not a process of invention. This is a process of discovery.

What we are uncovering about people, about tools and their use, about experiences — it’s always been there. We just didn’t know how to see it.

This discovery phase is far from over. Ten years isn’t nearly enough time. There’s more that we can’t see than is apparent to us right now.

For my part, and for you as well, I hope there’s always more for us to discover together.

Thank you all very much.

Video by Chris Pallé and “The UX Workshop”:http://theuxworkshop.tv/
photo by “Jorge Arango”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/jarango/3382137521/
Thanks to Chris and Jorge.

These podcasts are sponsored by:

The “American Society of Information Science & Technology”:http://asist.org/: Since 1937, ASIS&T has been THE society for information professionals leading the search for new and better theories, techniques, and technologies to improve access to information.

The “IA Summit”:http://www.iasummit.org: the premier gathering place for information architects and other user experience professionals.

The theme of the event this year, Expanding Our Horizons, inspired peers and industry experts to come together to speak about a wide range of topics. This included information as wide ranging as practical techniques & tools to evolving practices to create better user experiences.

“Boxes & Arrows”:http://www.boxesandarrows.com: Since 2001, Boxes & Arrows has been a peer-written journal promoting contributors who want to provoke thinking, push limits, and teach a few things along the way.

Contribute as an editor or author, and get your ideas out there. “boxesandarrows.com/about/participate”:http://www.boxesandarrows.com/about/participate