AEAChicago2007 – “The Seven Lies of Information Architecture” by Liz Danzico
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007Back to main AEAChicago2007 post
Liz Danzico’s post about her presentation
Definitely the most controversial presentation.
abriefmessage.com - with Khoi Vinh edits many people but project with Adobe was first time she'd been edited in a while Adobe's design center editor redlined a sentence that ended with a preposition rules are easy, guidelines are hard lists with numbers are commandments, people writing them are experts, etc. Joe and Josephine, first personas in industrial design - Henry Dreyfuss, The Measure of Man Strunk & White, The Elements of Style Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language many many others. Chris Messina, flickr Patterns Yahoo! Pattern Library Navigation must always be consistent. you can recognize a Chinese menu from a small window UT Austin, The Shape of Information, presented by Victor Lombardi at IA Summit can recognize Amazon left nav from color, content, space, leading, etc. Rapunyi Hills in Tokyo is beautiful very few street names in Japan, so they use landmarks, and those are on the Google map don't need Google searchbox of homepage on the Google Maps page need -> interpret -> navigate -> react, with interpret being the important step new Apple nav "inconsistent at every single page, which is awesome" So: Navigation must always be predictable and familiar. There is a magic number seven (plus or minus two). individuals can only keep about seven items in short-term memory but broad and shallow navigation structures are easier to navigate than deep ones So: There is a magic number but it always just "depends". Users must get to all parts of the site all the time. when you're dealing with a closed system, then provide navigation to all parts John Gruber of Daring Fireball talked at the AIGA/Apple speaker series asked audience who knew about the event from whom, and pretty much everyone knew from DF it's OK to get to an AIGA event without being notified by AIGA think about interconnectedness of web So: Users must get to everywhere from everywhere - but that includes external everywheres. Users must know where they are at all times. when wayfinding breaks down, people take matters into their own hands daylife's purpose is for you to get lost on the site YouTube doesn't have sense of place or structure, just jump around Barnes & Noble gains a significant part of its revenue from "people who bought this also buy" So: Users must know what's next, where can I go from here. The user experience must be seamless. Apple's Human Interface Guidelines has a very complete style guide - windows named "untitled" WordPress has its Codex to codify its interface original twitter sketch (my.stat.us) is about what you're doing "What are you doing?" and character limit are only constant across applications So: The designer must design beautiful seams. Shorter is better. how often do people make a mistake with Amazon One-Click? longer is often better: No one belongs here more than you, by Miranda July So: Short is better, and long is sometimes better too. Information architects do information architecture. cloaked society, secret handshake discipline good reason for explicit person to be responsible for deliverables we talk about moving between phases, really jarring words used to work at Razorfish when trying to figure out what IA was GM said "from now on, each one of you is your own project manager," and they were shocked instead of saying "we need to hire an IA", we should all figure out how to do IA So: Information architects do information architecture, and so should developers, designers, writers, clients, and users. this is scary, because pointing at research can stop an unwise client in their tracks you can point to research, but consider doing your own you can also point to this talk :) there's a chance Steve Krug is thinking about another book on usability testing on a shoestring students often flounder without rules - how do you avoid reinventing the wheel? Razorfish interviewing 8 people a day, hiring 3 people a week how do you teach people your practices when you don't know what they are yourself? created a project called Shallow Dive Project - like Dateline Deep Dive three days to solve a design problem using the resources in the company just gave them a brief, then after three days present to the entire company they found their own rules make research available to students, but present problems where they can experience the rules then let them decide which "rules" are actually useful how do you teach clients to catagorize content for a new CMS installation? subjective process, have to work through it together a favorite lie is "users will not scroll horizontally" relativist bent of this talk - learning rules to know when to break them there's value to learning rules, but people should be encouraged to decide when to follow them users may not need to know where they are, but do they need to be able to get back? studied news: the more tools people had to use the internet, the more excited and proud they were combination of bookmarks, RSS readers, friends, del.icio.us watch what they're doing - use of del.icio.us and bookmarks suggests need save feature what happens to accessibility when you're breaking the rules? what you do depends on audience
Delicious