What are we if we are not humane?
Donna and I went on a roadtrip today with her daughter Amber to complete the family Christmas visits. Along the way we discussed the content for her revamped website, and with it, the business benefits of IA.
Try as we might, we couldn’t come up with anything better than “You are going to do this stuff anyway - structure a site and some content to satisfy a business need. Hire me or some other smart person and we’ll help you to not screw it up”.
Can this be all there is?
The tale can now be told.
Wikipedia defines the Dunning-Kruger effect as:
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge think that they know more than others who have much more knowledge.
The phenomenon was demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University. Their results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December 1999.[1]
Kruger and Dunning noted a number of previous studies which tend to suggest that in skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (as Charles Darwin put it). They hypothesized that with a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,
- incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill,
- incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others,
- incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy,
- if they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.
I did not just quietly observe this - I actively saw it happen around me.
And no, I’m not kidding. I wish that I was. I’m not naming names because (a) I’m no longer on that project and (b) to do so would be unprofessional.
Matthew Hodgson and I were discussing the difference between the way we do IA and the practices of some of the process-centric user-centered design crowd.
An analogy that I drew, rightly or wrongly, was that we looked beyond the accepted thinking into the realm of meta-thinking, we are a little like Neo in The Matrix - while the process-centric crowd see the building, we look beyond the obvious, and see the code that makes up the building. I’m not talking about programming code here (although Matt and I have both been paid to code in the past), but an understanding of the true nature of things that goes beyond methodology or learning.
It sounds egotistical and perhaps it is. The wider IA community sometimes creates solutions that appear complex - some who do not know how they got there look at the solution and are impressed by the apparent complexity, and we who see beyond the walls look at the solution and are impressed by the elegant simplicity.
I wrote this article a couple of months ago on Facibus Reviews - I’ve updated it to reflect the change in technorati authority for the blogs listed.
UX Zeitgeist has the tagline “Important books and topics on user experience design, according to the UX community”. It’s a popularity-driven list of what’s hot in the UX (User eXperience design) and IA (Information Architecture) communities.
While we know that “popular” does not always equal “best”, I know or know of the people that are listed on UX Zeitgeist - they are my peers, my mentors, people I want to like and want to be like. I have reason to trust that in this case, at least, popularity is a fair indication of quality.
UX Zeitgeist displays, among other things, blog mentions. Here is my page on UX Zeitgeist - compare it to Steve Krug’s page. Steve is a nice guy and has written a book that has helped a lot of people - I don’t begrudge him his higher ranking in the UX/IA blogosphere, because apart from being a nice guy, I recommend his book to other
people, and the better he looks, the better I do by reflection for having recommended him. Anyhow, I digress.
This led me to thinking about the IA blogosphere and the technorati-style ranking that I might give for popularity of a set of different IA and IA related blogs. Rather than technorati-style I looked up the Technorati API on ProgrammableWeb.
Sure enough, everything there that is needed was there - but do I have the time to play with this now? The automagical solution is still to come (and if you have any thoughts, please leave a comment - I’ll put it on my project list - a thought
that occurs to me is that a “display the rankings of all blogs listed with Technorati by this tag” plugin might be handy).
OK, so, the manual way. A Technorati search on information architecture yields over 46,000 results. Narrowing it to “information architecture” yields over 4,000 results. Ack. From this result set - blog rankings for those blogs who have posted over the last 24 hours:
I know that there are a lot of other IA blogs out there that haven’t shown up in this result set. They include:
This is not an exhaustive list by any means - there are a lot more IA blogs out there. If/when I get my API act together, the list might be automagical. In the mean while, you can keep an eye on the top IA blogs according to Technorati by performing an authority search on blogs tagged information-architecture
Aside: There is a potential solution to this issue - using one of the many “turn any website into a web service/feed” options, I could turn the Technorati authority search on blogs tagged information-architecture into a webpage using the same feed to page method used for Blogging in the News.
Jef Raskin’s definition of a humane interface - “An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties” - inspired this blog. What is humane information architecture (IA)?
This article is subtitled “An interim definition” because I am pretty sure I can’t come up with a definition as wonderful as Jef Raskin’s the first time around 
By sheer plagiarism, I will start with “An information architecture is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.” Nothing wrong with that one at all. But it could stand a little clarification. Which humans? Which needs? What frailties?
Are we talking about just the end users here? Even if this is widened to include all stakeholders (including project delivery and maintenance staff, accounting staff that monitor both delivery and maintenance, and everyone in between) - is it wide enough? Does the humane information architecture need to be responsive to the needs of the IAs working on the project?
So maybe the revised definition should include a clause that says something like “do the best you can within the allowed budget in a humane way”.
Where does the responsibility to be humane end? Does it end? To be successful, the project needs a definable and pre-defined scope, otherwise it will go on for too long and cost too much money (that said, in the absence of scope, how will we know when it has gone over budget?).
Which needs are most important? Hopefully the project is structured enough to have a categorisation system for requirements - be they
The categorisation systems for requirements usually define them in some form, such as:
In this kind of structure, needs are mandatory, and in an ideal world, have been recognised as such. As an aside, I do not believe it is the job of the IA to validate all the requirements (unless it is one of those BA/IA gigs, which do occur) but they should be able to notify the BA/requirements management team of where there may be clashes and omissions.
What constitutes a need from an IA perspective? To me, this will be a two-part answer:
Examples of the latter are legion. It is not as if the IA is the Knight in Shining Armour come to rescue the poor end users from the evil Project Manager - far from it - but there are times when things get missed in the best of requirements sets. So we could take “do the best you can within the allowed budget in a humane way” and add to it “to meet the needs of all users and in so doing, make the system both useful and useable”.
And frailties? There are the normal interface design motherhood statements like:
How do you find out if these are enough? By testing - informal if needs be, but test early and often, with a minimum representative sample of ALL user types.
So now we have this: “do the best you can within the allowed budget in a humane way to meet the needs of all users and in so doing, make the system both useful and useable, and test to ensure that it recognises and compensates for apparent human frailties”. This is a bit of a mouthful - I am sure I can come up with something better in time!
Until next time, Andrew
Yaro Starak got me thinking about meta-thinking. While he writes from the perspective of a web entrepreneur, there are a lot of points in common between the way he thinks about things and good information architecture/consulting practice.
Yaro thinks about the way people think - and this is a good thing. He says:
The entrepreneurs reading this will no doubt relate to the way of thinking I am talking about. I often look at a restaurant I’m having dinner or lunch in, or a retail outlet I’m shopping in or any business whatsoever, whether it’s a service provider or product producer and ask - I wonder how profitable this business is? Or I wonder where they source this product from and what the wholesale price is? Or I wonder whether this business model has been applied to another industry? I wonder why the business owner decided to put this here or price this much or offer this now? etc, etc.
I don’t know much about entrepreneurs, but I know that this is how I think. When see a poorly trained waiter in a restaurant, I don’t think “you idiot”, I think “what management process failure allowed you to be put in a position that you are not able to handle?”. I look behind the issue to not just the answer, but the potential solution. That was why my rant about EzyDVD didn’t attack the employees who were present at the time of the debacles mentioned, but questioned the motives of the business system that allowed the failure.
I think that meta-thinking is essential to practitioners of my trade - information architecture - look behind and beyond the obvious so as not to fall into the sin of best practices. More than this, whatever field of human endevour we follow, meta-thinking is essential for self-examination, which I believe is a necessary part of a life worth living.
