Talking about IA: A practical way to talk about, compare, and evaluate any kind of information architecture

Austin Govella
I was in Memphis when it happened. I was there. All I ever wanted was to be an information architect. We’d flown in from all parts for the annual sequester. It wasn’t a conference yet. We still call it a summit. You have to remember what it was like to be there at the summit in 2009. The economy had cratered layoffs, furloughs, hiring freezes, project shutdowns, budget cuts and council contracts. Just tough keep it warm the tattered economy. But despite the throes of the financial crisis, we threw ourselves into the crowds at our annual crossroads. We were optimistic. Obama had won. Obama signed a 780 $7 billion stimulus stimulus bill in February, one month later, banking on promises of a turbocharged economy. information architects and their hangers on slid in the historic Peabody Hotel in Downtown Memphis. The Peabody is ridiculously lavish. for a weekend we ignored the economy and played fat cats with conference sessions and bar tabs. At one point, sunk load the lobby chairs, the bars closed drinks gone. We drink two bottles of gin straight from the bottle, because we had nothing more suitable to drink, nowhere more suitable to be and nothing more pressing to wait for in the morning. It was decorated. Now, the Peabody squats a few blocks from Mississippi, all the buildings in that part of Memphis seem to squat down by the river. As we hop the tourists perfect diet bars and juke joints bill Street, not one of us noticed a dark figure mingling at the festivity edges as the last day wound down, pregnant with giddy after glows, information architects gathered in the Grand Ballroom, the closing keynote, Jesse James Garrett, this giant of a mind mentioned event of an information architect. He lurched from the summit shadows and said, there are no information architects. There are no interaction designers. There were only and only ever have been user experience designers. There is no such thing as an information architect. I know what you’re thinking. But shitposting wasn’t a thing yet. Twitter was only three years old and everyone still lived on live journal. This was before the Russians took over.

Austin Govella
You have to believe me, his statement was a big deal. Seven years previous only seven years, his essay recon built a world where big and little II lived together his visual vocabulary. That’s the very boxes and arrows we use to draft our blueprints. And his diagram the elements of user experience had position information architecture as a core design discipline for a decade. All I ever wanted was to be an information architect. But Garrett was serious. There were no slides. There was no stage, there was no spotlight. For 43 minutes, Jesse paced up and down the Grand Ballroom center aisle, reading his talk from his phone. And for the last 10 years, for a decade, those 43 minutes haunted my mind. It wasn’t the salvo at the title. It was what he said about what we say. It was what he said about our language. What we don’t have our 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 ay ay ay ay ay ay ay from that is a striking that chord. Our colleagues have danced about information architecture, choreographed, careful languages of critique.

Austin Govella
In most cases, they combine words to talk about ay ay ay ay ay ay, with ideas on how to judge what’s good or bad. I believe that takes a bad turn. The language we use should distract cribe information architecture, not prescribe what is good or bad. In the next 50 minutes, we’ll learn three ways to talk about information architecture. First, we’ll work through ways distinguish the scale of an information architecture. Second, we’ll find language that describes how people experience information architecture. And third, we’ll explore ways to describe the differences between information architectures. Our examples will emerge from the commonplace an e commerce website, a coffee shop, a church a walk on the beach.

Austin Govella
The point isn’t to talk about ay ay ay ay ay, is to have clear objective shared ways to compare and contrast information architecture. We want to discuss debate and measure how good an AI is or predict how good it should be. We want to share the language we can use to talk about the many different ways you can get to good. So first, let’s talk about what makes good language So we can make sure we have Garrett says, We don’t have a good language for critique. So what makes a good language for critique? That word critique, so pretentious. I picked it up late high school early college during what Jonathan Corman Christen the critical theory wars. Back in the 90s, I spent the critical three wars at the University of Texas at Austin. My very first class on my very first day, I met one of my very best professors. She was late to her own intro to criticism class, breeze to the door and a formal Crimson dress that was way too hot for Austin in August. She began the class with a directive. When you read something, ask yourself, who is the author? What did they say? Why did they say it? Keep that in mind? Well, I explained what I believe makes a good language of critique. A good language for critique should not make assumptions about what is Good or bad? It should focus on outcomes, not the design, but on the experience the ay ay ay ay ay ay enables a good language critique should apply to any information architecture in any environment. And it should be as useful at your day to day job as it is at the academy discussing theory.

Austin Govella
I still dislike that word critique. But hear critique is the right word for right now, when Garrett says we don’t have a language of critique, he means we don’t have the words for a disciplined, systematic study of information architecture. That’s crazy, right? thousands of words, phrases, articles, presentations, printers and books, but they’re not the right words. Since that 2009 plenary, we’ve worked on it. We have heuristics rules of thumb, general principles to generate good ay ay ay ay. and we have poetic personal philosophies were principle a these prescribe what is good however, Wouldn’t Garrett talks about the qualities of an information architecture, he’s not talking about the quality, the qualities of an information architecture are not what makes it good, the qualities or characteristics and properties and attributes that help us differentiate one information architecture from another and these properties and attributes should be one neutral. So, they help us distinguish one information architecture from another, but not distinguish good from bad, they should describe what it is not prescribe how to make it good to these properties should be agnostic. So, they apply to an environment where we work, whether it’s digital, physical visuals are all tactile, social or whatever. Three, they should focus on outcomes. So we understand the kind of experience the AI enables, rather than the design the system and for the language should be useful. So academics and practitioners speak the same language with clients as they do with each other. Those four principles drove the design for the language of critique we’ll see here. So I wanted to lay these principles out front. If you disagree with these constraints, if you think they’re wrong, then you’re off the hook, stop now, you won’t agree with what comes next. But if he seemed reasonable, maybe even useful, then now we have a way to evaluate our language of critique. We have a way to evaluate. The words we use. When we talk about IA. and I propose, we talk about IA in three ways. One, we understand the scale of information architecture. Two, we described how people experience the information architecture. Three, we map the differences between information architectures, how can we describe the information environment? You can see these three languages only describe Information Architecture. They don’t presume what makes it good. They apply to any environment, and they focus on outcomes rather than methods or activities. With these three areas mapped, we can create a good language of critique for each one. with words for these three areas, we can create a good language boutique for information architecture. About five years ago, I was called in to help a global energy company migrate their digital marketing sites from one platform to another. It was one of those swanky consulting gigs, posh hotels, exciting restaurants trip to key cities around the world. Their current platform had been discontinued, and vendor support was due to shut down. They needed to move to a living supported platform. So we interviewed some stakeholders. We talked to seven separate lines of business and discovered they didn’t just have a vendor support problem. They had a platform problem. The current platform was slow to update and make changes. So they never tried anything new. The current platform provided only basic analytics. So marketing teams weren’t sure what worked, and it was slow and expensive to launch new sites. We didn’t just move them to a new platform. We transformed how they went to market with a new customized digital marketing platform. From the original seven sites. The platform has since launch hundreds of websites across 12 different business lines in over nine languages and countries all over the globe. Time for updates went from weeks to days. So constantly campaigns are always up to date. Time to launch new content went from months to weeks, and the time to launch new sites went from years, two months. In addition, the cost to launch a site went down 66% organic traffic was up for most business lines by 20% year over year, lead generation up as much as 150% and analytics are built into every component. So the Marketing team now has detailed data on how content, personalization and campaigns perform. All the things I’ve ever worked on. This is one of my greatest designs. We delivered a platform, not a site, we delivered a platform the client could use to build sites. We did some wireframes but they were conceptual to show what could be done and weren’t used to design individual sites. We created no site taxonomies there’s no content audits we deliver no templates, but the ay ay ay ay we created gave the client and its vendors, the language and mental models they needed to build their sites. Instead of taxonomies. We gave them metadata and classification systems. Instead of templates. We gave them layouts and components so they can design and build their own pages. Now, there’s an old mental model floating around that likens ay ay ay ay and other design pursuits to creating blueprints before you build the house. This was true 15 years ago, when there were no platforms or useful off the shelf software for building sites nowadays, is more like interior design. Someone else has already laid the slab and built the walls. You already have the platform, you come in, hoping it has good bones and make it somewhere livable,

Austin Govella
more fixer upper than Frank Gehry. Most times you don’t design the best taxonomy. You design with the platform will allow. You don’t leverage the metadata you need. Use the fields the platform makes available. So sometimes, ay ay ay works at the platform level. And sometimes it works at the site level. at each level, you do the same kinds of activities with different types of inputs and outputs. If we continue our fantastic journey, our skill grows narrower because sites are made up of interfaces. Just like with platforms insights to architect good interfaces, we must understand the mental mind Models their pieces and how they should be joined. Just as platforms are places where sites occur, and sites are places where interfaces occur. interfaces are places where interactions occur. To architect one level, you need to understand the foundation that creates for other scales. For example, to architect the platform for the oil giant, I had to understand what kinds of sites they wanted to build. To understand those sites, I needed to understand the types of interfaces they might want to design to architect those interfaces. To understand the type of interactions they want to enable. The information architecture at the largest scale of the platform constrains your architecture at the smaller scale at the interface. As john Culkin wrote, we shape our tools and then the tools shape us. For the oil giant, I shaped the platform, and then the platform constrain what types of sites could be built these constraints ripple across all scales. The site suggests possible interfaces possible interfaces, allow Possible interactions, the shape of the tool echoes to what the tool helps you build. You hear the echoes elsewhere as well. One of my favorite quotes comes from architect ileal Sarandon. Always design a thing by considering in its next larger context of chair in a room, a room and a house. Because I understand the sights the client needed to build, I was able to design the platform. As an aside, these two quotes illustrate designs fundamental tension, the oscillation from room to the chair to the ask that sits there. As information architects, our work oscillates across different scales. Understand the site to design the platform you need. Understand the platform and you can imagine Sarah and room to design the room consider the house design requires we work at different scales. And about this point, I can hear Christina prefer my shoulder whispering in my ear. Why do I care? Why should we care about working different scales, because you’d be hard pressed to compare the information architecture of the oil giants platform with the IA of one of its sites. Comparing the IAA one site to another is easy. The prerequisite to a disciplined systematic study of information architecture, it’s recognized that scale changes IA in significant ways. And if we want to compare information architectures, we must do so within the scale, platform to platform site to site. A platform can have many sites, a site can have many interfaces, an interface can have many interactions, and organization can have many platforms, and a culture can have many organizations. These scales assimilate the way many of our colleagues slice the world, and even echo in the work of thinkers like Gibson, and his concept of nesting. The information architecture at each scale is affected by different forces. One of those forces is the pace of change. You’ve probably seen a diagram similar to this showing each level as a different pace layer. This is based on a similar diagram about buildings from Stuart brand. That is, each layer moves at a different pace. The information architecture at each scale changes at a different pace. In this case, the outside moves faster than the inside. You might think this works like a bike tire, where each layer moves at a different speed and everything stays aligned almost as if you have spokes. But brands observation was not that each layer moved at a different pace. But at these different paces shared the layers away from one another. So the rotation is really more like a solar system, where the planets all move at different speeds. Although the needs and capabilities of each skill may align when you design them, the different speeds meet each layer immediately begins to share out of alignment with the others. Sharing means you’re only aligned once and the more and more out of alignment the more likely the layers We’ll shear off from one another. The information architecture at each level always exists at a different point in time. You can’t compare one scale to another, because the context at the time of design and the context at time of use are always different.

Austin Govella
The chair changes faster than the room, the room faster than the house. Sooner or later the house room or chair aren’t what you need anymore. So to evaluate whether or not an information architecture is good, first identify at what scale it operates. Information Architecture generally applies to one to five scales, the interaction, the interface, the site, the platform, or the organization. At each scale, information architecture operates with different constraints. Each scale changes at different rates, and each scale operates within a different design context. Scale gives us a way to classify the type Information Architecture. So we know what we can compare platform to platform, insight decide my whole life. Anytime I need a little piece a little solace, I take the highway down the Texas coast into a little town called Aransas pass. I take a left at the HDB and drive down to the ferry landing. From there, it’s a quick ferry ride across the channel to the north end of Padre Island. To the cozy coastal town of Port Aransas, a short drive down the access road I’ve arrived at the beach. I’ve often wondered why I find this place so peaceful. This is where my parents lived when I was born. Do I send some kind of residual experience of waves and wind from my mother’s womb? Or is it an amalgam of years of memories of friends and family and former lovers? I’m not sure. But when I need peace, this is where I go This is where I’m one with the universe. This is where I come to touch the divine.

Austin Govella
This is my church.

Austin Govella
This is a sacred grove in the Sahara and Ghana. People come here to touch the divine. I didn’t know this, but cultures in every country in the world have kept sacred groves. places where they go to be close to their gods. This is the church. This church is probably a little bit more familiar. It’s the mountain Zion Church in Manhattan.

Austin Govella
This looks like a church. Yeah, the cross purchased off the pitch roof and looked at three stained glass windows over the door. Each is topped with an arch and the central window is more prominent than the other two. This is a church in Denver. It looks a lot like the one in Manhattan, pitch roof cross perched atop even has the same three stained glass windows top arches, although in this example, the central window is much more prominent than the one we saw on the mountainside on church in Manhattan. But this isn’t the church. This is a nightclub. This is the 1122 church in Jacksonville, Florida. Other than the cross it looks totally different from the other teachers. No pitch roof. No three stained glass windows 1122 Church is inside what was once an H. H. Greg appliance store. What architecture makes this old appliance store a church? When I visit the beach in Port Aransas, what makes the beach my church?

Austin Govella
Where is the architecture?

Austin Govella
Philip Johnson’s my favorite architect. I don’t really know that much about other architects but I know a lot about Philip Johnson for years late at night, I randomly turn on public television. And there would be Charlie Rose interviewing the very elderly Philip Johnson. And it’s perfectly round eyeglasses and with his right smile. Later in life, Johnson began to explore sculpture. So rose asked if sculpture and architecture were similar, no triple Johnson. And he had this way of kind of tossing an idea away, almost dismissing it. They’re completely different. Art is something you experience. Architecture is where you experience it. Architecture is the place where the experience occurs. It’s not a structure, where indeed is the architecture.

Austin Govella
Last year, Carmen Maria Machado released in the dream house, an amazing memoir about her coming out and her first real relationship, a caustic, toxic, abusive affair.She uses the house The two of them share as the conceit to explore all the different possible perspectives of their relationship. To look at all the tropes. Dreamhouse has a memory palace as a lesbian cult classic as a stranger comes to town narrative, as a romance novel is a Bildungsroman coming of age story. Her point about the house and about one’s life in general is that you give the room its purpose. It doesn’t matter what was intended. The person inside is who determines that the story is a romance, or a comedy or tragedy Thriller Horror Story. The inhabitant gives the room its purpose. Your actions are mightier than any architects intentions. were indeed is the architect. It’s impossible to talk about architecture without also talking about experience. Experience is the architects intent, the spaces effect and the visitors phenomenon. As information architects, we create semantic information environments to increase the chance our visitors will have certain types of experiences over others. So it follows if we want to have a disciplined systematic study of information architecture, we should be able to identify, discuss and evaluate the kinds of experience we generate. Our pursuit of good critical language continues, right? So, as we talked about experience, we’re gonna make sure we remain neutral. And don’t try to classify good or bad experiences. We’re gonna make sure we can be agnostic of when, where or how the experience occurs. And we want to focus on the outcomes of the experience, what happens not what drives the experience or happens afterwards. So that’s set some ground rules for this discussion. Let’s go a little bit further and make sure we’re set up for success. I want to draw a very limited tight frame around experience. This more marks like the borders of my current thinking than where one needs to Stop. For me, it starts getting kind of fuzzy outside of these bounds. So I want to stay inside where it’s safe for now. I don’t want to spend time on how the user learned experience or how they find it. Not that those aren’t like useful questions. I just don’t want to discuss them here. Likewise, I don’t want to talk about what happens after. Is it connected to another experience? Where does one experience stop and another one begins? Again? Those are good questions. Just not for me right now. In a similar fashion, I want to avoid channels. For now. They’re important, but I think we can get to a holistic description of experience without channels. So let’s start with a mnemonic. Head, feet, hands eyes. For the head, does user understand the experience for the feet? Can the user access the experience for the hands, they represent whether or not the user can control their movement through the experience? The eyes referred to how Well, the user can monitor their process through the experience two complimentary attributes of experience. The first is relevance. How specific and relevant is the experience to the user. Think of relevance kind of like a conceptual ball that’s closer or farther away from the user. adaptable refers to how well the user can or can’t adjust the experience to make it more relevant to them. So that’s a current attempt at a monic head, feet hands eyes, plus that the complimentary attributes that gives us six objective properties that we can use to discuss experience. So we have the four primary attributes, understand, does the user comprehend the experience? access? Can the user participate in experience, control, can user govern how they move through the experience, and monitor can user observe where they are in the experience? All four provide a way for us to differentiate one experience from another In keeping with our goals, these attributes are both neutral and agnostic, so we can use them to describe any kind of experience. The two secondary attributes continue this approach. So relevant, how specific is experienced to the user and adaptable? Can user adjust experience to make it more relevant? So let’s do a quick dive in each attribute of experience before we look at how to use this vocabulary. Understand how well does the user understand the experience? On the left at the low end of understanding, we have the inscrutable affordance free monolith from the movie 2001 Space Odyssey on the right, that big red button. I don’t know what to do with the monolith. I understand I can push the button. This is similar to the idea of affordance but let’s leave that aside for a moment. But I do want to mention Adam greenfields book everywhere, where he describes a similar concept in the first two ability. He writes what sorts of features support the users attempts to figure out where they are, which past connecting to a given destination, and how best to actually go about going there. Access is another way to think about experience, how able Am I to participate in the experience. If I want to go up, the stairs are more accessible to me than the climbing wall. It’s easier for me to use the stairs. Imagine what access would mean if I was in a wheelchair. Control has to do with how much you’re able to control your movement through the experience. waterslides give you no control, you go over the edge and just go where you’re taking. In contrast, an airplane cockpit. Here’s a pilot loss of control over the experience of flying. Monitor describes how well the user can monitor the experience in surgery. You can’t monitor anything, they knock you out, and contrast. In an audience. The entire experience revolves around Your ability to monitor relevance has to do with how personal you find experience. Imagine an announcement in an airport terminal. That announcement is much less relevant to you, but you compare it to an announcement from a friend. adaptable describes how possible it is for the user to just the experience to make it more or less relevant to them. At one end, you have the kitchen of the restaurant you visited for dinner. You can’t change anything about that kitchen. At the other end of the spectrum. You have your kitchen at home, where you can adjust exactly where everything goes. So now let’s look at a few examples of how we can use these attributes to describe different kinds of experiences. I like to buy music, I love lingering over vinyl bins, fingering the records looking for special finds. However nowadays I buy most of my Music on Bandcamp a website that allows bands to sell their music directly to customers. Tweet Bandcamp and the record store, you can see the experience of buying music, how understandable it is, how controllable how monetizable and how relevant, it’s about the same. However, access is very different. I can access Bandcamp anytime I want, and never have to drive 30 minutes into town to loiter around record racks for an hour and then drive another 30 minutes home. I have kids, I never have two hours for anything. Importantly, note that we’ve made no judgment about which experience is better.

Austin Govella
I can’t smell old records on Bandcamp. The only thing we’ve done here is Note how the two experiences are different. And we’ve noted the differences in the experiences that occur across vastly different touchpoints. So it seems like I buy more from online vendor. So what if we compare Bandcamp to other online music stores like iTunes beatport I rarely buy music from iTunes and beatport. It turns out their selections are much less relevant to me than the music, I can find a band camp. So I patronize band camp more. Maybe that’s the reason. Again, we’re not making any judgments about what experiences good or bad. We’re just comparing the types of experiences I have. we’re comparing experiences that different information architectures have enabled. You. You might be wondering about that adaptive column on the far right, ignore that. I don’t think have all the kinks worked out. And that’s okay, because I hope you see this as an opening for discussion rather than some kind of like grand unassailable theory. And anyway, we’re evaluating shopping experiences, that’s easy. Let’s evaluate something trickier like like touching God. So in this example, I’ve taken a swag at how I would evaluate my experience touching the divine and our various churches. You can see the experiences are a bit more varied. For example, I better under And how a built church would get me closer to God than the natural setting. However, my preferences, my preferences for the one that’s more relevant to me, Port Aransas here, the adaptability column is interesting. I feel like I have a greater ability to adapt my experience in the built churches that I do in the natural ones. So let’s do that now to something a bit more macro, right like the ethics of artificial intelligence. And if you’re wondering, I’m literally just pulling random examples out of out of my brain and seeing if I can play the language to them. So there’s a lot of hand wringing and fretting about artificial intelligence, the bias algorithms and how we can design better AI. Perhaps our concern with artificial intelligence is not how ethical it is, or how to make AI ethical. Perhaps our concern is that we have no way to know how ethical a given AI will be. Ai is a blackbox. By Design, we don’t understand how much control we have over a given interaction. We have no way to monitor the algorithms that drive the AI decisions. And we have no way to know how well we can adapt our experience with an AI to make it more or less relevant to us. It’s no wonder AI bothers us when we think about it. But here’s the here’s a thought experiment. Think of another experience, the similar profile where you have no control, you can’t monitor and you can adapt it to improve the relevance. Try and think of one experience like that. That’s a positive experience. I haven’t tried this but but I bet you can. So as these examples show, we can describe experiences and ways Beyond Good and bad. We can describe information architecture, by the type of experience generates, right? Does a does user understand the experience? Can they access it? Can user you know, continue How they move through the experience can use your monitor and observe where they are, can they? how relevant is the experience to the user? And how adaptable can they can be adjust the experience to make it more relevant to them. We can look at how good and bad experiences compare. Based on these attributes. We can develop ideas about when it’s when it is and isn’t good to reduce users ability to monitor and experience or the best way to improve monitoring for a given channel or medium. When we can describe the type of experience and I in genders, we have a way to evaluate how the qualities and experience affect whether we judge it to be good or bad.

Austin Govella
Okay,

Austin Govella
we’re getting close to the end. I feel like we kind of started with it at different scales, which is a pretty unoffensive idea. And then we push a little bit by suggesting we have to talk about experience in a neutral agnostic way. Not too crazy. You with me so far. So like Jared says, Thank you for encouraging my behavior. And as a reward, I’m just going to keep going. This is either interesting or I’m tilting windmills. So far, we’ve talked about how a user interacts with information architecture at some scale, and they end up with an experience. We haven’t talked about what the information environment looks like, we know they’re different at different scales. And that’s useful. But how do we describe an actual information environment? That’s a cool question, right? Well, first, I don’t think we should talk about information environments, the way we usually talk about information architecture. labels and structure are not the information environment. Definitely for sure, if you try to describe an information environment, I think by default, you’d spend at least some time talking about labels and structure. We spent a lot of time there and deservedly so. labels and structure are tools we use to architect the information environment where we can Super circular. They’re the tools we use to architect the information architecture. But they’re not the information environment itself. And they don’t describe the information environment. They’re just decoration we apply to try and mold the environment, let us adjust and push and nudge the environment to get different experiences out of it. But they’re just tools. If we describe an information architecture, not the practice, but the thing if we describe information architecture by its tools, it’s like describing a house and in terms of hammers and nails. Take a look at this.

Austin Govella
The Red Hills places where we had apply a certain level of effort. The blue marks areas where we applied less effort, the lines or sockets, the dots are where we hammer nails. Those are tool marks. Those are labels and structure. The hammer nails reveal qualities about the shape of the environment, but they aren’t the wall. Not even the wood and the sheet rock is a real wall. The wall is a semantic concept we placed there, the word sheet rock nails, mind and paint. Let us make the wall visible. I propose there’s a more useful way to describe information environments. And that is in terms of relational depth, coherence variants and seams. How explicit is a given semantic relationship? how consistent are concepts both within and across scales? How variable or in variable or content functionality and structure? What do scenes between concepts and environments look like? But now, if you remember what my very best professor said, and are wondering what my agenda is this discussing links and nodes, labels and structure. That’s just not interesting. To me. Those aren’t questions that drive my design decisions. But talking about coherence and seems is right up my alley. I think that’s why I’m doing this. But we’ll dive in each property. But before we do that, let’s take a little detour and look at how this might apply. When we look back at artificial intelligence Again, this looks at how we might evaluate the properties of a typical AI information environment. Because AI is a black box, we don’t know how coherent the AI is, we have no way of knowing if there’s any variance in the content, functionality or structure, and we can’t see the scenes. From the outside, we have no idea what the information architecture of an AI is. Perhaps, that drives our concern, that we have no way to know how ethical the AI will be. Or maybe they’re all murder Hornet’s inside and we’re all gonna die. Let’s take a look at relational depth. And this is where the craziness started. I was trying to I was trying to enunciate the difference between a label that talked about a concept and a link that linked to a concept. And I started thinking about what are the other ways that we bring concepts closer together, push them farther apart. So you can think of relational depth as how far apart two concepts are Right, so if two concepts have nothing to do with one another, like kittens and chocolate, though the fact that I just mentioned kittens and chocolate next to each other means next time you see a kitten, you’re gonna think about chocolate and they’re connected in your head. Both of you have two disconnected concepts, then that means there’s no connection. Never, never will the two meet. Sometimes, however, when you’re looking at one concept, something about that concepts or just to you another concept, there’s a connotation you get there. Nothing in that concept by itself, explicitly or implicitly suggests the connotation, that connotation is something that you bring to it, right? That temptation is something you sense out of it, right? That type of relationship is just blank. Sometimes, however, we want to be specific. So we apply a label to one concept and that label allows us to link or reference another concept. That’s an annotation. Right? we’ve essentially we have haven’t provided any specific way to go from concept a to concept B in our information environment, we have annotated the first concept though to say that, hey, this is related to this to a second concept, a link just takes that annotation and makes it hyperactive. Now not only is it the label that says the two concepts are connected. Now I can click the link and I can now go from concept a, I can travel to concept B. You can see as we go down the down the timeline from a shallow relationship to a deep relationship, we start bringing more and more of concept B into concept a step further I purchase iceberg that’s what I call it on a homepage, when you let little pieces of the rest of the site kind of iceberg up. Right so it’s coming to you see the tip of the iceberg of a functional area and a homepage. If you click something there, you’re taken to that landing page, etc. I call them icebergs. And so use that use that metaphor here as well. iceberg is when it’s more than just a link, you’ve actually brought some of that, that second concept into the first concept and this breach through, it’s still two separate concepts. Right, but you’re seeing, you’re seeing the tip of the iceberg of the second concept.

Austin Govella
The next the next level is when one concept envelops another. So imagine if when you’re iceberg and you’re slowly pushing one concept through the other one. Imagine that you push it all the way through. And now you have concept two, sitting on the same plane as concept one. But concept one is still enveloping the second one, right, it’s enveloped, it’s surrounded. And the last level the deepest relational depth you can have is where concept two has been brought into consequent and developed and then the seams and separations have been removed. Right at that point. That second concept has been consumed by the first concept Now, I posit that whenever we, whenever we structure concepts in our information environments, what we’re actually doing is pushing and pulling concepts further, further apart and closer together. And we’re deciding how much overlap they have. And although we do not often have one concept consuming the other, it is it is quite possible that we envelop concepts. That happens quite a bit. We definitely iceberg and link things all the time. And I think it’s a blank connotations and though annotate the labels, I think those play a larger part in how and how we perceive an information environment, then we have typically given thought to seems like for a lot of our discussion is information architecture, we really focused on the explicit link between concept A and concept B. But I think that link has a different type of depth and our manipulation of that depth affects the shape The information environment affects the architecture of the information. So we’ll use an example. We’ll reference churches. I’m talking about those. So you can think of churches as, as relating the concept of the earthly and the divine, right? linking those two together. So Port Aransas, that’s where I go to touch the divine. That’s my church. That is somewhere between a label and a link. For me, right? The concept of the earthly divine is annotated and maybe linked depending on how spiritual I’m feeling on a given day. But to be quite honest, I didn’t actually give it a label or a link till till probably my mid 30s. Prior to that point in time, the the there was no there was no kind of conceptual link between the earthly and divine for me at the beach in Port Aransas. It was blank. I had some type of connotation, but I hadn’t articulated that the two concepts were connected traditional church, right?

Austin Govella
It’s not just an annotated connection between the Earth and divine, they say no, this place links the earthly and the divine. And depending depending on your faith, more or less of the heavenly iceberg through into the earthly whenever you’re visiting a church. Now the nightclub has has moved conceptually, the earthly part farther away from farther away from the divine. So you still definitely have a connotation there. You’re in a church and even pictures from the inside the nightclub. It still looks like a church, you definitely have the connotation. And if there’s if there if you view the actual physical structure of the building as a type of label, then it is the building is still annotated as a church. annotated is something that connects you to the divine. And of course, what I think is really interesting is that hh Gregg appliance store, it’s just a big box, but someone saw that big box They, they picked up a connotation that this could be a church, this could be a place that we could push, or whose relational depth we could change in relation to the divine. And that’s what they did with 1122. Church. They just changed it converted that hh Greg from being something that could have a connotation of a church does something that was actually a church to actually link to iceberg, the divine into the earthly sphere. I feel like I’m being a little woowoo here talking about the experience of churches. But the point of choosing, choosing that as an example, is, is my firm belief that if we cannot discuss the information architecture of our church, and the experience of attending a church and feeling like you’re closer to the divine, then that I don’t think the language that we’re using discuss information architecture is valid, it’s missing something, it has holes. So by choosing this very, very subjective and kind of hand wavy example, this is this is like an edge case, if the language can cover this example, then for sure it can cover a website.

Austin Govella
Let’s look at the next property coherence. This refers to how consistent concepts are within the environment. And this is within a scale. So across the site, but also across scales, like how coherent is it from the platform to the site to the interface interaction, right? There’s, there’s a level of coherence that occurs across the scales. But also, there’s a level of coherence that occurs across actors, right. So if, if I, if I am the marketing team, and I, I call what we sell widgets, and you are my customer, and you call what you buy sprockets, we have a lack of coherence between the two of us, it’ll be difficult for the customer to purchase this purchase sprockets for me because I only sell widgets, even though they’re the same, same thing. The lack of coherence bocock appearance interferes with the with the experience There’s even one more level of coherence that you can consider is that is how does it change across time. That’s one of the biggest problems that I’ve seen in developing platforms for my clients is, I can’t just imagine what the platform is gonna look at day one. when it launches, I have to imagine how it’s going to be maintained, I have to imagine how the marketing teams are going to evolve how the platform is going to the marketing teams to become more and more skilled, do more and more things become more and more advanced and how the platform continue to grow and evolve with them. As they learn more and more that imagine how the system evolves over time, throws an entire entirely new dimension into the coherence. So the coherence, we can evaluate across three areas. You can have coherence across content, functionality and structure. And it’s important to note here is that we’ll talk about variable variability in a second but coherence and variability are different and I I think the best example of that is personalization. So if on a digital marketing side if you’re personalizing content from one user, between one user and another so that user a gets content A, user B gets content B. There is there is variability between the content for the two users, by definition, you are giving them each different content, it is varied. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a coherent, coherent concept at work there. Right. The coherence of the concept is different from the variance of the of the content or the functionality we give to specific users and specific interactions. So for the example, we’ll use the digital marketing platform that I did for the oil giant for that platform, each individual site from the seven original sites, it was built for the hundreds of sites that supports each site maintained its coherence between the organization customers. That’s that’s why they’re able to see such a lift in traffic and lead generation just overall success the marketing program is that we help them become more coherent, and also be able to test their ideas better, right that coherence, help them be better marketers. And I assume they maintain coherence across sites. I haven’t seen all the sides, who knows. But assuming that’s the case, however, there was no coherence. Up and down, right between for content and function functionality. That is the only thing we delivered for the platform was a set of components and subcomponents instead of layouts. So just the structure, all the content and all the functionality for every single site was absolutely unique. It was it was conceived concepted designed, built and launched. entirely by individual business units. There was there’s nothing that came from the platform that did that going coherence to the platform was around the structure.

Austin Govella
The third way we can talk about the shape of information environments, I suggest is variance. How consistent is the content functionality and structure. So we can see here, I try to use a pictograph here to kind of show what we’re talking about. That content can change, right at different levels, right. So I noted that with the circles, the circles are all the same, the color is different, the content of the circles has changed. Your functionality can also change. That’s, that’s the second row there. I try to show that where the shape actually changes from a circle to a rounded square to a square to a Pentagon. Your structure can also change Tried to show that with, you have one square on the left, you have a bunch of little teeny tiny squares on the right hand side. Now if we use take a look an example of how this, about how this plays out, you’ll be able to see how the variance does. Can can play out across content functionality and structure. Again, though, it’s important to note that this is different than coherence, right? And personalization is absolutely the best way to kind of draw the distinction between those two in your in your mind. So this is example of that same digital networking platform for the energy company. You can see here the structure of every single site was different. The content of every single site was different, but the functionality of the components and layouts was the same for everybody. And I have now just realized that that I’m using functionality available here and structures previously, but I stand by my my initial statement a few slides ago, don’t take this as a huge unassailable theory, I don’t have all the kinks worked out, take this as an invitation to talk.

Austin Govella
There’s another example here that I thought was would be really interesting to kind of draw distinguish this draw distinction that has to do with a another digital marketing platform that we put together for another client. In this case, the client wanted a platform to kind of streamline their marketing capabilities, but they didn’t have multiple business units. That really wasn’t how they were structured. That wasn’t how they went to market. In that case, the platform was purpose built for the individual business line. So the structure and the functionality and the content did not vary, vary at all across the scale. It’s almost like you take the platform, the site and interface scales and you squish them all together. They’re the they’re very much the same in terms of the information architecture. It was kind of just one big piece. Now the fourth way that I suggest you can talk about information environments is is how how do the seams appear, you have two concepts. And they they bought up against each other, rather, the you the information architect have taken concept one and concept two and put them next to each other. There’s a seam there that appears, if there was no seam, there was no seam that one concept would have consumed the other. If you have a seam there, right, so the, that seam, those seams have qualities, right. You can try and remove it or you can try and make the theme. very evident that simple. moving across the scene can be something that happens instantly, or it can be delayed. The travel can be the move across the scene can be something that’s short or takes a long, long time. It can be a smooth transition, a bumpy transition. It can be open, there’s nothing in your way or it could be blocked. So despite the relationship of two concepts, the seams between the two can still manifest in many different ways.

Austin Govella
So let’s look at an example here. For this, I wanted to take the way Garrett plays with the concepts of information architecture and interaction design, and user experience design in the methods plenary.

Austin Govella
On the left, we have before the plenary

Austin Govella
and this is kind of my swag at how you might have just described the seam between information architecture, as a concept and interaction design as a concept, right, there was a scene there. But moving from one to the other. Was was something was pretty, pretty easy to do. Lots of our titles were just based on what the organization Call is not really what we did. Right? The activities are the same materials who worked with the same the products we worked on with the same. The focus is a little different. But it wasn’t a smooth transition. Right there was there was some friction there. And I think that’s part of that was part of the, the inciting the incitement behind a Garrett’s plenary. But it was definitely an open transition. I could just move from the concept of direction design, walk run over to the concept of information architecture wasn’t a problem. But what Gary suggested this plenary when there was only ever happened user experience designers is he tried to remove all of the scenes between information arc tech information architecture, and interaction design, and essentially have those who consume each other or have those to be consumed by the concept of user experience. And you can see to do that you make it as seamless as possible. You make the transition between the concepts instantaneous, there is no travel no space. between the two, it’s short, it’s smooth and it’s open. Right? It’s, it’s almost as if one day, you’re an information architecture looking interaction design, and the next day, you’re just there.

Austin Govella
There are no two places, you’re just in a place. That was that was what was done. And I think the, the reason I wanted to wanted to finish up with seams is I think it is how how we play with play with the seams that puts the space into an information environment. I know it’s kind of very abstract and super conceptual, but, but, but bear with me here, the how prominent a seam is and how how much how much conceptual distance there is, for me in order to cross cross the scene from one concept to another, that creates the space in the environment. And this is separate if you recall from the relational depth. relational depth has nothing to do with the quality of the seams that are there. It just talks about how much one concept is brought In the other how much overlap there is, but you still have a seam between the two concepts. And I think this is really, really fascinating. So I really believe the shape of an information environment can be described with these four properties, that relational depth between between two concepts, right? How, how explicit is a symmetric relationship? Is it something that’s just a connotation? Is this something where we’ve actually iceberg the other concept in right how explicit is that connection, the coherence of across across scales of information architecture, right between the the organization, the platform, the site, the interface, but also the coherence within a scale. So when when a visitor comes to the site, they’re having interactions, how can how coherent all those interactions the variance is a is also a good way to look at the look at the shipping information environment. How variable are the content the functionality in the structure? And lastly, how do we how do we manifest the seams between the different symmetric concepts that we’re using to build the information environment. And of course, the two tools that we use most to shape the properties of the environment are of course labels in the structure. Those are those are what we use to kind of corral our semantic concepts into ways that let us control the seams and the relational depth and how we affect the coherence and the variants of the information. So let’s talk about information architecture. And I really appreciate you sticking by me past, past all the all the craziness and the woowoo and the out there talk about four properties for information environments. But I definitely feel that we’ve got two good languages we’re talking about about IA scale. Is seems seems pretty pretty at face, obviously useful to me, I know that my current practice,

Austin Govella
I use it all the time I use it for, for selling engagements for planning engagements for, for managing engagements right that the the way we approach the delivery of a platform is different than the way the post delivery of a site is different the way you approach the delivery of a handful of interfaces, right? It’s how different from how we evaluate interactions. Those are different, we do the same types of activities, but each scale they are there are different inputs and outputs. I feel pretty confident that that even though experience is a very subjective, subjective thing, we can describe it objectively.

Austin Govella
And we can use that objectivity in order to compare information architectures, we can say this, this site generates an experience that has these properties. This other site has experienced it joins these properties, what’s the difference between the sites or if we have two sites that We think are similar. But we think the experiences, the experience between site a and site B are markedly different. That gives us something else to dive into. And the last part, the part that the part that that I think that I am most, most anxious is the word. The part that I think is craziest, but that really makes the most sense to me is the shape piece. The shape of the information environment is is isn’t something really, we really talked about very much in terms of conceptual shape. We haven’t we don’t spend much time talking about relational depth, and, and kind of seeing links and labels as items on the same continuum, or spend much time thinking of seams between concepts and systems as the ways that we we put space into the into the information environment.

Austin Govella
For me, that’s really super interesting. But what I’ve tried to do throughout all of this is is to offer proposals For ways that we can talk about information architecture, things that give us a systematic disciplined way to look at the work that we do. I’m trying to make sure that throughout, we’ve we’ve stuck to what we’ve decided was a good language of critique, right? It does not make any assumptions about what is good or bad. It focuses on the outcomes, right? What What is the shape of the environment? What are the qualities of experience? And what scale Are you working at? It can apply to any information architecture, any environment, and I hope that the examples going anywhere from a marketing platform online to your experience in a church to artificial intelligence, that those all kind of give you a sense of a way to kind of stress test how well the language does or doesn’t work. And I’m hoping that this that this the way we’ve described it is useful in both your daily discussions, as well as academic research.

Austin Govella
I think that’s that’s something that’s kind of hard to tell now, right? That’s definitely the goal. When we nail that last bullet. That’s when we know we have a good language language for critique. But the reason the reason why this is important, is it because there are lots of ways that we describe how you get to good. While I was researching this presentation, I came across lots of places where people made either either generalizations, or flat out comments, or just kind of dis sidetracked random phrases about what good meant in terms of information architecture. And these are not all the same thing. Right, being pervasive. It’s not the same thing as creating, understanding, making sense of a mess. It’s not the same thing as creating something that’s useful, usable and desirable. Finding the truth could be anything. In general, I don’t think we’ve had a very critical discussion about what good information architecture is

Austin Govella
For me, what makes good information architecture is I hope organizations learn. That’s how I build. That’s how that’s how I build the platforms I build. That’s what drives the way I build, build sites, how I how I build processes, and design services for four different organizations. I do it in a way that helps them learn over time. My goal at launch is not to create understanding. My goal is not to be pervasive. My goal is never to make it easy to find your way around. My goal is always to help the organization learn how they can do what they’re doing better. So they can achieve whatever goals they’re going for. And maybe their goal is to increase user engagement. Maybe that’s just this quarter. And the next quarter goal will be to enable emergent systems. I don’t know. But that’s why my personal politics about information architecture are helping organizations learn. But that’s not universal. You take a survey of everybody in the virtual room, what you describe as being your driving force, your rationale for how you architect information environments is going to be different from someone else’s. And you would only just have one, you might have several that you can prioritize. Like perhaps making the complex clear is your most important goal. But enabling merchant systems and making it easy to find information are secondary goals. You also try to pursue, how do you get to good so what I’ve done is I’ve taken the bibliography that I that I have material that I consumed, was putting the presentation together, it’s up on medium, the, the URL there redirects to medium because you can actually say this on the phone and someone can follow it. It’s ag ux.co slash Bibliography will be redirected to medium where you can see all the Horses I went through, and I was putting this together. And I really do really do invite the conversation. And if this is interesting to you in any way, please feel free to take it run with it. If you think if you no change to the words you use change definitions, try in different ways, I think interesting thought experiment might be to take Christopher Alexander’s patterns and describe them. Right in terms of the experience, the quality of the experience they generate, the skill they’re working at, and the the shape of the information environment that’s evolved there. I think it’d be really, really kind of cool to do. Ultimately, though, the goal here is to give us ways of talking about the product of our work, a language of critique, right? Because I think I think Garrett is right. We don’t have a disciplined, systematic way to do that. And until we have ways to describe the qualities, we won’t be able to talk good it for about a year and we definitely can’t, can’t have have good discussions about it because won’t ever be on the same page. So I’ve offered up what I hope is a good language critique, something you can use for a disciplined, systematic study of mixed architecture. But maybe it’s not the right, those aren’t the right words, hopefully, that you can take this as a straw man that you can respond to, and edit and change and revise, or just regard wholesale. So we can kind of pursue, pursue kind of more depth and how we talk about information architecture. The one thing I do know, though, is that language is a map. And one of the things that that I think is both most exciting and most scary about the language I’ve shown here is that this is essentially a new language. We’re talking about information architecture. As you’ll see if you look at those sources and the bibliography or if you recall, you probably are familiar with many of them.

Austin Govella
There isn’t anything, anything wholesale cut from wholesale new cloth in this presentation. One of my super powers is I’m a synthesizer and I see patterns across disparate from disparate places and can bring them together. And that’s essentially what I’ve done here. This new language is a map. But because we have this new language, that means we have new journeys, and I have no idea where any of this new language will let us go. But, but I’m really excited and looking forward to the journey.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai