Information Architecture & Findability

1. Information Architecture & Findability Peter Morville The Yaffe Center Conference on Creating Persuasive, Credible Web Sites University of Michigan Business School January 30, 2004

2. Peter Morville • Background • Library and Information Science (1993) • Information Architecture Pioneer • CEO, Argus Associates (1994 - 2001) • Co-Author, IA for the World Wide Web (1998, 2002) • Current Roles • President, Semantic Studios • President, Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture • Adjunct Faculty, UM School of Information • VP, User Experience, Q LTD

4. The combination of organization, labeling, and navigation schemes within an information system. • The structural design of an information space to facilitate task completion and intuitive access to content. • The art and science of structuring and classifying web sites and intranets to help people find and manage information. • An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

5. Search Systems • http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/search.html

6. Why is IA Important? • Cost of finding(time, frustration) • Cost of not finding(bad decisions, alternate channels) • Cost of construction(staff, technology, planning, bugs) • Cost of maintenance(content management, redesigns) • Cost of training(employees, turnover) • Value of education(related products, projects, people) • Value of brand (identity, reputation, trust)

7. Employees spend 35% of productive time searching for information online. Working Council for Chief Information Officers • The Fortune 1000 stands to waste at least $2.5 billion / year due to an inability to locate and retrieve information. IDC • Poorly architected retailing sites are underselling by as much as 50%. Forrester Research • 50% of web sales are lost because customers can’t find content fast enough. Gartner Group • Content on a typical public corporate website grows at an 80% rate annually. The CMS Report

8. Vividence Research • The Tangled Web • Vividence found poorly organized search results and poor information architecture design to be the two most common and serious usability problems

11. “Findability will eventually be recognized as a central and defining challenge in the development of web sites, intranets, knowledge management systems and online communities.” Peter Morville, The Age of Findability • “A case of librarians trying to muscle into the usability field with their own spin…findability is just a subset of user-centered design.” • Reader Response http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/002595.php

12. Hits Trust Location Location Location

17. popularity ≠ authority “melanoma” “cancer” Melanoma Home Page 3 1 2 Types of Cancer NCI Home Cancer Information

18. The fundamental premise of the cluetrain manifesto is that companies have been blind to the sea change the Internet represents, desperately clinging to methods that worked wonders in the broadcast era but that are radically unproductive online.

19. Pull  Push

22. Buying Info 14 Screens 300 Links 3,000 Words

25. Ambient Findability surrounding, encircling, enveloping the ability to find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime

26. Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002. Ninety-two percent of the new information was stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks. How big is five exabytes? If digitized, the nineteen million books and other print collections in the Library of Congress would contain about ten terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections. Although the Internet is the newest medium for information flows, it is the fastest growing new medium of all time, becoming the information medium of first resort for its users. http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/

27. A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate Economist

28. David Rose ambientdevices.com

29. An Austrian firm (Tholos Systems) is developing a giant video-conferencing system that will be deployed in public spaces in London and Vienna next year, allowing people in the two cities to meet and talk eye-to-eye. Wired News, Oct 22 2003

30. CNET News. Nov 25, 2003. Radio frequency identification tags aren't just for pallets of goods in supermarkets anymore. Applied Digital Solutions is hoping that Americans can be persuaded to implant RFID chips under their skin to identify themselves when going to a cash machine or in place of using a credit card. Automatic Locates Schedule an "automatic locate" to see where your child is at a given time. Breadcrumbing Feature This feature is great for identifying a specific route or series of destinations.

31. Peter Morville • morville@semanticstudios.com • Semantic Studios • http://semanticstudios.com/ • Q LTD • http://qltd.com/ • Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture • http://aifia.org/