Day 2 - content IA

The bulk of the day was about Content Architecture and then a case study from Wells Fargo. Essentially the presentation half was about how doing a good user needs analysis (who are the users? what do they bring? what do they already know) brings in profile information...then you map out what they want to do (whether stated or observed) . and what was nice to see is I'm not the only one who uses basic boxes and visio diagrams to make sense of things.... here's an example of how they work out the "mental models" and map it to content. Above the line are the mental models (aka - user goals and user tasks) and below the line is the content to deliver these. So you could use it as a way of doing gap analysis - if you've worked out the user's needs then have you got all you need to deliver? (or too much??)


What's interesintg for me this is the first presnetaiton I've been to when the IA is actually talking about IA...and not categorising data. Because in this discussion about the content to deliver the use needs... he was talking about feature functions not just data. So it was interesting as we went into a formulaic approach of choosing the right device to deliver the content. Peter Merholz showed an attribute chart he'd put togther for devices...including paper....

(not sure how clear these imnages will come out on the blog - click on them but I'll load up the slides when I get back)...

so then Peter described how he would look at a goal (eg buying a house) and split it into tasks (applying for amortgage) and see what attributes that task needed (see right hand column on the 3rd figure below). Matchign your "high"s indicates the best kind of device to use. Obviously there's still some subjectivity in this but more objective than a VP saying "I want it this way..."


Then it took a turn for "using tools to get results". Which essentially meant use a wizard approach where it makes sense. Peter tooks us into Matchmaker.com (not what you think) and it helps you select a bike. It actually was how Gateway first approached their online business - walk the user through....but shown again in a more funky interface...all in one hit rather than a multi-page effect... But agian interestingly - this is a presentation about content architecture and yet really - he's talking about interaction design....feature functionality. Interesting how the winds change (and yet they dont - everything I heard today was generally still the same principles of good HCI approaches - just nicely articulated and with more uptodate examples).

Then the presentation got into page deisgn and presenting tonnes of info but in a manageable way.... (but at whch point I had to step out to take a call...).

More links
http://www.rashmisinha.com/
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm%3Fid%3D1013177&ei=LX8LQ5TsB7O4YO7F-YoKhttp://www.iasummit.org/2004/finalpapers/87/87_Handout_or__final__paper.ppt

then we went into a case study about how Wells Fargo do their website - they use all the good stuff and I'll walk you through their approaches as I think it gels with our storyboarding and what we're trying to achieve on the Users and personas site.