Digital Likeness » information architecture

Separating content from presentation – social media style

Andrea Hill — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:09:54 +0000

As a recovering web developer, I am very acutely aware of the best practices of separating content from presentation. The other night at the social part of the Mile High Social Media Club, I was talking with some folks about semantics and web standards, and it occurred to me that this same nuance extends to the social media space.

In a meeting the other day, I was asked about which social media channels a client should consider. I asked what their message was, what they wished to share.

Just as a developer would first determine the content, and then decide the optimal means of delivery, so too it is in social media. The most obvious example is if your content is text, a youtube channel is not an appropriate delivery channel.

As a developer at LexisNexis, we didn’t always know the specifics of the content. We had general types of content, say briefs, legislation, etc. Semantically, though, we could describe the content type and determine how to present it. This is the same magic that’s behind RSS and APIs.. it’s a contract between the content creator and the content ‘displayer’ so even without knowing the specific content, it can be presented in an appropriate fashion.

Beyond the specific content items themselves, we can also use this analogy to decide what social media channels to explore. Many folks think they need blogs. But is the content appropriate? Is it information that can be presented in a linear fashion, and updated on a regular basis? If not, your presentation and content may be in conflict. Pigs are fantastic, intelligent animals, but as we all learned from the Muppet Show, they get a little creepy when you try to make them pretty. Don’t bury your message by trying to present it in an conflicting fashion.

How do you segment your online behaviour?

Andrea Hill — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 02:21:06 +0000

I was just playing around with wordle and decided to see how I used my blog, tumblog and del.icio.us accounts. Wordle uses an RSS feed to make something that looks suspiciously like a tag cloud, but is not. I was actually a little surprised how they turned out:

I had no idea I wrote so much about marketing! I did think the tumblog representation was probably accurate, as I generally store “quick hits” there and social media is garnering alot of my attention right now. Lastly my del.icio.us links are very tech-focussed. I suppose because those are my references, not intended for general consumption, and not necessitating much commentary.

what’s the deal with… findability, searchability, indexability and accessibility?

Andrea Hill — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:24:09 +0000

As a front-end web developer, I often hear the terms “findable”, “searchable”, “indexable” and “accessible” thrown around interchangeably. For many, they mean that the content can be accessed by a non-human, be it a screen reader or a search engine spider. On some level this is true, but there are several significant differences that are must not be overlooked.

For the sake of this discussion:

Findable: how easily a site can be found when using a search engine (rankings). Yes, I realize that this term also refers to how easily content can be found once the user is on the site, but I’m ignoring that aspect of it for now…
Searchable: how easily specific content within a site can be accessed when using a search engine (deep-linking)
Indexable: how easily the content of a site may be retrieved and used in search engine results
Accessible using AT: how easily someone using assistive technologies can use your site

(ShoeMoney.com has compiled a list of definitions for SEO from some industry experts, as well)

A site created completely in Flash or Flex may be findable thanks to the use of meta-data, but it is not indexable. With some diligent coding, information may be searchable, but this is no guarantee that it will be accessible.

(Not content with these descriptions? Have more to add? Please let me know what you think in the comments!)

As I’ve mentioned, my background is in accessibility: prior to coming to Resource, I worked on large subscription-based web applications. SEO was not a consideration at all. However, accessibility was. When I first came to Resource, I was eager to see how the two complemented and contrasted each other.

Overall, I see some overlap between the areas. However, their focus is different.

SEO is based on a page mentality – this is apparent in the search results that come up. Many common SEO techniques are applied at the page level, via adding meta tags or optimizing title tags. This is how a site that requires login, or is built using a technology like Flash or Flex, can appear in search results. A search engine can access meta information about the page, and use that to rank it. Findability relates to the notion of the discovery of the page itself.

A secondary notion is that of searchability. A web application may be found on google, but can the specific content that is being sought be retrieved? Searchability refers to the idea that site visitor can easily navigate to the specific information he’s searching for within the site, once the site itself has been discovered.

Both searchability and indexability deal with how elements of the page can be accessed, but arguably in different directions. Deeplinking into a flash movie may facilitate searchability, helping a site visitor dig into the site at a specific point. In contrast, indexability refers to the ability of a search engine spider to do a broad pull of content from the site.

Where SEO and Accessibility really start to diverge is when we move beyond the retrieval of content itself. A search engine spider is only interested in the data, so that the appropriate search result may be returned to an information seeker. In contrast, accessibility refers to the ability of a site visitor to navigate within an experience. The implications are significant: each interaction must be coded in a way such that a screen reader user can activate the change, and be notified of any changes that occur.

Another important distinction is the extent to which the site content is made available. A site may work to optimize or only make indexable certain aspects of the site. In contrast, accessibility refers to the ability of all content to be available and able to be engaged with.

Grad School Retrospective (2)

Andrea Hill — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:34:21 +0000

As I mentioned in my last post, I am taking some time to look back on my time in grad school. A list of course titles and descriptions doesn’t really speak to what I got out of the course, or what I put into it.

4. Application of Artificial Intelligence – This was the first elective course I took in my program. Much of the course time was centered on discussion, and there was a major project of our choice. I continued to focus on natural languages, and whether a machine could “learn” language in the same way a child could.
I had initially wanted to perform some first-hand research with children, but I wasn’t sure about my ability to gather, tag and analyze the amount of data that would be required. As well, I would only be able to observe the children’s output, I would have to infer how they arrived at such input. I decided therefore to focus my attention on accepted linguistic concepts like Universal Grammar and Principles and Parameters. As it turns out, the idea of “teaching” a machine in the same ways as a child was not a novel idea, and it has seen some success. This project was intended to serve as a starting point into more detailed research, for at the time I anticipated my capstone project would be related to natural language processing.

5. System Architecture and Engineering – I had been nervous about this course prior to enrolling in it, but it ended up being one of my favorites in the program. This course was the first to introduce us to Martin Fowler’s book “Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture”, to which we’d end up referring in several more courses through the program. Immediately, I loved the idea of patterns: identifying possible solutions for common problems, without getting into the specific implementation details. The course clearly contrasted functional and non-functional requirements, and spoke to how different requirements complemented and conflicted with each other. It was for this course that I wrote the Critique of ‘the value of a usability-supporting architectural pattern in software architecture design’ paper. At the time I was working in the Design and Usability/User Experience department at LexisNexis, and as was noted in the paper, often usability is not an initial consideration in architectural decisions. In the few months following my taking this course (and enthusiastically talking about it to everyone who would listen), I was selected as the departmental representative on the newly formed “Architectural Advisory Board” at work. We reviewed new project concepts and identified any architectural implications from the standpoint of the department or organization we were representing. I completed this course heartily acknowledging that “I want to be an architect!”.

6. Project Management of Information Systems – This was the second elective in the program. I will admit that I enrolled primarily because of the instructor, Roger Engle. On the first day of class, every student was asked what they hoped to gain from the class. I was blunt when I stated that my perception was that project managers were really baby-sitters, and I wanted to have a better sense of what they really did. Over the next twelve weeks, I gained a much better appreciation of the role of project manager, and I will admit I even toyed with the idea of PMP certification. I believe that this appreciation has made me a better individual contributor and a better team member.

7. Issues in Database Management – I’ll admit, this was one of the courses I was least looking forward to. I’ve taken database courses before, but I don’t have a particularly strong background in them. This was another case, however, where it was an ability to grasp concepts and strategies that proved to be more important than a background in a specific technology. Indeed, many of my classmates often struggled with the theoretical aspects of the class. “but how do we do this in SQL?” they often asked. We were being introduced to general concepts or best practices, and often my classmates were unable or unwilling to look beyond what they had been exposed to. We looked at object-oriented database models unlike any that current exist in the industry. Because of the lack of immediate applicability, some students resisted even learning about such. In contrast, I held no strong convictions about “how things are” (and therefore, how they are meant to be) so I was more open to the suggestion of different conceptual models.

lifestream management

Andrea Hill — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 02:19:02 +0000

iKeif is my pod-neighbour at Resource. We both started at Resource this year as Sr (Front-end) Developers, coming over from large corporations. We share many of the same interests and opinions on the UX/Web field (at least, he doesn’t disagree with me..!). If I hear of a new service, he’s probably already investigated it. Lately we’ve both been figuring out where we stood on the different lifestreaming services and how to manage the various “updates” each will cheerfully send off.

I’ll speak to this a little, but I hope he’ll chime in as well

I have two major profiles online: this blog and my facebook profile. I will readily admit that I select other online services based on their integration with these platforms. I had the visual bookshelf application on facebook until I realized that shelfari had both a facebook app and a widget. Keith had asked me about this, so I assume he made the same decision. The fewer manual “syncs” a person has to do, the better! Sharing every detail of your life with the world shouldn’t be hard, should it?

Recently I turned to friendfeed as an aggregator. I used to have both my twitter updates and my del.icio.us bookmarks on my sidebar of my blog as well as as standalone apps on facebook, but I’ve consolidated. I try to be careful not to duplicate my content pushes too much.

Part of the challenge as well is determining “what update goes where”? I asked another coworker this a few weeks ago: he had both tumblr and del.icio.us and I wasn’t sure what he used when. His response was that tumblr was for sharing with others, del.icio.us was for reference. Well that sufficed for me, and I’ve recently started tumbling. For me, tumblr is the light version of this blog: things I want to share or comment on, but not to the extent of a post like this.

I also recently set up feedburner, and there is an option to include your daily del.icio.us links with your feed. I’ve started doing so, but it has impacted how I bookmark. I now try to add in some notes, keeping the new audience in mind. Keith mentioned he’s recently started doing this as well. He’s set up his automated services a bit more aggressively than I; his del.icio.us links feed into his live blog, which then sends out a tweet notifying people thereof! So whereas I am trying for a separation of the content from one service to the next, he’s tying them together as a single offering. It’s like two sides of the same “content/lifestream management” coin.

I mentioned struggling with deciding if I needed a tumblr account or not, and there have been a few other services we’ve chatted about. We both have pownce, but I haven’t really used it yet. We were actually brainstorming on some uses today, so we’ll see if it has a place in our online lifestream arsenal..

Templates

Andrea Hill — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:51:17 +0000

Today I was back in ATG developer training – in their Commerce course. Some of our time was spent looking at templates for category and product pages. This was something I’d been thinking of on my own, and it was good to see that my ideas were right on track.

Basically I had been thinking about templates on both the presentational as well as the content levels. The templates we looked at today were set at the content levels. That is, a particular template could be created to ensure consistency across pages, but there could be rules set up to support deviations from the standard. Elements are associated with a particular template, which would basically serve as the way to retrieve the specific properties of the element.

My second thought was to create a presentational template as well, to support how these elements should be displayed. A simple idea I gave a colleague would be that every product page would contain a description, a title and an image, but in some cases we may want the image to the left rather than the right. The underlying data would be the same, but we would want the presentation to be slightly different. (this could be applied even so simply as including a specific stylesheet)

how you know you love your job: you’re blogging about it on a friday night..

Andrea Hill — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:05:42 +0000

Today was our day off after 9 days of ATG training. Yesterday afternoon, we were all mentally “full” of all we’d been learning. I wasn’t sure how productive I’d be at work today.. and as it turned out, it was one of those great days where you just can’t get enough done!

The morning started somewhat slow, but we had a major meeting scheduled from 11-12:30 for an upcoming project in which we’re to flex our new ATG skillz. The meeting went really well, we went over the strategic and creative briefs before getting into some more technical details.
Because I’m trying to get into an IA role, I was really excited about dissecting the tiny pieces that went into what we saw on the screen. For me, IA isn’t just about sitemaps and wireframes. I come to it from a programmer’s perspective: so what different objects make up the site; what are the properties of each.

After the formal meeting, several developers and our director were chatting about templates, and all of a sudden I got what was described as an overwhelmed look on my face. I was thinking about templates on two levels: templates that referred to data: mapping a template to a particular type of content, and then templates as they related to presentation. The scribbling to the right was my attempt to get some of this stuff out of my head: we could describe an object (say, a press release) as an aggregate of its parts: title, description, accompanying image(s), accompanying link(s). There could be a generic template used for this type of content, with variations based on the existence of different aspects of the element. Still, the underlying template would be of a press release.

But a template could also be used to vary presentation: a template could use the same attributes of a press release, but vary in terms of its orientation (image on the right versus the left). Where does the specification of this lie? Is it on the level of an individual instance (press release 1 could have the left-hand images, press release 2 could have the right-hand images), or should there be consistency across item types. (My personal thought is that for optimal user experience, items of similar types should be displayed in a similar fashion).

It’s like the post I had not long ago about areas of variation, or all the common UI building blocks discussions we had at LexisNexis. It’s about building a web application, not a web site.

After our group pow-wow, I still had all these questions on my mind, and I cheerily sat down to go through the wireframes. I tried to identify major item types, trying to consider all the information I’d taken in over the last few weeks. One major consideration is content updates, and I think sitting in training on the managerial track next week will help me understand what tools we need to provide for people to achieve their goals. (granted, we’re talking about my colleagues, who work at an interactive agency. We all have an abnormally high familiarity with the web, so we’re not indicative of a typical client)

I’m not the architect on the project, but I can’t help but see how the various pieces will fit together. I have a strong opinion on tying together semantically related content: an individual page describes a particular item, it is not simply a group of “stuff”. The challenge is looking across items to figure out how the compare and contrast. In training I asked about the possibility for a slot to be populated with different types of media — an image, a video. The response was that a slot can only contain a single item type: but the solution is to make a generic enough “type” that all media can be supported. I want us to see these patterns from the outset, rather than pigeon-holing ourselves into having unique, un-extensible content scattered throughout.

I’m really looking forward to this process…

Flagship sites – identifying areas of consistency and possible variation

Andrea Hill — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 03:32:00 +0000

Lately at work I’ve been helping out with some light Scotts work. The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company is a huge client, with several different microsites and campaigns. The recent redesign of scotts.com (disclaimer: I only performed perfunctory copy changes for the redesign) reminded me of much of the work I did at LexisNexis: scotts.com was the equivalent of a flagship product like lexis.com or nexis.com. The challenge from a branding perspective is how to maintain a consistent look and feel for subsidiaries, while still allowing them to maintain their own identity. I’ve donned both a developer’s and a business analyst’s hat in looking at these projects, and it’s a good exercise to identify the opportunities for consistency as well as for variation. This was truly where we were going with our common UX initiatives at LexisNexis before I left. How do we enhance the usability of all the sites by introducing consistent functionality, while ensuring each site meets its specific target audience’s needs?

Before I left LexisNexis, I was the UX representative on the architectural advisory board and I sat on the brand spirit (branding and identity) committee. There, we had three flagships and literally hundreds of projects a year that had some level of association with at least one of the three. It was absolutely imperative that design or development decisions were not made in isolation. The User Experience department I was a part of held design reviews every week to push for consistent user interaction and design across our products.

Coming to Resource late last June, I was thrown into agency life. It’s quite different dealing with different clients, who are paying for the development of their own unique brand and user experience. While there are always benefits in developing code libraries of common components that can be reused, the nature of the challenges we dealt with in a huge beast of an application like lexis or nexis simply don’t compare.

It’s actually fun for me to look at Scotts and see those patterns and consistent elements. In developing one microsite, I’m stretching my “build for the future” muscles again in anticipating potential future additions. It’s interesting how I can build this into my work both as a developer (coding in anticipation of reuse), and as a business analyst (explicitly identifying requirements that have shown up elsewhere or may be of significance moving forward). At LexisNexis, some of these considerations (as well as others) would be made by the system architect or a portfolio manager, but those are roles we don’t particularly have at Resource, due to the nature of most of our client engagements.

It’s interesting that considerations into the creation of a robust, usable, expandable site occur throughout the design and development process. I guess I consider it the difference between creating a web site, or developing the architecture for a web application. You can make a web site to achieve a specific purpose, or you can create a framework that supports as-yet-unknown functionality.

This is why I once felt I wanted to get into architecture: rather than putting square pegs in square holes, I want to consider the fact that I may not know what pegs I’ll be given down the road. I hope that in the movement to BA or IA, I will also be able to anticipate these unknowns and ensure we continue to deliver engaging user experiences that are also robust, usable and extensible.

A mid-career crisis?

Andrea Hill — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 22:41:45 +0000

After 8 years of various “web-” jobs (from Web Director (Jagged) to Web Designer (Maxim) to Web Master (Youthone) back to Web Designer (Common Sense Solutions) to Web Technician (Franklin University) to Web Developer (LexisNexis) to Senior Web Developer (LexisNexis) and now Senior Developer (Resource Interactive), I’m starting to think about a shift in my daily duties.

My earliest work on the web were all centered around fostering community and facilitating communication. I was a geocities community leader. I volunteered for the Open Directory Project (back when everyone thought human-powered search results were the way to go). I was on livejournal before they required invite codes. I worked for a not-for-profit that provided youth with online support and volunteer opportunities.

I waded through a bachelor of science in digital communication, a computer science certificate, a java 2 certification exam, and am nearly finished with my master of science in computer science degree. I definitely have a technical background. But in the end, I’m a liberal arts girl at heart and I just want to give users a kickass online experience, ensuring they can meet their needs in a way that best suits them.

At LexisNexis, I was in the User Experience team, so we primarily built prototypes and went out to usability testing and kept abreast on trends and best practices for providing an optimal user experience. Even as a developer, I attended weekly design reviews and had the opportunity to contribute to crafting the solution to usability challenges. My last year at LexisNexis, I was sitting on several boards and committees (Architecture Advisory Board, Branding and Identity Committee), and was the key Accessibility Contact. Everything was firmly with the users’ best interest in mind.

I can code. Some would say I do it well However, my interests really lay in how information is presented to the user. I’m fascinated by how people use technology to meet certain needs, and how we can best support them in their goals. I am working on that “Rich Internet Accessibility” paper, and the internet has been a great way for me to read up on other opinions, and connect with industry leaders. It’s also helped me to understand the challenges some people face. One article I found on the accessibility of social networks really struck me: one user stated that it was difficult for him to seek out a speaker at a conference to ask further questions, so he preferred to look them up online after the fact. It helped drive home the fact that the internet can really help people with disabilities, if we take the time to consider their needs. (Another great example is the short film “everything I can’t do in the real world, I can do with my Mac“).

In so much as I can contribute to delivering content in an accessible, usable fashion, I will do so. However, I feel as though I want to “move up” in the process, and suggest solutions or approaches, rather than coming in at the Implementation stage. It took me several months to really recognize that I have changed where I fit in the development cycle here at Resource. In the UX group at Lexis, yes, I was coding, but they were prototypes, early in the design phases. Now I work on the final production code, after certain major decisions have already been made.

One of the key reasons Resource is a leading interactive agency is our thought leadership. We do great work, particularly in our Insights phase. Certainly, our implementations are outstanding, but I am really yearning to return back to an ‘ideas’ role, rather than a ‘solutions’ one. I have been the only female developer in the company since I was hired, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s somewhat natural: women as nurturers, giving birth to children and ideas and fostering the commuity, and men as providers and problem solvers, delivering on requests and meeting specific needs.

…Hmm.. perhaps that’s not the best thing to post in my technical blog, but I’ll leave it there all the same…

I am going to start doing some light Business Analyst work, with a longerish-term goal of getting into the field of Information Architecture. I think this will be the route I need to step away from specific implementations and focus on common problems (aha, I sense a return to my previous interest in patterns). Ultimately I believe it is the goal of what a site can help a user achieve, and how he feels doing it, that interest me, moreso than the specific details of how.

in all my spare time…

Andrea Hill — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 16:42:05 +0000

With only a few months remaining in my college career (this time), I realized I had better take advantage of student discounts. My bookshelf will soon include the following:

No related posts.