UX Culture

(Reprinted from Modernista’s Blog.)

Some agencies steeped in decades of mainstream media may be locked in to a mode of thought in which they see their primary “product” as making ads. Of course, we all know what ads are, but I can’t resist a penchant for defining things, so here goes: It’s a compelling, memorable mini-experience in audio, print, or interactive form that interrupts the channel you’re engaged with, influences your perceptionB, and motivates you to take action. The only people who think of ads as “products” are the people who create them (agencies) and the people who work with agencies to create them (clients).

But with the digital disruption underway and still in its infancy, agencies are starting to move beyond thinking of ads as products, and shifting to the idea that digital and social media products, and the user experiences they offer, represent a new form of embedded self advertising. Some examples:

• The Kindle, with its built-in Whispernet connection, provides a great e-book reading experience, but also contains within it an always-on “advertising” and sales channel right back to Amazon’s entire inventory of e-books (725,000+ and growing).
• The iPhone contains an incredible ad for its own App marketplace.
• Adwords and adsense are deeply embedded into Google’s search product, in which search is advertising and advertising is search.
• Facebook understands that your social network and the recommendations and actions of that network are a dramatic new form of advertising customized by your social connections.

Since these devices contain embedded marketplaces and storefronts, they need not interrupt the channel experience. Today’s great products approach design and technology with the understanding that a great user experience advertises itself and sells itself.

Some core skills of great agencies are well-suited to this new landscape: incredible creativity, layered storytelling, deep understanding of design, strategic capabilities, and brand-building chops. But a focus on interruptions rather than destinations, and a focus on external third-party channels rather than ones baked right into product and platform experiences, can be an Achilles’ heel.

The self-advertising that product thinking represents requires new approaches that put the user’s experience of utility and value first. The experience can support users and enable them to opt in to embedded purchase decisions at their own pace. The experience itself needs to be designed with acquisition, ongoing engagement, and retention in mind. Today’s best digital devices and Web-based products and platforms represent an always-on channel. This mode of “advertising” has the longest shelf life possible: It lasts as long as people remain engaged with the experience itself.

Information Architecture has not been in fashion of late; the argument has been that it should no longer be seen as a discrete discipline. Instead, it should be seen as simply interaction design, or user experience design, or ui design. But there are many great reasons why IA is now more important than ever. Here are a few of them:

1. A Path To Domain Knowledge. Understanding complex domains and their associated work practices remains a tricky business. IA practices teams get up a ramp quickly and understand the domain.

2. Mapping Above The Page. A non-IA design approach often starts by tackling a homepage, and then looking at second-level pages. But most software design needs a higher-level of abstraction. IA help surface issues of flow, aggregation, roll-up, break-downs, variant issues and invariant patterns and get up above the page-by-page approach.

3. Matching The Solution To The Challenge. The rise of excellent canned UI code libraries, including Yahoo UI, jQuery, Moo Tools, etc, has created a mistaken industry impression that UX and usability problems are mostly pre-solved and the only challenge is code execution. But the biggest challenge, framing the underlying user task and context appropriately, and matching it to the right solution, remains. IA practices assert that you need to roll-back user issues to the underlying challenge at-hand and then identify the best UI/UX solution from either existing or custom UI elements.

4. Team Facilitation. Because IA focuses on the intersection of information and user context, IA practices often equip a team with a shared language and a shared logic for working together. This is especially important in agile practices where UX issues, if not tended to, can wind up reduced to the role of “fit and finish,” ie, UI polish. Used appropriately as part of Stage 0 sprint, IA gives the team a map and a shorthand that accelerates velocity and team-decision making.

5. Attunement to Content and Containers. With the rise of social media and issues like hashtags, permissioning, data feeds, we can see that it’s increasingly hard to separate containers from the underlying content. IA focuses on understanding the content structure, content consumption, and content workflow first; these are issues that a purely visual or purely code-driven approach are not well-suited to solve.

These are the thoughts of one IA and UX veteran; I welcome yours.