Enterprise Information Architecture Because Users Don’t Care About Your Org Chart

1. Enterprise Information ArchitectureBecause Users Don’t Care About Your Org Chart • Fall 2007 • Louis Rosenfeld • www.louisrosenfeld.com

2. About Me • Independent IA consultant and blogger (www.louisrosenfeld.com) • Founder, Rosenfeld Media, UX publishing house (www.rosenfeldmedia.com) • Work primarily with Fortune 500s and other large enterprises • Co-author, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (1998, 2002, 2006) • Founder and past director, the Information Architecture Institute (www.iainstitute.org) and User Experience Network (www.uxnet.org) • Background in librarianship/information science

3. Seminar Agenda • Welcome/Introduction • Top-Down Navigation • Bottom-Up Navigation • Search • EIA and the Organization • Research methods • Governance and more • Discussion

4. Introduction

5. Introduction:IA in one slide • Definition: the art and science of structuring, organizing and labeling information to help people find and manage information • Balances characteristics and needs of users, content and context • Top down (questions) & bottom up (answers)

6. Introduction:Only one IA rule • Pareto’s Principle (“the 80/20 rule”) • 20% of content satisfies 80% of users’ needs • 20% of possible IA options address 80% of content • 20% of IA options address 80% of users’ needs • IA’s goal: figure out which 20% • No other rules, just guidelines

7. Introduction:IA is about priorities

8. What an Enterprise Is • Large, distributed, decentralized organization made up of multiple business units • Distributed • Functionally in many different “businesses” (e.g., HR vs. communications, or hardware vs. software) • Geographically • Decentralized • Large degree of authority and responsibility resides in hands of business units in practice (if not officially) • Business units often own significant infrastructure (technical, staff, expertise)

9. IA and EIA: The differences • The “enterprise challenge”: providing centralized access to information in a large, decentralized, distributed environment • Information often organized by business function (e.g., “org chart”), not in ways users think • Not “textbook” IA; highly dependent on business context

10. The Challenge of EIA: Competing trends • Trend toward autonomy • Cheap, easy-to-use democratizing technology • Human tendency toward autonomy • Trend toward centralization • Users’ desire for single-point of access • Management’s desire to control costs and communications • These tend to cancel each other out, getting us nowhere • Result: content “silos” and user confusion

11. Indicators of Problematic EIA: Intranet glitches • “How come I didn’t know your department was developing a product similar to ours?” • “Why couldn’t we find any relevant case studies to show that important prospect?” • “Why do our sales and support staff keep giving our customers inconsistent information?”

12. Indicators of Problematic EIA: External-facing site glitches • “Our customers think we’re still in the widget business; after all these M&As, why don’t they realize that we’ve diversified?” • “We have so many great products that go together; why don’t we cross-sell more?” • “Customers keep asking for product support through our sales channel; why don’t they use the site’s FAQs and tech support content?”

13. The Holy Grail:Cutting against the political grain

14. Example: Expense Reporting

15. So How Do We Get There? • Let it go • There is no single solution • Redemption lies within phased, modular, evolving approaches that respect 80/20 rule • Your friends • Straw men • Your colleagues and professional networks • This seminar provides straw men for • EIA design • EIA methods • EIA team design and governance

16. Top-Down Navigation

17. Top-Down Navigation Roadmap Main page Site hierarchy Site map Site index Selective navigation

18. Top-Down Challenges • Top-down IA • Anticipates questions that users arrive with • Provides overview of content, entry points to major navigational approaches • Issues • What do we do about main pages? • Portals: the answer? • Other ways to navigate from the top down • The dangers of taxonomies

19. Top-Down Evolution:Univ. Michigan example 1/2 • Cosmetic changes

20. Top-Down Evolution:Univ. Michigan example 2/2

21. Portal Solutions:Why they fail 1/2 • Organizational challenges • Fixation on cosmetic, political • Inability to enforce style guide changes, portal adoption • Lack of ownership of centralizing initiatives, or ownership in wrong hands (usually IT) • Information architecture challenges • Taxonomy design required for successful portal tool implementation • Always harder than people imagine • Taxonomies break down as they get closer to local content (domains become specialized)

22. Portal Solutions:Why they fail 2/2 • Challenges for users • Portals are shallow (only one or two levels deep) • Poor interface design • Users don’t typically personalize • More in James Robertson’s “Taking a business-centric approach to portals” (http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_businessportals/index.html)

23. Top-Down Navigation:Design approaches • Main pages • Supplementary navigation • Tables of contents • Site indices • Guide pages • Taxonomies for browsing • Varieties: product, business function, topical • Topic pages

24. Top-Down Navigation:Main pages • Often 80% of discussion of EIA dedicated to main page • Important real estate • But there are other important areas • Navigational pages • Search interface • Search results • Page design (templates, contextual navigation) • Divert attention from main pages by creating alternatives, new real estate: supplementary navigation

25. Top-Down Navigation:Supplementary navigation • Examples • Site maps/TOC • Site indices • Benefits: • Create new real estate • Can evolve and drive evolution from org-chart centered design to user-centered design • Relatively low cost to initially implement • Drawbacks: • Often unwieldy for largest enterprises (not at IBM, Microsoft, failure at Vanguard)

26. Top-Down Navigation:Site maps • Condensed versions of site hierarchy • Hierarchical list of terms and links • Primarily used for site orientation • Indirectly cut across subsites by presenting multi-departmental content in one place • But still usually reflects org chart • Alternative plan • Use site map as test bed for migration to user-centric design • Apply card sorting exercises on second and third level nodes • Result may cut across organizational boundaries

27. Site Map:Visually

28. Site Map: State of Nebraska Majority of links reflect org chart

29. Site Map: State of Kentucky Evolving toward more user-centered, topical approach

30. Top-Down Navigation:Site indices • Flat (or nearly flat) alpha list of terms and links • Benefits • Support orientation and known-item searching • Alternative “flattened” view of content • Can unify content across subsites • Drawbacks • Require significant expertise, maintenance • May not be worth the effort if table of contents and search are already available • Specialized indices may be preferable (shorter, narrower domain, focused audience)

31. Site Index:Visually

32. Site Index:Am. Society of Indexers example • Full site index • @1000 entries for smallish site • Too large to easily browse • Replace with search?

33. Specialized Site Index:CDC example • Not a full site index • Focuses on health topics • Narrow domain • Specialized terminology • Possibly still too large to browse

34. Specialized Site Index: PeopleSoft example • Product focus • A large undertaking at PeopleSoft • High value to users

35. “Mature” Site Index:Informed by search analytics

36. Top-Down Navigation:Guides • Single page containing selective set of important links embedded in narrative text • Address important, common user needs • Highlight content for a specific audience • Highlight content on a specific topic • Explain how to complete a process • Can work as FAQs (and FAQs can serve as interface to guides) • Benefits • Technically easy to create (single HTML page) • Cut across departmental subsites • Gap fillers; complement comprehensive methods of navigation and search • Can be timely (e.g., news-oriented guides, seasonal guides) • Minimize political headaches by creating new real estate

37. Guides:Visually

38. Guides:Vanguard example 1/2

39. Guides:Vanguard example 2/2

40. Guides:IBM example

41. Top-Down Navigation:Topic Pages • “Selective taxonomy improvement” • Portions of a taxonomy that expand beyond navigational value • Help knit together enterprise content deeper down in taxonomy • New “real estate” can be used by • Individual business units (to reduce pressure on main page) or… • Cross-departmental initiatives

42. Topic Pages:CDC example Subtopics now comprise only a small portion of page

43. Top-Down Navigation:Taxonomies & portals • Can a single taxonomy unify an enterprise site? • First: can one be built at all? • Software tools don’t solve problems (see metadata discussion) • Approaches • Multiple taxonomies that each cover a broad swath of enterprise content: audience, subject, task/process, etc. • “Two-step” approach: • Build shallow, broad taxonomy that will answer “where will I find the information I need?” • Rely on subsite taxonomies to answer “where in this area will I find the information I need?”

44. Top-Down Navigation: Impacts on the enterprise • Potential of “small steps” around which to build more centralized enterprise efforts • Site map and site index creation and maintenance • Guide and topic page creation and maintenance • Large editorial role, minimal technical requirements for both • May be preferable to tackle more ambitious areas much later • Developing and maintaining top-level taxonomy • Connecting high-level and low-level taxonomies

45. Top-Down Navigation Roadmap Main page Site hierarchy Site map Site index Selective navigation

46. Top-Down Navigation Takeaways • Main pages and portals: Bypass for now, add guides over time • Site hierarchy/taxonomy: Start shallow, "simple" (e.g., products); add progressively harder taxonomies (work toward faceted approach) • Site map/ToC: Use as a staging ground for a more topical approach • Site index: Move from generalized to specialized around a single topic, or augment with frequent search queries/best bets work • Guides: Start with a handful, then expand and rotate based on seasonality or other criteria of relevance

47. Bottom-Up Navigation

48. Bottom-Up Navigation Roadmap Content modeling Metadata development Metadata tagging

49. Bottom-Up Navigation: The basics • Focuses on extracting answers from content • How do I find my way through this content? • Where can I go from here? • Goals • Answers “rise to the surface” • Leverage CMS for reuse and syndication of content across sites and platforms • Improve contextual navigation • Increase the effectiveness of search

50. Content Modeling:The heart of bottom-up navigation • Content models • Used to convey meaning within select, high-value content areas • Accommodate inter-connectedness • Same as data or object modeling? Absolutely not! • Many distinctions between data and semi-structured text • Text makes up majority of enterprise sites