Kids Health Galaxy

Yay!!! A site I worked on for over a year as Information Architect and Usability Coordinator has been graced with a Webby nomination in the Family/Parenting category:

http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=10

Kids Health Galaxy
The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
http://www.kidshealthgalaxy.com

Makes me extremely happy and am very lucky to work with a great bunch of people on it.

By the way, do an erratic blogger a favor and vote for this puppy in the People's Voice Awards section?

http://peoplesvoice.webbyawards.com/

Much obliged!

Taxonomies and Folksonomies: an age-old debate

I just read a paper by Clay Shirky titled "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags."  It is a wonderfully clear paper explaining the fundamental difference between the creation/management of taxonomies and the organic growth of "folksonomies."

The paper motivated me to jot down thoughts that have been rattling in my head for the past few months. I have been trying to determine whether and to what extent aspects of a folksonomic approach could be used in the context of the hospital.

Consider two cases:

1. A hospital web site offering health information content, and
2. That hospital's intranet

Health Information Content:
Though I am excited by organic, individual tagging tools there are situations where introducing this can be problematic. Health information content, in particular, seems to be a strong candidate for more centralized, regulated classification and tagging for a few reasons:

(a) Allowing organic tagging could increase the probability of inaccurate tagging and, given the nature of the content, this could have truly harmful repercussions,

(b) Even though the existing classification / browsing schemes may not meet the widest range of user expectations, these are schemes that have been engrained in our consciousness (e.g., Body Location, disciplines). Altering these may cause more disruption than continuing with the imperfect classification.

I know this is not an either/or proposition. Both systems could co-exist with an appropriate level of oversight to prevent error and with a responsive adjustment of classifications.

My current opinion is to NOT introduce organic tagging and classification tools for health information content (other than, perhaps, offering users the ability to self-select "content bookmarks" for future recall). An analysis of search logs, user interviews and user observation can give us a pretty solid picture of possible tags and alternative terminology that we can fold into the system. "Folksonomy" occurs, but it is mediated.

Intranets:
It seems that internal systems can benefit from both methods as a result of two oh-so-entrenched properties in corporate organizations: hierarchies and the need for cost efficiencies.

Given that a company (and in particular, a hospital) may have fairly entrenched and solid hierarchies for their organization and documents, it would be best to faithfully present that as a browsing scheme. Employees are expected, as part of their jobs, to become familiar with this. Being nice to the user is not as pressing, it would seem, as in the consumer-facing side.

At the same time, these corporate hierarchies tend to bury related items in separate branches and are not sensitive to actual usage patterns. An employee may need access to multiple resources that are filed away in separate "locations." We could spend the time and resources to identify these inter-relationships and implement ways of making this explicit on the intranet.

However, given the compulsive need for "cost cutting and efficiency," creating a system that allows individual users to tag and associate as they see fit seems to decentralize and minimize the creation and management of such a system. This would allow for idiosyncratic associations and quick recall. Thus the move toward "personalized portals."

-----

Let me phrase the issue in a more philosophical way. In Shirky's paper, he notes that the different approaches to this issue tend to be informed by differing conceptions between:

1. Those who see the world as having clearly articulated entities independent of our ways of conceptualizing them, and
2. Those who see the nature of entities as resulting from our own process of sense-making.

See "Semantic Challenges to Realism" for more.

The table of elements may be ideal since its categorization scheme relies on the independent facts pertaining to the number of protons in the nucleus. However, categorizing massive amounts of photographs may not be served best by a rigid taxonomy.

Where does health information fall? Even if I believed that health information is also, to some degree, relative to the sense-making activities of individuals, I would still opt for a stable and regulated categorization of the content. We can monitor the terminological and categorization tendencies of our user base and adjust.

To do otherwise would simply be too risky a proposition -- risky in ways that are more tangible than most other content domains. The philosophical principles take a back seat when following them produces a significant risk of detrimental pragmatic consequences.

...and that's the truth, Ruth!

In one of those occasional cases of serendipity, D. Keith Robinson at Asterisk just published a rant that is a carbon copy of the rant that has been rattling in my mind today at work.

"Technological Excuses: A Rant"

Nothing more to say but "Amen!" (and this from an atheist).

Don't call it a comeback...

Well,

I have not followed through on my promise to revive this place, but it is time to make ammends. The blog has been a bit barren these past few months because I have been pulled in by some other interests -- some worthwhile, some not so much.

Information Architecture Summit 2005
I attended this summit in Montreal recently. The bulk of the presentations were, either, focused on covering some of the fundamentals that I already had a strong background in or served to confirm that some of my undertakings at the hospital are in the right path.  There were, however, three excellent sessions:

Sorting out Social Classification
A traditional task for people working in any mode of content cataloguing, indexing and retrieval involves creating a categorization scheme and labels designed to assist the task of finding the relevant content as quickly as possible. This involved the usage of controlled vocabularies and hierarchical structures that, either, relied on existing standards or were created to address internal needs (taxonomies).

As the amount and availability of content (especially digital content) has increased dramatically, the job of cataloguing, indexing and retrieving has increased in complexity. In addition to this, a wider range of people now have the tools to search for content readily available. This has spawned the creation of tools allowing anyone to tag, label and organize content they find with their own vocabulary and organization scheme. In essence, these tools allow people to create their own "folksonomies" in order to catalog, index and retrieve according to their own individual needs.

The current debate in the field has to do with the expected tension that ensues -- identifying what is gained when you allow organic classification and tagging of content and what is lost when you allow too much of this organic growth to occur without appropriate control. The field is trying to find the appropriate balance.

For an example of an application allowing its users to tag, index and categorize freely, take a look at Flickr.

Content Packaging and Metadata: A Change in the Approach to Content Production
This presentation by the BBC gave us a preview of how the application of metadata on digital television and radio programming will alter the ways we interact with such multimedia programming. In essence, the BBC is working to create a granular metadata system that would allow users greater control over the choice and access of programming.

If you are not too crazy about a certain television program that includes several narrative threads within it but are intrigued by one of those threads, you could, under this proposed system, search and isolate the characters and narrative threads you are interested in and simply access those. So, if you hate Saturday Night Live, for instance, but have a predilection for Will Ferrell characters, you could simply separate the wheat from the chaff and extract what you need, on-demand. TiVo on crack.

Traversing the Corporate Web: IA and Taxonomy at IBM
The rare thing: a presentation that demonstrates how the relatively academic concepts of a controlled vocabulary, taxonomy and metadata have been applied and produced tangible results for a sizeable group of users. The panel was not stingy or reticent showing details of their implementation -- a rare peek behind the curtain. You can find this presentation at Subway Love.

What does a gaggle of information architects look like? A sampling can be seen here.

World of Warcraft
It seems that there is one game every year that sticks its hooks into me and won't let go until it drains out of my system. This year's winner is World of Warcraft. If you play this game, why don't you drop by, say "hi" and try an intervention?

Character:  Morrissey
Race:  Night Elf
Class: Druid
Level: 57
Guild: Gnomeland Security
Server: Eonar

Help me....

Fellow IAs

Here are some links to sites / blogs of other folks that practice information architecture.

Peter Merholz - information architect for Adaptive Path in San Francisco.

Orange Cone - blog kept by Mike Kuniavsky. He is also a member of Adaptive Path and author of Observing the User Experience.

InfoDesign: Understanding by Design - ''...is dedicated to the growth and improvement of the information and experience industries through the provision of a centralized online resource that serves all interested audiences. Launched in 2004, the site will continually evolve to meet the needs and desires of its participants. 'InfoDesign: Understanding by Design' is a non-profit informational resource." A site maintained by Peter J. Bogaards.

Noise Between Stations - Victor Lombardi's personal weblog. He is an information architect in NYC.

What to do about links?

I've been debating what to do with the list of sites and blogs that I tend to visit often. Should I...

(a) add a sidebar element with a semi-permanent list that changes every so often, or
(b) post entries with links that I discover every so often?

Well, since none of you drop comments in here and offer your views, I have decided to opt for (b) and that's that. With that out of the way....

Gizmodo - Gizmodo is an online review dedicated to gadgets, gizmos, and cutting-edge consumer electronics.

purse lip square jaw - Blog written by a technology researcher, ethnographer & designer, inhabitant of Ottawa in the Land of Ice & Snow, lover of eggplant and asparagus, the music of Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Mogwai, strange places, brilliant & otherwise hardcore people.

IAMScruelty.com - Great. Now I have to wean Bogie and Squid to some other brand and once they get used to it and grow to tolerate it -- a new cruelty scandal will crop up with that brand...sigh.

Boxes and Arrows - Should give you a sense of the kinds of issues and projects I'm involved with as an Information Architect.

Until the next installment!