Jul 02, 2009: Upcoming talks: Brooklyn, Seattle, DC

Steve Krug and now have our fall workshop schedule settled. You might not know, but Steve is working on a new (and much anticipated) book on DIY usability testing; that's what he's covering in his new workshop. I've been tuning my site search analytics for UX workshop; the attendees in London last May seemed to like it quite a bit. We'll be in Seattle October 29-30, and in Washington, DC November 9-10; registration is now open (there are discounts if you register for both, register three or more, or register before the early bird deadline).

I'll also be keynoting the first Delve event, here in Brooklyn, on August 5. I'll continue Marrying Web Analytics and User Experience until they give in, fall in love, and produce dozens of robust children.

Jul 01, 2009: Shame and disgust

Stumbled across this brief article about a new CIO at the US Department of Veterans Affairs. CIO Roger Baker's "...plan will require managers to deliver systems and applications incrementally, rather than all at once. If managers miss three key milestones, he will take steps such as stopping program development, analyzing and fixing problems, or even firing contractors if things appear to get out of hand."

Holy crap. They'll even fire a contractor? Good God.

But though I snark away, there but for the grace of that Good God go I.

I used to do a little IA consulting for the VA. My client was wonderful, as were some of his colleagues. Most of the people I encountered there, however, were what you'd expect to find within a large, highly dysfunctional agency: water-treaders that were counting the days until they could retire. And you could hardly blame them.

But there were a few that were so completely pernicious that I feel sick to have them traipse across my professional memory even occasionally. Let me tell you...

I was struggling with the upper layers of the site's information architecture. I had been for quite a while. It just didn't do a good job of making health benefits information—the stuff that's the VA's primary raison d'etre—easy to find. In fact, the existing design seemed to go out of its way to obscure benefits information from veterans, even the web-savvy ones that were starting to return from Iraq and Afghanistan in droves.

Naively, when I raised this issue, I thought I'd receive a more typical response, something along the lines of "Yes, it's a huge problem for us, but fixing it would require aligning content from many of our internal departmental silos. But that's why we hired you, Lou."

Nope. What they told me was that they didn't really want to make it easy for veterans—those people risking their lives for their country—to learn about the health benefits that they were entitled to. And that taxpayers had committed to funding. All to save money—and for what??

IT issue? Not. It was an issue of business model design, and this particular business model was shrouded in a sick morality emanating from the top levels of the VA's management structure. Absolutely immorally, shamefully, and horribly sick.

Stunned, I didn't do anything about it while I was still consulting at the VA. And until now, I haven't brought it up, even though it raises such strong feelings of disgust and shame for me.

But I'm hoping that posting my experience and angst here and now helps somehow. I certainly needed to get it off my chest. And maybe it will enable some of the good people in the VA's new administration to get a little further in making their site actually help veterans.

Most of all, I'd like to know what I should have done. This unofficial policy was so terrible in so many ways to so many people. An intentionally poor information architecture likely caused much suffering among thousands and thousands of veterans. But the VA was my client, and should expect a degree of discretion from consultants like me. I feel odd even going public now, five or so years after concluding my work there.

What would you do, fellow information architects?

I think we should all be prepared to answer questions like these, because it could happen to you. Ethical quandaries arise in any profession, but as a new profession, I'm not sure how much we've collectively discussed stuff like this. So...

What would you do?

Jun 15, 2009: Beyond berrypicking

A colleague asks:

I need to gather some evidence of user behaviour with regards to site search, namely 'browse vs search'. Do you know of any recent research papers that show a trend towards people preferring to search a website, rather than navigate? If so, what are the common themes? Does it depend on the type of user, the type of site, etc?

Great question. I always refer people to Marcia Bates' seminal work on berrypicking, which defuses the versus part of "browse versus search," as it well should. But it's now twenty years old; any other, more recent suggestions?

Jun 11, 2009: Main page malaise, part 17

Fast Company recycles some coverage of the American Airlines main page dustup. Interesting discussion in the comments section, worth checking out.

But I can't help but thinking that they're spending way too much time kvetching about the main page at the expense of improving the UX of all those other pages. Advice to American Airilnes UX team: let your pain in the ass stakeholders fight over the main page: while they're distracted, you go and fix the rest of the site. After all, it's important too.