Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville Interview · 2186 words posted 10/04/2002 05:20 PM

Peter Morville Peter Morville is President and Founder of Semantic Studios. Since 1994, he has played a major role in shaping the modern practice of information architecture design. Peter co-authored the best-selling book on the subject. As CEO of Argus Associates, he helped build one of the world’s most admired information architecture firms.

Peter holds an advanced degree in library and information science from the University of Michigan. His work has been featured in numerous publications including Business Week, Fortune, MSNBC and the Wall Street Journal.

Louis Rosenfeld Lou Rosenfeld is co-author of “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” (O’Reilly, 1998 & 2002), the leading text on the subject. Formerly co-founder and president of Argus Associates, Lou is now an independent information architecture consultant, working with such clients as Ford, Hewlett-Packard, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lou also is a regular speaker at the Nielsen Norman User Experience conferences. Lou’s background is in information science and librarianship.

since1968: For the benefit of my readers who are unfamiliar with the term, could you briefly define Information Architecture (IA)?

Lou Rosenfeld: Information architecture is the art and science of organizing, structuring, and labeling information to make it easier to find and easier to manage.

Wow, that’s a mouthful. It’s also kind of boring, so maybe an analogy would help.

Visualize a pile of books strewn across a floor. What’s the difference between that pile and your local Borders? The books [at Borders] are organized and presented in ways that are useful and attractive. There are signs that guide you to sections, and more signs that guide you to categories. The collection of books in stock continually morphs to meet the changing needs of the buying public. Employees develop policies and help maintain this information environment, and business rules and context play a large role in how the store should be laid out and its stock organized. All that stuff that makes information more accessible and findable – that all could be considered information architecture.

since1968: When I read the first edition of your book in 1998, I thought its advice was useful and hard-headed, one of the very few books of its era that was free of late 90s Internet froth. Yet Argus Associates, your former business, is no more. What happened?

Peter Morville: We spent roughly six years growing Argus in the slow, conservative manner you might expect from librarians in the Midwest. However, in late 1999, we made a conscious decision to grow faster, in order to remain competitive in an industry increasingly populated by consulting giants like Scient, Sapient, Razorfish, and marchFIRST. Within a year, we tripled in size to a staff of 40, increased salaries and benefits considerably, and financed moves to larger office space, twice.

In hindsight, we invested in growth at precisely the wrong time. In November of 2000, the bad news began. We lost existing business and our pipeline of proposals and leads dried up. By March 2001, Argus had closed up shop. It was a painful experience, yet mercifully it happened very fast, and we were tremendously proud of the kindness and professionalism demonstrated by our staff through this difficult period.

So, how does this relate to the broader worlds of IA and IT? Well, Lou recently summed it up in the following way: Since information architecture was on the cutting edge, it was the first to be cut when the budget axe in large companies began to swing. Argus was a canary in the coal mine, an early warning of tough times ahead for the whole Internet consulting industry. Since then, many companies have closed and many people in IA and IT roles have lost their jobs.

Does this mean the end of IA? Not at all. Many information architects have managed to keep their jobs through the downturn and many have found new jobs despite the economy. I’m hopeful we’re already beginning to see an uptick in job postings. And ultimately, we’ll see more pure IA consulting firms, though most information architects will work within interdisciplinary teams as innies (inside large companies) or outies (inside professional service consulting firms).

since1968: The difference between usability engineering and Information Architecture (IA) isn’t always clear. Sometimes it sounds like a usability engineer is just an information architect who does testing. Here’s an example: I have a very hard time finding the right link to pay my Visa bill online. Is that a usability issue or an IA issue?

Lou Rosenfeld: It is confusing. To answer your question, the hard time you’re having may be caused by both problems of usability and findability. The site’s search system may be difficult to use due to poor choices in page layout, interface widget selection, or font size. But once you figure out how to use it, it may be quite effective in helping you find that link.

On the other hand, the search system may be incredibly usable, but poorly designed from an architectural perspective, and therefore doesn’t help you find what you’re looking for. Usability and findability are simply different aspects of design, and you can have one without the other.

Who does design and who does testing is another issue altogether, and represents a minefield that I hesitate to wade into. Perhaps traditional usability engineering was more focused on testing and evaluation, but dammit, that gets old, and it’s hard to resist the siren song of design. And while information architecture has been more oriented toward design, you can’t avoid the need to test and validate those designs. So there is certainly an increasing convergence between what usability engineers, information architects, and many, many other user experience professionals are doing.

since1968: You have a description of Times Square in your book that captures its essence so well I’d like to quote it in full here: bq. Have you ever walked through Times Square in New York City at night? It’s quite a spectacle. You’re on the corner of 42nd and Broadway. The glassy facades of buildings are pulsing with real-time information, courtesy of the latest in flat-panel display and projection technologies. Business news, financial data, corporate logos, and URLs are all lit up in neon. Taxicabs sport billboards on their roofs as they honk their way through traffic. Pedestrians (or shall we say “users”) hustle past one another, chattering into their cell phones or stopping on the corner to check email or get directions on their wireless PDAs. This is William Gibson’s cyberspace turned inside out, physical architecture meets information architecture, a world of content, labels, and metadata all competing for your attention.

But isn’t Times Square wonderful because of, not in spite of, its energetic disarray and lack of information architecture? To use another example from your book, isn’t Times Square more like Gould’s Book Arcade than a library?

Peter Morville: Yes. Like Gould’s Book Arcade, Times Square delivers a wonderfully chaotic, serendipitous experience. But would you really propose setting up office cubicles in the middle of Times Square? It might be a fun experiment, but would probably not raise productivity. When it comes to finding information, completing tasks and getting work done, some level of structure and semantic order is critical to success.

since1968: As Google becomes ever more popular, do you find that your clients are tempted to let IA slip? In other words, what’s the incentive to spending time and money on planning your site’s content when there’s a good chance someone can find it on Google for free anyway?

Lou Rosenfeld: If Google solved all of the world’s information retrieval problems, that would be fine with me. I could go back to waiting tables, a slightly less stressful vocation than information architecture.

But Google doesn’t solve all information retrieval problems. I for one don’t want to rely on a popularity-driven presentation algorithm when, for example, I need to find medical information to help deal with a family member’s illness. Or when I’m working on my dissertation. Or when I’m making decisions about how to invest my money.

Popularity may also be a bad approach to apply to certain information environments, like large corporate intranets, which often consist of vertical “silos” tied to individual business units. There’s usually not much linking between silos, and it’s those links that Google relies on for result presentation.

Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely love Google and the people behind it are brilliant: they are figuring out which information retrieval and presentation algorithms to apply to specific types of information environment. But there’s a lot more work along those lines that needs to be done, and information architects are the people that need to do it.

since1968: Is it difficult to translate the concepts underlying IA and business strategy into plain language? For instance, I’m pretty sure the first time I use the phrase activity system maps with one of my clients, they’ll call security.

Peter Morville: Absolutely. Much of our success in spreading the IA meme has come from translating academic terminology from the fields of library and information science into plain language for business consumption. We also try to borrow ideas from other fields such as business strategy and social network analysis, again seeking to take high-fallutin’ terms like “activity system maps” and describe them in simple terms. Of course, some people would accuse us of creating a few fancy terms of our own. Speaking plainly about complex, abstract, dynamic topics is a constant challenge.

Lou Rosenfeld: In fact, one of the most useful things an information architect can do is teach to his clients a standard terminology that describes issues of information. If an information architect can get the people he works with to be able to articulate their “information pain,” and to hear each other and see they’re not alone, he’s made a huge difference.

since1968: Let’s talk for a moment about developer adoption of IA. Verity, a full-text search tool, is bundled for free with ColdFusion, Macromedia’s application server. Yet according to Macromedia less than a third of the CF sites on the web use Verity. Likewise, very few small-shop developers know about, much less use, the English Query feature of Microsoft SQL Server. Is that the fault of the vendors or the developers?

Lou Rosenfeld: It’s partly a marketing issue: when you purchased ColdFusion, were you looking for a search engine at the same time? It’s often also an issue of integration: it’s hard to assemble a suite of tools in a logical way that makes sense to developers. Not impossible, but hard, and harder when the tools come from different sources.

since1968: Fair enough, but if app vendors don’t market their tools with an eye toward IA, and clients don’t even know IA exists, how do you persuade small-shop developers to care?

Peter Morville: During our early years at Argus, we learned how difficult it is to convince skeptics of the importance of information architecture. People only become ready to care after they have felt the pain caused by lack of structure and organization. This pain is felt earliest and most exquisitely by large companies with huge web sites and intranets. That’s why we focused our consulting efforts on solving IA problems for Fortune 500 corporations.

However, we know from research studies that the number one usability problem of web sites and intranets of all shapes and sizes is that users can’t find what they need. Most small-shop developers have already got religion when it comes to usability. Our goal is to help them recognize that on the Web, findability precedes usability. After all, you can’t use what you can’t find.

As the sites of even the smallest organizations grow in size and complexity, and as users and developers become better attuned to what really matters in the online environment, attention will shift towards findability as a major challenge and information architecture as a key solution.

In the foreword to our 2nd edition, Jakob Nielsen notes that in this age of information overload, just organizing our own email folders and computer files is becoming a challenge, and predicts “In the long run, personal information architecture may turn out to be even more important that corporate information architecture.” We agree. Maybe that should be the topic of our next book. :-)

since1968: I understand that the best IA is sometimes invisible to the end user. Still, would you point to a “wow” example of IA on the web?

Peter Morville: The myriad ways that Amazon.com provides fast, effective access to millions of books provide the best “wow” example I can think of. You’ve got:

Amazon’s information architecture is a critical component of their competitive advantage. It helps Amazon to deliver an exceptional user experience and maintain brand loyalty.

since1968: Thank you for your time.

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Buy IA2 from Amazon.

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