How to Make Sense of Any Mess (2014)
Abby Covert
▪ This book outlines a step-by-step process for making sense of messes made of information (and people)
▪ "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." —Carl Sagan, Cosmos
▪ Think about everything you have to make sense of each day. Projects, products, services, processes, collections, events, performances, boxes, drawers, closets, rooms, lists, plans, instructions, maps, recipes, directions, relationships, conversations, ideas. And the list goes on
▪ Having to progress in the face of chaos, confusion, and complexity is something we all have in common.
▪ Information architecture is a set of concepts that can help anyone making anything to make sense of messes caused by misinformation, disinformation, not enough, or too much information
▪ Messes are made of information and people
▪ Here are some of the many messes we deal with in our everyday lives:
The structure of teams and organizations The processes we undertake in working together The ways products and services are represented, sold, and delivered to us The ways we communicate with each other
▪ It's hard to be the one to say that something is a mess. Like a little kid standing at the edge of a dark room, we can be paralyzed by fear and not even know how to approach the mess.
▪ These are the moments where confusion, procrastination, self-criticism, and frustration keep us from changing the world
▪ The first step to taming any mess is to shine a light on it so you can outline its edges and depths
▪ Information architecture is all around you.
▪ Information architecture is the way that we arrange the parts of something to make it understandable.
▪ Alphabetical cross-referencing systems used in a dictionary or encyclopedia
▪ Links in website navigation
▪ Sections, labels, and names of things on a restaurant menu
▪ Categories, labels and tasks used in a software program or application
▪ The signs that direct travelers in an airport
▪ We rely on information architecture to help us make sense of the world around us.
▪ We've been learning how to architect information since the dawn of thought.
▪ Page numbering, alphabetical order, indexes, lexicons, maps, and diagrams are all examples of information architecture achievements that happened well before the information age.
▪ Even now, technology continues to change the things we make and use at a rate we don't understand yet.
▪ But when it really comes down to it, there aren't that many causes for confusing information.
▪ Too much information
▪ Not enough information
▪ Not the right information
▪ Some combination of these (eek!)
▪ It's easy to think about information messes as if they're an alien attack from afar. But they're not
▪ We made these messes
▪ When we architect information, we determine the structures we need to communicate our message
▪ Everything around you was architected by another person. Whether or not they were aware of what they were doing. Whether or not they did a good job. Whether or not they delegated the task to a computer.
▪ Information is a responsibility we all share
▪ We're no longer on the shore watching the information age approach; we're up to our hips in it.
▪ If we're going to be successful in this new world, we need to see information as a workable material and learn to architect it in a way that gets us to our goals.
▪ Every thing is complex.
Some things are simple. Some things are complicated. Every single thing in the universe is complex.
Complexity is part of the equation. We don't get to choose our way out of it.
▪ Here are three complexities you may encounter:
▪ A common complexity is lacking a clear direction or agreeing on how to approach something you are working on with others.
▪ It can be complex to create, change, access, and maintain useful connections between people and systems, but these connections make it possible for us to communicate.
▪ People perceive what's going on around them in different ways. Differing interpretations can make a mess complex to work through.
▪ True means without variation, but finding something that doesn't vary feels impossible.
Instead, to establish the truth, we need to confront messes without the fear of unearthing inconsistencies, questions, and opportunities for improvement. We need to be open to the variations of truth that are bound to exist.
▪ Part of that includes agreeing on what things mean. That's our subjective truth. And it takes courage to unravel our conflicts and assumptions to determine what's actually true.
▪ If other people have a different interpretation of what we're making, the mess can seem even bigger and more hairy. When this happens, we have to proceed with questions and set aside what we think we know.
▪ Over your lifetime, you'll make, use, maintain, consume, deliver, retrieve, receive, give, consider, develop, learn, and forget many things.
▪ This book is a thing. Whatever you're sitting on while reading is a thing. That thing you were thinking about a second ago? That's a thing too.
Things come in all sorts, shapes, and sizes.
The things you're making sense of may be analog or digital; used once or for a lifetime; made by hand or manufactured by machines.
▪ That's because I believe every mess and every thing shares one important non-thing:information.
▪ Information is not a fad. It wasn't even invented in the information age. As a concept, information is old as language and collaboration is.
▪ The most important thing I can teach you about information is that it isn't a thing. It's subjective, not objective. It's whatever a user interprets from the arrangement or sequence of things they encounter.
▪ The belief or non-belief that there were other cookies on that plate is the information each viewer interprets from the way the cookies were arranged. When we rearrange the cookies with the intent to change how people interpret them, we're architecting information.
▪ While we can arrange things with the intent to communicate certain information, we can't actually make information. Our users do that for us.
▪ Information is not data or content.
▪ Data is facts, observations, and questions about something. Content can be cookies, words, documents, images, videos, or whatever you're arranging or sequencing.
▪ The difference between information, data, and content is tricky, but the important point is that the absence of content or data can be just as informing as the presence.
▪ For example, if we ask two people why there is an empty spot on a grocery store shelf, one person might interpret the spot to mean that a product is sold-out, and the other might interpret it as being popular.
▪ Information is architected to serve different needs
▪ If you define each word from your favorite book and organize the definitions alphabetically, you would have a dictionary, not your favorite book
▪ If you arrange each word from your favorite book by gathering similarly defined words, you have a thesaurus, not your favorite book.
▪ Neither the dictionary nor the thesaurus is anything like your favorite book, because both the architecture and the content determine how you interpret and use the resulting information
▪ For example, "8 of 10 Doctors Do Not Recommend" and "Doctor Recommended" are both true statements, but each serves a different intent.
▪ Users are complex.
▪ User is another word for a person. But when we use that word to describe someone else, we're likely implying that they're using the thing we're making. It could be a website, a product or service, a grocery store, a museum exhibit, or anything else people interact with.
▪ When it comes to our use and interpretation of things, people are complex creatures
▪ We're full of contradictions. We're known to exhibit strange behaviors. From how we use mobile phones to how we traverse grocery stores, none of us are exactly the same. We don't know why we do what we do. We don't really know why we like what we like, but we do know it when we see it. We're fickle.
▪ We expect things to be digital, but also, in many cases, physical. We want things to feel auto-magic while retaining a human touch. We want to be safe, but not spied on. We use words at our whim.
▪ Most importantly perhaps, we realize that for the first time ever, we have easy access to other people's experiences to help us decide if something is worth experiencing at all.
▪ Stakeholders are complex.
▪ A stakeholder is someone who has a viable and legitimate interest in the work you're doing. Our stakeholders can be partners in business, life, or both.
▪ Managers, clients, coworkers, spouses, family members, and peers are common stakeholders.
▪ Sometimes we choose our stakeholders; other times, we don't have that luxury. Either way, understanding our stakeholders is crucial to our success. When we work against each other, progress comes to a halt.
▪ Working together is difficult when stakeholders see the world differently than we do.
▪ But we should expect opinions and personal preferences to affect our progress. It's only human to consider options and alternatives when we're faced with decisions.
▪ Most of the time, there is no right or wrong way to make sense of a mess. Instead, there are many ways to choose from. Sometimes we have to be the one without opinions and preferences so we can weigh all the options and find the best way forward for everyone involved.
▪ To do is to know.
▪ Knowing is not enough. Knowing too much can encourage us to procrastinate. There's a certain point when continuing to know at the expense of doing allows the mess to grow further.
▪ The truth is that these are all potential realities, and understanding that is part of the journey. The only way to know what happens next is to do it.
▪ To help Carl identify his mess, we could start by asking questions about its edges and depths:
▪ Who are his users and what does he know about them already? How could he find out more?
▪ Who are the stakeholders and what does he know about what they are expecting?
▪ How does he want people to interpret the work? What content would help that interpretation?
▪ What might distract from that interpretation?
▪ This chapter outlines why it's important to identify the edges and depths of a mess, so you can lessen your anxiety and make progress.
▪ I also introduced the need to look further than what is true, and pay attention to how users and stakeholders interpret language, data, and content.
▪ Users: Who are your intended users? What do you know about them? How can you get to know them better? How might they describe this mess?
▪ Stakeholders: Who are your stakeholders? What are their expectations? What are their thoughts about this mess? How might they describe it?
▪ Information: What interpretations are you dealing with? What information is being created through a lack of data or content?
▪ Current state: Are you dealing with too much information, not enough information, not the right information, or a combination of these?
▪ Our language choices change how we use our time and energy. For every word we use to describe where we want to go, there's another word that we're walking away from.
▪ The words we choose matter. They represent the ideas we want to bring into the world.
▪ For example, if we say that we want to make sustainable eco-centered design solutions, we can't rely on thick, glossy paper catalogs to help us reach new customers. By choosing those words, we completely changed our options.
▪ Language is any system of communication that exists to establish shared meaning. Even within a single language, one term can mean something in situation A and something different in situation B. We call this a homograph. For example, the word pool can mean a swimming pool, shooting pool, or a betting pool.
▪ Perception is the process of considering, and interpreting something. Perception is subjective like truth is.
▪ For example, many designers would describe the busy, colorful patterns in the carpets of Las Vegas as gaudy. People who frequent casinos often describe them as beautiful.
However good or bad these carpet choices seem to us, there are reasons why they look that way. Las Vegas carpets are busy and colorful to disguise spills and wear and tear from foot traffic.
▪ Gamblers likely enjoy how they look because of an association with an activity that they enjoy. For Las Vegas casino owners and their customers, those carpet designs are good. For designers, they're bad. Neither side is right. Both sides have an opinion.
▪ What we intend to do determines how we define words like good and bad.
▪ What's good for a business of seven years may not work for a business of seven weeks. What works for one person may be destructive for another
▪ When we don't define what good means for our stakeholders and users, we aren't using language to our advantage. Without a clear understanding of what is good, bad can come out of nowhere.
▪ And while you have to define what good means to create good information architecture, it's not just the architecture part that needs this kind of focus
▪ Every decision you make should support what you've defined as good: from the words you choose to the tasks you enable, and everything in between.
▪ When you're making decisions, balance what your stakeholders and users expect of you, along with what they believe to be good.
▪ Pretty things can be useless, and ugly things can be useful. Beauty and quality are not always related.
▪ As users, we may assume that a good-looking thing will also be useful and well thought-out. But it only takes a minute or two to see if our assumptions are correct. If it isn't good, we'll know.
▪ As sensemakers, we may fall victim to these same assumptions about the relationships between beauty and quality of thought.
▪ Beware of pretty things. Pretty things can lie and hide from reality. Ugly things can too.
▪ If we're going to sort out the messes around us, we need to ask difficult questions and go deeper than how something looks to determine if it's good or not.
▪ Getting our message across is something everyone struggles with. To avoid confusing each other, we have to consider how our message could be interpreted.
▪ Who's most important to get agreement from?
▪ Who's most important to serve?
▪ What words might make them defensive?
▪ What words might put them at ease?
▪ How open are they to change?
▪ How will this affect their lives?
▪ How does the current state of things look to them? Is that good or bad?
▪ Understanding the why behind what you're making allows you to uncover your intent and potential
▪ When everyone knows why they're doing something, the way forward is clearer and each person can understand their individual responsibilities.
▪ Why does this work need to be done?
▪ Why is change needed? Why do those changes matter? Why should other people care?
▪ Why hasn't this been tackled correctly?
▪ Why will this time be different?
▪ When we jump into a task without thinking about what we're trying to accomplish, we can end up with solutions to the wrong problem. We can waste energy that would be better spent determining which direction to take.
▪ What are you trying to change? What is your vision for the future? What is within your abilities?
▪ What do you know about the quality of what exists today? What further research will help you understand it?
▪ What has been done before? What can you learn from those experiences? What is the market and competition like? Has anyone succeeded or failed at this in the past?
▪ The saying "there are many ways to skin a cat" reminds us that we have options when it comes to achieving our intent. There are many ways to do just about anything.
▪ Whether you're working on a museum exhibit, a news article, or a grocery store, you should explore all of your options before choosing a direction
▪ Why, what, and how are deeply interrelated
▪ Our why, what, and how aren't always determined in a linear process. The answers to these fundamental questions may change from moment to moment.
▪ Your why may be "because you want this checked off your to-do list" or "because you want to play with certain materials or ideas."
▪ Your resulting what might be to "start making the first thing that comes to mind."
▪ They may not be lofty in intent, but the intent has been stated. These are valid answers to why and what that will serve as a guide for how you define what is good. Your actions will be the result of your answers.
▪ How long would you spend on a task without understanding why it's important or what you are actually accomplishing? Constantly answering these basic questions are a big part of our everyday life.
▪ Language is the material of intent.
▪ The words we choose change the things we make and how we think about them. Our words also change how other people make sense of our work.
▪ In writing this book, my intent was to make it:
Accessible Beginner-friendly Useful in a broad range of situations
As a result, I had to be comfortable with it not being these other things:
Academic Expert-friendly Useful in specific situations
▪ Karen is a product manager at a startup. Her CEO thinks the key to launching their product in a crowded market is a sleek look and feel.
Karen recently conducted research to test the product with its intended users. With the results in hand, she worries that what the CEO sees as sleek is likely to seem cold to the users they want to reach.
▪ Karen has research on her side, but she still needs to define what good means for her organization. Her team needs to state their intent.
To establish an intent, Karen talks with her CEO about how their users' aesthetic wants don't line up with the look and feel of the current product
▪ First, choose a set of adjectives you want your users to use to describe what you're making.
▪ Then, choose a set of adjectives that you're okay with not being used to describe the same thing.
▪ Whenever we're making something, there are moments when it's no longer time to ponder. It's time to act, to make, to realize, and perhaps to fail.
▪ Confronting your fears and knowing what is real is an important part of making sense of a mess.
▪ Before we go on, I have to warn you of the many opportunities ahead to lose faith in yourself as you climb through and understand the details of your reality. It can start to feel like the mess wants you to fail in making sense of it. Don't worry. That thought has occurred to everyone who has ever tried to change something. We all have to deal with reality. We all want what we want and then get what we get.
▪ Reality involves many players.
▪ As you go through the mess, you'll encounter several types of players:
▪ Current users: People who interact with whatever you're making.
▪ Potential users: People you hope to reach.
▪ Stakeholders: People who care about the outcome of what you're making.
▪ Competitors: People who share your current or potential users.
▪ Distractors: People that could take attention away from your intent.
▪ You may play several of these roles yourself. Be aware of potential conflicts there.
▪ For example, if you believe your users are like you but they're not, there's more room for incorrect assumptions and miscommunications.
▪ No matter what you're making, you probably need to consider several of these factors:
▪ Time: "I only have _____________________."
▪ Resources: "I have _____________________."
▪ Skillset: "I know how to ________________ , but I don't know how to ______________ yet."
▪ Environment: "I'm working in a ___________."
▪ Personality: "I want this work to say _________ about me."
▪ Politics: "Others want this work to say _________________ about ____________."
▪ Ethics: "I want this work to do right by the world by __________________."
▪ Integrity: "I want to be proud of the results of my work, which means _____________."
▪ Reality happens across channels and contexts.
▪ A channel transmits information. A commercial on TV and YouTube is accessible on two channels. A similar message could show up in your email inbox, on a billboard, on the radio, or in the mail.
▪ It's common to see someone using a smartphone while sitting in front of a computer screen, or reading a magazine while watching TV.
▪ As users, our context is the situation we're in, including where we are, what we're trying to do, how we're feeling, and anything else that shapes our experience. Our context is always unique to us and can't be relied upon to hold steady.
▪ If I'm tweeting about a TV show while watching it, my context is "sitting on my couch, excited enough about what I'm watching to share my reactions."
▪ In this context, I'm using several different channels: Twitter, a smartphone, and TV.
▪ Reality has many intersections.
▪ Tweeting while watching TV is an example of two channels working together to support a single context
▪ A single channel can also support multiple contexts
▪ For example, a website may serve someone browsing on a phone from their couch, on a tablet at a coffee shop, or on a desktop computer in a cubicle.
▪ When you begin to unravel a mess, it's easy to be overwhelmed by the amount of things that need to come together to support even the simplest of contexts gracefully on a single channel.
▪ "It's just a ____________" is an easy trap to fall into. But to make sense of real-world problems, you need to understand how users, channels, and context relate to each other.
▪ What channels do your users prefer? What context are they likely in when encountering what you're making? How are they feeling? Are they in a hurry? Are they on slow Wi-Fi? Are they there for entertainment or to accomplish a task?
▪ Reality doesn't always fit existing patterns.
▪ Beware of jumping into an existing solution or copying existing patterns. In my experience, too many people buy into an existing solution's flexibility to later discover its rigidity.
▪ Imagine trying to design a luxury fashion magazine using a technical system for grocery store coupons. The features you need may seem similar enough until you consider your context. That's when reality sets in.
▪ What brings whopping returns to one business might crush another. What works for kids might annoy older people. What worked five years ago may not work today.
▪ We have to think about the effects of adopting an existing structure or language before doing so.
▪ When architecting information, focus on your own unique objectives. You can learn from and borrow from other people. But it's best to look at their decisions through the lens of your intended outcome.
▪ Objects let us have deeper conversations about reality.
▪ When you discuss a specific subject, you subconsciously reference part of a large internal map of what you know.
▪ Other people can't see this map. It only exists in your head, and it's called your mental model.
▪ When faced with a problem, you reference your mental model and try to organize the aspects and complexities of what you see into recognizable patterns. Your ongoing experience changes your mental model. This book is changing it right now.
▪ We create objects like maps, diagrams, prototypes, and lists to share what we understand and perceive. Objects allow us to compare our mental models with each other.
▪ These objects represent our ideas, actions, and insights. When we reference objects during a conversation, we can go deeper and be more specific than verbalizing alone.
▪ As an example, it's much easier to teach someone about the inner-workings of a car engine with a picture, animation, diagram, or working model.
▪ Start with scope and scale.
▪ Before you make objects like diagrams or maps, spend some time determining their scope and scale.
▪ Scope is your clearly stated purpose for the diagram. The scope of a blueprint for an actual house is greater than the scope of a diagram explaining the rooms that make up a typical house.
▪ Scale is the relative size of your diagrammatic work.The scale of a map covering a wall is greater than the scale of a map on regular-sized paper.
▪ What do people need to understand?
▪ What are the edges of the map or diagram?
▪ What are you not mapping or diagramming?
▪ Where will other people see this map or diagram (e.g., on a wall, in a presentation, on paper)?
▪ While you're thinking about scope and scale, consider the timescale you're working with.
▪ Then: How did things used to be?
▪ Now: How are things today?
▪ When: How do you see it being in the future?
▪ Rhetoric is communication designed to have a persuasive effect on its audience.
Here are some common rhetorical reasons for making diagrams and maps:
▪ Reflection: Point to a future problem (e.g., a map of a local landfill's size in the past, present, and projected future).
▪ Options: Show something as it could be (e.g., a diagram showing paths a user could take to set up an application).
▪ Improvements: Show something as it should be (e.g., a diagram pointing out opportunities found during user research).
▪ Identification: Show something as it once was or is today (e.g., a map of your neighborhood).
▪ Plan: Show something as it will be (e.g., a map of your neighborhood with bike lanes).
▪ Architecture before design.
▪ You can tell complex stories in a diagram with boxes and arrows. A box represents a thing; an arrow represents a relationship between things.
▪ These relationships can be one-way (e.g., dropping a package into a mailbox) or two-way (e.g., calling the postal service to see if it was delivered).
▪ We use a diamond shape to represent a decision point. This allows us to diagram relationships that change depending on the circumstances.
▪ Start by creating a box for each concept, each piece of content, and each process. Arrange the boxes based on how they relate to each other. Play. See what reveals itself as you move things around. Try a few different arrangements before you add the arrows.
▪ Keep it simple. The more you add styling and polish, the less you'll feel comfortable changing and collaborating on the diagram.
▪ Make it easy to make changes so you can take in feedback quickly and keep the conversation going, rather than defending or explaining the diagram.
▪ Your diagram ultimately needs to be tidy enough for stakeholders to understand and comment on it, while being flexible enough to update.
▪ Objects like diagrams, maps, and charts aren't one-size-fits-all. Play with them, adapt them, and expand on them for your own purposes.
▪ The biggest mistake I see beginner sensemakers make is not expanding their toolbox of diagrammatic and mapping techniques.
▪ There are thousands, maybe millions, of variations on the form, quality, and testing of diagrams and maps. And more are being created and experimented with each day.
▪ The more diagrams you get to know, the more tools you have. The more ways you can frame the mess, the more likely you are to see the way through to the other side.
▪ To help you build your toolbox, I've included ten diagrams and maps I use regularly in my own work.
▪ A block diagram depicts how objects and their attributes interrelate to create a concept
▪ A concept is an abstract idea or general notion that exists in people's mental models. For example, pizza is a concept on which many actual pies are fired.
▪ A flow diagram outlines the steps in a process, including conditions a user or system is under, and connections between tasks.
▪ Conditions are rules that dictate the flow. For example, the path I take in the flow is different if I'm ordering for pickup or delivery.
▪ A Gantt chart depicts how processes relate to one another over time. Timelines, and project plans are both common examples of Gantt charts.
▪ This type of chart helps us to understand relationships between people, tasks, and time.
▪ A quadrant diagram illustrates how things compare to one another. You can create one based on exact data (e.g., price of a slice, thickness of pizza-crust) or ambiguous data (e.g., fancy or casual, quality of service, or tastiness).
▪ A Venn diagram is useful for highlighting overlapping concepts or objects. The overlap, known to some as the hedgehog or the nut, represents how these things relate. In this example, both pizza and movie relate to Friday night at home.
▪ This same technique can be used to sort things into sets based on how they're similar. For example, we might make a circle for movies we love and one for movies referencing pizza, and put the movies we love that reference pizza in the overlap.
▪ A swim lane diagram depicts how multiple players work together to complete a task or interact within a process. The result is a list of tasks for each user. This is especially useful when you're trying to understand how different teams or people work together.
▪ A hierarchy diagram depicts how objects, concepts, people, and places relate to each other. In website design, hierarchy diagrams are often called sitemaps.
▪ L-brackets, as seen above, tend to be easiest to read, but you may also see hierarchical relationships depicted as trees or pyramids.
▪ A mind map illustrates the connections between concepts, objects, ideas, channels, people, and places within a particular context.
▪ These concepts don't necessarily live under an established hierarchy or sequence. For example, in the diagram above, I've outlined the various aspects of running a pizza parlor as the owner (me!) might think about them.
▪ A schematic is a diagram of an object or interface simplified for the sake of clarity. Schematics are known by many other names including wireframes, sketches, lo-fis, and blueprints.
▪ Since a schematic reduces complexity, unintended errors and ambiguity can be introduced. Would someone understand from the previous schematic to put cheese on top of the tomato sauce? Maybe not.
▪ This is a case where an exploded schematic is useful, because it shows how the individual pieces come together to form the whole.
▪ A journey map shows all of the steps and places that make up a person or group's experience.
▪ The rows represent the user's context (e.g., outside, on the bus, at home). Each point represents an event or a task that makes up the overall journey. Each point is placed sequentially as it relates to the other points.
▪ This example shows events that only involve one person, but journey maps are also useful for showing the movement of pairs, teams, and organizations.
▪ Even if Maggie is the most talented creative director in the world, her work won't matter much until she faces the reality that she doesn't understand her client's business. She needs to get a clearer mental model out of her client's head and into her team's hands.
▪ With that as a basic model, she can ask better questions and compare her client's mental model with her own. She uses a mind map to capture thoughts as they talk. After talking with her client, Maggie has a clearer understanding of their business and much more confidence that her team can support their needs.
▪ On the following page is another favorite diagram of mine, the matrix diagram
▪ After making a simple matrix of users, contexts, players, and channels, you'll have a guide to understanding the mess. By admitting your hopes and fears, you're uncovering the limits you're working within.
▪ This matrix should also help you understand the other diagrams and objects you need to make, along with who will use and benefit from them.
▪ After you face reality, it still takes a tremendous amount of work and courage to move from understanding why something needs to change to knowing what you can do about it.
▪ People often get in their own way by becoming overwhelmed with choices, choosing not to choose instead. Others are limited by frustration over things they can't change immediately or easily.
▪ Change takes time.
▪ When we reference a place, it exists within other places. If I say, "I live in SoHo," that place is within another place called Manhattan, which is within a place called New York City.
▪ When we reference things, they exist within other things and places too. For example, a mug exists within a cabinet, in a coffee shop, in a building, on a city block, in a neighborhood, in a city, in a state, in a country, on a continent, and so on.
▪ Digital things live within other things and places, including physical and analog places.
▪ For example, a user accesses a mobile application on a smartphone, in a coffee shop, in a building, on a city block…
▪ We make places and we make things. The places and things that we make are part of a user's real life.
▪ Once you know what level you're working at, you can zoom in to the appropriate level of detail. Sometimes we need to zoom all the way in on an object. Other times it's more important to zoom out to look at the ecosystem.
▪ Being able to zoom in and out as you work is the key to seeing how these levels affect one another.
▪ When you're deep in the details, it's easy to forget your broad effect. When you're working overhead, it's easy to forget how your decisions affect things down on the ground. Making changes at one level without considering the affects they have on other levels can lead to friction and dissatisfaction between our users, our stakeholders, and us. One tiny change can spark a thousand disruptions.
▪ For example, if we owned a restaurant and decided to eliminate paper napkins to be environmentally friendly, that would impact the entire restaurant, not just the table service our diners experience.
▪ We'd need to consider other factors like where dirty napkins go, how we collect them, how often they're picked up and cleaned, how many napkins we need on hand between cleanings, and if we should use paper napkins if something spills in the dining room.
▪ One tiny decision leads to another, and another.
▪ The way we choose to arrange a place changes how people intrepret and use it. We encode our intent through the clues we leave for users to know what we want them to do.
▪ When you're cleaning up a big mess, assess the spaces between places as well as the places themselves.
▪ I once had a project where the word "asset" was defined three different ways across five teams.
I once spent three days defining the word "customer".
I once defined and documented over a hundred acronyms in the first week of a project for a large company, only to find 30 more the next week.
▪ I wish I could say that I'm exaggerating or that any of this effort was unnecessary. Nope. Needed.
Language is complex. But language is also fundamental to understanding the direction we choose. Language is how we tell other people what we want, what we expect of them, and what we hope to accomplish together.
▪ Without language, we can't collaborate.
▪ Unfortunately, it's far too easy to declare a direction in language that doesn't make sense to those it needs to support: users, stakeholders, or both.
▪ When we don't share a language with our users and our stakeholders, we have to work that much harder to communicate clearly.
▪ To work together, we need to use language that makes sense to everyone involved
▪ If we were to write a dictionary, we'd be practicing lexicography, or collecting many meanings into a list. When we decide that a word or concept holds a specific meaning in a specific context, we are practicing ontology.
▪ Here are some examples of ontological decisions:
▪ Social networks redefining "like" and "friends" for their purposes
▪ The "folders" on a computer's "desktop" you use to organize "files"
▪ The ability to order at a fast food chain by saying a number
▪ To refine your ontology, all you need is a pile of sticky notes, a pen, and some patience
▪ Put the sticky notes onto the surface as they relate to each other. Start to create structures and relationships based on their location
▪ By asking your customers for words they think about within a grocery store, your map could grow to reflect overlapping and related terms.
▪ If you were choosing words for the aisle and department signs or the website, this exercise would help you along.
▪ It's important to discuss and vet your ontological decisions with stakeholders and users. Talking about language choices gives you a chance to test them.
▪ It may sound obvious, but it's quite common to think something is clearly defined before talking about it with other people.
▪ A good starting point in exploring ontology is to bring everyone together to make a list of terms and concepts. Ask each person to share:
▪ One term that they wish they knew more about
▪ One term that they wish others understood better
▪ Documenting language standards can reduce linguistic insecurity.
▪ Variant spellings (e.g., American or British)
▪ Tone (e.g., Submit or Send)
▪ Scientific and popular terms (e.g., cockroaches or Periplaneta Americana)
▪ Insider and outsider terms (e.g., what we say at work; what we say in public)
▪ Acceptable synonyms (e.g., automobile, car, auto, or vehicle)
▪ Acceptable acronyms (e.g., General Electric, GE, or G.E.)
▪ A controlled vocabulary doesn't have to end with terms you intend to use. Go deeper by defining terms and concepts that misalign with your intent.
▪ Terms and concepts that conflict with a user's mental model of how things work
▪ Terms and concepts that have alternative meaning for users or stakeholders
▪ Terms and concepts that carry historical, political, or cultural baggage
▪ Acronyms and homographs that may confuse users or stakeholders
▪ In my experience, a list of things you don't say can be even more powerful than a list of things you do. I've been known to wear a whistle and blow it in meetings when someone uses a term from the don't list.
▪ I've avoided using these terms and concepts:
▪ I have reasons why these words aren't good in the context of this book. That doesn't mean I never use them; I do in some contexts.
▪ When I was in grade school, we did an assignment where we were asked to define terms clearly enough for someone learning our language. To define "tree" as "a plant that grows from the ground," we first needed to define "plant," "grow," and "ground."
▪ It was an important lesson to start to understand the interconnectivity of language. I like to apply this kind of thinking in my work to uncover terms that are nested within other terms and their definitions.
▪ When it comes to language, people are slow to change and quick to argue. Documenting these details will help you make your controlled vocabulary as clear and useful as possible.
▪ Verbs don't exist without nouns. For example, an online share button implies that it will share this post.
▪ Nouns are often created as a result of verbs. A post only exists after posting
▪ How would your work be different if "authors writing posts" was changed to "researchers authoring papers," or "followers submitting comments?"
▪ From the previous example:
▪ An author can write a post
▪ An author can delete a post
▪ Any user can share a post
▪ Any user can read a post
▪ When you take the time to make requirements concrete and prioritize them, you can better understand what you're actually making.
▪ If you're designing an interface that prioritizes reading, it will be fundamentally different than an interface that prioritizes writing, even with the exact same list of requirements.
▪ When we talk about what something has to do, we sometimes answer with options of what it could do or opinions of what it should do.
▪ A strong requirement describes the results you want without outlining how to get there.
▪ A weak requirement might be written as: "A user is able to easily publish an article with one click of a button."
▪ This simple sentence implies the interaction (one click), the interface (a button), and introduces an ambiguous measurement of quality (easily).
▪ When we introduce implications and ambiguity into the process, we can unknowingly lock ourselves into decisions we don't mean to make.
▪ No matter how hard we try to be aware of opinions swirling around us, it's hard to remain neutral. But in the end, progress can't happen without a decision.
▪ What if I disagree with a user need or opinion identified in my research?
▪ What if I disagree with the way another stakeholder sees a core concept or decision?
▪ What if I don't want to do this the way others want me to?
▪ Some people choose to hide from the realities behind these questions. But if you shield your ideas and simply follow orders, you may end up with goal-crushing (and soul-crushing) results.
▪ Admit where you are.
Let's say you're on a weeklong bicycle trip. You planned to make it to your next stop before dark, but a flat tire delayed you by a few hours.
Even though you planned to get further along today, the truth is that pursuing that plan would be dangerous now.
▪ Similarly, an idea you can draw on paper in one day may end up taking you a lifetime to make real. With the ability to make plans comes great responsibility.
▪ Think about what you can do with the time and resources you have. Filtering and being realistic are part of the job. Keep reevaluating where you are in relation to where you want to go.
▪ Be careful not to fall in love with your plans or ideas. Instead, fall in love with the effects you can have when you communicate clearly.