I helped the micro-learning education startup Elemeno Health design, develop, and release a structured content solution to more effectively create, publish, and reuse thousands of hyperlocal, clinician-focused resources at patient care locations across the country. Elemeno's content now works harder and lasts longer, allowing it to scale more effectively over time and deliver greater value to Elemeno customers.
In this episode of "The Informed Life," Jorge Arango and I discuss the role of structured content in making complex ideas clear online. Topics include the transition from traditional web pages to a data-centric web design, the role of information architecture in making complex information systems accessible and intelligible to both humans and machines, and the challenges and opportunities in using semantically sound structured content to enhance digital information's usability and accessibility.
In this episode of the "Earley IA Podcast," Earley and Associates founder Seth Earley and I discuss the role of information architecture in the development of knowledge graphs, the importance of keeping "humans in the loop," and the unsung benefits of starting small with knowledge graphs (even when—especially when—you've got big plans for the next iteration).
Last week I had the pleasure and privilege of attending the 18th annual Taxonomy Boot Camp in Washington DC. This year’s conference carried on its strong tradition of ideas, talks, and workshops for neophytes and experts alike, and, as always, provided much food for thought. Here’s a roundup of the themes and topics I saw recurring across talks, plus (as always) a bit of commentary on where I see them fitting into the bigger picture of designing information spaces that are easy to understand and pleasant to use.
Are you still trying to wrap your head around what structured content is, how to use it, and what the benefit is to the folks who use your content? One way to think of it is that structured content treats information as a set of ideas, concepts, and facts to communicate, each described in a way that conveys its meaning in a machine readable way. Here's a brief illustration to demonstrate what that looks like.
I helped the World Health Organization (WHO) Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD) assess and revise the information architecture of their WHO sub-site content. Where their site had previously been structured to mirror their internal organization, based on the diseases they seek to control, their content structure and navigation now reflect the information needs of key site visitors and the priorities of the NTD department.
I helped the World Health Organization assess and develop an improvement roadmap for the Knowledge Action Portal (KAP), a community-driven communication and collaboration web application focused on the prevention of non-communicable diseases. Now, the KAP team has a clear path forward for making high-impact usability, accessibility, and performance improvements.
In this episode of "Content Strategy Insights," Larry Swanson and I discuss the huge gaps between the human needs of digital content consumers and the constraints and requirements of the digital systems that manage it. We also, of course, explore how information architects use data, stories, and meaning to bridge these gaps and bring content to life for the human beings who need it.
One of the greatest challenges in digital design is identifying and maintaining focus on the right problem. For information architecture, one of our most common deliverables, the visual sitemap, can actually make focusing on the right problems harder, if not impossible. In this article we’ll examine why this happens, explore what practitioners and teams can do to avoid this trap of misplaced focus, and learn how to rehabilitate our wayward sitemaps and reinstate them as the effective design artifacts they can be.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a website in possession of a shiny new design, must be in want of good content. Unfortunately, the process of auditing, revising, migrating, and creating quality content can be daunting. Style guides can help! Here's a brief intro to web writing style guides—and a quick way to get started with creating your own.
Not every project needs a dedicated information architect, but things can go woefully sideways if you need one and don't have one. Here are a few clues that you should include an information architect, or at least a practitioner with strong IA skills, on your design team.
Information Architecture is the process and the product of designing shared information environments. In the same way that building architects collaborate in the creation of physical environments for shared human use, information architects collaborate in the creation of information environments for shared human use. The architect may not know in detail how each wall or widget gets built, but they know enough about how all the pieces fit together as a whole to ensure that the final result effectively meets the human needs.
Voice user interfaces, smart software agents, and AI-powered search are changing the way users—and computers—interact with content. Whether or not you’re building services for these emerging technologies, structured content is now necessary to ensure the accuracy and integrity of your content across the evolving digital landscape.
If you’ve ever done any contextual inquiry or usability testing, you’ve probably observed first hand the difference between what people say they will do and what they actually end up doing. Overlooked calls to action, bizarre navigation paths, mind-bogglingly irrational decisions — even the most sensible seeming users occasionally (or often) do things that “rationally” make little sense. Which is to say that we all, on occasion (or often) do things that seem to make little rational sense.
In order to effectively communicate across contexts in digital information spaces, we need to understand the way we make meaning as thinking animals. We also need to dig in to the details of the language and models we use to make them intelligible, both so that we can use them more effectively and so that we can leave them behind when they are hindering communication. In the same way that we construct our built environments in response to the physical mechanics of our bodies, we can construct our information environments in response to the conceptual mechanics of our minds.