2005: My Own Year in Review

I have had a really interesting, satisfying year. I just wanted to take a few paragraphs to write down some of the more memorable IA/UX experiences I’ve enjoyed this year.

I spent a large portion of 2005 thinking and writing about Enterprise Information Architecture, and how to explain the discipline of information architecture to enterprise architects. That work generated some interesting discussion, and I appreciate all the feedback I received on various diagrams and presentations. I presented my explanation of how user experience fits into Zachman’s enterprise architecture framework at the IA Institute’s New Challenges Retreat in New York. I was heartened to hear that other IAs were wrangling with similar issues in their environments. I think next year we will see giant advances in data interoperability and integration, especially in the federal government. With the Department of Defense’s Net-Centric initiative, and with the Federal Enterprise Architecture’s Data Reference Model, we are finally getting our first enterprise data standards that are really implementable. I’m not a believer in the semantic web, but I do believe that semantic web initiatives, like Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), are a huge step towards an effective approach for workable enterprise information architectures.

This was the year of folksonomy, no doubt about it. The taxonomists and the taggers were at each other’s throats all year. Like many people in our line of work, I spent a lot of time toying with delicious. I’ve used it practically every day for a year, and spent a lot of time exploring the community they’ve built. My personal conclusion was that the wisdom of mobs is pretty limited, and that following the guidance of experts is far more fruitful. I blogged my thoughts on the matter, and provided some tips for more effective tagging. My post on del.icio.us ended up being my most popular all year.

I spent the entire year on a project to develop a series of taxonomies for a federal government customer. The taxonomies themselves are fairly interesting, but the part that was most engaging for me was the data architecture I designed to store, manage and display the taxonomies. I’ve refined my practice considerably this year as a result of the constraints and challenges of this project. The first thing I’d recommend to anyone working on a large taxonomy is to think of it as a metadata registry instead of just a taxonomy. There are a lot of great standards out there to support this work. Use XML if you can, and try to reproduce the characteristics of XML if you’re stuck using something else. Build smaller taxonomies in the context of a holistic system of metadata. It’s the only way to build in the context and interconnections to make it work. The other thing I would recommend is to consider presentation early and often. I had some technological limitations earlier in the year that restricted my ability to present the data. It effected the data structure; it effected how efficiently I could work; and it effected how well I could explain the work to customers. Consider how you want to present taxonomy development data right from the start. And I’m not just talking about the taxonomy itself. You may also want to be able to show who contributed what terms, or which terms from one taxonomy relate to terms in another taxonomy. One of my taxonomies right now is filtered into ten separate sub-taxonomies. Another is mapped from ten taxonomy islands to a central core taxonomy. My work has required custom interfaces and displays for every step of the work, which has been both a challenge and a reward. These days, after much iterative design and fussing, I am programming my own reports in a very flexible data-driven environment.

Records Management has become a buzzword. Imagine that. For those of you who don’t know, I actually have a degree in records management. In their continuing war on risk, the feds are very concerned about records. Agencies are funding large scale modernization projects to make the jump to managing electronic records. Relatively radical ideas are winning credence with policy-makers, and so the landscape is changing very quickly. Probably the best example is the Department of Defense program to convert all of its information, including all of its records to a new Net-Centric paradigm (which, frankly, can’t be explained succinctly). This work has kept me extremely busy, and I expect things will continue to heat up next year.

We had a great IA Summit this year. For the first time, SRA’s entire user centered design team made it to the summit. Dan and I brought our wives. The Washington DC crowd got together for dinner and took a tour of Montreal. The summit is a great opportunity to get together and talk shop with interesting folks. DCIA hosted a redux of the Summit once we were back in DC. We enjoyed a great turn out for the event. I led the discussion on content management.

This year ends on a high note, because I was fortunate enough to attend the IA Institute & MAYA Design presentation on the Carnegie Library redesign. They put together quite a show. Peter provided a great synopsis of the day’s events on peterme.com. If I could recommend only one take-away from the entire day, it would be the transparency, honesty, and sheer audacity of MAYA’s case study style. They came up with an excellent solution to their customer’s problem, but a lot of companies do that all the time. What was unique about MAYA was that they then turned around and made that successful project into a seminar for UX Week and an all-day presentation for IA Institute. And this wasn’t a half-hearted case study. There was no apparent anonymizing going on. They put all the cards on the table. They brought real customers to the show to talk about their experience and process. They brought in other contractors to talk about their interaction with the process and how they used the results for their own process. It was a real eye opener. The results were impressive, the process was interesting, but the case study was remarkable.

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