Information architecture practice: An interview with Seth Gordon Zefer

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, Aug/Sep 2000

AISB: Can you describe in some detail what you (or your firm) do for your employer or your clients? If you have a specialization, how would you characterize it?

SG: The company I work with, ZEFER, helps clients define strategy, then build the site that goes with it. We consult and implement across a broad range of services, including strategy, experience design (including rich media and brand development), customer relationship management and supply chain consulting.

I work in the experience design competency, where I spend a lot of time studying how people work their way through transactions, in particular, site personalization and commerce checkout processes. People's experiences with these two areas have a huge impact on the way they ultimately perceive a site. I work with the strategists and technologists to ensure a consistent user experience at every point the customer comes in contact with the company, on- or off-line.

ASISB: Please describe a specific IA challenge that you have solved.

SG: How can we architect information if we don't know what information we need to work with? The questions of figuring out what content belongs in a site is one of the hardest parts of the job. If the content is wrong, it doesn't matter how well it's arranged. The content at the start of a project isn't necessarily going to be the same six months down the road. But a solid architecture will be able to flex and scale to handle some content modifications.

I've attached a few images from some content categorization and prioritization exercises we worked on with a financial services client. Multicolored post-it notes (Figure 1) are a great way to differentiate between assorted types and sources of content. Color-coding can be used to denote different values of content (to the client or consumer) as well as the technological complexity of gathering and maintaining the information.

In this case we translated the post-its into a wireframe version of the site (Figure 2), which we used for usability evaluations. Actual customers provided feedback on site structure, nomenclature and process flow.

AISB: Could you discuss your methodology? What tools, techniques and software do you use?

SG: There are as many techniques as there are IAs. I've cho sen three techniques that have always done right by me. They can turn out very relevant results without forcing you to be overly analytical.

Contextual inquiry /ethnographic research: To help us understand how people think about content and complete tasks, we observe them where they work and where they live (with their knowledge, of course). If we're working on a new business idea and an opportunity to observe people in action does not exist, we will bring them to our customer experience center for concept and prototype evaluation.

Card sorting: This is a low-tech approach that usually yields some very interesting results. Basically, we will label index cards, each with a description of a potential content piece for a site. Then, we'll bring in respondents and have each of them create piles of cards which all share similar relationships. Then, we have them create a name for the content pile they created. The results from card sorting let us know how people think about the relationships between different parcels of content, and what titles they think identify the content. We then take these findings and apply them to our work for site architecture.

Validation techniques: To make sure that users think the site is accurate and useful, we run usability tests. We are generally able to gain high quality and accurate results using a sample size of six respondents. I wrote a description of this approach, often called discount usability, which is posted at the CNET site: How to Plan, Execute and Report on a Usability Evaluation

www.builder.com/Graphics/Evaluation/?tag=st.bi.3880.promo2. bl_feat

ASISB: What professional and academic experience did you bring to your current position, and what are the most critical things you have had to learn on the job?

SG: I came to this position with a lot of experience working in "hostile and hectic" environments, including

* An Internet startup co-founded a company acquired by USWeb

* Entertainment - working at Discovery.corn when it was one of the coolest sites around

* Academia - spearheaded the transition of the american.edu Website from Gopher to the Web

Working in these different environments gave me opportunities to look at the Web through several different lenses.

The most important lesson I learned, and re-learn regularly, is how to reconcile business objectives against user wants/needs and resource constraints (time, technology, people). Learning how to strike the best balance isn't something that comes from a book or a nifty matrix, it's the kind of learning that comes from doing.

ASISB: If you do your information architecture work as part of a team, what additional essential skills does your team provide?

SG: At ZEFER, the size and complexity of the engagements we work on require multidisciplinary teams that have deep expertise in several areas, including strategy, experience design and technology.