One mark of a good public speaker is to appear relaxed and spontaneous. Two apparently effortless asides bookended Martin Belam’s excellent talk last night at LIKE26. The first was a question on job titles: a good one should fulfill two conditions – it should fit on your business card, and it should explain to your mum what you do at work. Having had a particularly obscure job title myself not so long ago, I’m guessing that as Lead User Experience & Information Architect at The Guardian, Martin also struggles with both of these conditions. The second aside came in the Q&A session at the end, words to the effect that the purist theory of Information Science in the workplace must always bow to the pragmatism of organisational (and in Martin’s case at the Guardian, editorial) requirements.
Martin gave us a wryly humorous account of his professional development as an information architect. He began in the surly world of Reckless Records in Berwick Street, Soho, where discs were arranged rigorously according to the customer’s expectations (e.g. Nirvana albums appearing alternately in “Rock/Pop” for the hit Nevermind and "US Indie” for the obscure 1st album coveted only by pre-sellout fans).
He moved from here to the BBC, working on the early days of the website, and building taxonomies extropolated first from user requests and queries, particularly those of the archetypal Mandy of Bromsgrove, then progressing into the more sophisticated world of search log analysis and content audits. He closed his talk by outlining the increasing complexity of the Guardian’s tagging systems – which have evolved to the stage where they have their own Twitter account.
Martin contrasted the merits of formal user testing of new information products, with all its lab conditioned drawbacks, with the more playful approach of guerilla sampling of unsuspecting idlers in the British Library. Where either of these approaches have been exhausted or neglected, user feedback on the launch of new products can be swift and merciless – viz the sorry tale of the redesigned online Guardian crossword page’s first day in the sun.
The underlying theme of Martin’s talk, implicit in his opening and closing gambits was that information workers, whatever they choose to call themselves, are constantly engaged in balancing customer demands and behaviour with organisational imperatives, and ergonomic system design in its very widest sense. Over- emphasis on user requirements in information architecture can result in the degeneration of underlying structures, and badly designed systems will never be used properly, either by end users or backroom workers – and these are laments familiar to information managers the world over.
If I was feeling very clever, I'd probably come up with some smug parallel with Ranganathan's dimly remembered Five Laws of Library Science, but I don't have the time or space. It would be far more productive to find out more for yourself about Martin's work in his blogs about user experience, journalism and digital media at currybet.net, and on Twitter as @currybet.
Thanks once again to the LIKE collective for a hugely enjoyable and informative event.
- Donald
