And, when companies define their business rules, they are using language to establish how the world will work, long before anyone is explicitly “designing” anything. In my experience, however, more often than not I’ve seen the business side of the organization abdicate much of the responsibility for the rigor of business rules, opting instead to just generally state vague wishes and leave the hard details to IT.
Making complex, pervasive systems work well contextually will require more and better effort from business and design stakeholders in collaboratively composing business rules. That’s because business rules are architecture. They are blueprints—maps—that describe the natural laws of the to-be-made territory. They use language to create molds, which will then be used to cast the gears and armatures of the machinery upon which the business depends.
So, one challenge for information architecture practitioners is to not only understand the end user, but to understand the organization that is making something for the user to begin with. Large organizations especially have trouble with semantic confusion because there are so many different political factions and cultural silos involved. Departments of engineers, marketing professionals, and executive management all tend to understand language from different perspectives. Any user-experience designer who has tried to explain why “research” is necessary, even though the Marketing/Communications department has done lots of “research” already, has experienced the pain of these disconnects.
As information architect Abby Covert says in her book How to Make Sense of Any Mess:
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 our direction.[408]
Meaning is a participatory sport, in which the game can seem completely different depending on the perspective of any given player. But, we can minimize risks if we work to understand the collage of perspectives and learned meanings that will be perceiving the structures we introduce to the world. Semantic information is also the territory. There’s already a map driving the creation of new environment, whether we acknowledge it or not. Semantics are never “just semantics.”
I like the thought of the organization as a medium for understanding—a material we can reframe, recalibrate, refine. This is basically what we’re doing when we introduce new language into organizations; powerful semantic function can get into the body politic and change its shape, like stem cells that grow new bones over time. No joke; I’ve seen it happen!
But even if we don’t change the organization as a whole, we still need to change parts of it enough to accommodate and support the new architectures it needs; otherwise, the new organs are easily rejected, abandoned, or neutralized through assimilation.
* * *
[387] Icons by webalys.com
[388] Interpreted from a version by Abby Covert.
[389] I should mention that Jorge Arango also has a three-part model: Links, Nodes, and Order, that I really like as well. There is no single, right model for all this. I see all models as provisional, contextual, and nested among one another. Jorge’s model is available at http://www.jarango.com/blog/2013/04/07/links-nodes-order/.
[390] Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Philosophy of Mind). London: Oxford University Press, 2010:1145–6, Kindle locations.
[391] ———. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Philosophy of Mind). London: Oxford University Press, 2010:1128–32
[392] It is telling that, in the current move toward “flat” design, it’s the simulated objects such as buttons that are being removed, putting even more weight on labels for establishing invariant structure.
[393] Klyn, Dan. “Understanding Information Architecture.” January 13, 2014 (http://bit.ly/1x5o8Ql).
[394] Citrix. “Most Americans Confused By Cloud Computing According to National Survey” August 28, 2012 (http://bit.ly/125vdXZ).
[395] Greenfield, Adam. “On the ground running: Lessons from experience design.” June 22, 2007 (http://bit.ly/1oqMMvQ).
[396] In previous work, I’ve used “connections” here, but I now think “relationships” is a better way to frame the idea.
[397] Warren, Christina. “New Twitter API Drops Support for RSS, Puts Limits on Third-Party Clients.” Mashable.com Sept 5, 2012 (http://mashable.com/2012/09/05/twitter-api-rss/).
[398] Lambe, Patrick. Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness. Oxford, England: Chandos Publishing, 2007:10.
[399] ———. Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness. Oxford, England: Chandos Publishing, 2007:4.
[400] ———. Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness. Oxford, England: Chandos Publishing, 2007:16.
[401] Somerville, Richard C. J., and Susan Joy Hassol. “Communicating the science of climate change.” Physics Today, October, 2011:51.
[402] The use of the word “terms” as part of a contractual agreement is one of the lovely examples of synecdoche (essentially conflating a signifier with the whole of what it represents) we rely on to both communicate and create our environment.
[403] Klyn, Dan. “Understanding Information Architecture,” January 13, 2014 (http://bit.ly/1x5o8Ql).
[404] Resmini, Andrea, and Luca Rosati. Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2011:66.
[405] ———. Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2011:113.
[406] Conway, Melvin E. “How do Committees Invent?” Datamation April, 1968; 14(5):28–31. (Retrieved 2009-04-05)
[407] Dourish, Paul. What We Talk About When We Talk About Context. 2004.
[408] Covert, Abby. How to Make Sense of Any Mess. (Author) 2014.
Chapter 21. Narratives and Situations
The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms.
—MURIEL RUKEYSER
People Make Sense Through Stories
BEFORE COMPOSING SOMETHING new WE SHOULD UNDERSTAND WHAT IS ALREADY THERE. But we’ve already established that there is no stable, persistent “context” to begin with—that it emerges through action. So, how do we understand the current state if it won’t sit still? The key is in studying the experience from the points of view of the agents involved and how they think and behave. Those points of view provide the dynamic landscape—and the principles we derive from it—that puts everything else into perspective. These agents can be individual users, groups of them, organizations, and even digital actors. Let’s begin with how humans work—and how they understand their experience as narrative. Recall our working definition: context is an agent’s understanding of the relationships between the elements of the agent’s environment.
The environment exerts more control over that understanding and action than we often realize, but that influence over the experience has its limits. Ultimately, the final interpretation and recollection of any experience is up to the individual who has it.
As we learned earlier, a stone lying along a path can be clutter, a tool, or a piece of a wall—it all depends on the context the agent brings to the perception of the stone. People find meaning in the environment even when there is no semantic information there at all: clouds can look like trains and elephants; the burn marks in toast can look like a religious icon; tree branches can look like human arms. The way we perceive our environment in the moment is through information pickup, but the way we understand our experience is through narrative.
Human
s make sense of the world through stories. Unlike our nearest primate cousins, we have the ability to follow a substantial narrative such as in a conventional-length movie. Our brains don’t only react to each moment of action; we can also integrate complex threads of story over a significant period of time.[409] We bring this ability to our own lives and how we find meaning in our actions and experiences. What we do in a given day might or might not have linear causality or rationale. But, we can’t help seeing a narrative (Figure 21-1) when looking back on those disparate events. Our personal stories are what we construct for ourselves in hindsight.
Figure 21-1. Narrative is a function of the agent’s action and perception in the environment
Consciousness is not a single entity; it involves many processes and specialized systems across the entire organism, many of which aren’t obviously connected.[410] Remember, we perceive-and-act by using soft assembly (Chapter 4): our bodies are full of tiny sensemaking systems and feedback loops for which there is no empirically identifiable “boss” in charge. It’s the coalescence of all those disparate systems that makes it possible for us to perceive ourselves as discrete, coherent selves with personal histories. Consciousness emerges because we have the ability to interpret our experience, reconstituting it into a narrative whole.
A lot of this story-weaving happens in what we colloquially call “daydreaming.” It turns out daydreaming is a complex family of psychological activities that take up much more of our lives than we realize, and could even be the mind’s default state.[411] Stories, and their indirect lessons, have even been shown to be a superior way of teaching children new behaviors than just-the-facts instruction.[412]
Although it’s true that most of our actions in a given moment aren’t explicitly conscious, our later recall of those actions tends to be a conscious, narrative-weaving act, even if it’s a split second afterward. In fact, the effect left on us from the pain or pleasure of an experience is largely reconstructed from only parts of what we actually experienced, according to what’s been called the Peak and End Rule: “Global evaluations are predicted with high accuracy by a weighted combination of the most extreme affect recorded during the episode and the affect recorded during the terminal moments of the episode.”[413] For example, if asked to rate our enjoyment of a movie every few minutes as we’re watching it, the average of our ratings during the movie doesn’t necessarily correspond to how we rate the movie after it’s over. So, we might see a film that’s actually quite mediocre, but rate it highly if it has a great middle and ending. This effect can work the other way, as well—a really crummy ending can drastically harm our remembered experience of an otherwise excellent film.
Other research has qualified this finding: even though the emotional effect is strong, it doesn’t mean we remember the facts of the peak and end any better than the rest of the experience—and, the memory is more affected by the end than the peak.[414] Those strong emotional points, and strong emotion in general, can shape and distort our narratives in relation to actual facts. According to one neuroscientist, “We all have narratives....We’re all creating stories. Our lives are stories in that sense.”[415] Initial, direct perception occurs outside this narrative construct, but it generates and feeds the narrative; by the time we are aware of and reflecting upon any perception, it’s part of our narrative.
Context emerges out of action and sensemaking. But that doesn’t mean the environmental elements we design don’t have any structural, narrative influence. Even though we can’t literally reach into a person’s consciousness and meticulously create an experience, we can definitely shape the environment in a way that all but guarantees one sort of an experience over another. People don’t visit Disney World and mistake it for Las Vegas; and they don’t visit Amazon and mistake it for the Library of Congress. The structures of those environments, the combinations of what actions they enable, make them places that nudge people into particular sorts of experiences that meet specific needs.
Still, ultimately, information architectures invite agents into a dance with the environment, in which the outcome is always unique, no matter how immersive or carefully sculpted the structures and rules we create.
Intentions and Intersections
I remember going to Disney World with my parents when I was around seven years old. At the time, I was crazy for space stuff—astronauts, moon landings, everything. I’d heard of Disney World’s Space Mountain and couldn’t wait to see it in person. This was the 1970s, so there was no website to read about the attractions; our only knowledge was based on a few scraps gathered from pictures on TV. My parents and I assumed it was going to be like an indoor museum of space-themed exhibits. After all, what else would be in a big futuristic dome-like structure (see Figure 21-2) like that?
Figure 21-2. Space Mountain: an enclosed environment, with few external cues about its internal structures. Photo by author
My dad was the one who took me inside. After waiting in line for a while and getting strapped into a rocket-shaped rail car, imagine our surprise when we took off at high speed through a twisting, jarring, and nearly dark roller coaster—my dad gripping my waist, afraid I’d slip out into the void. It was thrilling, but not what we were expecting. When we finally disembarked, stunned and bewildered, we wondered how we hadn’t realized what we were getting ourselves into.
I tell this story to illustrate the slippery relationship between experience and design. Space Mountain is an exceedingly immersive environment, purposefully designed, and structurally linear. If anything could exert complete control over an experience, it would be something like that ride. And yet, my dad and I didn’t experience it in quite the way Disney’s Imagineers intended. We misunderstood the context of place, and misread signifiers—semantic functions and physical affordances—until it was too late to back out. (Of course, when I was older, I couldn’t wait to go back and ride it again!)
What we design is environmental (Figure 21-3), and the environment exerts control over what is possible to perceive and act upon. We didn’t emerge from Space Mountain recollecting it as a water ride, or a rock concert—that would’ve been nonsense. But, we did manage to slip through an unintentional loophole, because our expectations remained unchanged until we were zooming through the dark.
Figure 21-3. Designed environments should meet people where they are, and supplement their narrative with what they to take away from the experience
Context involves the stories people bring along with them. Their recollections of prior experience, combined with their “feel” for where they’re headed (whether an explicit goal or a tacitly meandering direction), are part of the context for which we design. As much as we’d like to think that we can completely control the experience and reset the users’ expectations, we can’t fully control their narrative. We can only influence it, nudge it, with environmental conditions—sometimes significantly, and sometimes only marginally, but never completely. For my dad and me, roller coasters were always outdoors, and enclosed attractions were always more subdued, based on our learned experience.
Of course, I love Space Mountain and I hope Disney never retires it. It’s a thrill ride, and it did its job. However, when people need an environment to meet the expectations of invariance that it signals, only to find out it’s not what it seems, the result is real damage—to people’s trust, or worse.
The Tales Organizations Tell
Users aren’t the only ones with a narrative perspective, or who work their way through an environment in an embodied, tacit manner. Organizations are made of people, so when all those different individual perspectives are added together, an aggregate narrative emerges. Or, many narratives emerge from subcultures in the organization, which frequently conflict with one another. Often, you can see the narratives rubbing against one another in the structural distortions and fissures of the environments the organization creates.
Take, for example, the global navigation structure for the Starbucks website shown in Figure 21-4.[
416]
Figure 21-4. The Starbucks website global navigation menu
Even before opening each top-level mega-menu, it is clear that there are several cultures within the company that are trying to express themselves within the “top” structure of the site. Why is there Coffee but also Coffeehouse? Because Coffeehouse is actually a label for Starbucks’ foray into entertainment media, part of its attempt to make itself a lifestyle brand that goes beyond coffee and snacks. It borrows from cultural affectation more than from clearly signified indication of its contents. What is Menu? It’s about the food and drink available at the physical Starbucks shops, which some might think of as more related to the Coffeehouse menu item, but the relationship is muddled.
Card is about the ways in which customers can use the object of “card” to have a “rewards” account with Starbucks, but it’s also about gift cards, which are not the same as “rewards membership” cards. This distinction is not easy to discern, even after reading the site’s content. One part of the company is pushing a rewards program; another part is pushing the ability to transact within the nested structure of a long-term “account” relationship with Starbucks, and another is managing the product/service of gift cards. It turns out, however, that gift cards and rewards cards are not well connected in this service ecosystem. We haven’t even touched on the public-relations-driven priorities of the Responsibility area, or the confusing relationship between Shop and Menu (am I in a Starbucks store of sorts while I’m on the site?).
Understanding Context Page 38
