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Information architecture

A plea for the lost practice of information architecture — Vicky Teinaki

A pile of well-known information architecture books: How to Make Sense of Any Mess, Information Architecture (x 2), Design By Definition, Information Ecology, with a toy dinosaur

I was sad to learn earlier that Vicky Teinaki has died. Vicky had been a designer for a few different government departments and public sector organisations.

I didn’t know her well. But I have read her blog posts for years, and I was delighted to encounter her in meetings about structured information since I joined the civil service a few months ago. I was struck by how she demonstrated both fresh thinking and wisdom.

Just a few days after I started in my information architecture role at the Scottish Government, she published this excellent article about the discipline.

It serves multiple purposes expertly. It is a comprehensive but concise history of information architecture, tracking its major milestones over the past 20 years.

Vicky argued that information architecture had become diminished when it got absorbed into user experience, and then got forgotten entirely when it suddenly became easy to churn out high-fidelity visual prototypes without tackling underlying structural decisions.

The post is also an incredible bibliography of key information architecture resources. I have turned to this blog post numerous times over the past six months, and I know I will continue to do so.

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Business — User experience — User research

A basic diagram of a desert, with multiple sand dunes visible in the distance. The furthest-away sand dune has a blue flag on top

I have long been an advocate of agile ways of working. One of the things that originally drew me to user experience was the opportunity to have evidence-based ways of understanding the changes you need to make. So I was surprised whenever I encountered people who believed that user experience methods ran counter to the principles of agile.

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Accessibility — User experience

Work:

Getting to the root causes of usability errors and accessibility problems — User Vision

Perception–Cognition–Action (PCA) analysis is a method of uncovering the root causes of usability errors and accessibility challenges in systems. By understanding these underlying issues, designs can be enhanced in order to avoid hazardous situations and cater to a wide array of user needs.

The approach is particularly recommended for medical devices, and is described in the international standard IEC 62366 on the application of usability engineering to medical devices. But this powerful technique can go so much further than that. It can help us understand how to improve usability and accessibility for a wide range of products.

My article for the User Vision website describes how the Perception–Cognition–Action approach works, how it aligns with established accessibility best practice, and how we at User Vision have applied it to transform a complex medical system used by both patients and healthcare practitioners.

I will also be speaking about the technique at this week’s UX Edinburgh meetup, which is an accessibility special in recognition of Global Accessibility Awareness Day. If you are around on Thursday 16 May at 18:30, it would be great to see you there.

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Social science — User experience — User research

Breakfast briefing — Behavioural science: Approaches to improve user experience — User Vision

Join me for a virtual breakfast session where you will learn about the links between behavioural science and user experience. We will also introduce some behavioural science frameworks and models you can adopt to improve your user research and design work.

It takes place online on Tuesday 7 March at 8:30am.

Update: Slides for this session are now available:

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Content design — User experience — Web

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Unlabelled venn diagram

Today I have started a new job. But while I’m looking forward, I have also been reflecting, as this moment marks my first real move away from higher education. Despite the differing natures of the three organisations I worked for, there were many parallels across them.

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Economics — Social science — User experience

Work:

Nudge in user experience — Website and Communications Blog

Over the summer my user experience team at the University of Edinburgh had the wonderful opportunity to work with a Behavioural Insights (Nudge) Intern. There are lots of parallels between behavioural science and human-centred approaches. Nudge models give us the opportunity to bring an extra level of formality to our approaches.

Working with a behavioural science specialist has brought things full circle for me. My first association with the University of Edinburgh was when I studied economics here for my undergraduate degree.

And it really is full circle, because this was my last blog post as an employee of the University of Edinburgh. I’ll publish more about that news shortly.