[Sigia-l] Less Spatiality, More Semantics?

[Thomas Vander Wal]

On 3/25/03 10:54 AM, "Peter Merholz" <peterme at peterme.com> wrote:

> The session was also the most provocative for me. I ended up contextualizing
> much of the rest of the conference in what I heard there.
> 
>> After mulling this over, I've decided I don't really understand what Andrew
>> 'meant' (heh) by his use of the word
>> 'semantics' AT ALL.
> 
> Andrew was careful to distinguish spatial processing from semantic
> processing. He acknowledged that both are important, but that, currently, we
> as IAs favor supporting spatial processing, largely because it is easy.

I agree that it is easy to think of navigation in a spatial metaphor, but it
is also not that greatly helpful as it has tied most of us as IAs to an
approach that does not describe what we are trying to accomplish.  We are
trying to build information structures and interfaces that ease the user's
ability to find the information they are seeking.  The user is in all
intents and purposes (literally) trying to draw information to their screen.
The way we think about aiding a user is very different if we think of
navigation and way finding, it works better for smaller sites that have a
narrow and well defined purpose.

> What Andrew means by spatial processing, as I understand, has to do
> primarily with the notion that we "navigate" information, and that we have
> to create tools (navigation bars, breadcrumbs, explicit hierarchies) to
> assist people in navigating it.

> In doing so, we don't address the separate, and possibly deeper, issue of
> *semantic* processing. We're not very good at helping people deal with the
> meaning of information, and capitalize on how people process semantically.

I agree that is what is done with navigation, but often we (as IAs) try to
fit information into navigational structures.  We have run into problems
with this when we try to explain this to clients and business and decision
maker as to why we are building taxonomies, thesauri, faceted systems.  We
also have not had an easy way to understand and discern what is best for our
projects.  In the simplest sense we are trying to help the user and the
information be drawn together.  The user more specifically is trying to get
the information on the screen in front of herself.  She does not go out and
track the information down.

Why is this literal difference important?  As IAs we should also be thinking
about what the user is going to do with the information?  If we start
thinking that the user is attracting information to themselves then we can
get better think what the user can do with that information from the device
they have drawn the information to.  The cognitive (linguistic, rhetorical,
and preconceived structure of the information), sensory (visual and auditory
appeal), mechanical (digital aggregators and site scrapers), and physical
(what type of device is being used? Is it a small mobile device (limited
storage, screen size, low bandwidth)?) all play an important role in the
user's access to information.  The navigation metaphor greatly limits how we
think about solving these issues as they arise.  The navigation devices only
work with browsing for information, but similar problems exist when solving
search and the containers that information is housed (proprietary documents
to open data structures)

The Xerox Parc folks have done a wonderful job at helping us think more
correctly with the advent of Information Foraging (and its sub-set Scent of
Information).  The attraction of the scent is important to the user it is
the metaphorical device used to describe how the user recognizes
similarities with what is in front of themselves and what they are seeking
(even when the user does not know what they are seeking).
 
> I felt this tied right into Mark Bernstein's section on his panel (as well
> as his later talk), where he encourages IAs to acknowledge the messiness and
> complexity of information, and not to obscure this with an oversimplified
> structure designed to ease navigation and promote findability. His point is
> that these attempts at easing navigation actually make it harder for people
> to find stuff, and for them to draw understanding from the material, because
> these navigational devices obscure the actual relationships of the
> information.
> 
> A big theme of Mark's talk(s) was "multivalence is not a vice," which I also
> think ties into this quite neatly. In an effort to achieve clarity and
> understandability, we often attempt to reduce our presentation of
> information so that everything we offer has a single, obvious purpose. Mark
> finds such reduction foolish, claiming that there's no information that
> isn't multivalent, that couldn't be used to support a variety of purposes,
> and that we need to acknowledge, and, perhaps, celebrate that.

Agreed.  

> One thing that both Andrew and Mark commented on is that what they're
> talking about isn't easy to grasp, present, develop methods for. They're
> challenging us to tackle a difficult issue, instead of relying simply on the
> more facile crutch of just spatiality.

I not only agree that our roles and tasks are difficult, but understanding
what we do as we sell our trade to others is an even harder task.  I have
had good luck selling the needs for IA using the Model of Attraction, but
also using it as a model to think about solutions.  The MoA is still in
development and it is still extremely broad and high-level.

Much of what we do as IAs is based on attraction: Discover and build
categories structures (drawing like information together); Uncover user
types and commonalities (how users are a like for personas); Build thesauri
(draw users to possible results); etc.  When one of my current clients
wanted to redesign their Intranet (used by 3,000 people) they knew they
wanted to restructure the look of the site as well as needed to rethink some
navigation issues.  I suggested we spent time to learn how the users thought
about the information.  The concept was tough to relate until I started
talking about the initial card-sorting as a method to see what the user's
were attracted to (and thought the current terminology for high level links
meant) and how they saw the information groups together based on the
likeness of the items.  I used a metaphor of thinking of the topic
categories as magnets. Not only did they think the exercise would be very
helpful, but thought it would be worth spending the time doing (moving the
client from understanding a concept to wanting to implement (or pay to
implement) is often a difficult task).  We discussed building a thesaurus to
help search as well  as augmented search results (best bets) as ways to
better attract the user and his desire to find information that is more
difficult to find.

Not only do we need a better method to work through browsing and search, but
we need to think about how the user will use the information an keep the
information near herself.  I have been describing the user as having a rough
cloud of information that she wants to keep attracted to herself.

All the best,
Thomas