analytics
Time-based analytics
An Article by Ryan SingerAnalytics apps don't tell you much about usage behavior. You might be able to see how many users performed an event, or how many times they did it. But none of the analytics packages out there are good at showing you how often people do things. Are they using to-dos once a week? Every day? Only signing into the app once a month but happily paying for years?
Time matters. You can't understand usage without time.
Collaborative Information Architecture at Scale
An Article by Brandon DornHere I describe an approach for defining new information architectures for large organizational websites managed by many stakeholder groups.
Broadly speaking, there are four general phases to the approach:
- Auditing. Begin by immersing yourself in existing content and encourage stakeholders to adopt a critical, audience-minded perspective of their content.
- Diagramming. Work with stakeholders to develop new conceptual categories that better serve audiences and organizational direction.
- Elaborating. Think through content in detail and test new categories against specific instances and edge cases.
- Producing. Prepare content teams for production using a shared database of new sitemap pages and editorial considerations that you’ve developed incrementally.
Sermon for WIAD Bristol 2021
The language itself has been weaponized
It’s quite difficult, to fight back against the seeming wisdom of axiomatic “truths,” when the language itself has been weaponized through the power of pattern. Through rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and consonance.
The last time I was in England was at the invitation of Nomensa, to give a talk at a conference wherein I encouraged the audience to discard an axiom that I feel has done users of the English language more harm than good through endless and glib repetitions.
Like “Curiosity Killed The Cat,” “You Are Not Your User” sounds so good that we keep on saying it, without appreciating what we’re reifying through repetition. The pleasure of repetition, the pleasure of pattern matching, the pleasingness of Kuh Kuh Kuh consonants on the one hand, and of the round vowelly Yuh Yuh Yuh on the other make these things we say seem true because they sound and feel so good to say.
One Of Us
That’s the primary difference between an axiom like “Curiosity Killed The Cat” and an axiom like “You Are Not Your User. ” The former rings true in common experience. It’s test-able, like striking a tuning fork or dangling a bit of yarn in front of a kitten. The latter is just some stuff that somebody said.
Sometimes, axiomatic sayings like “You Are Not Your User” no longer have a who that’s saying them. They cease being an actual instruction, and instead serve as a kind of identity, to identify the person who’s repeating the axiom as One Of Us.
The technical term for when an axiom devolves into an ID card is shibboleth: a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.
You and your user are one
In the case of the seeming egalitarianism and beneficence of the voice from the cloud that says “You Are Not Your User,” what I hear in that voice is the ringing of a cash register, and the creaking of the crank on the side of a box that software development efforts disappear into, and that money comes out of.
A mechanism that would seize up instantly if some still small voice were to propose the opposite of what the thunder says: that you and your user are one.