Information architects are inveterate systems thinkers. In the Web’s early days, we were the folks who focused less on pages than on the relationships between pages. Today, we continue to design organization, navigation, and search systems as integral parts of the whole. Of course, the context of our practice has shifted. Increasingly, we must design for experiences across channels. Mobile and social are just the beginning. Our future-friendly, cross-channel information architectures need to address the full spectrum of platforms, devices, and media (Peter Morville).

The is a quote from The System of Information Architecture, the editorial of the current issue of the Journal of Information Architecture (Issue 2, vol. 3) — the same issue that has our “Brief history”. Morville clearly expresses the purpose of the reconstruction we have made in our paragraph.

In our perspective, the evolution of information architecture is characterized by a progressive widening of perspective, from the single page, to the website, to the system — a collection of several channels and devices that participate, from the user’s point of view, in the same experience. This roughly comes down to three identifiable movements:

1. IA as a synonym of information design (Wurman), where the focus is on the single item or page
2. classical IA (Rosenfeld and Morville), where the structure and navigation of the whole website become central
3. pervasive IA, where the structure flows across channels.

Read A Brief History of Information Architecture at the Journal of IA.

The city of today is not only a thriving social and physical infrastructure, but a complex network of communicating pervasive information architectures which produce, process, exchange, use, and re-use information.

As more and more mobile devices and intelligent appliances are deployed, cities turn into places where “both the urban fabric as a whole, and discrete objects within it, have been endowed with the ability to gather, process, display, transmit, receive, store and take action on information” (Greenfield). They are getting smart, they are becoming sentient, they interact.

Challenges for user experience

They also have a potential to confuse, frustrate, and provide inconsistent user experience to all of us as we try to make sense of things while using different combinations of websites, smartphones, real-time displays, street or shop signage, and good old paper-based materials to accomplish day-to-day tasks. Think of getting an appointment for some physicals at the local hospital and consider how many unrelated systems, interfaces, and environments you are bound to interact with before you know if you need to cut on those cupcakes.

Our talk will initially frame the discussion of how to design for distributed, city-wide services within the boundaries of pervasive information architectures in cross-channel user experiences, explaining

• where the challenges for information architecture lay
• what they are
• how pervasive information architectures work in concrete
• how we should design for them and why.

Benefits of a seamless cross-channel approach for user participation and consumption will be offered for discussion, as much as possible design pitfalls and shortcomings designers need to be aware of. We will introduce the concept of resilience, the capability of an information space to shape and adapt itself to the different range of users, needs, and seeking strategies, and explain how it can be employed to improve our architectures.

Examples and case studies

We will then offer insights of some case studies — included one on the design of a region-wide local transport system — where a pervasive, cross-channel approach was used to improve the final user experience. We are going to highlight the initial status quo and some of the project’s goals and motivations, such as the desire to reuse already available components, both internal and top-down (for example data on traffic) and external and bottom-up (such as georeferenced social networks). The idea is that users have not to be coaxed into yet another platform but rather helped make sense of existing ones as part of a single experience; and that the final outcome would be a sustainable, dynamic process which would impose low technological and financial barriers to its adoption, open to third-parties for further development.

Draft deliverables for the whole process and for one of the artifacts part of the final pervasive information architecture will be showed, explained and commented upon.

Further readings

The website of the EUROIA conference

• Coward & Salingaros, The Information Architecture of Cities
• Dekker et al. City Crawlers Berlin (in preparation)
• Greenfield, A. The City Is Here For You To Use (in preparation)
• Institute For The Future, Cities in Transition Forecast & Scenarios
• Institute For The Future, The Future of Cities, Information, and Inclusion
• Khan et al. Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series
• McCullough, M. Digital Ground
• Mitchell, W.J. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn
• Mitchell, W.J. Me++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City

Multi-channel is a way of delivering services that allows users / customers to interact with the system through a number of different channels: the peculiarity of multi-channel is that in any of these channels, you can perform a varying number of tasks from start to finish without resorting to any other channel.

Thus, for instance, you can perform a transfer using a home banking system via web, or a phone banking channel, through a mobile application, or walking to the closest branch. In each case you can complete the entire transaction inside one unique channel, without necessity to move toward another channel.

Cross-media (or transmedia)

Most of the discussion on cross-media we owe to Henri Jenkins. His basic stance is that cross-media products can be experienced as a whole (if ever) only across a number of environments, media, and channels. Contrary to multi-channel strategy, in cross-channel encourages or forces the migration from one channel to another — this is necessary to complete a task or experience a product.

Phenomena like Matrix or Lost are excellent examples of this strategy: TV or movie fictions, video-games, websites, spin-off and so on all constitutes a system where each part / channel is deliberately designed to allow only a partial experience of the whole. With constant and more or less explicit references and linked to the other channels. In other words, cross-media is expressly designed to be experienced fragmentarily: no single medium provides the full package. Furthermore, there is an emphasis on media-related experiences and consumption (movies, music, tv).

Cross-channel

Cross-channel offers a different stance from both multi-channel and cross-media: the single channel might or might not offer a complete entry point into the ecosystem, but the fact is that most of the users / customers will not stay in that channel from point A to point Z. In other words, in a ubiquitous ecology some channels do allow users to complete their experiential journey without resorting to other channels, in contrast to cross-media, but that is not going to happen very often (or at all, in contrast to multi-channel). This is where the specific nature of cross-channel lies, and where the challenges for design reside.

You can read more about this in a recent entry in Andrea’s blog.

Further readings

1. Drew Davidson et al. 2010. Cross-Media Communications: An Introduction to the Art of Creating Integrated Media Experiences. ETC Press.
2. Jenkins, H. 2009. The Revenge of the Origami Unicorn: Seven Principles of Transmedia Storytelling. Confessions of an Aka-Fan, December, 12.
3. Resmini, A. and Rosati, L. 2009. Information Architecture for Ubiquitous Ecologies. doi>10.1145/1643823.1643859. Also available at http://andrearesmini.com/blog/ia-for-ubiquitous-ecologies.

What they outline above can be easily said to be the main take-away of the book: users, customers are interacting with the brand and have little interest in the single channel they are using at any given time. “The whole of the experience should be greater than the sum of its parts”, as Jess McMullin and Samantha Starmer put it.

Pervasive information architectures are consistent information spaces that are not limited to the Web, but bridge across all active communication channels for a given company, product, or service. In the book, we promote a heuristic approach to design them, based on 5 related indicators: place-making, consistency, resilience, correlation, and reduction.  Two of these, namely consistency and correlation (respectively Chapters 5 and 8 of the book), are those which directly impact on the idea of simpler, seamless human-information interactions in the retail process. This is how we define them:

1. consistency is the capability of pervasive information architectures to suit the purposes, the contexts and the people they are designed for (internal consistency); and to maintain the same logic along the different media, environments and times they encompass (external consistency);
2. correlation is the capability of pervasive information architectures to suggest relevant connections among pieces of information, services, and goods to help users achieve explicit goals or stimulate latent needs. We distinguish between internal correlation, which promotes semantic proximity between similar items belonging to the same channel, and external correlation, which promotes semantic proximity between items belonging to different channels but connected to the same task, process, or people.

Both heuristics serve the purpose of making experiences across channels better working parts of the whole, from different angles. Where consistency stresses the need for getting away from the idea of simple, ever-stable categorization as the holy grail of IA, correlation actively suggests that connecting loosely joined pieces is the only way to make complexity work for the users. Properly designed external correlation allows for example users to commence a task in any one channel and seamlessly complete it in another one, with minimal cognitive or logic dissonances. And, more practically, to retrieve and exploit pieces of information they acquired – or results of tasks they performed, of course – in channel “a” when they move to another channel “b“, and so on.

NCR uses a slightly different terminology, but it seems we share a common vision. A few excerpts from their White Paper probably better clarify this:

Confusion

Even though they are empowered with greater access to information and multiple channels for dealing with businesses, consumers often are confounded by communications and interactions that lack consistency and coherence. [...]

The research findings show that nearly two-thirds of consumers use the Internet more frequently to research products and prices. [...]

But these same consumers also express dissatisfactions. They note, for example, that information they need from retailers is available on some channels, such as websites, but not in others, such as stores. Or that they receive information that isn’t relevant. They often feel bombarded with information and find it difficult to get consistent information (pp. 2, 5).

Customization

The research also shows that consumers are interested in a more personalized shopping experience, but they want control over that personalization.

[...] Brand preferences, receipt type, and food/drink choices at restaurants are also top of mind, along with personal shopping lists and being recognized by name (pp. 2, 6).

Across channel

Critically, the research reveals that consumers want a seamless, consistent experience across channels when they interact with businesses.

[...] Organizations that evolve their business model to converge channels and touchpoints, while providing a consistent experience and control over personalization, are more likely to earn greater consumer confidence and loyalty (p. 2).

Further readings

Whitepapers

• NCR 2010 Global Consumer Research
• Converging the Retail Experience to Connect with the Changing Shopper

Websites

• NCR Converged retailing
• Retail TouchPoints

Pervasive information architecture: the CHUbe model

The workshop explains how to design ubiquitous ecologies and pervasive information architectures through an iterative, holistic, imprecise process. The framework consists of a heuristic methodology based on what we call the CHU model or CHU cube (friends and family call it CHUbe), comprising:

• Channels, the different media, devices, or environments
• Heuristics, our design guidelines or indicators
• User-tasks, the various actions that the system allows or encourages.

Let us tell you one thing: it will be a prime, but this won’t be the first time we give this workshop. We are already working on some of the materials we assembled from our own professional practice through the years and on the sketches we drew while we were writing the book, building a storyline and turning some examples into exercises. Then I will be running tests for most of March, trying out different combinations and trying to assess what works best, what makes understanding how to design pervasive information architectures easiest and comfortable.

If the final structure holds, once we are done with introducing ourselves, we will have a brief cross-channel surprise experiment, and then we will introduce the idea of IA as a pervasive layer, and its design methodology, with a few stories from the book which will explain what the experiment was all about in the first place.

Then we’ll get our hands dirty with a full-blown design exercise (or exercises) meant to acquaint us with the five heuristics (place-making, consistence, resilience, reduction, correlation), the CHU cube model, and what it means to design an information architecture which is successfully cross-channel. We will use pen and paper and plenty of coffee, and the only skill that is really required to get out of the workshop room with some valuable take-away is that you bear with our accent.

Register for the workshop »

From Homer to Joyce to Borges, Eco explores the crucial issue of the coherence of a classification system at the crossroads of epistemology, semiology and information science.

A must-read for every information architects.

The Infinity of Lists

Salience and Taxonomy Change

• Broad Street Pump Outbreak
• John Snow and the removal of the Broad Street pump handle