My current thinking came to me in a two minute stretch while showering yesterday, so take it for what it's worth. (Man, it was a nice shower though!) But the following concept seems pretty low-cost and, potentially, useful in both symbolic and concrete ways. I'd love your feedback on it:

How it'd work

• A "friend of Rosenfeld Media" who's a native speaker of a non-English language would volunteer to do the following:
  • Translate our tweets and post them to a language-specific RM account (e.g., "@RM_espanol").
  • Translate a page on the RM site (e.g., http://rosenfeldmedia.com/espanol/") that includes our mission, a list of our products, and links to those products on the RM site and, if available, from publishers who've translated our books (currently many of our titles have our are being translated into Chinese and Korean). Even better, translate each product's brief description.
  • Facilitate communications between RM and non-English speakers by serving as a go-between/translator.
• The generous friend would in turn receive:
  • Copies of all of our books and webinars.
  • Prominent mention on the page for that language.
  • Our undying gratitude.
  • The good feeling of helping connect their fellow language-speakers with more good UX content.

Why to do it

• It's a low-cost and potentially high-impact way to connect and engage with UX practitioners with whom we have minimal contact with right now. We're a small company, but we do genuinely care about non-English speakers; this might be a nice way to show it.
• It has SEO benefits--more non-English speakers will find our products.
• It's nice for the publishers we currently partner with on translations, and may be a nice incentive for other publishers who are considering working with us to translate our titles in other languages.
• We'll learn more about new markets through both direct engagement and analytics, and might learn that there are certain markets that we should be more involved in.

Why not to do it

• Our books are written in English; will providing information about our books in other languages actually increase our sales? (BTW, we don't really make any money on the sales of our translated titles.)
• A volunteer could be a poor translator or act maliciously in a language that we don't know; we would be pretty vulnerable.

What do you think?

That said, despite some initial skepticism I am very impressed by the company. Although I'm not familiar with the salary and benefits package they're offering, I'm sure it's reasonably good, as they've managed to attract some really smart and highly motivated people.

And PayPal is beginning to tackle some really meaty IA challenges that include:

• Centering their design efforts on a comprehensive user mental model (hooray for mental models!)
• Figuring out and operationalizing the measurement of their site's findability and comprehension
• Grappling with developing an information architecture for a truly global audience
• Moving to a new content management platform (that alone should keep an army of information architects busy)

There's lots more going on there; I can imagine no shortage of interesting IA work in PayPal's future.

So why was I skeptical early on? Well, my initial experiences taking payments via PayPal (for IAI membership dues, many years ago) were not so good. The UX has gotten much better, but there is still obviously much room for improvement (I'm not sure who that wouldn't be true of). But my latest round of first-hand experience makes me hopeful; since setting it set up on Rosenfeld Media's site, about 25% of our customers immediately started paying via PayPal.

Surprisingly, PayPal has made this progress despite its culture of data-driven decision-making. PayPal's senior leadership comes from the worlds of banking and financial services, and as you might guess, these aren't the kinds of people who are typically comfortable with investing in areas—like UX—with a hazy return on investment. Yet they've done just that; in fact, I've never worked with a company that had staffed so many smart people to tackle user research, web analytics, and market research. It's really an impressive group.

They're also not a risk-averse company. X.com is PayPal's effort to operate as a platform for developers. When millions of people are using your services to move their money, it's, umm, unsettling to imagine opening things up a bit to perfect strangers. Yet PayPal is doing just that, and the impact could be revolutionary (imagine coding in ways to accept payments within that next game UI you design).

In short, I like the people, I like the work they're tackling, and I like the company's overall approach. So I hope you'll consider applying for the job, or encouraging others to do so.

You can learn about the workshop by reading the UIE's description and by watching the three minute preview (via SlideShare):

The regular price is $129, but use code LOU to take $40 and get lifetime access to the recording. Of course, the price includes the live version, when you can to get all your pals into a room to listen, watch, ask questions, and generally harass me during the discussion section.

I'll keep teaching those workshops, but something's telling me that it'd be a good idea to create a workshop simply on Information Architecture. Not necessarily for the enterprise, and not just about search. Just IA.

I've got a bunch of ideas on what I might cover, but before getting into them in detail, I'd really appreciate your suggestions on what you think I should teach. Here are the ground rules:

• Format: Like my other workshops, it'll run a day long, with lots of discussion and hands-on exercises.
• Audience: I'll target beginning and intermediate information architects.
• Caveats: I'm not going to teach wireframing and sitemapping. There are a zillion better places to get these kinds of commodity skills. Besides, I'll likely include a copy of the polar bear book in the price of admission.

So: what are the critical information architecture concepts or skills that you (or your staff) need? Please comment here; I'll randomly select one of the commenters and send him or her a signed copy of PB3 (to be eligible, please make an actual suggestion). Thanks!

I grappled with this issue six years ago while consulting for another multinational client, blogging about it here, here, and here (these posts are especially notable for the incredibly wise comments). Unfortunately, I've not had much opportunity to work in this space since then. In the interim, I was hoping that some brilliant cosmopolitan information architect (Peter van Dijck? Livia Labate? Jorge Arango?) would have figured this space out, but those folks are wicked busy. After some limited searching, I'm not sure we're that much further along than we were in 2004.

So in the interest of resurrecting a six-year old conversation, here are some questions. I plan to use these to get my client to think strategically about the challenge of developing a multi-lingual, multi-cultural, and multi-regional information architecture. Being the information architect that I am, naturally I categorized them. Please chime in with your own suggestions...

Language

• When a user visits an organization's web site, should he expect to access content in his native language?
• Which languages are most common to users?
• Does that organization operate in its own "master" language?
• Which languages have the greatest strategic value to the organization? Which would simply be nice to support? Which aren't a priority at all?
• Does the information architecture's native language (e.g., label lengths might be quite different, or might not translate at all) translate well into other important languages? Are there other semantic issues to consider?

Geography

• Are there geographic regions (e.g., countries, states/provinces, municipalities) that are important to users? Do they self-identify by any sort of geographic region when they use the organization's site, or does it matter at all to them?
• Are there geographic regions (e.g., countries, states/provinces, municipalities, sales territories) that are important to the organization?
• Why are these important (e.g., legal issues, tax collections, sales territories)?
• What geopolitical disputes (e.g., China and Taiwan) might impact the information architecture?

Culture

• Are there cultural issues that impact how users interact with online content in general?
• Are there cultural issues that impact how users prefer to interact with this specific type of organization or industry in particular?
• Does the existing information architecture's structure work well in other cultures (e.g., one culture might value hierarchical breadth over hierarchical depth)?

Confluence

• Are there intersections of any of geography, language, and culture that stand out and merit special attention (e.g., Quebecois, Malay-speaking Singaporeans)?
• How does the organization define the objects where these issues intersect? As "locales"?
• Conversely, how does it define "locale" (the standard term for such an object; typically a pairing of language and country)?

The organization

• How is comprehension of the organization impacted by language/geography/culture?
• How about its products? Its services?
• What resources is it currently devoting to i18n and l10n? And where have these efforts begun (e.g., with content management)?
• Is there an emphasis on i18n rather than l10n, or vice versa?
• Does the organization consider a locale the same as a market? How are the latter defined today the organization?

The organization's content and information architecture

• Are there specific products, services, and/or content areas that merit l10n? Put differently, are there certain products and services that are especially relevant for specific locales? Or not?
• How might these be prioritized?
• How do users find their way to an appropriate locale (or how should they)?
• Where should they find their way to an appropriate locale (e.g., main page, landing pages, critical pages deep in the site)?
• Are there other areas of the site that should make clear that different language/culture/geographic options are available, and provide those navigational "switching" options?

Many thanks to Organic's Anthony Viviano for the opportunity!

• Robert Barlow-Busch
• Steve Baty
• Scott Berkun
• Sarah Bloomer
• Peter Bogaards
• Cennydd Bowles
• Carl Collins
• Christian Crumlish
• Rob Enslin
• Will Evans
• Karl Fast
• Ian Fenn
• Nick Finck
• Gerry Gaffney
• Whitney Hess
• Peter Jones
• Jan Jursa
• Lyle Kantrovich
• Katie Koch
• Jon Kolko
• Dave Malouf
• Jess McMullin
• Rachel Peters
• Andy Polaine
• Alice Preston
• Whitney Quesenbery
• Ginny Redish
• Andreas Resmini
• Lou Rosenfeld
• Dan Saffer
• Will Sansbury
• Dennis Schleicher
• David Sherwin
• Carolyn Snyder
• Eric St. Onge
• Mark Vander Beeken
• Thomas Vander Wal
• Chauncey Wilson
• Christina Wodtke
• Luke Wroblewski

Some listed disagreed with their inclusion (myself included; hard for me to read much more than the books Rosenfeld Media publishes!).

But there you have it: these are, apparently, the most well-read UXers out there. Feel free to suggest additions, of course. Better yet, suggest a better methodology for answering the question.

Speaking of which, why did I ask this question? More on that later; I'm not completely sure I know the answer yet, but it'll likely have something to do with UX publishing.

For the publisher, it's the conference bookseller. Granted, there's little money in it for the bookseller, and that's probably why you've noticed fewer and fewer of them at the conferences you regularly attend.

But still, I hate'em: they demand a 40% discount from the publisher, sell on consignment, communicate poorly, and are notoriously slow at paying (if they pay at all) and at returning unsold books. They know little if anything about the books, the event, or its attendees. Worse for the publisher, they work differently enough at each event to totally confound the publisher who hopes to do things the same way for all events.

Cut out the middleman, then! But how?

Well, that's where you design thinkers come in. Your challenge, should you accept it, is to design a way to get single copies of, say, a few dozen UX books from a variety of publishers to a bunch of different UX events. Let people thumb through the books, then process their orders on the spot. Make the setup mobile, so the books could go to where the people (and authors) are, rather than sitting still inside an exhibition hall (this would be especially important at spread-out events like SXSW). The process should easily repeatable for each event, and obviously a human would have to be there to supervise the whole process.

I've been talking informally with other publishers who are similarly frustrated by the situation. We've come up with an initial stab at what might work, but I'm sure you'll have much better ideas:

• Where are the books displayed? How about a bookmobile? A portable rack, maybe even set up on a little red wagon, could go where it's needed. However, there are some logistical challenges to getting the hardware to the person handling a particular event. And what sort of hardware? This is perhaps the biggest challenge.
• How do customers pay? Could use a cool credit card device that attaches to an iPhone like this one. Or give people a discount code and either have them make the purchase on their own device, or supply an iPhone or iPad to handle sales on the spot.
• Who handles this? Could be a couple of volunteers who take turns handling the bookmobile in return for free passes to the conference and/or the collection of books (which will be too thumbed-over to sell). Or they could take a cut of the sales. They have to be trustworthy, as we'd be having them handle lots of books, possibly loaning them an iPad, and giving them a pass to the event. Not sure how to handle this risk.
• How will this be publicized? Between an event's social networking tool and Twitter, we'd probably be able to publicize a bookmobile's existence fairly effectively, even at a larger event. We could also make the poor person handling sales wear an excruciatingly funny and impossible-not-to-notice hat. ("Look for the guy wearing the giant pink sombrero with the flashing 'UX BOOK' sign on it!") Dragging a bunch of books on a little red wagon would also be hard to miss.
• And then what? Hopefully, the nice helpers, dignity intact, send back our wagon, rack, iPad, and whatever else we loaned them. And they can keep the incredible collection of books, as noted before.

There are plenty of holes in this attempt to design a solution, but it's a start. I'm hoping you might have some better ideas for getting your favorite UX books to whatever conferences and events you'll be attending in the future. And maybe some of us publishers could (ahem) cough up some free books to whoever designs the best solution.

Thanks!

Using the all-powerful Twitter, I pulled together an informal flex track discussion nicely summarized by Red Molly. We ranged from format to content to the competition to an oldie but goodie, the bizarre ASIS&T/IA Summit/IA Institute love/hate triangle that I'm apparently the only person who understands (which isn't surprising as I'm probably more to blame than anyone else). About thirty of us went at it; as Red said, productive but not conclusive.

Here are a few thoughts that I liked. Not sure which are mine and which aren't; I'll just claim credit for the good ones. ;-)

• The committee needs clearer responsibilities and a better structure. When you rely on volunteers, and there's little documentation from year-to-year to serve as institutional memory, too much ends up in the hands of too few, and balls are going to get dropped (e.g., mention of the flex track, design of the program). Here's a way to fix that: three conference chairs—one for the program, one for operations, and one for engagement.
• That institutional memory thing. At least two ways to handle this:
1. Each chair gets a lackey, er, co-chair. Co-chair shadows, observes, and (hopefully) helps. The next year, they take over as main chairs of their respective areas of responsibility. During each Summit, the co-chairs look for problems to fix and opportunities to address during their turn. Along those lines, co-chairs should convene a meeting like I did to find out what's working and what's not while it's fresh in people's minds.
2. Convene old farts who've run past conferences. Especially this conference. There's your institutional memory, you betcha. Some of these folks (including yours truly) are already on the committee, but again, this part of my screed is about clarifying roles and responsibilities. So use old farts for old fart style tasks.
• Create an engaging format(s). This was ostensibly my main concern. It does seem to be heading staleward, and there are lots of competitors out there. The shiny side of that coin is that there are lots of good models to rip off. Here are couple thoughts to consider:
  1. Single track, a la original IA Summit. Sure, it's nice to have everyone in one place. But (sorry Peterme) we've already got IDEA for that. Some of the "I can't be in three places at once" pressure could be relieved by making the event longer, and that's worth considering. In fact, I think it was Jared that suggested making the pre-confs—which earn much if not most of the event's revenue—included as part of the deal, and allow people to opt out of them if necessary. (Yes, calling them "pre-conference" really does make them seem like icing when they really could be cake).
  2. Use case driven program. There are people who are absolute newbies, wanting to learn wireframing (and we should be very careful not to ignore them, as most of the organizers are anything but new to the field). There are managers who want to send their teams (um, could we have team pricing then?) There are people who are there to get advanced skills. There are people there to recruit and be recruited. There are people there to sell stuff like (ahem) books. Why not identify the important use cases and implied relationships, and build the conference around them? The result might be single track, multi track, eight track for all I care. Could be one day, could be forty days. Goddammit, we're information architects, and we should be able to structure such content, even if it is complicated by the added dimension of time. This is plainly a solvable design problem.
• Engagement is more important than the event. Before and after are as important as during. Before could seen as marketing and promo, but it's also concrete stuff like finding a roommate and figuring out what kind of topics people might want to hear presented. After is helping people take what they've learned—possibly in a physical form—and using it to educate and evangelize both the content they've acquired and the event itself. If we design for engagement, for the lifecycle of the people actually attending, the event becomes a snapshot of a longer, fuller process—perhaps the most important snapshot, but by no means not the only one. I suggest taking those use cases that I suggested identifying, and asking the basic question that never gets asked: "How can we engage with each of these groups?" Then take that question further: "How can we engage with them BEFORE the event? DURING? And AFTER?" This is why I'm suggesting an engagement chair, and I believe that engagement is more important than marketing and promo; the latter are almost a byproduct of a strong engagement plan.
• IA Summit as an exercise in design. Need I say more? So let's have fun.
• ASIS&T WTF: Define that role. Assuming ASIS&T continues in its current role, they should be involved in a way that plays to their strengths (e.g., finding a venue, collecting $$). Money is the critical issue, and I'd hate for ASIS&T to, for example, screw around with things like what the committee should pay for badge creation. ASIS&T should assign a budget, and if the chairs want to go over budget, they should as long as they find a source to cover the overage (e.g., a sponsor for something specific—like badges).
• Create financial incentives for chairs. Base them on such goals as achieving a certain threshold of sponsor dollars, or registrations, or tweets, or whatever the hell would make sense. Really, it's not fair they way it works now. There's got to be a better incentive for chairs and other volunteers, especially if the current state requires them to take crap from the likes of me.
• Ditch Crowdvine. Now. Start over with community-based functional requirements. Then find a new partner if necessary. We all bitch about Crowdvine and its shaky definitions of networking relationships. Like I said, we're a bunch of information architects, goddamit; let's find or create something better.
• Cut the crap on having presenters register. Let's face it, ASIS&T ends up rolling this back when individuals complain enough (oops; you didn't hear it here). It's a legacy from academia (where ASIS&T originated), where institutions paid their faculty's conference costs. Given that about 1% of the IA Summit's attendees are academics, I think it's time to kill this one dead.

OK, that ought to do...

PS I originally sketched this, but the one thing Dan Roam didn't tell us was to purchase a scanner. So here's my text. Scanner recommendations gratefully welcomed...

Tweeting aside, I still do have a day job or three. One is teaching my full-day workshops. I've got two coming up next week in my old, wonderful hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, sponsored by the Merit Network. On Tuesday March 30, I'm bringing back (by popular demand! I've always wanted to say that) my "Enterprise Information Architecture: Because users don't care about your org chart" seminar. I think I retired it prematurely; it seems more relevant today than ever. And on Wednesday, March 31, I'll teach my "Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience" workshop, with fresh stuff as we inch toward finishing the book on the same topic. A few spaces are still open for both days; register here.

And on Tuesday night, Michigan UPA is sponsoring a happy hour in my honor from 7-9 at the Corner Brewery in Ypsilanti. Please RSVP please, if you please.

Many thanks to Andy Rosenzweig of Merit and Dave Mitropolous-Rundus of MiUPA for hosting me. I hope to see you somewhere in Washtenaw County next week.

I don't think that there's a clear use case for something that's small but not as small as a phone, and useful but not as useful as a laptop. (Best effort in a weak field to define the use case so far comes from Luke Wroblewski: "a digital version of your leisure time activities".)

But that doesn't matter.

It's relatively easy for Apple to create a new platform. There are already plenty of apps out there that will run on it, and the developer community will soon provide us with many, many more. It's what they do. And although only a small subset of those apps will provide any compelling value, only a small subset of those eventual thousands of apps needs to work. All Apple has to do is provide the platform, and make sure that it works well enough to support all those apps.

They're essentially leaving it to the developer community to figure out a mind-blowingly large number of micro use cases. There will be enough to make the iPad attractive to enough consumers for the venture to be profitable for Apple. Apple can ignore the traditional keystone requirement for product design—the need for a broad use case—and simply deliver a well-designed and sufficiently open platform.

PS As a publisher, I am very happy that Apple's ebooks will use EPUB, the open ebook format that we've invested ourselves in at Rosenfeld Media. I'm hopeful that those EPUBs will also be DRM-free, though considering Apple's past record here, I'm pessimistic. Does anyone know if they will be?

If you don't mind, a word:

There are a lot of great opportunities to take good UX-related workshops in and around London. Why come to these?

Well, Steve Krug is simply fantastic. What can I say? We've been on the road for seven years, and every time I pop into his workshop, people are absolutely engaged: talking, interacting with each other and with Steve. (He's nice enough to say similar things about my workshop.)

Did you think I was going to say rapt? Worshipful? Well, they are, which is what you'd expect with one of the Three Gods of Usability. And they're entertained as well: Steve is even funnier in person. (Added bonus: Steve's new workshop matches his new book.)

What you might not realize is that Steve and I both teach our workshops to small groups (usually a couple dozen) and over the course of the day we work with you very closely. We often learn everyone's name. Steve may critique your site, and I'll likely sit down with you and we'll look at the query data together. Honestly, Steve and I are usually a bit surprised when attendees' evaluations emphasize the intimacy of our workshops; why would we (or you) want it any other way?

I'll never be as entertaining as Steve, but my attendees seem to enjoy themselves. I'm certainly very earnest (just check this photo and you'll see). I'll not just help you through the analytics (see my workshop slides): I'll also make a strong case for why UXers need to learn analytics in general, and suggest a framework for doing so (see this presentation for some of my ideas along these lines).

If you were wavering on attending, I hope this helps. So take advantage of the early registration deadline (again, it's January 31) and I hope we'll see you in March!

PS I'm hoping to take along my six-year old, Iris, who's fallen in love with geography and is absolutely desperate to cross an international border (any will do). Will be trolling for to-dos at some point here on Bloug; I don't think that the London Eye will keep her occupied for three days...

So, being the annoying consultant that I am, I gently scolded them, saying that there wasn't one ideal or even optimal local search implementation. But there were some principles worth considering. Here's my first stab; given that these took only a few minutes, I'll likely add more:

1. Keep the initial query entry UI simple
2. Make sure it's persistent in location on pages, and that it's on all pages
3. Support query refinement (and avoid "advanced search" UIs)
4. Repeat a query back in the refinement UI and display # of search results
5. Provide refinement options that fit the need (e.g., don't provide options that narrow result sets when 0 results have been retrieved)
6. Show just enough information—and the right information—per search result to enable users to get the information they need (either on the results page or by clicking through to a result page)
7. If you're searching multiple content areas, see if it pays to expose these differentiations; if so, what order should results be presented in? (federated search)
8. Support result sorting (e.g., chronological)—if it helps
9. Teach your search engine to recognize regularly occurring queries for specific types of information (e.g., names of people, products, unique IDs) and configure search results accordingly
10. Ask for feedback on search results pages—both quantitative and qualitative (e.g., "rate you satisfaction with what you found; if not satisfied, what would you have liked to find?")
11. Learn what your most frequent queries are; then test their performance regularly
12. Learn what queries fail most frequently, and fix them
13. Manually create recommended search results for the most common queries

Does this list stick against your wall? Anything obvious that I'm missing? If I can, I'll assemble good examples of each (and feel free to suggest some yourself).

Want to help me figure it out?

First, imagine a single, combined index—possibly a single page—that'd reference whichever books where an index entry occurred. Then picture the ability to filter that index by individual title. Now we're ready for some questions:

Does it make sense to put an individual book index on the web? Each Rosenfeld Media book has its own web site, and we already make each book's tables of contents, FAQs, and other materials available. Would there be additional utility in viewing a book's index? Coming from a background in librarianship, I know that there are a few index fetishists among us who might judge a book by its index (a character in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle goes further, judging the indexer's personality). I imagine one might indeed get a sense of a book's scope, but unless there is a link to a webified (and, likely, free) version of the book, there'd be no navigational value. (Given that we're a for-profit, we'd likely link to a way to quickly purchase the relevant title.)

Does it make sense to put a collective index of many books on the web? If the term "remote testing" or "Axure" occurred in multiple books, that might be an interesting factoid. Even more interesting—a report of the most frequently-occurring terms (hmmm, this is starting to sound suspiciously like site search analytics). Of course, a union index would say something about the collective scope of Rosenfeld Media books, but I'm not sure who—aside from me—would find that useful. So the jury's still out.

Does it make sense to create individual pages for each index term? On the surface, this may seem like the least useful idea yet. But what if each page could provide these things for an index term:

• Link to a glossary definition (if available).
• Retrieve the term's results from Google (duh).
• Retrieve the term's results from UX Zeitgeist (yes, we're still working on it, and it's going to improve radically).

That's still likely not much value to users. But to Rosenfeld Media? Could be quite promising:

• If we SEO these pages reasonably well, the more specific terms might bring in a decent amount of essentially free traffic. (After all, who else is going to do this?)
• We can promote our own books on those pages.
• We can insert some Google advertisements on those pages, which, while not bringing in retirement money, might fund some future Rosenfeld Media holiday party.

This is my first pass at fleshing the idea out, and frankly, my own reaction is lukewarm. Then again, these pages wouldn't be hard to create, nor would they get in the way of other, more critical aspects of the rosenfeldmedia.com user experience. So I'm tempted to go for it.

Still, it seems like I'm missing something. Any suggestions? Good ideas are always worth a free book, according to this publisher.