I'll also be keynoting the first Delve event, here in Brooklyn, on August 5. I'll continue Marrying Web Analytics and User Experience until they give in, fall in love, and produce dozens of robust children.

Holy crap. They'll even fire a contractor? Good God.

But though I snark away, there but for the grace of that Good God go I.

I used to do a little IA consulting for the VA. My client was wonderful, as were some of his colleagues. Most of the people I encountered there, however, were what you'd expect to find within a large, highly dysfunctional agency: water-treaders that were counting the days until they could retire. And you could hardly blame them.

But there were a few that were so completely pernicious that I feel sick to have them traipse across my professional memory even occasionally. Let me tell you...

I was struggling with the upper layers of the site's information architecture. I had been for quite a while. It just didn't do a good job of making health benefits information—the stuff that's the VA's primary raison d'etre—easy to find. In fact, the existing design seemed to go out of its way to obscure benefits information from veterans, even the web-savvy ones that were starting to return from Iraq and Afghanistan in droves.

Naively, when I raised this issue, I thought I'd receive a more typical response, something along the lines of "Yes, it's a huge problem for us, but fixing it would require aligning content from many of our internal departmental silos. But that's why we hired you, Lou."

Nope. What they told me was that they didn't really want to make it easy for veterans—those people risking their lives for their country—to learn about the health benefits that they were entitled to. And that taxpayers had committed to funding. All to save money—and for what??

IT issue? Not. It was an issue of business model design, and this particular business model was shrouded in a sick morality emanating from the top levels of the VA's management structure. Absolutely immorally, shamefully, and horribly sick.

Stunned, I didn't do anything about it while I was still consulting at the VA. And until now, I haven't brought it up, even though it raises such strong feelings of disgust and shame for me.

But I'm hoping that posting my experience and angst here and now helps somehow. I certainly needed to get it off my chest. And maybe it will enable some of the good people in the VA's new administration to get a little further in making their site actually help veterans.

Most of all, I'd like to know what I should have done. This unofficial policy was so terrible in so many ways to so many people. An intentionally poor information architecture likely caused much suffering among thousands and thousands of veterans. But the VA was my client, and should expect a degree of discretion from consultants like me. I feel odd even going public now, five or so years after concluding my work there.

What would you do, fellow information architects?

I think we should all be prepared to answer questions like these, because it could happen to you. Ethical quandaries arise in any profession, but as a new profession, I'm not sure how much we've collectively discussed stuff like this. So...

What would you do?

I need to gather some evidence of user behaviour with regards to site search, namely 'browse vs search'. Do you know of any recent research papers that show a trend towards people preferring to search a website, rather than navigate? If so, what are the common themes? Does it depend on the type of user, the type of site, etc?

Great question. I always refer people to Marcia Bates' seminal work on berrypicking, which defuses the versus part of "browse versus search," as it well should. But it's now twenty years old; any other, more recent suggestions?

But I can't help but thinking that they're spending way too much time kvetching about the main page at the expense of improving the UX of all those other pages. Advice to American Airilnes UX team: let your pain in the ass stakeholders fight over the main page: while they're distracted, you go and fix the rest of the site. After all, it's important too.

Well done. You guys are fantastic. You've got some great leaders among you, and more importantly, you seem to be generating a lot of meaningful grass roots activity. The world really needs you, and you're poised to achieve some big things over the next couple years.

Just don't screw it up, OK?

And how might you screw it up? By falling back on old models that make it hard to do new things. By doing it yourself, except when you ought to do it yourself. And most of all, by not using your imagination.

Here are some suggestions, annoyingly unsolicited, based on a skewed interpretation of past community building experiences, and, most likely, completely worthless. But you've been on mind of late and it's my damned blog, so here goes:

1. Watch your language: framing is critical early on. That's my way of saying that you'd be making a huge mistake in trying to build (yet another) professional organization. It's not that you shouldn't get organized, or go out and incorporate your favorite flavor of 501(c) entity. It's just that locking in to the professional association metaphor means 1) creating expectations that you'll do all those things that professional organizations have been doing, and 2) you'll therefore miss out on building something that your community truly needs. Before you begin framing your thinking, figure out whatever the hell it is that content strategists need. I'll bet dollars to donuts that it's not a professional association. I'll guess that it's going to use a lot more technology than most professional associations will with their 1980s thinking. And most importantly, a dialogue unfettered by established organizational models will mean that the dialog will continue indefinitely.
   
   I mean, wouldn't you rather continually tune a communal dialog rather than "perfect" a professional association? Engage, folks, engage. Again and again and again. Associations are not so good at doing that. They see their targets as recruiting and retaining "members". You don't want members. Members bitch about not getting enough value for their $40/year fee. No, you want participants. Think about all the ways that you can engage with people interested in content strategy who work in different kinds of roles, or are at different points in their career lifecycles. How can each type have a stake in the content strategy dialogue? That's the question you need to answer, not whether you'll be a 501(c)3 or 501(c)6. What you do next is answer that question and solve problems. And do it again and again, because, believe it or not, the content strategy community won't be the same--so shiny and new and wet behind the ears--in five or even three years. It changes, so you change.
2. Piggy-back as much as you can... As you figure out those answers, you'll soon be itching to go out and build stuff. Some of that stuff is already there, like job boards. Is there a tool that you can use to do it? Probably so, and it's probably free or close to it. If not, is there a sibling community that let you play in their sandbox? If so, there's probably a win-win opportunity to explore there. Victor Lombardi once gave me a sage piece of advice: "Just launch the fucker". You should do the same; get it to market and keep your momentum going.
   
   Worried about the long-term consequences of such decisions? Five points of extra credit. But the costs of migration, steep and painful as they will be, will be far cheaper than dithering and ultimately doing nothing today. Go cheap, go fast, and let a more mature version of your community deal with the headaches in five years. They'll be a somewhat different set of content strategists, and trust me: they'll be as good at fixing messes as you pioneers are at creating them.
3. ...but fill the gaps that others haven't identified or tackled. Does your community want to do something new? Something that there isn't a model for? Fantastic; go for it. What do you have to lose? Creating new, useful things for communities is one of the most creative, energizing, awesome things you can do, if you pull it off. And just about everything that's new and interesting these days is the product of synthesizing existing tools, rather than building them from scratch.
   
   What if you fail? So what? You'll have the satisfaction of having tried. You'll have learned more than any school can teach you about the industry and how communities work. And most of all, you'll have squashed the feelings of regret that make us crabby and sour when we're old.
4. Exploit the kids. You're a young community right now. Not in ten years. Not in two years. Now. You have energy, purpose, and perhaps something that's the most of useful of them all, naivete. When those three planets line up, things that couldn't have been done get done. So. Do. It. Now.

Speaking of the young, I need to go pick up my daughter from kindergarten, so I'll have to cut this short. Please don't mention #4 to her, ok?

Over and out

• Reports should be built around questions. Really, reports should be answers to questions. Of all the cool dataviz work that Jeff Veen and his team did for Google Analytics, bringing the questions to the fore was their most impressive and useful achievement.
• But even well-designed reports are of limited value if they're just reports of one variety. If you think analytics app when you hear the word "report," you're not getting the full picture. Ditto that if you think of reports that pretty much come from your user studies. And so on.
• What we really need are ways to integrate reports from these sources and more. Envision a dashboard that provides access to your analytics reports, help desk log reports, task analysis testing reports, reports from surveys, content inventory reports, the whole array of stuff regardless of whether it's quantitative or qualitative.
• But a bunch of reports all in once place, while convenient, isn't especially meaningful. We might be able to enable synthesis and, ultimately, derive meaning from our reports if we connect them in logical ways. How? Well, you might have a quantitative report that examines some sort of behavioral data to establish what's going on with your site, identifying interesting questions to follow up on along the way. You might use a qualitative user study to answer some of those questions. Solution: present them together in a way that shows the relationship between the questions from one and the answers from the other.
• Time fracks up stuff like this. The quantitative report might be from last quarter, and the related qualitative data might come from tests run many months later. But both types might be updated on a frequent basis, making it hard to depict a snapshot where both types ought to be connected.

Make sense? Nah, I didn't think so; it's late and I'm tired; just wanted to get these thoughts down, hoping that they'll make sense in the morning. Hoping that someone some brilliant visual thinker like Veen or Dave Gray stumbles upon this posting, makes sense of it, and has it all worked out by the time I wake up...

So I've begun to make the case for a more unified practice of web analytics and user experience. In fact, doing one without the other is probably a short-term waste of resources and a long-term recipe for your product or service becoming obsolete. I've started to scratch the surface in a presentation given a week or so ago at the Janus Boye Philadelphia conference and, earlier today, at the IA Konferenz in Hamburg (Keynote slides below).

One issue that came up at today's talk: we would probably all benefit from a dashboard of reports that included the ones that we've come to expect from our analytics tools, but that also include other quantitative reports (such as from help desk logs) and, perhaps more importantly, qualitative reports from such sources as ongoing usability testing. The presentation of these various reports could be designed to support better integration of the results from quantitative and qualitative research. For example, questions that arise from the former are often answered by the latter, so perhaps the dashboard would visually make the connection between the two.

Is this happening now? I think some of the analytics applications are starting to incorporate CRM reports, but I'm really out of my range here. I'd love to find some examples of dashboards that go beyond the basic behavioral data that are typically addressed by analytics tools. Suggestions?

Can't make it to Etre Get Together 2009? Fancy sinking a few pints with Lou Rosenfeld, Steve Krug and Etre anyway? Then join us at LVPO in London's bustling Soho district on Wednesday, 20th May, 2009 (from 5.30pm) for beer, snacks and hot UX-related chitchat.

Important note: Entry is free but by guest list only—so RSVP to gettogether2009@etre.com to reserve your place/bar stool.

And, um, there are still some open seats for my Site Search Analytics workshop (earlier that day in London, May 20). And my Enterprise IA seminar (Hamburg, May 18).

• Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton (Sydney, Melbourne, London, Israel, Atlanta, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia, Toronto, Twin_Cities, Washington DC)
• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug (Canberra, Memphis, Los_Angeles, Boston)
• Mental Models by Indi Young (Boston, Brisbane, New York, Portland)
• Subject to Change by Peter Merholz et al (New York, Richmond VA, Boston, Sydney)
• Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter (Sydney, Chicago, Glasgow)
• The Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam (Silicon Valley, Portland)
• The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp (Chicago, Dallas)
• Emotional Design by Don Norman (Brisbane, Toronto)
• Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks by Luke Wroblewski (Ithaca, Warsaw)
• The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin (Cologne)
• Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer (Austin)
• The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun (San Francisco)
• Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr. (Twin_Cities)
• About Face by Alan Cooper et al (Los_Angeles)
• Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge (Atlanta)
• Neuro Web Design by Susan Weinschenk (Dallas)
• Web Design for ROI by Lance Loveday (Warsaw)
• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud (London)

Great big shout out to Steve Baty, godfather of the UX Book Club movement, for pointing me to this list. It's fascinating.

• Who: WHO | World Health Organization (OK, this one was pretty predictable)
• What: What Really Happened: the history the US government hopes you never learn! (cuh-reepy site!)
• Where: WHERE GPS Mobile Application, iPhone App & Location Based Services Development Platform (ho hum)
• Why: WHY? on MySpace Music (Oakland, California-based indie band; they look earnest and hirsute... earsute?)
• When: The Death Clock--When am I going to die? (actuarial's wet dream; and I thought "what" was creepy)
• How: HOW Design--The leading creativity, business and technology magazine for Graphic Designers (hmmm, maybe I can get them to review some Rosenfeld Media books?)

OK, will try this silly little exercise again in a year or so...

Here's the schedule:

• May 16: I'll be keynoting the Deutsche IA Konferenz. I'm looking forward to catching up with the other speakers, including Peter Van Dijck, Peter Boersma, and Andrea Resmini.
• May 18: I teach my day-long Enterprise Information Architecture Seminar for the first time in Europe since 2003. Jim Kalbach will be teaching two very interesting workshops on ethnography and personas the next two days; we'll both be hosted by Karen Lindemann of Netflow, one of the hubs of user experience in Germany. Registration details are here; the early bird deadline is April 30.
• May 20: I teach my day-long Site Search Analytics Workshop for the first time in Europe. (Yes, the book really is coming along). Steve Krug teaches his Discount Usability Workshop the next day. Steve and I will be hosted by the absolutely wonderful people at Etre, and teach at the ICA, which I hear is quite a nice venue. Registration and more information is here. And the early registration deadline is coming up very soon: April 20.

My warmed-over corpse will then try to make it to its first UPA in early June.

I'm actually showing off the cufflinks—ducklinks, actually—that Mags Hanley and the rest of the wonderful IA Summit committee presented to me for hanging around for so long. What I really could have used was a better haircut, but I'm thankful nonetheless.

By the way, it's not just the cufflinks; check out the lower left of the photo and you'll see that even the damned butter pats at the Peabody are shaped like ducks.

Back in the mid '80s, long before I was a naive publisher, I was a naive undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, where I took as many courses as was permitted from J. Mills Thornton, a student of C. Vann Woodward (what's with the initialed first names?), a tenured professor of US history, and a favorite son of Mobile, Alabama.