How information architecture can save the world: IA of a pandemic response

Transcript (and see slides)

Hello, IAC21, and welcome to my talk, "How information architecture can save the world: IA of a pandemic response."

I’m Anita, content designer at San Francisco Digital Services. And as I like to say, I know waaay too much about what SF is doing about COVID-19!

So, it’s our second year of being online. I remember the uncertainty of whether IAC20 was going to go on at all. It seemed that the entire world was on the precipice of anticipation - what’s going to happen, will we be prepared for whatever happens, what can we do?

And it turns out, I had to miss a huge part of IAC20, even in our online form, because I’d been called to service.

This was me, explaining to you all, just what I was up to. I was only 2 weeks into the gig then, and I had no idea what I was in for! I mean, even a mere month into the City’s emergency pandemic mission, I already knew that IA would be important.

And as I record this, I will have had more than a year of doing this work, and I’d like to share with you what I’ve learned.

But first, some context! How it all began.

If you are a full-time employee at the City and County of San Francisco, you are what they call a Disaster Service Worker, or a DSW. That means, if there is an emergency, they can request you be taken out of your regular role for 2 weeks, and put into a role to help in that emergency. Usually at what they call the "Emergency Operations Center," a group pulled from various City departments to just work on the emergency at hand.

Naturally, in the Bay Area, we imagine a major earthquake first. Maybe we’d be taken out of our techie roles and trained to pull people out of rubble.

In this case, SF Digital Services got a request in early March 2020. At first glance, it seemed that what they wanted was someone to just post stuff on a website. "To continue developing, updating, and disseminating public information to various audiences…"

Naturally, we thought we could do better than a "website manager" aka "webmaster" So we sent a visual designer, Scott Tyler, and a content strategist, Bekah Otto.

Teaming up with a Department of Public Health strategist, Linda Acosta, we started to give San Franciscans the information they would need to stay safe and healthy.

The visual designer, Scott, already had something to work with. We knew what the visual principles would be. The visuals would have to be attention-getting, have big icons, big text, making room for multiple languages. SF’s COVID-19 graphics quickly became well known across the Bay Area for being clear and accessible.

Unfortunately, us content people did not start out with such a clear mandate. Like most government entities, SF’s website situation is all over the place, dependent on which department the information is coming from.

Furthermore, government websites are for posting all the things. We like to say that government websites are often treated like bulletin boards. If information is somewhere on the website, that’s good enough!

Well, that wasn’t good enough for us! In the first week, Bekah convinced the powers that be, that it was imperative to have the latest COVID-19 info on only one website. To consolidate what everyone needed to know, on the first place that people would think to look.

That place was SF.gov, a website that Digital Services had soft-launched the previous year.

Furthermore, we already made some content principles for it: Start with people. Make it easy. Write for everyone. Engage communities. Earn trust. Hold ourselves to account.

That was something we could start with. Especially these 3 principles:

1. Start with people. Meet readers where they are and tell them what to do.
2. Make it easy. Hide the complexity of our processes. Only give users the info they need at that time.
3. Earn trust. Keep the website current, accurate, and the single source of truth.

On March 16, 2020, we did just that. We published the country’s first Stay at Home order, we took the most pertinent info, and we put it up on a webpage. We told people what was happening. We told people what they had to do. People LOVED it!

To be honest, we didn’t love it exactly. We did the best we could, but at the time, we were still obligated to publish what we were told to publish. Every single thing. That page template was only meant to hold 3 accordions and I believe we maxed out at 63.

But it was a start. The powers that be at the Emergency Operations Center were starting to get why having a readable, accessible single source of truth should be the goal.

In our third week, my boss Persis Howe even managed to get some of the major players in the room together and agree on how the COVID-19 topic page should be organized!

All of that in the first 4 weeks! That was my starting point when it was my turn for a 2-week shift at the Emergency Operations Center. That 2-week shift, has turned into more than a year. Believe me, nobody expected that this emergency would last quite so long! And as far as I can tell, it’s mostly my ability to keep calm while doing 5 things at once, that’s the biggest reason why I’m still there.

What this meant was that there was a content designer in the room where everything was happening. I had the unique opportunity to inventory all the information that was coming in, and know enough context to suggest a good place to put them.

I could take care of present emergencies while nurturing future needs.

I could do IA.

Now, if you were paying attention to my title slide, you might have noticed that my job title is not "information architect."

You might be thinking. "Wait, content design isn’t information architecture. That’s the wrong 2-word phrase involving "nerd noun" and "art noun."

Besides, what is content design, anyway? What does it have to do with IA? According to the inventor of the job title itself, Sarah Winters, content design is answering a user need in the best way for the user to consume it. The way I describe my job is that it’s a mix of IA, content strategy, and writing. In that order.

Which may seem weird, because the job title "content design" seems to be going in, and "IA" seems to be going out.

People have long predicted the death of IA.

And indeed products have been trying to kill IA for decades. Here’s one that says claims that the heard of its software is "the ability to extract the meaning from any piece of text." You’d be able to automatically aggregate, organize, categorize, tag, access, and route information. Automatically!

Well, if you saw this site and thought it looked vintage, you’d be right. This page is a Wayback Machine snapshot from 2000. And the product no longer exists. Perhaps to nobody’s surprise.

Of course, there’s still Google. Keyword search extraordinaire. More on Google a bit later. But if you Google Image search "information architecture," you get a lot of site maps and wireframes. But I say, that IA is so much more than that. Let’s think bigger, and more long-term.

"Information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable."

Or, in even broader, more plain language terms, "Information architecture is about making meaning out of piles of facts."

If you think about it that way, writing anything about government processes means you have to do a lot of IA. By default. There are hundreds upon hundreds of pages of information published by government entities. Thick manuals about public programs that intimidate and stress out potential applicants, who only have one question: "What do I have to do?"

So first things first, you gotta trust IA. Don’t be afraid to create meaning for others, in a world of confusion. Call it what it is.

The Polar Bear book introduces us to the infamous three circles of IA: Context, content, and users.

Jasons Hobbs, in his 2018 IA Summit keynote, offered us the idea that the intersection of all the circles is not just IA, but broadly meaning making. All of us have the ability to make meaning when we put together context, content, and users.

And that is something search engines, even Google, just can’t do.

If there is any way that Google pulling out keywords out of this 113-page public health order helps people make sense of what is going on, I’d sure like to see it! (The title itself is more than 100 words long!)

IA to the rescue!

According to the Polar Bear Book, context includes business goals, funding, politics, culture, technology, resources, and constraints.

In this situation, the goal was to keep San Franciscans from getting COVID-19. The culture started from traditional emergency comms in government, with the added bonus of public health experts leading the way. Our constraints were our normal government limitations on staffing and what we like to call procurement, or "paying for stuff you need to do your job." Another challenge was that the work was very decentralized. We have multiple teams working on vaccine operations, for example.

Content for us was pretty straightforward. We had the health order and its associated directives, written by lawyers. It told the City, this is what you have to do. This is the legal bible of what is allowed and what is not allowed.

We also had public health guidance, written by doctors. Not quite a legal bible, but had lots of information about what you should do, to stay safe.

Users includes information about your audience, tasks, needs, information-seeking behavior, experience.

Our audience was broad: Everyone who lives or works in SF, which includes people with limited education or tech access, or who do not speak English well.

Their needs would include getting the following questions answered: "What am I allowed to do? How can I keep myself and my family safe, given our situations?"

And what made this mission especially interesting, was the knowledge that many people would be getting their information from outside sources: news media, social media, and community organizations. The website would not be an island onto itself.

And that is what I took with me, as I started to make meaning out of our COVID-19 response on SF.gov.

Again, my job title isn’t formally information architect, but I always have it top of mind when doing my work. And I realized a few things about doing really heavy IA, that made the pandemic response work manageable.

IA can embrace the chaos, while cutting through it.

While digging in a pile of facts, you find that you can hold all the truths in one hand.

For example, all of these things can absolutely be true.

• To stop COVID-19, we must keep people from gathering
• This includes closing businesses and schools
• We don’t want to close everything all the way
• Some activities are more risky than others
• SF is under an indefinite Stay Home Order

This complexity was what I worked with all year. I was able to use IA with content strategy to work towards a point of view. That’s what we do when we categorize and label things.

For me, I always worked with one goal in mind: Answer the question, "What do I have to do?" for the audience of that page.

IA can help you unpack context.

When new information is coming in fast and furious, you need context fast to make sense of it. And it’s true, there would be days where our priorities would drastically shift between morning and afternoon!

This was one real day last August. In the morning, the comms teams were saying, "we have to know where the virus is." We have to focus on COVID-19 testing.

And then in the afternoon, "Testing is not the way out of the pandemic." That’s because we found out our testing supply were going to be low for the foreseeable future. So we had to work with the strategies we had on hand - prioritize masking and ventilation.

When you hold all the truths in one hand, you can acknowledge the system within it. And understand quickly, just what is going on. Then be able to respond to it. More on this a little later.

IA can go the last mile.

I will be quite honest with you. IA did not do this alone. The SF.gov website did not singlehandedly cause San Francisco to have the lowest COVID-19 death rates in any major city in the United States.

We had a lot going for us, and we were lucky. We had collaborative health officials working together to make sure the entire Bay Area acted as a singular entity. We have a mayor who listened to the science.

This is part of what SF’s COVID-19 response entails. First, public health policy leads everything, and then it’s operations all the way up. Plus sitting in a sea of whatever the federal and state response is going to be!

The stuff that I was involved in - website and graphics - are only a teeny tiny part of this giant iceberg of effort.

We also had a lot of good information to start with. SF’s city attorneys and public health clinicians worked endless hours to create these guidelines, to ensure San Franciscans stayed safe and healthy. There’s just….a lot of it!

I didn’t create any of this public health guidance myself. What I did was take all this great information, and make it relevant for various audiences on the website. And because of how it was packaged, the rest of the comms team was able to then spread it even further.

My goal for SF.gov was always to make it a tool for others to use.

It’s "only" the last mile of all this effort and expert knowledge, but as anyone in transportation can tell you, it’s the last mile that’s most critical.

IA can also lead the way.

By being able to embrace the chaos, unpack context, and going the last mile, you can focus on what needs to get done next. And being first is critical in a crisis.

We are in a special place to lead.

Back to last August. From various sources, I heard rumblings that testing supply was running low. I also heard that SF’s Health Officer was going to be more specific on what types of masks would be allowed.

So I didn’t wait. I asked Linda, our public health liaison, whether I should just go ahead and update our COVID page spotlight, and start slowly changing our messaging about getting tested, because we wouldn’t have supply. She said go for it!

And a few days later, the COVID Command Center testing strategy lead, who I had never met or talked to before, confirmed that our overall messaging should shift from "universal testing" to "universal masking." It was like we were mind-melding! It was awesome.

Why is it important that you use IA for all these things?

Because in a crisis, trust is critical. You cannot work in crisis response without trust - with your colleagues, and with your constituents.

A good IA is one that creates trust. Categories have to make sense and be relevant to your users.

If they don’t trust what they’re looking at, they’ll go elsewhere for their information.

For COVID, we didn’t want them to do that! There’s rampant misinformation out there, and we wanted them to get information right from the source. Us.

It’s even one of our content principles. To earn trust, we must keep the website current, accurate, and the single source of truth.

And how do you earn trust?

First and foremost, you have to know what you’re doing. You have to know what you have.

Of course, my first move is always to make an inventory in Airtable! This is basically how I traverse all of the COVID-related pages on SF.gov. This is only a tiny view of it, I’ve got around 5 views I use heavily, and about 30 columns. And as you can see, about 250 pages that have anything to do with COVID. It’s definitely more now!

I’ve got all the pages organized by status, public health subject, and reopening subject. And I have a Google Doc for almost each one.

Every time there’s an announcement on reopening, or some other public health guidance change, I can find which pages I need to update pretty quickly.

If I need stakeholder approval, I can send them the Google Doc and tell them to make comments or suggestions. It’s all right there.

Knowing my tools included knowing what SF.gov could do. I had to know what content types we had, their goals, what they were good for, and what their limitations were.

Another thing you have to do is know your source materials. Now, there was a time early on, where I was reading everything. The health order, the guidance, the City Attorney’s FAQs. That’s when we were closing everything.

Turns out, it’s much harder to reopen businesses, given the various public health guidelines for each one.

And then I had to graduate to a much more scalable strategy: Working with other people to tell me what was going to be updated.

That meant I had to earn their trust, and they had to earn mine. You have to create strong partnerships. The way that I did it, was that I was responsive, and I shared what I knew.

It really, really helped that I had already prepped my Airtable inventory. If I got an email asking about a certain new development, I could pull up the relevant Google Doc, draft something, and then send it over.

Speaking of scaling your work, you have to trust others. A living, encompassing IA can’t be done alone.

Sharing what I knew went further than just what was on the website. Because the website was in the intersection of communications and operations, I became the de facto hub of information. Especially about vaccines. And for this kind of thing, my motto is to just let everyone know about everything that might affect their work.

Especially for the 311 and social media teams. I give them intel, they give me feedback about what’s happening on the ground. And then I take it back to the decision makers who can actually improve things. It’s a symbiotic relationship, really. We’re all trying to make each others’ jobs easier.

Even for the public health clinicians and lawyers, they write all that content so it’s out there for the public! If you help that content reach more people, everyone wins!

It’s been a journey, since it’s hard for a lot of super educated people to let go of their complex, academic language. But I really have gotten Grade 3 and 4 language approved by the City Attorney’s Office in the past year. Which is an awesome feeling.

How to do that - find a common goal and have a singular message. Everyone I work with, is doing COVID response to help save lives. And the only way to do that is to communicate that singular message that is agreed on by up top. I find out what the Mayor’s Office and the Dept of Public Health want to message that week, and I communicate that as far and deep as I can in everything that I do. You have to work together. And trust each other.

You also have to welcome new points of view. They’ll only bolster your own. You’ll know more of the landscape.

In case you have figured out by now, all this is really about trust. Trust all the way up, and then trust all the way down.

I mean, all the way down. To start making an impact now, you have to trust yourself.

In the grand scheme of things, I really have not been doing this all that long.

My educational background is in biology. I did molecular biology in a cancer research lab for 7 years. I am the epitome of a career changer.

I got my very first fulltime job in UX 6 years ago. It just so happened to be in government. And now I work on the COVID-19 response website for a major city.

And this is where I started. My very first website that I made just over 10 years ago. It’s the project where I discovered what IA even was.

Yes, it’s a site about Batman! It’s about a viral marketing campaign for the 2008 movie The Dark Knight, to be specific.

Back then, I got really sucked into it - the alternate reality game that consisted of online puzzle games, real-life scavenger hunts, and movie-adjacent media collateral like entire newspapers you could read. Over a year and a half, all those discrete pieces of content told a story that acted as a prequel to the movie.

Except absolutely no one had compiled it all into something that made sense. All this things that happened, with no structure, no story.

Until I thought, someone should make an archive of it. And that person might as well be me!

When I started, I had no idea how to make a website.

Early on, I did discover the name for the practice of organizing information on websites, and then I was off to the races. These were some of the very first books I read about IA and UX. I started thinking about the site visitors, their goals, their tasks, information flows, and inventorying what there was.

I believe there were around 200 pieces of content - puzzles, in-game audio, and various events. My original Excel spreadsheet contained 975 rows, because I didn’t have Airtable back then.

And then I compiled it all into a singular story. Making meaning out of a pile of facts.

I like to talk about how I started, and about this project in particular, because it goes to show that you don’t have to have a lofty brief to start making sense out of a pile of facts.

All of the skills I use today, doing IA in COVID-19 response, I first learned how to do, on a Batman website for fun 10 years ago.

You have to start somewhere. Don’t worry about where it is. You’ll only make an impact and learn if you genuinely apply yourself. You don’t learn if you only go through the motions.

As you can see, I never had any chill about any of my projects! And I fully believe that’s how I’ve gotten so far in my 5 years of working experience.

I mean, even I look at my journey for the past 5 years and and even I’m like, "I have no idea how this happened. I don’t know how I got here, really." I’ve been incredibly lucky to have the honor to be doing this kind of work.

But this is what I believe too - that luck is a combination of preparation and opportunity. Every step of the way, I’ve focused on making a bigger and longer-lasting impact, and empowering people.

That’s always been my goal. I’ve always looked outwards, and thought, "How can I help?" The next step has always been clear to me, if I kept that in mind.

I think what’s limited us, is how we often look inwards instead.

We’ve talked about having 2 types of IA - little IA and big IA.

Little IA is the information retrieval specialist. You call on them to do metadata and taxonomy. How to get there, is pretty straightforward. There’s already a model - library science. Get your library science degree, your MLIS and you are on your way to being an IA!

There’s also the Big IA. Gayle Curtis has described is as being an "orchestra conductor or film director, conceiving a vision and moving the team forward."

A big IA’s tool: Change management. And what’s truly befuddling is….there’s no set path to get you there.

And you might think that change management is pretty big and scary. It is! And even in information retrieval, it can involve quite a bit of change management.

Karen McGrane puts it plainly, "The longer I do this, the more I realize everything we do is change management. Every single thing we do. Our whole job. Our whole career. Every single one of you, your whole career is change management."

This was from her 2013 IA Summit keynote. Which was named "IA in 2043, it’ll still be around!" How appropriate!

But we still have existential crises about it!

Even just a month ago, March 4, 2021 in fact, UX Radio had a podcast episode titled "Where did IA Go?" where co-host Chris Chandler observed that, "information architecture has pretty much gone away as a discipline by itself."

And their guest, Donna Spencer, replies, "Well if it went away, did it matter?"

Donna goes on to say, "What I see is people over-designing screens...when actually what it would be more useful is designing 5 page types. Not 70 pages and hoping they will link to each other somehow."

But it’s not obvious that it’s important.

For many, it has gone away. It’s taught in half a day at UX bootcamps. It doesn’t seem important. And it’s challenging, because it’s often invisible. Structure is not as immediately tangible as UI. Plus, telling the story can be complicated. Nobody notices a bad IA until they start to use a product or service.

One thing that I’ve noticed lately is that IA as a discipline really loves its concepts, its processes, and terminology. Which is all well and good! I mean, a huge part of why I love this conference is because it’s a chance to step back and think about the big picture of what we’re all doing.

But I think that’s also partially why we have an existential crisis about IA every year. We ask ourselves, what good are all of our concepts and definitions if nobody even cares what IA even is?

But what would happen if we really started focusing on impact?

I am here to tell you that yes, absolutely, it does matter. It still matters. And the first step is to talk about its impact more.

My job title may be content designer. My deliverables may be webpage content. But I always, always use IA first in my work. My goal is content written in plain language that make sense together.

Without IA, this is what San Francisco’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic might have looked like.

Instead, I reached into that giant pile of facts and grabbed information so it could be understood and shared by others.

One of the most gratifying things in doing this work, is seeing strangers, reporters even, use content I wrote to help each other. People helping each other understand how to have safer gatherings. How to have safer holidays. Helping each other understand vaccine eligibility.

I think many of us are starting to focus on delivery too. By my count so far, 4 people that I’ve met from this conference have worked on COVID-19 response or vaccines. Clearly this is where all the cool kids are hanging out!

You all can join us. You can do this. Don’t wait for permission

Get out into the world and empower people. And keep going.

How is it working so far?

SF.gov is understood to be the destination for the general public on everything COVID-19. I’m getting involved earlier and earlier for updates on public health policy and vaccines.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to clinical policy meetings, where the public health folks discuss what to open in SF. It’s literally the source of everything. And let me tell you, as a former scientist, their discussions are endlessly fascinating! And now I get to be an even more responsive information hub!

Most importantly, by using IA, I’ve gotten to be a part of this. Dr. Bob Wachter’s COVID chronicles on Twitter have been a constant source of hope when things were not looking great. And a month ago, he calculated that if the US mirrored SF’s COVID mortality rate, more than 364,000 Americans would be alive today.

That is staggering.

What else is out there for those of us who believe in IA? What other kinds of wicked problems can we tackle? Climate change? Who knows! I had no idea that IA would be so important in pandemic response!

But I believe, that in trusting IA, our allies, and ourselves, we can create the change we want to see in the world.

Thank you.