More than meaning: Using information architecture to grow a budding service

Transcript (and see slides)

Hi, I’m Anita. I’m a content designer at San Francisco Digital Services, an in-house team embedded in city government right here in San Francisco.

I know what you’re 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 Richards, 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.

The IA part was key for one of my bigger projects, the City’s cannabis business permit. Yeah, IA and weed, we’re totally going there.

But first, a little history!

Cannabis was legalized for recreational use in California in 2016. Now all adults can buy weed legally!

But, now what? How do we regulate it? How would businesses be permitted to sell it?

Policymakers in Sacramento are still hashing that out. Same with the SF Office of Cannabis. There’s no existing paper form. There's just a bunch of requirements created by those policymakers.

And whatever information the Office of Cannabis wanted to know in order to deem a business responsible enough to sell a federally banned controlled substance, and not like, get robbed at gunpoint.

My role as a content designer was to turn what the Office of Cannabis wanted to know, into an application that business owners, some of whom had never owned a business before, could fill out correctly.

And all I had to start with, was a literal pile of requirements in Article 16 of the San Francisco Police Code. Count it, that’s 56 pages! With the mandate to turn it into some questions.

Where to start?

Well, there is “information architecture,” after all. Remember: “Information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable.”

It sounded just what I needed!

Even though the output would be completely different from what Google says an IA deliverable is - sitemaps and wireframes. You think IA, you think sitemaps.

Let’s think bigger! Let’s think about how to use IA tools and principles to grow this budding service of cannabis business permitting. All puns intended!

Here’s what I did.

First, you have to inventory. Know what you’re working with.

I started the way I always do when faced with a giant pile of information. I opened my favorite spreadsheeting tool in the world, Airtable, and I started inventorying all the things. I went down the business requirements in Article 16 and I logged them all.

Heck, I even logged all the questions the state application PDFs asked! A lot of our requirements were the same, and they’d have to fill out all the state forms anyway. Might as well give them a little head start on that.

It got pretty detailed. As you can see, 166 records. I figured, I needed to know the materials I was working with. Get it down so that I could use it as a starting point.

Some of my coworkers thought this was overkill. “Just ask the Office of Cannabis folks, they’re very nice! They’ll tell you what they want!”

But I just needed to do it anyway.

Now, this is when you know you’re an IA, whatever your job title is. When inventorying things soothes your soul.

In hindsight, this was actually a great thing to do because after I did it, the Office of Cannabis seemed to respect me as an equal. If you don’t know it, you can’t structure it.

Okay, so I had a detailed spreadsheet, with the necessary content I had to work with.

Next was to audit it all. You have to pull out what’s relevant.

Not all of it is! Turns out, not all the requirements in Article 16 made sense to ask of people.

For example, this is one of the requirements from Article 16. “A Cannabis Cultivation Facility must have weighing and measuring devices used in connection with the Sale or Distribution of Cannabis that meet state standards.”

I mean, is anyone going to admit they aren’t going to do that? Of course you’d check that confirmation box! If everyone would answer it the same, it would be useless to ask it.

In the end, I determined there were 3 categories to all these requirements:

1. Eligibility requirements. If we find you not doing this, you’re in trouble.
2. Business reporting requirements, mostly around staffing and areas business promised to support. It’s like, we’ll ask you in a year about the status of this.
3. And application requirements. Have you considered how your business will handle cannabis? Prove it. These were the questions to ask.

Next, I had to group this list of application requirements. Grouping means we set expectations for our users. They know what this batch of information will contain, and not be surprised. Every time you change subjects, your users spent some time and energy figuring out just what you did there.

I had a huge fork in the road to decide, early on. Businesses would be applying for a permit to do certain cannabis activities, like retail, cultivation etc.

Do we give all those business types one big individual form all at once, with questions repeated across all of them?

Well, I did the math. Due to all the possible combinations, we’d need to maintain questions and match answers across 11 separate forms. That’s a lot of tedious work.

We all know that IA can be used for understanding, but it can definitely be used to make your life easier! No shame in that!

I decided to make separate forms instead, for each group of questions. Mostly grouped by activity, but there were also sections that would be common across all businesses. That means that you only get a form if you it would be relevant for you to answer it. We would reuse forms across all businesses.

This is what it looks like in practice. We would send all business a short form about general operations, all businesses a short form about security. But only businesses doing storefront retail or delivery would get the delivery form. And so on.

That meant that it would be easier to maintain the questions, if we decided to rewrite them. It would be easier for the Office of Cannabis to review answers across multiple questions at once. And even though they would be more forms, they would be a lot shorter and easier to fill out. Win win win!

The next part is more content design than IA, but still done in the spirit of IA - writing with stakeholders. We have to make sure to speak our users’ language, while being accurate. Because again, cannabis. A lot of eyes are on us, we have to be pretty exact.

We like to do pair writing, which is kind of like pair programming, but about writing clearly. You literally write everything together.

For every requirement, I asked the Office of Cannabis: “What answer could someone give, that would let you know they were ready to handle cannabis?” That’s me, being what I call a heroic advocate rebel toddler.

That’s because I had to fight for my users, question the way we’d always done things, and ask annoying questions that drill down to what they actually want.

You have to have a lot of trust in each other, as well as the process!

You aren’t going to have all the answers sometimes. Neither will they. That’s why it’s important to work together.

Sometimes the requirement is something like: “An odor mitigation plan.” What is that exactly? What should it contain?

What kind of information does the Office of Cannabis need to know, to say that this business has a plan to make sure their neighbors don’t smell cannabis from outside?

Turns out, they just want to know if you’ll be using charcoal filters.

Which makes the question very straightforward! Will you be using charcoal filters? Yes, no. If no, tell us what you’ll be using instead.

It gets down to exactly what the Office of Cannabis wants to know, instead of confusion over what they mean when they use a jargon-y word.

Sometimes pair writing results in interesting fun adventures in finding the right word or phrase for something

The director of the Office of Cannabis and I were trying to find a more direct way of describing a partition, the word that was used in the regulations when drawing a premises diagram. We decided to Google it.

The results were not what we expected. Instead of a definition of “partition,” we got a silhouetted image of Beyonce and a chair.

It’s important to make friends with your colleagues. Especially when you’re working in content!

The proper policy wonk of the Office of Cannabis looked up “partition” in the City code somewhere and came up with nonstructural walls. So we went with “temporary walls.” Instead of a silhouetted Beyonce and a chair. Sorry Beyonce.

Which goes to show that team work makes the dream work!

After we finished writing a form, we needed to make sure that it would work for the people who would use it. Did our concept model match their reality?

Because this is the reality if it doesn’t! This kind of reaction says that we’ve lost their trust. That we have no idea what we need this information for, or what we’re doing.

We didn’t want this kind of thing happening, at least not on the live form.

Here’s an example of how we used user testing to improve the form.

City requirements dictated that the application needed “contact information for the employee on the premises that is responsible for the maintenance of the video surveillance system.”

When we tested this, applicants didn’t know what to put for this person.

“Wait, not only do I have to run a cannabis business, I have to hire a full-time video tech too? Just to have someone to put on this form??”

Actually no. The office wanted to know if they had anyone checking if video was working, and who to contact to get footage. Which is a completely different question! So I rewrote the application to actually ask for that. And nobody was confused after that!

This is also an example of how the questions we ask affect how users approach the entire process of cannabis business permitting.

By drilling down what information the Office of Cannabis wanted to see, we turned this from a hiring task - I have to set aside budget to hire a new full-time person - into a scheduling task. “Make sure Bob checks to see if our video feed is working every time he passes the counter.” That is huge!

After we felt comfortable that we had what we needed, it was go time. Sending that form out into the world, to be filled out by people hoping to open a cannabis business in San Francisco.

And in doing so, cannabis became the first business permit application in the city to live entirely online. If you go to the Office of Cannabis with your paperwork, they will sit you down and help you fill it out online. There is no paper-based workflow for this.

So far, 3 brand new businesses have gotten their permits.

Besides that, the Office of Cannabis has mostly stopped using jargon to explain things. They’ve gotten really good at getting right down to the point. Which is hard for policy folks!

And last year, I did a shortened version of this process for event organizers interested in selling cannabis at their events.

For those of you who attended Outside Lands last August and perhaps enjoyed GrassLands there, you’re welcome!

So, IA and cannabis. We totally did go there, turning pages of requirements into a form that people could answer. IA tools and principles made it happen.

And in doing so, we even shaped the way that cannabis business permitting would work in the City and County of San Francisco. Hopefully, we’ll be able to continue using these tools and principles to shape how permitting will work overall.

As you all know, today is World IA Day. And this year’s theme is the IA Element. It’s a progression of how the field of IA has been changing in the last 10 years.

Where there’s any information at all, there IA is.

It’s high time to consider how to use IA in your work. Think bigger than just websites.

Thank you.