A Lens A Day #13 - Setting Expectations

Transcript

Dan: Hello, my name is Dan Brown. We are here today to talk A Lens A Day—conversations about information architecture. And today I get to talk to the dazzling Anita Cheng. Anita, thank you so much for joining me.

Anita: Thank you so much for having me on.

Dan: So the way I’ve been starting these conversations is to talk about process—specifically, how we help other people who maybe don’t come at this from an IA perspective, to come at design, to deal with some of these IA challenges that we’re dealing with. What are some of the ways that...I guess let me start here. What are some of the hardest parts of the IA process to explain to other folks? What do you find most difficult about the IA process to help other people get involved with?

Anita: Yeah I think just to start with, I feel like a lot of people don’t understand why we have to have all the context that we need in order to do a good IA. Like a lot of times for instance, I’ll have a stakeholder come in and ask like. “Hey I got a request to have this webpage,” and I was like, “Sure, you want this webpage, but why do you want it? Who’s the audience? Like, how does this fit in everything else we have?” And they don’t think about that, because they’re just like, “Um, I want a webpage so we can tweet about it.” And that’s kind of it. And then having to explain why we need all this other information is very illuminating to them as well. Because a lot of time, they just don’t realize how useful it is to have all the context. But having to explain like, “Okay let’s back up. This is a press release you want to write, but let’s back up and talk about how this fits everywhere.”

Dan: Why do you think that’s such a mystery to folks? Why do you think....what what is the light bulb moment, I guess, for them when you start sort of saying, “Well we need all of this stuff to help us through the IA process?” What do you think about your description, or the process itself, helps them kind of make that connection?

Anita: I always talk about how their message is gonna look like after they tweet it out or something. It’s like okay, you have this initial announcement but then what? How is this going to be referred to in the future? How are people going to understand it in the wider context of what we’ve already done? And I think a lot of people, they don’t think about it because they’re so reactive. Which is kind of like just how we live in this world now. Social media is very reactive, the news media is very reactive, and you’re always reacting to things. But then you always come up with these Band-Aid solutions. And a lot of times with IA, you gotta pull back and be like, “Okay, let’s think about long-term strategies. Here’s what’s necessary versus just reacting to, you know, everything.”

Dan: Now I mean, you work in government so I imagine there is a lot of just sort of dealing with the latest crisis or the latest thing that needs to go out. Or you know the latest need for the city to communicate with its residents, with its citizens. Is that part of the mindset that your stakeholders have, coming in? Like context, “I can’t even think that big because I’m just sort of dealing with what I’m dealing with here in the moment. Do you think that’s part of it?

Anita: I think that’s part of it. I don’t think that it’s that unusual in government specifically. I think part of it...I mean because a huge challenge for government is that it’s so huge, but we’re also so siloed. So a lot of people don’t know what other departments are doing. And if you have someone like me who is like, “Okay well, you want this, but this department is also working on like something similar. So why not work together?” And they just had no idea that another department was working on something similar, because they’re so siloed. And in that way, it’s actually really useful to get all the contacts, to be like, “Oh like, this is what you want and why you want it. Let’s combine forces with this other initiative, so it’s not so confusing where you have like two initiatives that are separate but very similar, and then that just confuses everybody.”

Dan: Right right, but that context lets you add more value to your job because you are helping people build bridges where maybe it didn’t occur to them, those bridges. So besides asking people about context, are there other tools or techniques that you use again, to sort of help with the IA process or even help draw people in to that process?

Anita: I do a lot of prototyping, usually in like a Google Doc. It isn’t like that fancy, it’s not in Figma or anything. They’re like, “Okay this is the ask that I’ve heard you make. So let me just write up something to make sure that I understand this is what you mean.” Because a lot of times if you even just have ideas or workflows, it’s hard for people to really understand what that looks like as a finished product. And for me, I’m actually a content designer, so I use IA for I would say all of my work. But my deliverables are content. It’s like, text on a screen. So in that way, it’s just like, “Okay, let’s just like draft something really quick to make sure that I understand this is what you mean, and then we can work from there.” And people see it and they get it. And they’re like, “Okay now I’m going to go into the Google Doc and add suggestions.” Then we can work together really fast like that.

Dan: That’s really interesting. I almost feel like being a content designer in this case gives you a little bit of an advantage. I don’t mean to overstate that, right? Because I know this is all hard work...But when you sort of go to someone and say, “Here’s what I heard you say, here’s what I wrote, can we edit it together? Like that’s kind of a familiar milieu, if you will. So it‘s sort of like, people are like, “Oh yeah we’re editing the content. This is a collaborative iterative process.” Whereas if I, as an IA, show someone a site map, they’re like, “Well, is this how it’s going to be?" I’m like, “No no, we can move boxes around and like...”

Anita: Well yeah, and like put the links here, but they have a hard time like visualizing it.

Dan: Right.

Anita: You really have to see it to really understand what it means to go through the site.

Dan: Yes exactly. But I feel like you can kind of sneak in IA stuff when you’re doing content design. Can you maybe help us understand what that looks like or how that works?

Anita: For the past year, over a year actually, I was working for San Francisco’s COVID-19 response. And part of my job that I gave myself—since I was like, “This is really hard to understand for the public”—was to take all the public health orders, which is written in a lot of legalese, but it tells people what to do, right? It’s like, “You have to close your business” or “You have to wear a mask,” which is what happened today—and take the legal content and put it on web pages where people could be like. “I want to know what I have to do about masks.” And there’s a page about masks, and then there’s a page about businesses and stuff. And so in that way, it’s a lot of IA where I have to like...you have this pile of information and then you have to pull stuff out to make sense of it. So in a broad stroke it is IA even though it’s not necessarily about clicking through a whole experience. It also is that, but it’s mostly the words on the page trying to tell people like, “Here’s what’s going on. If you can’t read this legalese, this is what you have to do.”

Dan: Yeah that’s really cool! I appreciate the idea that part of what information architecture is, is creating—imposing some structure on an otherwise...let’s call it chaotic document. Or maybe let’s say that differently...a document where the structure is not geared towards the person consuming it.

Anita: Right, yes, yes.

Dan: Like, digging through the structure and we’re saying, “Okay, that’s written for a lawyer or a policymaker. Let’s dig that out and create a new structure.

Anita: Yeah, like you know people who just want to find out, like masks—“I just need to know about masks. Like, what’s going on about masks?” And they don’t want to go through all 100 pages of the public health order to find out about masks. So yeah.

Dan: I’m not familiar...I don’t live in San Francisco so I’m not familiar with San Francisco’s COVID web information. Was there a lot of kind of—besides editing it down or restructuring it, was there a lot of interlinking that you did? Was there a lot of stuff for findability, or was it really just trying to get as, in some ways, as little content as possible, to make it as highly navigable as possible?

Anita: I think a lot of it, honestly, was making sure that each piece of content was as clear as possible. We found that a lot of people actually don’t click through everything. I mean they can, but we did find that most people would actually rely on social media to get information. And so, a huge part of my work was to be like, “Okay, the holidays are coming up, we have to have a campaign about like how to stay safe during the holidays. So let’s make a webpage that links to, like, masking and traveling and testing.” A lot of stuff! But at the same time, like, this is a page about the holidays that we can build off of, that people can link to from their Facebook post or a Twitter post. This is the hub of information for the thing that you want to know, and then it links off to other, more detailed things.

Dan: That’s really cool. It sort of brings us to the lens that we picked out. Do you want to tell us what lens you selected, and what about that lens resonated with you?

Anita: Sure! So I picked the lens for “Setting expectations. How does the structure influence user’s perception of what’s next?” And I picked that one because I feel that especially with the pandemic and the communications all around it, we really have to set expectations about what people were going to read. Especially with all the links that we had available, it’s like this is what to expect if you click on this link. Like, “We’re gonna give you information from the CDC.” Like, “This is a PDF.” And it was a challenge because there’s just so much information. There’s just so much stuff out there that we really had to choose what to write, what to link to. And then explain like, this is why we’re giving you this link and what to expect when you click on it, that kind of thing.

Dan: If you’re open to talking a little bit more about that I’m really interested, because I sort of think of this as very much uh, caught up in the label. Like make sure that the label that someone clicks on aligns with the page that they get, right? So that we’ve set their expectations with the label. And then when they get to that page, it sort of pays off that expectation like, “Oh yes, I’m in the right place” or “I got what I thought I was gonna get,” but it sounds like you’re also describing maybe adding—here comes context again right?—some additional verbiage or expectation-setting around that. Did I get that right? Is that...?

Anita: Yeah! I think like, because—I thought it was interesting, because the lens itself is talking about links. But like in terms of expectations, I was also doing a lot of expectation-setting with the page structure and the content design of each page. Like okay, “This is what I’m going to give people—first, headline. Like, when to wear a mask for example, because that’s what people want to know right away. And then as you go down the page, there’s a little more information about like, what kind of masks to wear, who should not wear a mask. Like if you have babies, they should not wear masks because it’s could be harmful to them, because they might suffocate. But you have to predict what people will want to see first and then start with that. And then kind of go deeper where it’s like, “Well, if you want to keep reading, here’s some more information.” Which is kind of like the way that journalists write, where they have the inverted pyramid, you know? Where it’s like, “This is like a TL;DR.” Like if you stopped here, you would get like the gist. But then a lot of time for information that you want to tell people about, a lot of people will start with the background, because they’re like, “Well let me give you the context.” But sometimes you want that and sometimes you don’t want that. And in this situation, it was sort of like, “Okay if they stopped at the first sentence, or like the first 5 seconds of reading a page, did they understand what they have to do?” And then that was kind of like how I was trying to explain to people why I wrote it that way.

Dan: Did that resonate with your stakeholders? Do they have any concerns? Because I know, having worked with some stakeholders in the past—only in the past, none of my current stakeholders, okay? None of the the more recent ones! They were like, “Uh no, we want to tell our story. Like, we want to start from the beginning. We want everyone to know everything about us!” And you’re like, “Well, how about we just give them what they came for upfront, and then we can kind of fill in some of the story.” Did any of your stakeholders react negatively to that approach that you took?

Anita: Yeah I think one good thing about COVID is that everyone really understood how imperative it was to give people information that they needed right away. They were all on board with like, “Yeah let’s just give people the information that they need.” A lot of times though, they think that that’s more information that people would actually need. So it was me kind of like, trying to chip away at this extra content. Like, “Well, this kind of situation, this paragraph that you have here would only apply to a very small percentage of the population. So maybe we could put that somewhere else, like maybe at the bottom of the page, maybe on another page for that audience.” Because a lot of times with stakeholders, they know too much. They just know everything and they want to impart everything. But then it’s like, layperson/general public, not a health care worker, not someone who works in a jail. It’s like, what is going to hit like 80% and then just put it up there right upfront. And then like caveats—we can link them elsewhere. Because you can’t assume that everybody clicking on the page is going to be working at, like, a congregate living setting or something, right? You really have to chip away and be like, “Well I know this is an important exception, but like, how many people does it really apply to?” Then you start questioning that and then they’re like, “Okay well” and “Sure.”

Dan: I don’t know if you can share any stories with us about design decisions that were especially hard to make. Like did you run into any...I know you were moving fast and so you’ve said before that people sort of gave you some more leeway than maybe you’ve experienced previously in your career, just because things had to move very quickly. But were there any contentious design decisions that you had to deal with?

Anita: I don’t know if it was necessarily a design decision because ultimately I was the person who was publishing things on the website. So if i had any doubts then....well it also depended—it was like okay if something is going to be effective on this day and time, I’m just going to publish it. And if nobody says anything, I’m just going to do it. Because like, this is the deadline—that’s what I’m gonna do. And I always figured, well if somebody had a problem, we can always fix it, right? We can always update the web page. We just gotta get something up so it’s not wrong. And I think there’s always like a push and pull with how much detail to give people, how much to explain to people, that kind of thing. But later on in my work—I would say starting late last year like November, December—I actually got more involved with the Department of Public Health, who would actually work with me directly to be like, “Okay, this is why we’re saying this.” And I’m like, “Oh okay, now I understand why you want this detail. Let’s work together on making it more readable, even though it’s like really complicated.” Because COVID mitigation is complicated! And now with Delta and vaccines, it’s more complicated! But at least if we can sit down and work together and talk it out, at least we can come to an understanding of what this has to be. But there’s always “how much to tell people” versus like....well you have to assume that people aren’t reading all of it. Like most people are not going to be reading all of it. So what is a thing that we should tell them right up front versus everything. So that that’s always a challenge. But it’s not bad....One of the things that I love about content design and IA is that you just get to learn everything. And I just love it because it’s like, “Oh I understand more!” And it just feels really wonderful to do that.

Dan: Yeah I mean, this business is fantastic for liberal arts majors. Like I went to a liberal arts school and I learned a little bit of everything and now that’s what I do for my job. I feel like folks like you and I, who have spent a lot of time thinking about content and we’re sort of immersed in the world of IA, have a little bit of a different perspective on designers entering the industry now. We’re seeing the last five years where there hasn’t been quite the same amount of attention being placed on information architecture. And so I think they come in with a different viewpoint and part of that viewpoint is not really grasping the value of information architecture. Or even if they do understand it, not having been exposed to the range of tools and techniques that folks like you and I were exposed to. So if you were to give a newer designer, a designer just entering the field some advice on how to make use of this lens—or really sort of content design in general—what advice might you offer a designer who hasn’t been as exposed to IA thinking as much as you have?

Anita: Yeah I think to start with, it would be good to think about a user journey. Because a lot of people, they’ll do user journeys for certain experiences, like...I don’t know, what’s a common one....like going to the bank. Or you know, using the ATM or something like that. But then that’s just one touch point. But if you really pull back on before they got to the bank, what were they doing, what were they thinking, what was their task. Like, “Oh I have to go to the bank because x.” And I think that would be really helpful in trying to get out of the “I’m only working on an ATM screen” sort of thinking. Which is what I think is maybe part of the challenge that we have with IA, where people think like, “Oh IA is not as important if I’m doing something really small and granular,” just because there’s not a whole lot there to architect. But if you think about the entire context of how someone is approaching trying to solve the problem, then it gets a lot more interesting, right? Like that there’s just a lot more to play with. And I think that’s how I would go about it thinking about more context, rather than someone is definitely gonna do this because that’s how my user journey started right?

Dan: Stick the card in the machine, right? That’s where my journey started.

Anita: That was the first step, and you’re like, “No no nom they were there for some reason like who is using an, I dunno..?”

Dan: They didn’t come into existence standing in front of your ATM! They’ve lived a life.

Anita: They had reasons for doing so and then...yeah.

Dan: Anita, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me on this little journey.

Anita: Thank you for inviting me again to talk about IA, because it’s always super nerdy but awesome.

Dan: Bye-bye.