Author: Sarah Kimes

A sepia-toned cabinet photograph depicting a man dressed in a military uniform

Connected Content and the Preservation of Context

Metadata is more than a descriptive search and discovery tool for content. It also helps us to make connections between pieces of content when they are stored in a larger management system.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jessica Helfand published an essay entitled “Missing” that describes the sense of ambiguous loss we are all feeling at this particular moment in time. To illustrate this, she included a conversation she witnessed between her three students regarding an historic photograph:

Many years ago I was working with my students on an experimental project, adapting an early twentieth-century photo album as an interactive website, when we came upon a picture of a young soldier. He was photographed alone, in uniform, standing in an empty field. Below him, someone had written three words:

Taken in France.

We sat there staring at this image together for some time, searching for a narrative we could all agree upon—and couldn’t.

The photograph was taken in France, said one student.

No—he was taken prisoner in France, said another. He was missing in action.

No again, said a third. He was killed in France, and taken from his family.

Three students, three readings, three fully different, yet entirely reasonable explanations.

Jessica Helfand, “Missing”

The first thing I noticed when I read this passage was where the three students centered their discussion. There was no argument about who the photograph featured, what it was trying to depict, or why it was taken in the first place. What they focused on was the word “taken.” What did the word mean here? They didn’t know because they didn’t have any contextual clues that could either prove or disprove their theories.

In this example, the phrase “Taken in France” is so vague as to be almost meaningless and I can only assume there was no additional information for them to reference. The lack of verifiable information forced the three students to create their own meaning because the photograph was divorced from its context.

The difference between usable, valuable content and content that’s been stripped of all meaning is metadata. Metadata not only bridges that gap between the known and the unknown, it also provides us with the meaningful information we need to establish and preserve context.

Laying the Foundation for Context

We use metadata for many different reasons but I want to focus on two in particular.

The first reason deals with description. We include metadata that describes the content in as much detail as we can afford with the goal of answering a short list of questions: what, when, where, who, and how.

You’ll notice that I didn’t include why in that list. To best answer the question why, we need to place individual content items within a larger system that contains other content. By doing that, we can use other technical tools, such as ontologies, to make connections and create relationships between these items (if any).

In its article “What is Metadata?,” Ontotext lists a few reasons why we put so many resources toward including thorough metadata with our published content. I want to highlight one paragraph in particular:

When created and handled properly, metadata serves the clarity and consistency of information. Metadata facilitates the discovery of relevant information and the search and retrieval of resources. Tagged with metadata, any digital object can be automatically associated with other relevant elements and thus easy to organize and discover. This helps users make connections they would not have made otherwise. [emphasis mine]

Ontotext, “What is Metadata?”

This is the second reason why we use metadata: to make associations and connections between content. In fact, I believe metadata is at its most powerful when we use it for this reason because those connections can help us to form understanding.

However, that only happens when we can place the content within context.

Preventing Ambiguous Loss

Back to the mysterious photograph that stumped Helfand’s students. What if the original photographer had provided more information about the soldier such as his name, his rank, or his unit? What about an exact date of when it was taken?

Imagine we had all that information, which we could then translate into machine-readable metadata. Imagine we could upload that information into a larger system that held other photographs from the same time period. Imagine that there exists other photographs of this soldier and the metadata attached to those photographs is also available in this system.

We could be celebrating a connection made instead of mourning an opportunity lost.

Not all information loss is preventable. Neither is it inevitable. If we have the technical tools to capture and preserve it, we should use them.

Photo by Mr Cup / Fabien Barral on Unsplash

A person stands in front of a bulletin board filled with cards and handwritten notes

Book Review – Figure It Out by Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast

In my archival work, I specialized in processing and cataloging large donations of 500+ item collections. This work could be overwhelming on even the best days but, over time, I developed a successful process for tackling these types of projects.

If I did not need to preserve the context of the collection’s original order, I liked to lay out all the items across several tables and workbenches to get a better view of what the collection contained. Once I had a high-level view of the items, I began sorting everything into rough categories and labeling those categories in a way that would make sense to our end users – an open card sort, if you will. Only once I had physically handled and categorized the items could I feel confident about moving forward with my work because I had a much better understanding of the collection as a whole.

Little did I know that I was proving the theories that Stephen P. Anderson and Karl Fast, Ph.D. propose in their new book Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding published by Rosenfeld Media earlier this year. It does a wonderful job of explaining how we make sense of the abundant (and sometimes overwhelming) amounts of information that surrounds us. The conclusions they draw have the ability to greatly influence how we practice design. Which is the reason why I recommend this book to all UX professionals but especially to those who work in the information architecture, usability research, content design, and interaction design spaces.

In their book, Anderson and Fast introduce a new perspective on how we make sense of the world around us through their use of the Extended Mind thesis. This thesis proposes that we not only parse information in our brains but also through our bodies using everything we have available to us in our external environments. That is to say, we make a habit of using our bodies and the tools we have on hand to extend our thinking beyond our brains, easing the cognitive load that large amounts of information can demand of them.

The book is divided into six distinct parts. Part 1 lays the foundation by explaining distributed cognition and the Extended Mind thesis. Then, Parts 2 through 6 provide convincing evidence for their theories by going into detail about how we use associations, external representations, interactions, intertwined systems, and tools to make sense of everything.

If that summary makes it sound like a highly theoretical textbook, I assure you it is not. The authors use real-world examples and concise summaries of academic research to help readers make the necessary connections between theory and application. For example, they open the book with an attention-grabbing example of how Anderson redesigned a chart containing complex and sensitive medical information to make it easier to read at a glance. If you weren’t already convinced that poorly organized information could lead to a life-or-death situation, you will be after reading how he dealt with this challenge.

The authors tackled a complex topic, and they did it well, making even the most abstract concepts approachable and relevant.

At 432 pages, Figure It Out is the longest book in Rosenfeld Media’s catalog to date. It’s also a dense read, with every page packed full of vital information. The authors tackled a complex topic, and they did it well, making even the most abstract concepts approachable and relevant. I appreciated chapter 11 on information seeking especially, which felt both comprehensive and succinct in its explanation.

With that said, readers should not expect to breeze through this in a single afternoon or come away with a step-by-step checklist they can apply right away. Anderson and Fast demand more from us. They might help us to make sense of the topic but it’s up to us to put it into practice.

Photo by Brandon Lopez on Unsplash

Three people sit in front of a painting in a museum exhibition hall

How My Museum Exhibit Design Experience Influences My UX Practice

If you talk to 10 people about how they found themselves working in the user experience field, I guarantee that you’ll hear 10 different meandering pathways into the profession. Personally, it’s one of the reasons why I enjoy working in this field. I have the chance to collaborate with people who were trained or educated as philosophers, social scientists, computer programmers, architects, librarians, artists, bakers, psychologists, educators, and journalists, among others.

From my perspective, this is a feature, not a bug. These various backgrounds provide us with different lenses through which to view our work. When we take these perspectives into account, our work and its outputs become stronger as a result.

Take my unique background and pathway as an example. I hold a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in information science. Both degrees helped me to understand language as an advanced technology that can be applied to solve problems, clarify issues, and accomplish goals. When I began my career, I spent years applying my skills and education to the museum and archives field where I developed and designed exhibits around our museum’s artifact collection for visitors of all ages.

Now that I’m immersed in the UX field, I appreciate the fact that I was able to develop and refine my design skills within a physical space using 2- and 3-dimensional artifacts. Looking back, I can see how this experience prepared me for this next level in my career. Below, I identify 3 areas of my work as an exhibit designer that influences my UX practice today.

Practicing content-first design

In recent years, some UX professionals have begun advocating for a content-first design approach where digital product teams consider content early in the design process instead of leaving it to the last minute. In museum exhibit design, designers must incorporate content at the beginning of the project because the exhibit itself cannot stand on its own without it.

Imagine entering an exhibit gallery space where nothing is on display. No artifacts, no artwork – nothing except labels and text panels. I can’t imagine that visitors would linger for long.

For museums, content is king. And when I say content, I mean those artifacts that make up a museum’s collection. Those collections can number in the hundreds of thousands of artifacts (sometimes millions). When we design an exhibit, we start with an idea for a topic and then perform an audit on the collection to find artifacts related to that topic. Then, we identify a small group of artifacts that we think will support the overall narrative we’re trying to tell in the exhibit. Without those artifacts, our exhibits would be a lot less interesting and informative.

My experience in designing museum exhibits around a group of curated artifacts naturally led me to a content centered design philosophy. I used design to highlight the exhibit’s content, not the other way around. Extending this to my UX practice, I believe that the design of an experience should enhance and highlight the content that people seek. Content is the reason people use digital products and platforms in the first place.

Helping users achieve their goals

One of the main reasons people visit a museum is to see its current exhibits. Those exhibits are unique because they’re highly mediated experiences, as Jennifer Trant explained in her article “Emerging Convergence? Thoughts on museums, archives, libraries and professional training.”

“Unique artefacts are presented in an exhibition space, assembled according to a curatorial thesis and sequenced to support an argument or illustrate a theme. Within a gallery, didactic educational materials provide context and meaning for the works chosen, offering an interpretation and explanation for the visitor. Labels both identify artefacts or specimens and explain their relevance to a particular context within an exhibition. … Visitors are strongly guided through collections.”

Jennifer Trant

To achieve this, subject matter experts work with curators and exhibit designers to translate high-level, specialized material into an exhibit that anyone can visit and come away with a good understanding of that subject. People shouldn’t need an astrophysics degree to appreciate their visit to a planetarium. The ultimate goal for an exhibit designer, then, is to create something that will walk people through complex topics, ideas, and issues and allow them to learn something new along the way.

As a UX professional, I work to create something that will help a user achieve their goals, whether that’s to find a product or make a bill payment. Sometimes, the best way to achieve that is to create a mediated experience that will walk the user through the process of finding that product or making their payment. Little did I know that learning to design a mediated museum exhibit would train me to create a better onboarding experience for a new customer.

Asking the right questions

Every museum position I’ve held in my career gave me the opportunity to interact with our visitors daily – greeting them, answering their questions, and collecting as much feedback about our museum’s exhibits as I could gather. This proved to be excellent training for my later work in UX research.

I learned through trial and error that visitors would only give me helpful feedback when I learned to ask better questions. If I asked, “How can we make this exhibit better?,” the answers I would receive wouldn’t yield the helpful, applicable feedback I hoped to hear. Every time I spoke with our visitors, I had the chance to refine my questions to gather the feedback that my team could use in our next design.

On top of that, receiving immediate daily feedback helped me to develop a thick skin when it comes to design critiques. Sometimes, feedback can be sharply critical, but I’ve learned to accept it for what it is. After all, the feedback is not about me personally – it’s about the design.

This is not an exhaustive list. It only scratches the surface of how my experience prepared me to become the UX professional I am today. How did your early experiences influence your UX career?

Photo by Christian Fregnan on Unsplash

Reading and research area located inside a large library

Book Review – Living in Information by Jorge Arango

I’m writing and editing this book review at the local branch of my public library. The building itself was recently renovated with a layout that separates the quiet study areas, like the ones I favor for writing, from the louder and more heavily trafficked areas, like the entrance lobby and the conference rooms. This allows different groups of people to use the same building for their own pursuits, and they can be assured that it will allow them to achieve what they came to do.

Looking beyond the physical library space into its inner workings, libraries use complex organizational and retrieval systems to lend materials, like books and music, to anyone with a library card. Both the libraries and their patrons operate within a larger system that sees a benefit to giving the public access to information.

We all exist in spaces and environments like these without realizing how they impact us. However, Jorge Arango recognized their influences and saw them as lessons for how we should design our digital spaces and environments. In his book, Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places, he argued that we can and should design these new digital spaces like we design physical ones – with the assumption that what we’re creating will impact society in a number of ways that we can’t even begin to understand.

An ecommerce website, a Slack channel, a Facebook group – all these spaces are information environments.

In his opening chapter, Arango posed the thesis of his book as a question: “How can we design information environments that serve our social needs in the long term?” In order to understand his thesis and the solutions he proposed, we first need to understand the meaning of the term “information environment.” According to the author, an information environment is a space mediated through words and images, and transmitted via an interface, such as a screen. At first, this definition appears to be too broad and general. If that’s all that’s required of an information environment, then technically any website or digital platform can be considered one. An ecommerce website, a Slack channel, a Facebook group – all these spaces are information environments. They are places we visit to work, shop, learn, and socialize. This broad definition, it turns out, is an effective tool for shifting our perspective from regarding these websites as business platforms to seeing them as spaces where we live our lives every day.

True to the subtitle of his book, Arango used this expanded definition of an information environment to argue that designers have a social responsibility to think about the impact of their design products. If people are living their lives inside the platforms and websites we create, then we need to think carefully about how we engage and incentivize our users. And we need to think preemptively about how they could use features within these information environments to harm others. Arguably, this could be one of the most important skills a designer possesses.

What sets Arango’s book apart from others in this space is his last chapter, entitled “Gardening,” where he explained how and why we should design information environments that will grow and change over time. Although it’s impossible to know exactly how people will use our products in the future, understanding that it will change as its users change demands that we develop these environments with intentionality. This idea reminded me of S. R. Ranganathan’s five laws of library science, particularly the fifth law: a library is a growing organism. But growth can only happen when we cut and remove things that aren’t benefiting the space anymore. A library isn’t a random group of books but an intentionally designed collection that librarians routinely weed to remove materials that are no longer serving its users. We should approach the design of an information environment in a similar way by asking our users what’s no longer serving them and making room for what matters.

Many of the concepts discussed in this book are highly cerebral. I think Arango recognized this. He consciously used tangible, real-world examples to describe concepts like context and how they impact people in physical spaces that draws parallels to our new digital environments. That’s why I recommend Living in Information to anyone who’s interested in this topic, not just UX design practitioners and product managers. It would be especially helpful to people who want to understand why they act and interact differently on Twitter than they do in their workplace Slack channel.

Photo by Benjamin Ashton on Unsplash