melinda miller media blog

I was thrown for a loop last night using the Walgreens iPad app for the first time. On the surface, the app allowed an easy method for ordering a refill on a prescription. No log-in was even required. But once I entered the prescription RX, it got a little trickier.

The first screen (below) allows the user to confirm the Walgreens location where the prescription will be filled. The correct pharmacy was listed for me, so I clicked the Submit button. read more »

While I’m still reading Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (a.k.a. the polar bear book because of it’s iconic O’Reilly polar bear illustration), I had the chance to listen to an ASIS&T webinar titled Beyond the Polar Bear, and it was a great preview of things to come.

The presenter, Mike Atherton, used  his experiences in realigning and wrangling the websites for BBC television and radio programs (a project that involved addressing issues with thousands of sites many of which were disconnected in their own silos) as a jumping off point to discuss a different approach to IA — domain modeling.

Slide from Mike Atherton's Beyond the Polar Bear

The idea is to de-emphasize starting with a taxonomy and moving from that to navigation and wireframing. Instead, Mike explains a process by which the IA maps the “things” associated with a domain and focuses on the user’s mental model of the domain. His examples were Disney World, where the things would be characters, hotels, rides, resorts, restaurants, etc. And eventually he moved onto the BBC program example, where the things would be items such as episodes, actors, characters, music tracks, track lists, mini-series, spinoffs, etc. The IA’s maps would include arrows (with crow’s feets notation for one-to-many and many-to-many relationships) to establish the connections among the items. (And, yes, there was a big nod to FRBR here although it was not really discussed.)

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Chapter 1 starts at the beginning, of course, with an attempt to define and explain what information architecture is … and isn’t.

I am all too familiar with the “explaining to others” section in this chapter. As I’ve attempted to define for myself why IA interests me and why I think I’d be good at it, I’ve had to talk about my career shift with friends and family. Yes, I enjoyed the my 17 years in journalism and the hectic pace of the newsroom. But I was always most fascinated by the systems and structure of the newsroom and our creations. I was drawn to improving how we worked and how we created our end products. But there was not a lot of time or room to focus on those organizational and systematic issues in daily journalism. So here I am, taking the lessons learned from 17 years as a visual journalist and editor, applying bits and pieces from my courses in information and library science, and reading Morville and Rosenfeld.

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The clock is ticking a little to fast on my master’s program in library and information science at the University of Illinois.

OK, well to be honest, two weeks ago when I was struggling to get all my final projects done for spring semester, I wouldn’t have said that. But now, with all of that behind me, I’ve just got this summer and fall to go before completing my 40 hours for my MLIS degree. And it feels like it’s going to go crazy fast and I won’t have gotten to take half the classes I wanted to and won’t have been able to dive as deeply into some of subjects that I wanted to.

Which is why an independent study (originally suggested by my friend Gemma who is undertaking a similar project) is perfect for this summer. While I’ve been geeking out on all the information science knowledge I’m gaining at GSLIS, my main interests — information architecture and usability — are not well represented in the curriculum.

So, the idea is to chart my own course through some of the leading books that talk about different aspects of both topics (although my list is heavier on the IA side) and read and write about them all summer. Along the way, I plan on pulling in some blog posts, Twitter favorites and journal articles. And hopefully, I’ll be able to immerse myself in the topics and synthesize what I’m reading and my own thoughts on the subjects.

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