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November 26, 2002
Train of Thoughts and IA Backlash
Has anyone else seen John Lenker's book: Train of Thoughts? I've looked at it at the bookstore a couple of times, and it really is an interesting oppositional view of how to do design for the web. The comments at Amazon are accurate: it is an intellectual argument in favor of creativity, as opposed to Nielsen-like systems of rules. The book certainly is itself a love-it or hate-it design: most pages are huge full-color photos and a small box of text. Amazon lists it as 300 or so pages; I'd have guessed more like 800.
The book's own site is already out of date (forums coming in August!), the "Prospective Reader" section is still coming soon, and is possibly one of the least inventive uses of Flash I've seen.
Lenker is (I'm paraphrasing here) upset with the fields of Information Architecture and Usability, and the book is largely an attempt to define a creative process that works around them. His main quibble with IA is that it's only concerned with building rigid heirarchies and completely predictable ways to get at information in them. Usability exists largely to validate and refine those kinds of systems.
This strikes me as a pretty wrong-headed understanding of IA as it's currently practiced. If anyone recognizes the limits of simplistic heirarchical structures for information, it's IAs. Probably, though, Lenker's impression is a commonly held one: let an IA at your project and you'll get a big drill-down heirarchy as the result.
His own methods (which come out of instructional design) seek to design highly personalized systems where users are always individually recognized and information always appears just where it's needed, just when it's needed, and adapts to the pace and context of its use.
That's hardly easy to achieve at any scale. No wonder most of Lenker's case studies in Train of Thoughts are sites with very little (relatively speaking) content: BMW Films, Absolut.com, HillmanCurtis.com. (LandsEnd.com is a notable exception.)
There are ways to begin to organize lots of information to achieve Lenker's vision (which is certainly not orignal to him). The trouble is, it takes lots of tedious, unglamorous "library" work: building controlled vocabularies, metadata schemes, and yes, well-labelled categories. Not to mention the often boring work of designing systems and interfaces for people to write and categorize all that stuff. As far as I can tell, Lenker doesn't mention those parts of the process at all, nor does he offer alternates.
Posted by Andrew at November 26, 2002 05:06 PM
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Funny, I just ordered Lenker's book today. Now I'm not sure I want to read it, or at least take it too seriously. Sounds like yet another misunderstanding of what IA actually is...
Of course, that's us IAs' faults too. Hmmm. Maybe we need to organize ourselves to promote the field more effectively (and accurately)? ;-)
Posted by: Louis Rosenfeld at December 3, 2002 02:52 AM