For over a year, I’ve been working on a personal project and finally it’s time to share it: Dopeology.org, a website about doping in professional cycling.

Professionally I work in a fairly conservative environment with stable technologies. What’s more, the emphasis of my activities has been shifting inexorably closer to improvement and management rather than development.

So I decided to stretch myself a little, to take on something less familiar. I set about putting together a web application to collect reported instances of doping in European professional road cycling.

Rediscovering a passion and discovering the truth

I raced a road bicycle as a teenager and I was pretty decent rider even if I had no illusions about future prospects. At fifteen, I crossed the line in front of many other young riders, but then two new competitors entered the race and I could not beat them: beer and girls.

I met a cute girl and fell in love. I went to university. I smoked some cigarettes and then some other stuff. I didn’t train and I had fun instead.

So when pro cycling was rocked by the Festina scandal in 1998, I’d already nearly lost touch with the sport.

Source: W Sojka, Wikimedia Commons

Life goes on. Some years passed and then J and I relocated to Belgium, home of the Ronde van Vlaanderen, Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Home of pro road cycling. No surprise then that in 2009, I found myself checking a few results and then watching the Tour de France on television.

I’d heard of Lance Armstrong and the controversy surrounding the 1999 Tour de France but as the American now rode Mont Ventoux for the last time, it became suddenly more relevant.

When I’d last followed the pro cycling scene, Armstrong was a slightly heavy, promising one-day racer who got lucky in the 1993 World Championships and later scored a Tour de France stage victory. By 2009, the seven-time Tour winner was getting on in years. His career was almost over.

I cite Armstrong here, not because he was the trigger for my interest in doping in pro cycling, nor because of the FDA investigation currently involving him, but rather because he was one of the very few names I still recognised when I watched the Tour that summer.

So where, I asked myself, were all those other promising names I remembered? Jan Ullrich, Abraham Olano, Francesco Casagrande, Manuel Beltrán, Laurent Roux …

And if so very many of these promising careers were strongly affected by doping, why wasn’t that of Armstrong?

So as any old fan trying to reconnect might do, I searched the Internet. And I found that the chronicle of history, as it often does, had compressed and compacted my projected aspirations of yesteryear into a few concise paragraphs of coldest hindsight.

Caveat emptor

A litany of doping intrigues and revelations would put off many. Let sleeping dogs lie and all that.

Yet I found that my old passion for pro cycling had come this far and it would survive a shock or two more. Even though I was older and perhaps a little wiser, the colour and beauty of the sport of my teenage years could still hold me in thrall.

Indeed it was because I was a little wiser that I quickly accepted the prevalence of doping all through those years I’d blithely worshipped my cycling heros and beyond all to the very beginnings of the sport.

So if I found that I still loved pro cycling and if I wanted to catch up on the faces and exploits of the years I’d missed, I knew that I’d need more than just a sports almanac. I would need plenty more information to decide on how to interpret that history.

This is the reality of cycling – and many other professional sports more or less “outed” – in our world today: things are not often what they seem.

For fun and (non-)profit: the making of Dopeology

Doping and corruption in sport have always existed since the beginning of recorded history but I could not and did not want to cover everything, so the first step was to define the scope of my enquiry.

As I outlined above, my main interest has always been the European pro road cycling scene. I decided to limit myself to doping in that domain.

To render the volume and sourcing of data more manageable, I started out from 1980, a round number which captures some of the typical behaviour of drug use associated with earlier generations but which also fully encompasses the more sophisticated methods prevalent in our own times.

Next I examined the reporting of doping cases over that time period and tried to find the common elements between them.

I decided that every doping case boils down to one or more ‘things that happen’, which I call incidents. Each incident requires the involvement of people, teams and products. Finally, a Berkeleyan proposition: an incident can only be an incident when published sources exist as evidence that the incident happened.

Having proven the concept of incidents using a few real world examples, my partner J and I developed a database design. I don’t normally do this kind of work, so it was pretty exciting. To test and set up the design in MySQL, we got help from the database modelling software Modelright.

Next I developed the simple data entry tools in HTML5, PHP, jQuery and JSON. Once this process was complete, the biggest task then began: adding the data. Even if the ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘who’ and ‘where’ of the data entry are straightforward enough, the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the business rules are more sophisticated. I have since explained these briefly in the incident methodology on the Dopeology website.

I completed the public aspects of Dopeology with similar technologies, adding the excellent Highcharts SVG library for data graphing and an alternative layout for mobile devices.

In fact, the process of entering the data has taken the longest time. The quality of the website depends on the quality of the data, which of course might never be totally complete, since new information comes to light all the time. This ‘grunt work’ consists of a huge amount of internet (and some offline) research in several languages, building up sources and extracting the bare facts.

Conclusion: sharing is caring

I continue to cling (perhaps naïvely) to the purest notion that the Internet is about sharing useful information and generating knowledge. Online marketing and commerce, together with some of the less meaningful aspects of social networking, may be useful but not without the exigence of profit.

My intent has never been to judge any individual or organisation involved in doping activities within professional road cycling. My intent is instead to synthesise from a broad mass of published information, a structured, usable corpus of facts.

From a personal point of view, the project has enabled me to use my professional skills (and to try out some new ones) to closely examine one of my passions and to deliver something that I believe has genuine value to others.

• Visit Dopeology.org

Information architecture for websites is about organising information into containers and content. Both of these require labels. This article is about the reasoning process behind website labelling.

How labels work

As with most information delivered electronically, users tend to scan labels rapidly, looking for familiar patterns rather than really digesting the language.

User behaviour on websites all about foraging, experimentation and discovery rather than grassroots comprehension. Initially the most important objective is to provide a strong foothold on our information architecture rather than to fully explain it.

If the user is required to think – to engage in a process of actually deciphering what is written and making a value judgment about it – then there’s an increased risk of confusion. That’s what labels are for: they’re touchpoints of familiarity, rungs on the ladder.

Website labelling mistakes

The three most common mistakes all self-respecting website labels should avoid are:

1. Ambiguity
2. Superfluity
3. Repetition

Since different processes can arrive at different results, it’s easier to illustrate the above with some examples of what not to do!

Poorly devised labels usually end up suffering from one or more of the three mistakes described above, such that they tend to be ambiguous, overlong, complex, superfluous or repetitive:

Facilities Management/BC

Who knows what “BC” stands for (it’s “Business Centre” actually)? Even an habitual user might not understand something that you take for granted from the inside. I have worked in my current environment for two years and I encounter at least one acronym that I don’t already know almost every week!

Next, labels containing acronyms require two processes from the user. The first is to decipher the meaning of the acronyms, whether or not this is a conscious thing, and the second is to decide if it is relevant.

If users do not really ‘learn’ the first process, the label could cause the same user to stumble again. Assumption is always dangerous, even in labelling!

Finally, the slash ‘/’ is a tell-tale sign of “tacking on”. Sometimes we find a bit of content that just doesn’t seem to fit. It’s too brief to warrant its own distinct content unit and it doesn’t relate to most of the other stuff we want to publish.

So we figure this pesky snippet – in our example, it’s ‘BC’ – is vaguely relevant to one lucky volunteer label and we ‘tack it on’ to the end of that, thinking nobody will notice and those that do will ‘get it’. Yet if the rest of our labels are nicely done, we can be sure that this is the label that people will notice for all the wrong reasons!

Let’s look at another example:

Strategic planning and programming

This is a lengthy label. It might even need to break onto two lines and thus become visually distracting.

It’s also ambiguous to some extent. Do we mean “programming” as distinct from “strategic planning” or do we mean to use a slightly shorter version of “strategic planning and strategic programming”? Or are these both wrong and we’re actually referring to, say, “computer programming”?

Finally, in semantic terms the distinction between the two participles (“planning” and “programming”) – which both describe very complex concepts – is probably not essential to deciding whether or not to view the content.

Information sources

This label is also ambiguous. What do we mean by Information sources?

Isn’t the website itself a kind of information source? So the page behind this label, is it going to tell users who to contact for further information? Or is it just going to be a list of links to other websites? Could it even be a map of services available within the organisation? Let’s face it: it could mean almost anything (and frequently does)!

Departmental policy

Policies and guidelines

Ethical policy

Facebook policy

Lots of different policies here. The word ‘policy’ itself is repetitive and does not connect with a simple concept.

What do these labels really represent? How are they different from each other? Are any of them actually related?

Think outside the box

True confessions

Get in touch

Everyone likes a service with a personal touch. Most people like a bit of mystery.

When it comes to website labelling however, these do not apply!

It’s tempting to try to be different on the Internet. Marketers often talk of ‘key differentiators’, for example: in a world of choice, what makes your offer different to anyone else’s? Being different in our labelling is likely to equate to confused users.

The labels in our example above are rather exotic. In fact, they actually stand for a company’s social events calendar, a manager’s blog and a contact form.

That’s another thing about being different: for some users we’re obfuscating the truth of what’s there, while for others it will be a terrible disappointment to click on True confessions and end up with something as banal as a manager’s blog!

Best practices in website labelling

We’ve seen some of the pitfalls and the problems. Now let’s consider some best practices. It will come as no surprise that these best practices are just the mirror opposites of the mistakes we discussed above.

• Every label that we formulate must be clear, concise and simple.
• Each label should mean the same thing to as many people as possible.
• Each label should not require users to “think about” what it means, nor to reflect unduly on whether or not it is relevant to them.
• Each label should be understandable outside the context of parent-child relationships – we shouldn’t have to know in what section a content unit appears to understand what its label represents.
• Labels are just labels. The content they represent is the thing in which users are really interested, so in this case deliver to expectations, not to aspirations.

Labelling etiquette

I take a reductivist approach to information design. I try to reduce things to their purest meaning, like cooking down a sauce. Designers are not artists: we are working for users – not for ourselves and our patrons – so we have to deliver only what is essential and be consistent in our approach to doing so.

I try to apply this idea to all types of information design, including labelling.

In practical terms, that means removing distractions from labels wherever possible. By ‘distractions’, I’m referring to any word or character that is not essential to visual or textual meaning.

Reducing labels is a process that should be approached with a certain amount of caution and sensitivity to the environment in which we’re working, always checking that the result benefits from reduction and that stakeholders are comfortable with it.

With that proviso in place, let’s look at a couple of possibilities:

Grammatical taekwondo

Prepositions, conjunctions, definite articles and sometimes even plurals can be unnecessary. Consider the label Members of the Council. Couldn’t we do better with just Council members?

Noisy capitals and common case

Too much capitalisation makes labels more difficult to read. Consider the label EU-Wide Ex-Parte Decisions: it looks like the profile of a Tour de France mountain stage!

It would work better as European ex-parte decisions. Note that I have only used a single capital letter at the beginning of the label.

If I apply this practice consistently as a rule, the visual appearance of the labels when displayed en bloc will improve.

Punctuation and special characters

In the previous example – EU-Wide Ex-Parte Decisions – I also removed one of the dashes by using a synonym “European” instead of “EU-Wide”. Of course, the stakeholder should approve of this type of choice, particularly when the label embodies a commonly-recognised phrase.

In any case, the dashes subtract from the overall facility of reading, as do any non-alphanumeric characters because, as explained above, they usually require an additional process of deciphering.

Another example might be a service called Helpers@Home. Even with the pervasiveness of modern technologies, not everyone knows the meaning of the “@” symbol. Indeed, in some linguistic cultures this same character conjures up references as diverse as mice, cats, dogs and even elephants.

So if throughout the labelling process we avoid …

• Potentially confusing symbols. and
• Unrequired prepositions as described above

… we could end up with Home care.

Of course, that ignores that prize-winning branding expertise peculiar to middle management, but it delivers to the user exactly what she expects.

Labelling as a collaborative exercise

Formulating labels is not easy. If your experience suggests otherwise, then you probably work alone and don’t do much usability testing.

Labelling is not something that should be done in an hermetically sealed environment, especially when a collaborative process is so easy to set up.

All we need are stakeholders, a spare wall and plenty of sticky notes. To begin with, we encourage and accept any label suggested by a participant.

Then we start to narrow the collection down to just the labels that all participants can validate, sometimes coming up with an entirely new result, but always discussing our reasoning out loud.

We can later use the selected labels to develop hierarchical information structures, which should be the next collaborative exercise.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Summer’s over and that means it’s business time in the public sector. It’s time to get down.

We now have the unenviable task of managing the transition between the current, mostly monolingual version and our eventual target of providing support for over twenty languages.

So we fill a small room with ourselves the web team, our opposite numbers in communications and the translators. The first salvo is fired by the translators.

“As part of our terms of engagement,” says their self-appointed spokesperson, “we need to have a detailed analysis of our intended audience. We will translate,” she adds, “but first we will need to rewrite. So we need to know for whom we’re writing.”

A simple enough question, I think, while savouring the scent of high quality grammar in the room.

But our communications representative is lost for words and moments later my eyebrow’s raised so far, it’s using my forehead as a launch platform.

Despite the airing of a few vague keywords, it becomes pretty clear that we do not know our audience. So it falls to Muggins the Web Consultant to find out:

• Just who are these mysterious 1.4 million visitors a year, and
• Are we saying the right things to them?

Audience analysis

When you operate in the echoey corridors of the public sector, few things are straightforward.

And when the only things you’re selling are policies, messages and a mass of gauzy statistics, you get no customer service, no focus group insights and no sales trends.

So how do you analyse your audience? The answer, it seems, is to gather as many different sources as you can find and make some informed conclusions.

Visitor profiles

I already have a few visitors – over 1.4m annually as mentioned above – so provided that I have good quality analytics, I can learn a lot from them.

Analytics software should tell me the following:

• Physical location
• The organisation from which the visitor originates (sometimes)
• Locale/language to which the visitor’s system is set
• How often the visitor visits
• How long the visitor spends on how many pages
• The probability that the visitor found what she was looking for

Free, hosted and effective solutions such as Google Analytics cannot always be used when there are issues around data rights. So, as often happens, an expensive, unusable and ineffectual commercial solution tends to be available instead, just to enliven a slow afternoon.

Inbound links

The same software should produce a table of inbound links: clicks on links from other websites that lead to my own. I can also use search engines for similar though somewhat more laboriously attained results.

The character of these originating websites can tell me a lot about who’s interested in my website. Typical examples might be:

• Businesses and interest groups with direct links
• Blogs maintained by academics
• Twittering activists

Such a trawl can be both fun and informative and should be recommended to the business side of the organisation: it’s a useful way of staying connected to the vox populi, particularly when anticipating those difficult questions for the next press conference!

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Commissioned studies

Sometimes these big, chunky and expensively bound documents can be a goldmine, particularly when the scope of the study included aspects of communications.

I vigorously ransacked a number of these documents (don’t drop them on your foot) in which the writers used qualitative and quantitative study methods on a range of handpicked interviewees. The kind of profiling done throughout that handpicking process helped me to polish my own audience analysis.

Our great leaders

So far, I’ve looked out at all the folks coming in like a wide-eyed kid at the docks.

Now it’s time to look inside, into the dark inner soul of the organisation, at the denizens of this public sector underworld who speak in whispers, spread bizarre and macabre rumours, drink sour-brewed coffee and blank one another in the corridors.

I ask them what they think about the composition of our audience. After all, the policies, messages and statistics are coming from their marvellous minds like some gushing fountain of knowledge.

Enquiries

Finally, let’s not forget who we’re working for here. Every public sector organisation that isn’t replete with subterfuge, secrecy and skulduggery has some sort of enquiry system in which people can get in contact and ask questions.

Lucky for me, my communications chums are in charge of this bit, so it wasn’t so difficult to get information about who these people were and what they were asking of the organisation.

And since the method of contact was a form on the very website about which I’ve been making all this fuss, I can be pretty certain that these are live, real, actual, three-dimensional members of our audience!

And so I face the final curtain

Armed with all that data, I feel confident that our translators will be satisfied. In the hush of the meeting room, only the throaty burr of the air-conditioning can be heard, along with the twanging of a few nerves before the proceedings begin.

I have drawn up a set of profiles that define my audience, based on all the sources of evidence I listed above, each with their own succinct, respective conclusions. I found, to my complete lack of surprise, that each of these sources tended to agree with one another anyway. Of course they would, there are no ghosts in the machine round these parts.

I have photocopied my analysis – enough copies to go around whilst equally minimising the effect on tree life around the globe (think before you print, folks) – and I have passed them out. The translators’ self-appointed spokesperson is eager for a cross-examination.

Finally, our communications representative breezes into the room.

“Don’t worry everyone,” she cries, “the directors have decided not to go ahead with the translations because they would be too expensive!”

Carl Spitzweg’s The Poor Poet (1839)

Writing copy for online consumption still seems to be something of a black art. Most web professionals know what works, but figuring out how to achieve it is quite a different matter.

This article brings together a few of the themes that I encounter in my activities around the relationship between information design and editorial policy.

The shock of the new

Often I encounter writers and editors more used to ‘traditional’ communications, raised on a diet of press releases, white papers and speeches. Some may even express impatience with the business of writing online copy: normally this is just a mask for unfamiliarity.

Indeed it’s probably understandable that those who work with such copy will tend to focus almost exclusively on the message rather than the medium, particularly if their subject is highly specialised. If looks could kill, it’d be best not to mention the word ‘Twitter’.

Successful online delivery requires method, usually arrived at through trial and error and a healthy dose of self-restraint. Specifics are beyond the scope of this article but certain characteristics are essential:

• Brevity
• Structure
• Pattern

Writing styles and content management

Therefore when authoring content for online consumption, there tends not to be much room left over for personal style. Sometimes writers and their expectations need to be managed.

Consider a situation I experienced recently: a changeover of editors on a website consisting of 20,000+ units of content. In newspaper journalism the content model is often so strict that editorial changes are barely noticeable but here in public sector policy and statistics, the effect of the swap was both immediate and profound.

The outgoing editor had a fastidious attention to detail. He was concerned to substantiate all assertions very carefully and maintained a subtractive, minimal approach to copy. His replacement took a freer hand and preferred to discuss matters at length.

Both writers were drafting materials essentially on the same subjects, yet the texture of their respective outputs was markedly different: the former produced shorter items peppered with links and endnotes whilst the latter delivered lengthy paragraphs and fewer headings.

Involvement in the content writing process

When should the information architect take a hand? How involved should she be in the editorial process?

The answers to these questions depend on the environment. Some writers and editors will be interested in hearing about information architecture, others may be rather more buffeted by the tides of strong personality.

What seems clear to me is that some guidance is essential for those less familiar with the online domain, but any imposition of strict editorial rulesets will send out the wrong message and will probably be ignored.

Unclaustrophobic guidelines explained by common sense should be adopted more or less silently (not to say gratefully) by most writers and editors and negate the worst excesses of any prima donna. I outlined the seeds of this approach in an earlier article about testing content for relevance: it should just be a matter of turning principles into friendly advice.

Turning good habits into workflow

Here’s a quick reminder of the information design process at its simplest:

Data --> Information --> Communication --> Knowledge

Acronyms and abbreviations might well be the bane of modern communications. Why? Well, only prior knowledge gives access to the information, which is a subversion of the above.

In a technocratic environment, content writers risk making too many assumptions about the prior knowledge of their readers. In an international environment meanwhile, OTAN, PALO and EASS can all mean the same as NATO.

Online content writers should be encouraged to develop good habits and apply them regularly, then editors will ensure they’re kept up. The proper explanation of acronyms and abbreviations is just one example among many others that collectively form a corpus of editorial best practice and produce highly-skilled online writers.

Conclusion

Information design shouldn’t stop at the launch of a content management project or limit itself to technical development.

There is also an important role to play in the creation of institutional best practice and it’s a role that requires considerable sensitivity and lots of teamwork.

Internally, migrating and modelling content is a major task that depends on collective knowledge and must be completed in a collaborative context. Externally, the needs of the end-user must be properly understood and reflected in the published content.

While discussing walking in Wallonie with the generous and prolific enthusiast Gert Sonck, who maintains an excellent website containing many of the routes I describe in English on my own website, I started to think about signage systems.

Signage systems

There are many examples of wonderful signage systems, perhaps nowhere more abundantly than in airports, these being a newer sort of public place into which much time, effort and modern thinking has been invested.

Many of us barely notice the flow between taxi rank and departure gate: it can be a near-unconscious exercise even in unfamiliar countries. Even though we might change a baby’s nappy, look for a wi-fi point or divert our path to a last-minute gate change, we’re more likely to be upset by queues and other ignorant passengers.

In our busy world, good signage is as important as the architecture to which it is attached. So it’s probably obvious that good signage is less easy to do where there is no architecture.

Warning signs for hunting

Out in the Belgian countryside, hunting for sport is still legal (more on that elsewhere) and whole areas of land must be cordoned off to enable the hunters to roam.

And of course, the law demands the proper signage and prescribes how it should be used.

On our walks, we have stumbled upon these signs warning us about hunting in the area. Walkers in Belgium know that when they encounter such signs, they may need to revise their path.

The rules state among other things that these signs need to be posted along all public paths affected by the area designated for hunting.

Sometimes, the paths themselves can be part of the hunting area and are at such times off-limits to the public.

Confusing signage

The real situation: Limited hunting area (centre), public path (blue) and diversion (red)

Imagine this country scene: within a fairly narrow tract of woodland there’s a hunting area in the shape of a rectangle, the top side of which is flanked by a public path (blue line). The hunters post duly their placards all along the path.

A pair of walkers follow the public path for a time but after coming across several of these placards, they decide to turn back and divert their route. They return to the edge of the woodland and skirt around the lower edges of it (red line), now assuming that the public path is off-limits.

The perceived situation with a much larger hunting area overriding public path

Later the walkers learned that the path actually remained open and that the hunting area in fact did not actually cross it but was instead contained within it.

So a failure in communication had occurred between walkers and hunters due to perceptions and assumptions. The hunters knew they had to warn walkers that their designated area was nearby. The walkers thought that they risked danger entering the area.

Perception and assumption

The root of the failure is that the hunters, by not providing any information other than lining the path with warning placards according to their legal obligations, had unwittingly caused the walkers to fall back on learned knowledge and to make false assumptions.

Let’s look at the view on the ground:

Picture 1 shows the tree-lined path as it appears to the walkers. Every so often on the left side, attached to the trees, there are the warning signs.

Picture 2 shows the reality: the warning signs refer to danger on the left side since the hunting area is inside that area. With full knowledge of the coordinates and dimensions of the hunting area, the hunters have made the assumption that their intent will be understood by the walkers.

However, the contrast between pictures 1 and 2 is considerable, since only picture 2 assumes prior knowledge of the exact location of the hunting area. In default of that knowledge, the walkers who see only picture 1 may well fall back on learned assumptions.

Accordingly, for the hunters the woodland is a static space within which they can roam within fixed, legal boundaries. For the walkers, the woodland is a thoroughfare consisting of a set of waypoints marked on a path by which they will enter, traverse, then later emerge from, the trees.

This notion of a thoroughfare causes walkers to unconsciously misapprehend the signs as a warning about what’s up ahead on the path, a function of road markings and signage. Instead of perceiving a warning about the hunting area to their left, the walkers perceive a warning about the hunting area ahead of them, and with a repetition of the placards, they eventually conclude that they have already entered the hunting area, hence the dichotomy between real and perceived situations described and illustrated above.

The final straw

Picture 3 shows the view that finally forced the walkers to turn back and divert completely around the edge of the woodland.

Already concerned about the warnings, the walkers on the thoroughfare have already used learned assumptions to define the boundaries of the path as a line of trees on either side. Of course, the woodland consists of little else but trees; what’s really different from any other line of trees is the trail of the path.

So when the walkers see ahead of them in picture 3 another warning placard with a rope between two trees, for them it’s the last straw and they turn back – the thoroughfare is blocked and the placards have warned them already.

However, looking very closely at the horizon, one can see that the path actually passes to the right of that hanging placard. At any other time during the rest of the year when there’s no hunting season, when there are no warning placards or rope cordons to trouble walkers, they would probably have perceived the path running to the right well enough.

Instead, they fail to notice that in the distance the path runs off to the right. That final warning placard hanging from a rope cordon up ahead all but monopolises the walkers’ attention.

That is, after all, what warning signs are supposed to do.

Conclusion

User-centred design requires information designers to think themselves inside the mind of those who do not already know what they do.

If you’ve come this far, you’ve probably figured out that “the walkers” were of course J and I. Here I am, calling myself an information designer, so how did I come to misjudge the size of the hunting area and fail to notice that the route was accessible?

Well, I just don’t work weekends!

As they grazed there on the fertile page all fat, polychrome and insouciant, I remembered that we need to choose our graphical data models very carefully.

As Wainer (2009) so brilliantly reminds us,¹ some models when incorrectly applied can often hide the statistical message they were designed to communicate.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The original pie

Consider the “original” pie chart produced by William Playfair, the Scottish pioneer of information graphics.² The pie communicates to us the proportions of the Turkish empire located in the respective continents.

This pie does not communicate the actual figures or percentages other than the area equal to 100%, nor does it represent the Turkish proportion of each continent, for that is obviously a different statistic.

What did Playfair want us to infer from his chart?

1. The Turkish empire covers three continents
2. The overwhelming majority of Turkish empire is in Asia
3. About a quarter of the Turkish empire is in Europe and somewhat less in Africa

What is not immediately inferable from the chart:

1. The total size of the Turkish empire
2. The actual percentage proportions in each continent
3. The size of the Turkish empire relative to other empires or the continents themselves

So the pie is almost purely narrative, communicating the array of values, their proportions to each other and the dominant value. It is this latter dominance that the pie communicates most effectively.

When the eye is bigger than the belly

Corpulent pie charts require a lot of visual digestion. If we pass from Playfair’s example to something more florid, the product is much less eloquent.

Here, the pie’s only real strength – the communication of dominance – is rather wasted in the proximity and plurality of the values.

Indeed the creator of this chart did not want us to infer dominance, he/she merely wanted to communicate the values and when represented all those colours and labels, we have to do a lot of work to digest them.

The next pie takes us to the opposite extreme.

Why do we need a pie at all? Most of us can imagine well enough how dominant a figure like 98% tends to be against the remaining 2%.

And nobody sums up better the rest of what needs to be said than that arch-pie hater Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge, a one-man continent of information design.³

Few appends the arguments against three-dimensional and multicoloured presentations: such ‘innovations’ offer us no solution for pie indigestion. Indeed shading and tilt are merely extra layers of crust to cut through.

Cutting to the chase

Returning to my work, I remembered to put myself in the position of my users: so instead of a pie chart, I employed a horizontal bar chart, much like this one:

The advantages of a horizontal bar are numerous, not least among which are the increased legibility of the horizontal alignment and the muting of any dominant-subordinate relationships.

1. It is pretty much impossible to accurately read a pie chart value unless it is a recognisable fraction (for example, a quarter or a half);
2. Colours and 3D rendering can make values appear confusing or inaccurate
3. Pies only really enable us to infer the dominance of some values over others, such that
4. Pies will often cause us to infer different or unintended meanings.

Footnotes

1. In his fascinating book Picturing the Uncertain World: How to Understand, Communicate, and Control Uncertainty through Graphical Display by Howard Wainer (2009) Princeton University Press. Online review at American Scientist §
2. See the Wikipedia article on William Playfair §
3. Stephen Few’s article at PerceptualEdge.com §

Source: Wikimedia Commons

This article is intended for technology professionals new to usability testing programmes and prototyping.

In the broadest terms, usability testing seeks to place proposed elements of a user experience in front of participants in order to:

1. Measure and evaluate a particular aspect or collection of aspects of use;
2. Discover new, sometimes unforeseen issues, problems or requirements;
3. Limit and manage project risks and resources.

Usability testing versus other types of testing

Usability testing should be strongly distinguished from, for example, user acceptance testing or systems testing, both of which have very different and terms of reference and outcomes. The temptation to mix these processes out of a sense of convenience or perceived harmony should be scrupulously avoided.

Usability testing does not concern itself with defects, bugs or performance any more than how these might damage or otherwise affect the quality of the user experience.

Nor do usability testing programmes follow on from the development process.  Testing should normally be conducted prior to development, since that is when issues should be recognised and risk can be limited, all at the least risk and cost to resources.

The role of test participants

It is common to find a range of different testing methods employed in a usability testing programme. These can be roughly divided into learning or practice methods, in which testers gather information from participants either by discussion or by interaction with user experience objects such as interface or device prototypes.

The participant him-/herself is not the object of the exercise. Useful results are rarely achieved without the participant being completely aware of this fact.

Indeed substituting the word customer for the word user in the classic adage the customer is always right explains the principle precisely. A problem experienced by the participant as a result of his/her user experience almost always translates to a trend of improvement. In this way, problems should be fully recorded rather than explained away!

Dependencies for effective usability testing

The character and effectiveness of a usability testing programme depends squarely on the circumstances of the project into which it is introduced but also on the quality of the variables involved. These variables typically include:

1. Partiality or prior conditioning of participants;
2. Depth and incremental frequency of testing work packages;
3. Analysis and result handling in the project governance.

Key test components

Usability testing usually involves or may even generate certain components, each of which are important to the success of the overall programme.

Objectives

Test designers should identify objectives for the test based on what they consider to be the most important issues to be addressed. Examples might be the flow of navigation or the perception of a particular task.

The measure of innovation within a proposed concept can also influence the objectives of the test programme, especially if the concept seeks to establish some kind of novel user experience pattern.

Any testing programme absolutely requires defined objectives, without which it is otherwise difficult to define the other test components.

Scenario

The scenario consists of preparatory information about the role of the participant and the purpose of the test, together with any other relevant information such as expectations or task descriptions. A simple example might be:

Story so far

You are a university student and you’re planning your next academic year. You are required to enrol online for two extra-faculty modules in the Spring Semester.

Your task

Use the module booking facility to enrol for the two modules “PH101 – Introduction to Philosophy” and “PO102 – Political History Since 1945″ in the faculties of Philosophy and Political Studies respectively.

Use case

As in Business and Systems Analysis, the use case describes a sequence of actions expected to be taken by the participant from a starting point to an endpoint. The general purpose of a use case is to achieve a task, which should already be described in the scenario.

I do not wish to imply that the endpoint is always associated with successful completion, since the test designer might actually intend failure. An example of this latter case might be where the test programme’s goal is to evaluate the quality of error handling.

The image below shows a very simple use case example in which all the possible paths to the endpoint are shown:

The term “use case” is often used interchangeably with “scenario”, though inaccurately so. The latter describes the process of use, whereas the former is concerned with the creation of a viewpoint for that process.

Web prototypes

For the purposes of this article, a web prototype consists of one of the following:

1. A single or collection of paper sheets containing representations of interface elements which, taken together, form the illustrative basis of a use case (the ‘paper prototype’);
2. A single or collection of screen-based views presented in a browser which again, taken together, satisfy the flow of a use case (the ‘screen prototype’).

In a paper prototype test, the test subject interacts with the paper sheets, progressing through a pre-defined use case. In the latter example, the same occurs onscreen with the usual methods of interaction peculiar to that medium.

The value of prototypes

Prototypes are cheap to create and easy to manage. Success criteria can be measured without great expenditure of resources.

Just as in industrial design, prototypes enable designers to mock-up and user experience professionals to try out a concept, object, or process before major investment in design or development.

Furthermore, since the prototype is simplified to its basic elements, the test process better targets basic objectives without distracting participants with other, specious concerns.

Paper prototypes

A paper prototype is produced with every iteration of a rapid iterative design process. The prototype represents the elements of a user interface drawn to the minimum of detail required to communicate  patterns or concepts clearly to the target audience.

The participant is invited to navigate a paper prototype as they might onscreen. Instead of a mouse pointer, the participant interacts with a pencil.  Interactions are managed using additional paper elements, new pages are replicated by new sheets of paper.

The prototype will be hand- or computer-drawn and should not normally include any rich graphical objects . The purpose of this approach is to remove any subjective notions or judgements about the prototype, thereby avoiding any confusion accidental or otherwise between purely visual design and usability.

Care must also be taken to ensure visual consistency. This is particularly important when using paper sheets that were originally computer-drawn and then printed.

Similarly, even though some representations do not lend themselves to the dimensions of a single page, all sheets must nevertheless retain the same scale and that might mean joining pieces of paper together.

Screen prototypes

Just as with the paper version, the screen-based prototype must maintain consistency and avoid any superfluous graphical detail.

The interaction between the user and the interface should try to maintain fidelity to the experience of the medium. In a web browser, this translates to the requirement that browser functionality including scrollbars and software-level navigation should always be retained.

An example of a screen-based prototype is shown below:

Choosing between paper and screen prototypes

Which type is appropriate for a test programme depends first and foremost on the resources and processes available to the project.

Though consistency and fidelity to a real user experience is usually easier to maintain with screen prototypes, they can be more difficult to maintain than paper prototypes throughout a rapid iterative design process.

Jeremy Bentham (source: Wikimedia Commons)

I’ve mentioned a couple of these findings before, applying them to the management of migrated or contributed content.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is a quantitative theory of ethics supported and developed by such luminaries as John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham.

Its purpose is to evaluate the worth of an action in terms of its contribution to overall utility. The object is to deliver ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’.

Since it was coined, the term ‘utilitarian’ has attracted rather negative connotations beyond the original meaning. We’ll find out why in our next analogy.

How it relates

To communicate information to a varied audience from a single source, the designer must employ general principles of usability and good design.

The end case of the project is to deliver a product that satisfies the requirements of all target users. This is an inherently utilitarian object.

Utilitarianism versus Aestheticism

In the nineteenth century, debate raged in the arts between utilitarian thinkers and those who furthered the cause of a diametrically opposed school of thought Aestheticism.

Utilitarian art critics considered that there must be a practical purpose for and wide-ranging benefits from, the creation of art.

For much of recorded history, the likes of sculptors, painters and architects had been viewed as skilled labourers rather than the auteur-creators we think of today. They managed workshops and apprenticeships, joined guilds and competed for commissions.

The Renaissance more than any other period contributed to the notion of the divinely-inspired artist, a strange beast whose raison d’être was purely to satisfy his/her own whims, sustaining him/herself with the proceeds of sales to distant, admiring but uncomprehending patrons.

Oscar Wilde (source: Wikimedia Commons)

So in contrast, Utilitarianism’s pursuit of purpose sought a return to the perception of art as a vocation, craft and profession in which all art was useful, satisfying a pre-determined objective, usually for public benefit.

Utilitarianism therefore equates to a concern for the function of things.

The mirror opposite was Aestheticism, embodied in the rise and fall of the always controversial Oscar Wilde. Those sympathetic to Aestheticism believed that the elevation of art beyond product was both worthwhile and necessary.

The practical result of this approach was a concern for the form of things. The sole object of art, according to aesthetes, was a sincere pursuit of the ideal of beauty.

Neither the Utilitarian nor the Aesthetic school vanquished the other despite occasionally rancorous and often public debate. Indeed, both terms have since passed into the English language, albeit with more prosaic definitions and sometimes negative connotations, while their influence on the concepts of modern thinking is still obvious.

Especially since the massive wars that threatened to destroy and did substantively change the world during the twentieth century, artists have become even less constrained, some might say dispersed. However, though artists are no longer expected to provide a valid, useful purpose for their art, what they seek to represent is not necessarily an ideal of beauty either.

How it relates

One lasting result of this extraordinary clash between Utilitarianism and Aestheticism has been to effect a clear separation of design from art. Design itself requires the identification of a need and the object of a function, whilst art does not.

That is not to say that design is the exclusive domain of utilitarian thinking. We have seen in the very best examples of design that there is still plenty of room for aesthetic excellence.

Usability, for example, requires that users be ‘satisfied’ with their user experience. Aesthetic refinement can be a significant contributor of user satisfaction.

However, it would be wrong to evaluate a visual design based entirely on subjective, aesthetic opinion, in the same sort of way one would appraise a work of art. It is unfortunately still true, for example, that designers of screen-based interfaces may occasionally face misdirected criticism from clients on purely aesthetic grounds.

As always, the practice of moderation is necessary, though every designer will consider the balance between form and function differently depending upon their training and experience.

Auguste Comte (source: Wikimedia Commons)

Positivism

Training and experience are prized by proponents of Positivism, a philsophical concept first defined by the French proto-sociologist Auguste Comte.

Positivism demands that knowledge can only be acquired by experience and this has to be arrived at by strict scientific method. This is the thread that links ancient science with modern science: in both, theory begets experimentation.

How it relates

Christopher Alexander’s pattern theory of urban planning and design is a seminal work, modern architecture’s equivalent of Vitruvius.

The work is a systematic ontology of architectural patterns. Unlike Vitruvius’ focus on the individual structure, whose importance I am not disputing, Alexander considers how patterns can be tesselated to form conurbations: villages, towns and cities.

Tabs: a user interface pattern

It follows that one can apply a similar method to information design. To use of grids, typographic schema and common user interface elements is to use patterns. Successful patterns are the product of experience.

An interface that engenders a good user experience, to borrow from Steve Krug, doesn’t require users to think about using it. This ‘instinctual’ essence is typically the result of patterns and in a wider sense, of Positivism.

In few other situations do things get trickier than when an organisation wants to publish key messages and insists in a fit of decentralisation that its business units represent themselves in such a context.

Let’s assume we have developed a hierarchical information architecture. For the moment, though, it’s entirely empty. How do we describe each node properly in content?

Guiding principles

When deciding on what needs to be communicated by new content or through testing the relevance of old content within a new structure, we can use two time-honoured principles from centuries past:

a. Occam’s Razor

William of Ockham was not actually the inventor of the Razor, but the Friar from Sussex has always been the popular source when referring to the maxim that:

Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity

b. (A paraphrasing of) Bentham’s utilitarianism

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the context of content:

Deliver the greatest amount of satisfaction to the greatest number of users

Along with his influential theory of utilitarianism, reformer and philosopher Jeremy Bentham can also be credited with the inspiration for the modern prison through his Panopticon.

The questions

Accordingly, these principles require us to describing and explaining a node, we satisfy only the following questions, concisely and in the precise order:

1. What?
2. Why?
3. How?
4. Who? and optionally,
5. [When? If the node is axiomatically subject to a period of time]

The content should respond to the above and nothing more, otherwise it has exceeded the remit of its purpose to describe the node.

The content should then provide users with access to:

• The next sibling element;
• Thematically-aligned elements;
• The immediate parent;
• The root element

If these criteria are satisfied, the node is properly described and explained.

I have arrived at a logical pause in my efforts to write an Information Design library, so in the current fashion I’m releasing it as a “beta”.

Some time ago, I wrote in a post entitled “21st Century Job” that an Information Designer …

“…makes sense of complex information and communicates it … so that information is converted to knowledge.”

Now since I’ve been a consultant in this capacity for some time, I’ve learned a couple of things that have prompted these recent efforts:

1. Clients need to have a better understanding of Information Design
2. The concepts and processes I use need to be documented

The library (working title “Insight”) attempts to address both these issues by describing the conceptual framework of Information Design. So far, I have only just begun to discuss the design disciplines involved, starting with web-based design, the area in which I’m most active.

So rather than bang on about how I’m trying to write more nowadays anyway (future career move in the offing?), I’ll just close there.

By way of a postscript, I might add that “writing the library has been a labour of love”, but there are problems with that soundbite:

1. I make it sound like I’ve finished writing it, which I haven’t;
2. I didn’t love the writing, it was a bit of a grind, but I hope reading it won’t be!

If you didn’t already spot the link above, you can find the library at: http://www.fincaso.com/work/insight. Enjoy!