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

Recently, I visited Paris. The main reason for this visit was to attend the Mondrian / De Stijl exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou. This article provides some biographical information and artistic discussion, mainly on Mondrian himself.

Piet Mondrian was born in Amersfoort near Utrecht and raised in a strict Protestant family. He appears to have led a strongly self-possessed, almost ascetic life, beginning his career as a teacher before devoting himself full-time to painting.

Early years

Mondrian’s early work contains references to various artistic movements of the time, notably impressionism and cubism. Some of his experiments were brief: the brighter, complementary colours associated with fauvism appear in only a few works, whilst a muted palette dominates the later part of his representational period.

Not long after his move to Paris in 1911, Mondrian’s paintings seemed literally to disintegrate. His subtle economy of colour and shade grew narrower and flatter, while his furrowed fields and dense networks of tree branches morphed into grids. Mondrian progressed toward ever more basic, spiritual expressions of balance and harmony.

The theory behind this process of refinement, purification and reliance on instinct came to be known as neoplasticism and Mondrian expounded it through the essays he published in De Stijl, the epoymous journal of a movement of which Mondrian was a founding member.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Unexpected opportunities

During a visit home, the outbreak of war and the neutrality of the Netherlands effectively marooned Mondrian in his native country. Thus seeking an opportunity to maintain the trajectory of his artistic development, Mondrian joined an artists’ colony where he first encountered the painters Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg.

Van der Leck’s current approach, in which he limited his palette to primary colours, was incorporated as yet another step on Mondrian’s path to increased abstraction. Meanwhile van Doesburg, ten years the junior of Mondrian, was an energetic and enthusiastic colleague, the very embodiment of the twice-bright candle.

If Mondrian’s theoretical and philosophical studies formed the basis of De Stijl’s ideological dialogue, much of the movement’s momentum and proliferation came from van Doesburg, who drew in new contributors from the fields of spatial design.

After the war Mondrian returned to Paris, leaving behind his fellow De Stijl members. Van Doesburg did not remain long in the Netherlands, decamping to the Bauhaus at Weimar – where his presence and influence would be considerable – and developing increasingly international connections. De Stijl would later lean further towards the spatial design aspects of van Doesburg’s later contemporaries, in particular through the activities of Gerrit Rietveld and JJP Oud.

The harmony of the grid

With the key periods of Mondrian’s artistic development having their mise-en-scène in his adopted city, it is perhaps surprising that Paris has never before mounted a proper retrospective on Mondrian’s career.

Nevertheless, it will be remembered that the twentieth century was characterised by mechanisation with internationalisation as its corollary. The New World equalled and then surpassed the economic hegemony of Europe and, reflecting this redistribution of wealth, art collections were scattered across the world. To bring together the oeuvre of Mondrian in Paris, given his status as a prominent artist of that century, is a considerable feat.

And Mondrian’s reputation was sealed with the advent of the 1920s. Having once more settled in Paris, he now focused intensely on his own work, arriving at the period of his career for which he is best known. The extent of abstraction in his paintings reached its peak between 1921 and about 1927, when he sought out ever more minimalist, instinctive expressions of harmony on canvas. It was in the middle of this same period that Mondrian definitively broke with De Stijl, accelerating the pursuit of his own development.

The fruits of Mondrian’s labours at this time consist of his famous combinations of thick black lines and red, blue, yellow and occasionally black rectangles on a field of white or sometimes bluish grey.

Viewing a Mondrian work from this period can be a profound experience. If we take the elements required to achieve an instinctive visual balance and we pare them down to the absolute minimum required to represent the effect to ourselves, a Mondrian work might be the result. Moreover, given the artist’s ongoing quest for the expression of harmony, the detection of some hint of the Oriental in the work is not unexpected.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The lines and the colours are harmonious in terms of both positive and negative space, resonating as mutually exclusive elements yet effectively combined as a whole proposition, when together they achieve a delicate balance.

In this way, Mondrian still engages with the age-old idea concern of artistic composition. What separates him from others is that he has successfully reduced the harmonious composition to its most basic ingredients. It is both an achievement and a preoccupation that artists would continue to develop and investigate throughout the twentieth century.

In a state of constant experimentation, Mondrian now even applied his aesthetic of harmony to his living and working space. Contemporary photographs show the artist’s sparse yet bright decoration, with a selection of works hanging from the walls that chart the progression from his early career right up to his present. Happily, the curators of the Paris exhibition reconstructed the artist’s space within the exhibition space, which gave a clear impression of Mondrian’s environment.

Final departures

The De Stijl movement could no longer survive without the central figure of van Doesburg who died in 1931, though the principles lived on, longest of all in the field of architecture where Oud and Rietveld received important post-war commissions and whose ideas influenced others including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Mondrian meanwhile had left Paris by 1938 and after a two-year sojourn in London, he moved to New York where he would live and work until his death. It was in New York that Mondrian’s approach to art appears significantly to have altered, indeed to have loosened up.

I confess that I tend to view this final period of his rather sentimentally. Certainly, anecdotal evidence suggests that Mondrian was much taken with the energy of the great Gotham – doubtless including finding much in common with its grid system – and with jazz records, of which he was a noted admirer and which he liked to play from a gramophone he had installed in his studio.

Now the black lines proliferate, then change colour and are even partly obscured by bits of coloured tape. Just before the end of his life, Mondrian had begun in fact to use the walls of his living space as a kind of experimental canvas.

Lasting influences

The influence of Mondrian and De Stijl has been profound, far outgrowing the period of activity, and notable in cultural expressions including fashion, typography, computer programming and several generations of designers, including myself.

Probably my first encounter with Mondrian and De Stijl came through cycling. There was of course Bernard Tapie’s La Vie Claire cycling team, but the French cycling equipment company Look had adapted a “De Stijl” treatment of primary colours for its logo and I owned a pair of Look cycling shoes. My favourite cycling team was Panasonic-Sportlife, whose kit used the same colours minus the white background.

Much later, I found a Mondrianesque reductivist approach useful to my work in information design. Alloying Mondrian’s sense of instinctual harmony to a fairly rigorous self-interrogatory process that developed out of my attendance at a usability course in 2005, I learned to develop and test my decisionmaking in visual design and information architecture.

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.

I’ve spent much of this week struggling with a Google Mini, a server that plugs into a network, crawls what it’s told to crawl and then returns search results using the vendor’s famous technology.

The Mini had been sitting there in perfect anonymity – as far as being bright yellow allows – on the server rack, looking like a slab of emmental. It’s a cheaper and therefore more limited version of the Enterprise search which I first came across over five years ago while working for Research Machines.

One fine day, someone vaguely remembers the Mini’s existence and I’m asked to “look into it”. Good things rarely come of these three words.

Getting started

I’ve never been keen on Google’s documentation and the bumph that ships with the box is no exception.

The information is properly formatted but it just never seems to get inside my thick skull. In my experience as an information designer, this tends to happen when the writer fails to provide a context. It helps to know the purposes, reasons and consequences of one’s interactions.

I’m not a sys-admin, but I’m not exactly a technology virgin either. Even so, getting to grips with the new vocabulary (“OneBox”, “Host Load Schedule”, “Freshness Tuning”) is a difficult experience.

Background activity

According to the log file, I learn that the Mini has been happily crawling away for the last almost three years already. Perhaps the licence limit has been met.

Could this go some way to explaining the steampowered search speeds I’ve been getting? With 50,000 items of content in the index and me the only user querying them, an enormous recordset of 269 results is rendered in a dizzying 34 seconds!

Front-ends

One of the better aspects of the box admin is the ability to alter the search/results UI. There’s so much bad code in the factory XSLT that this comes as a big relief.

Customised search results

As this autumnal week of long shadows draws to a weary close, I’m left plugging away at what originally promised to be the most interesting aspect of the Mini for me.

OneBox modules are self-written keys to leverage information from other datasources when returning Mini search results. In theory, you can poll another server when users ‘trigger’ the functionality in their search terms. Here’s an example:

1. User submits a search query for who: mike padgett
2. Google Mini checks the query for triggers – keywords or phrases that trigger a OneBox
3. Google Mini runs the search for mike padgett normally and polls the location defined in the OneBox, say, http://myserver/?q=mike+padgett
4. Google Mini processes the results and returns custom-formatted content above the ordinary search results

This offers fantastic opportunities for the “joined-up” organisation. Rather than simply go ahead and dump the output of the crawl matches, we can first offer customised boxes of information. Google already uses many examples of OneBox modules in its own online searches, including geographically aware weather summaries and unit conversion.

I decided to adapt an “internal organisation” example outlined by Google by developing a little box for staff member contact details, triggered by a who keyword similar to that mentioned above.

So far, however, I’ve been unable to get anything working. What I’ve been left with are: a blank search log, no error logging and a mild headache. Watch this (vacant) space…

Epilogue

It’s not easy to say whether the Mini – or indeed big brother Enterprise – has been a success. Of course, the Gartners of this world probably told you that it was the best thing since Sharepoint.

As for the people who actually have to work with the stuff on which management bursts the budget, there are some pretty jaded reviews out there.

Michael Cottam talks of hardware failure, while Justin Deltener’s problems were all software-related.

Finally, I think that Ville Laurikari sums up many of my own frustrations when he says: “It’s like shining a bright light on a big pile of crap. It’s still a pile of crap, but you can see it more clearly.”

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.