Season 1, Episode 2: Abby Covert
Abby Covert is an information architect at Etsy, Past President of the IA Institute, the inventor of World IA Day, and played a fundamental role in getting TUG up and running back in 2011. In 2014, she wrote the book, How to Make Sense of Any Mess.
Dan Klyn: Okay, well shit, it's 11 o'clock and apologies to any children who are listening in, and welcome to the second installment of architecting information. My name is Dan Klyn. I'm an information architect in Michigan and on this monthly conversation series, what I do is I ask friends to come talk with me about information architecture. And today I have the deep deep pleasure of having my best friend Abby Covert, author of How to Make Sense of Any Mess, Senior Staff Information Architect at Etsy, Inventor of World IA Day, behind the scenes so many of the conference's that you've gone to, people of the world.
So It's a rare treat and I'm going to have to be adding people. People keep adding to this. So I know the experience is probably pretty crappy to keep hearing that dingdong but people are going to come into this.
Abby Covert: If other people hear the ding dong, I do not hear the ding. Maybe you are the only one hearing that, Dan.
Dan Klyn: Okay, good. Well, so the way that this works for those of you who don't know. Last month was the first one of these with Andrew Hinton, who with Abby and I, we could make a human cuddle of such deep deep love that it might change the tilt of the planet on its axis. And that would you know, probably we shouldn't use her words of love like that.
Abby Covert: I was going to say, there was one time where we were in a pancake house in Georgia and the world felt different. And then, yeah.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, Georgia got awesome for a minute there.
Abby Covert: It was.Very very short-lived.
Dan Klyn: Wow apologies to Georgians who might be joining us. So yeah. So the way that this will work is I'm going to talk with Abby for a while. We've got two hours set aside. And probably for the first half hour or 40 minutes there's some things I'd love to talk with Abby about that you all are so welcome to be listening in on. And then, as soon as possible, I know that sounds stupid, but as soon as possible, I will then invite any of you in the right-hand panel over here to either type or just I'll turn your microphone on and you can ask Abby whatever you like.
Abby Covert: Cool
Dan Klyn: Does that sound okay? I have questions for you.
Abby Covert: Oh, my goodness.
Dan Klyn: The first question that I have is about. So in the lead-up to the, to the official time that we start this thing you and I were talking about your IA heuristics poster and the phenomenal response that people have had to that. Starting seven years ago when you made it and continuing on even until like, I just saw a download of it a couple minutes ago. So my question is about information architecture. And for sure, you can learn it because here we are.
Abby Covert: Here we are.
Dan Klyn: But how do you teach it? And..and...if I remember correctly, you had a teacher at North-Eastern who didn't tell you something, but he turned. He pointed your attention at a crucial time.
Abby Covert: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: Something called information architecture and then you learned it from there. So, I'd love to hear a little bit about how you learned whatever it is that you know about information architecture under and then this question of how it can be learned about. How do you teach it?
Abby Covert: Yeah, I think about that all the time. So you're correct in remembering that my first exposure to the term information architecture was in college. So, I went to The Graphic Design program of North-Eastern University. And the teacher that turned me on to IA is a woman named Anne McDonald. She's amazing. And information architecture, when you go to print school, is a pretty common subject that you would cover and it's very much like tall women style information architecture in terms of the concepts that you might be introduced to. So like just to give you a sense of the class information architecture at Northeastern. You're designing a poster and you're taking a very complex topic. The topic that I took on was youth voting. And you're presenting the information that you want to convey to an audience through the medium of a poster. And so, you think about hierarchy. You think about the use of imagery versus words. You think about the message that you want to get across. And, in order to do that, you really have to think about, like, well who are the people that I'm trying to reach with this thing? What's context that it's going to be hanging in, in this case. And you sort of go through that whole process in pursuit of a poster. And you know at the time I was kind of like information architecture is poster design.
Like, that was kind of what I left school. And then when I got out of school, I was looking for a print design job. And essentially there were none. So I started to get desperate town and I went to Craigslist. Now, Craigslist in 2004 was not as scary as it is today to try to find freelance work. But at the time it was kind of a legitimate source. And I found a really sketchy post on there. That was designing icons for banking software in Bermuda. Those words should not be put together in a Craigslist posting for like a 19-year-old person to be like. Hey, that sounds like a good idea. I'll do that.
Dan Klyn: Now, for those who don't know what your bio, you know a little bit about Bermuda or at least about offshore.
Abby Covert: Yes. It's like a Caribbean Island. So yeah, that's a little bit about me. I grew up on an island called St. Croix. So yeah for me like. it's just another place to live. No big deal. Back on it now though. It was kind of sketchy as a Craigslist post to respond to. So anyways, I responded to it and they were like, hey, this is great we really need icons. You've designed icons. Here's a list of verbs that we're going to put in our software and you just design icons to this specification and they gave you like a size and a color palette. They're like: go ahead. They never showed me the interface, nothing. I never asked either. So this is like ,you know very naive of me at this point. So I designed them and I spent a lot of time and effort on them. I printed them out and critique them. I had other designers I was friends with look at them. Like, took it really seriously, but it was only in the context of like looking at them in their little boxes as you know, a set together not really interface wise, so I was happy with them and I sent like a low-res version of them to the project manager. And he was like, these are great. Can we have the working files? And I was like. Working files are too big to email. What should I do? And he was like, well, we're based in New Hampshire. The bank is in Bermuda, but you're in Boston. Why don't you drive over with these icons?
So I did. I put them on my jazz Drive. I rented a car and I drove the icons to New Hampshire. I really needed this money, y'all. Like this was a big pay your rent or ask your parents to bail you out kind of moment. So I delivered the icons and they were really happy. I remember the client was on the phone and they have the low-res version and they were looking at it and I got to present my icons for the first time. Still not in the interface. Just looking at them as a PDF, a pretty little PDF, with like, you know, my little letterhead the project name and everything. And then at the end of the meeting, you know, everybody's just, like, all great job. They're going to hand me a check and I'm like, this is great and the software architect had taken the actual files during this meeting and he had produced them into the graphics going on the interface and he showed me the interface and I was just like, oh, this is terrible.
Of course, I was sitting there going through really wanting to use this in my portfolio, but like. It looks terrible in this interface. And then I was, like, really I could just use the icons and then it...it just was very obvious to this team that I was disappointed in what this looked like. And so the project manager was like, you know, what's up? And it's, like, I just think that the icons are not the right way to do this and he was like, what do you mean? I was like, well, it's software. Why doesn't it just have a menu? Like why would you have 15 icons across the top? There are no labels there, it was just just bad. And he was like, what would you do instead? And I was like, I don't know, like a menu with like nested actions like you could group some of these together in one thing then another thing and then, you know just have a couple of easy menus to get through. And he was like, do you know what information architecture is?
And I was like, yeah, of course, I went to print school at that point I was kind of like what are you talking about? Do you want me to do a poster? But then he kind of clarified. He was like no there's this thing, you know information architecture something that we're starting to think about for software and there's this book about it and it might be something you're really interested in and, if you are, we're like desperately looking for junior Consultants to do this for Microsoft implementations, which -
Dan Klyn: Wow
Abby Covert: At the time, it was the most exciting thing I've ever heard. Looking back on it. I'm like, wow, I basically got really excited to drive to an office park in New Hampshire and customize SharePoint. But I got paid for it and it was actually using my degree kind of. So, yeah. I read that polar bear book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. Pretty much, I think I drove to Barnes Noble while I still had my rental car and bought it right then. That's how I remember the story. I'm not sure if that happened and then yeah, they offered me a junior IA internship first and I had that for about two months before they let me kind of go off on my own and do a real project and then I got promoted to an actual information architecture consultant. And I just moved on from there. So most of my ideas…
Dan Klyn: You were taught IA making posters and then…
Abby Covert: Understanding audience's understanding hierarchy. Understanding the message that you're trying to convey to an audience through the medium and context that you're in. That's…that's how information architecture was presented to me.
But, at the time I was kind of like, you know, I was in a world of...We were designing posters and DVD boxes. And, you know, the closest thing I got to interactive was bullets two years into my education. I was put into this experiential kind of thing that they were doing called “multimedia” where they took two print designers, two engineer's, two graphic animators, two music technologists and two photographers. And they like put us all together. And they were like, do a project.
Dan Klyn: Huh, so what did you do?
Abby Covert: We did a Capstone project on the surveillance state. This is very 2002 of us. Yeah, and it was it was an interactive video game and I was the environmental art director. So I created all of the environments for the different scenes in the game. So it’s my job to lay things out in terms of place and to make it really clear like how to get from one place to another. I was also responsible for sort of the zoomed-out view of that which was a map. So that was kind of along the lines of IA, too, when I look back on it. But at the time it was just not something we were, that I was calling that. It was just kind of like Abby was good at that stuff from a graphic design standpoint. There's definitely people who are better visual designers than me in that program. But when it came to writing down concepts and making things like clearly articulated, and putting things into kind of context of other things. Those were my strengths. So well, I think it actually was kind of a blessing that I didn't go down the print design route because I think I would have been, I think I would have hit a wall eventually if that job hadn't existed already.
Dan Klyn: See, I wanna, I want to believe and when I write your biography someday, I will, I will put these things together that your grandfather being Visual Communicator par Excellence. I've seen his work.
Abby Covert: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: And then your father.
Abby Covert: All over here. Yeah.
Dan Klyn: That's yeah. Yeah, so your grandfather being a par Excellence Visual Communicator both from a typography standpoint, giving presentations that convey important instructions. Working in the Navy, working in the mill. Or was it the Navy or the… of yeah, so, like, life shit.
Telling people procedurally how to make the complex clear. So I want to say that. That was just when it happened. But it would happen because of this inheritance of yours from your grandfather for one thing. And that's on your mom's side? And then your father being a design build-contractor, architect-and-everything-but degree.
Abby Covert: And both my parents were…
Dan Klyn: Elevations of this. Built environment projects when you were a little girl. So that's my theory is that you would have been an information architect. You always were going to be. And then it just happened how it happened.
Abby Covert: I mean, I did create a card catalog system for our family library when I was about eight.
Dan Klyn: Eight?
Abby Covert: So today, has been, it's been nothing. But so my grandfather was an efficiency expert in the Navy. He, I quoted in my book that he's the first information architect that I ever knew. I would gather that he was one of the first information Architects that could have actually called themselves by title as well in the professional sense. He was like one of the instrumental folks in bringing the Navy from an all paper environment to punch cards. And just think about where the minds of Naval officials would have been in terms of thinking about technology at that point. And I have, over here in the corner of my office, I have his portfolios which are full of all of these flip charts that he made. And I mean all of them look like things I've made myself.
The interesting thing is I didn't hear it, any of this stuff until after he passed. So he and I talked a little bit about the stuff while he was still with us, and he was a big fan of my work and was always my first reader. And he made it long enough to see my book get published, which was amazing. It was really kind of weird when I did start going through his stuff at a more detailed level, and figured out how close in nature we really were alike. he was writing controlled vocabularies. He was making hierarchy diagrams. He was making flowchart diagrams. He was like making slides that said stuff like you can't have acronyms because they cause confusion. Like there's all these...I'm kind of like, oh my gosh. I just almost do all of this so that you might bring
Dan Klyn: You used the word nature and back to my question about certainly you can learn it. But can it be taught? There's something in your nature, perhaps that lends itself to this.
Abby Covert: Yeah. I mean, I think I think like there's current types of strength of sorts. I’ve definitely noticed in teaching there are people who are more naturally what I call IA-minded. And like the attributes that I put into the basket of IA-minded. A lot of it has to do with curiosity, the ability to identify and call out things that are not clear. And not being afraid to do so. So, like precocious children, I think. I'll give you a good example.
Dan Covert: Dan Klyn’s son, Garrett, is definitely very IA-minded and he is one of those folks that I mean, I think when Garrett was about 7 or 8, you could see that very very clearly when I was working on the heuristics poster, which we started talking about the ending of this. Garrett was one of our test readers if you remember, Dan. And there's this really funny moment where we were in the pool at Dan and Sally's house and Garrett and I were swimming. And we were talking about the heuristic principles. And I was just asking him, like, how would you define this? Because I wanted to make sure that every principle was super boiled down to its essence. I didn't want it to be full of jargon in any way. And so we went through every single one to see, like, what is like, you know, how old is Garrett now?
Dan Klyn: Oh gosh, he is gonna be 17 in December.
Abby Covert: Yes. He was about 10 when this happened. And I remember going through the list with him and like all of them. We had a real good like back and forth with the attention I could get from a 10-year-old. But I'm trying to be cool or talking about IA and then we got to clear. And he got so frustrated that I wanted him to tell me what clear meant. Like he just was like: IT IS JUST CLEAR. I was like, okay. Yep. I see your frustration. But I feel like that kind of moment with folks happens a lot, where you know, you can tell when somebody is not interested in just passing over at a surface level. Like when somebody really prayed and has like the curious energy towards understanding step at a deeper deeper place. And isn't afraid to ask questions and get frustrated when things don't make sense. So yeah, I think like there is a natural inclination for some towards that. But I don't think that that means that you can only be an information architect, only do information architecture work if you're set up that way.
Dan Klyn: If you've been genetically gifted to have a predisposition, right?
Abby Covert: I don't think that comes out. I think that you can put yourself through training in the concepts of IA. Just like you can put yourself through training in any other skill. But there is going to be kind of that natural gift towards it that occurs for some people and doesn't occur for others. There's also people that just freaking don't like it. They don't like any questions about meaning and structure. They just, it doesn't tickle their fancy and that's totally fine. They're really good at other things that I'm not good at. My husband's one of those people, like, he just does not want to go deep on meaning of words and structure. In fact, that's, like, I would say something that, you know, when it comes out in personal stuff, it is not always great. Because it’s also your greatest weakness, if you think about it. So while I'm very willing to go to bat to understand meaning and structure at work. You try doing that, in an argument with your spouse and it's not as great in terms of a scale. It can make [them] feel alienated, you know. Like you're always using semantics against me is something that has been said to me by many people in my personal life. Not just James. So yeah.
Dan Klyn: Yeah
Abby Covert: And you can wield it in any way you like.
Dan Klyn: And it presents as combativeness. Often, well...
Abby Covert: So that's probably, I would say, if there's like a teachable thing (and this is something that I learned very slowly and I'm still learning every day). It's that combativeness IS something that you can control and it's part of the job to control it because that combativeness is a tone, that then changes the nature of everything that you're discussing. And so that's… that's something that I never really never have been formally taught or told. But it's something that I've grown to understand over time that, you know, when I first started as an IA at that consultancy, oh gosh.
I remember just rage arguing with people about things, you know. I would see something on boxes and arrows, or I would read something on the mail list or something like that. And I would just go hard. I'm like, we got to do it this way. And all the engineers I worked with - I work with all engineers - who are all like, you know, 10 to 20 years older than me, all dudes. I'm in an office park wearing a twin set for the first time in my life. Like, this was very uncomfortable territory. But I would fight with them and I’d be like, this is the way you have to do it. This is the
way. And even when we started doing user testing, which I also learned in that job,it was still like, if the user said something I had to stand up for. No matter what. No matter what - even if it was going to be hard. Even if they disagreed, I had to stand up for the user. And what I learned since then, and continue to learn is that like my attitude in presenting these things colors the way that these things are perceived. And so by being a jerk about it and trying to force people down your path you actually can set yourself up for an even worse information architecture result than you thought before. So, I've really tried to shift my attitude when working with other people. I do focus a lot of my energy when I'm teaching IA, I focus a lot of my energy on soft skills. I feel like collaboration and the ability to go into these scary murky places with other people and to make it a safe, enjoyable experience is part of the job. and I take a lot of pride in making that a big part of what I teach. So it's not just, let me show you how to make taxonomy better. It's also like: let me give you the skills, the people skills, to talk about the fact that things are going to change. Because humans don't think change, even if the change is going to get them what they want at the end. There’s still that journey that you have to take them on. To kind of go towards that change and feel safe about it. So that's, I think, that's kind of a harder thing to teach.
It's fairly simple in my mind to teach somebody the brass tacks of the deliverable side of IA but they won't be successful as information Architects if they don't if they don't learn that that's also skills side.
Dan Klyn: I'm curious if the ways you've come to understand that you are the medium for this IA message and the way that you put yourself together as the conduit directly absolutely affects whether or not any positive change (let alone shitty change) will ever happen. That it has a lot to do with how you present who you are in that room? I'm remembering being in a room with a chief creative officer for a multibillion-dollar global manufacturer with you. I, and the nature of my question I'm getting at, because you've now had had significant experience on both sides of that if that a divide.
One of the things I saw you do with that chief design officer is you used power in the conversation. To try to make sure that the kind of change that you were hired. This guy didn't hire us. But, we're in a room with him, and you're leading the conversation. And you brought out of yourself. What? I saw you doing there was: dang. She's gonna be the person who will make him uncomfortable enough to see the thing we’re supposed to be talking about. If there's any chance of this changing in a good way. So what you just described is something more giving, and more of an exchange and more. Not that. Yeah. And I wonder if being inside of a company where the consequences...Because it's not like you swooped and pooped on this big shot. Right? Like you were being the person if there was any chance and this project didn't succeed. Of course, so like, but you tried as hard as you could to be the interlocutor that would maybe… you were trying to work the lock of interlocution like: Fucker. Come on. Like, acknowledge this. Tell me about this and he didn't go there. But you tried really hard and what you described about how to be a good conveyor of this stuff. It sounds like you're inside of a company where the consequences of what you do are just all around you all the time. Can you talk about the difference between outie and IA.
Abby Covert: Yeah. I mean, I think that it's interesting that you bring up that story. Just I think at the moment. But that happened. I was really proud of myself for standing up to that.
Dan Klyn: Oh, yeah, I still am proud of that. Whatever it is you did in that room.
Abby Covert: Yeah, and and I did, I made him deeply uncomfortable in what I considered at the time to be a very powerful way. But it, so that was eight years ago. I think.
Dan Klyn: Seven.
Abby Covert: Yeah seven to nine years ago, and I think what I've learned since then is...I think that it comes down to something that I ended up writing about in the book, towards the end, actually. About being the coffee filter and not about the grounds. I played grounds and tried to play filter for a really long time as an IA. Like half my career, right? I was trying really hard to get people to agree with me. my ideas. I was very, like, egocentric about those ideas. Like they were mine. I came up with that idea. I just see it a lot differently now. And I think that's a function of teaching. I think that's a function of speaking with others and trying to figure out how to speak about the stuff without just being like: go to your company and tell them they need this. And then push so hard you'll get fired. Like that's just not it's not great. It's not great. So so yeah. Kind of like. I don't know if that has anything to do with the question around the IA vs. being an outie. Because I feel like the last several years that I was still independent I had already made that shift. Yeah, but the shift really is around like being more like a coach and less like a player. And that is something that I still, as I’ve taken on my role at Etsy. I've really taken that.
Like, I try really hard. Not just being another smart person in the room with an opinion because we have plenty of those. What we have is people that can take all of those opinions, bubble them up into the themes of the opinions and then present them back in an unbiased way and go: Okay guys, we could go this way. We go this way. We could go this way. Which way should we go? I find that work to be much more interesting and I find that people react to the concept of information architecture much more positively, you know.
I get the feedback a lot, and I wish this wasn't the case, but I get the feedback a lot that in the early days of our industry a lot of us were running around with our egos on our shoulder going like you have to do it this way.You have to listen to me. I'm an expert. I'm an expert. That actually doesn't sell the concept. That doesn't sell the value. And honestly, it doesn't produce the IA result that you're after either. Because you’re either going to have people buckle under the pressure and let you do whatever the hell you want, in which case, you're designing for you. Or you're going to have them be like, well, screw you. I'm not going to work with you. And they're going to do it without you as the expert. And they're going to make missed steps because of things they actually kept them away from if you had been a better working relationship with them. So I got sent to anger management for business professionals at a certain point. Like that's a reality of my coming through as well. I had a boss who identified this combative thing that I was doing. I had just kind of crossed over that line between being a senior and talking about starting a team. I was going to make my first hire and he was like: hey, I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but in two weeks we're going to send you to this thing. And when I got to the thing it was anger management basically for business people. It was called like, working better with others or something like that number. I sat down at this table with like four other people, and it was very obvious there was going to be group work which like: cringe. So I sat down with these other people, there's an open chair, even write your little name tag or whatever and we're going around.
Dan Klyn: Hi, I am Abbi and I'm angry at home.
Abby Covert: Yes, exactly. Hi, I'm Abby. And so you're going around like they ask you just like introduce yourself and say why you think you’re in the room. And so it’s just a little group, you know, it’s got pretty intimate by the end of the two days.
Dan Klyn: I would, I would think.
Abby Covert: There was crying. It was that angry. Anyway, so we're going around doing the intros. I said my intro and like all the people at the table were also like probably, I don't know, the closest one is probably 15 years older than me. So it was very intimidating that I was sitting there. I was just like, I don't know what I'm doing here. This is weird. I feel all sorts of feels. So I finally did my little intro and this woman who was sitting next to me. She goes, I don't see how anyone could find you combative and I looked at her I shot her a look and I was like that just proves you don't know me very well. She was like oopsie. By the end of the two days I think she understood.
Dan Klyn: Did she get it?
Abby Covert: Yeah, I would think so, but I got my certificate. So, you know: anger away. But yeah, that was, that was an eye-opening moment for me. I remember calling my mom in the parking lot after day one and just being like, I've been an asshole my whole life. Why did nobody tell me? And she was, just like, we figured you'd figure it out on your own. So anybody that I interacted with before 2007 in this community, which is very few people. I'm sorry. And please give me another chance.
Dan Klyn: Did you have to unpack to the any outie thing and I'll drop it once it doesn't have anything. Well, I'm curious if you had to unlearn anything if there's something that served you well as a consultant that like didn't work or was the opposite of what is good when you're in any.
Abby Covert: I would say so first of all, you said that I have I have equal experience in both worlds at this point. I don't think that's actually true. I'm like two and a half years into Etsy and I had an any role at Fidelity years and years ago - about two years, but but I was inside an internal agency so I don't actually consider that to be any work there. This is my first day on the job and I'm learning what it means to be in iny. There's also like there's just not a lot of models to follow when you look for information architects, specifically in their specialty working in product-based companies. So, I've been reaching out to the ones that I can find, which you know, there's a little cohort of us and they're really interesting conversations because we all are kind of struggling with the same thing.
Which is that I - much like design is going through its own kind of establishment of what I started referring to as like a maturity model. We have kind of like the UX maturity model and you'll see that for design in general and things like that. But I think there is one for IA. And, from what I'm seeing, there is a pattern to it. so it starts out with okay company X has something that is challenging from an IA standpoint and someone in their organization. Sometimes it's somebody from engineering sometimes it's somebody from UX or design. Sometimes it's somebody from something like content strategy or marketing. It kind of comes from anywhere. They've heard that term. They associated that problem with that term and they've gone looking for somebody to solve it for them. And that would be like where The Understanding Group and companies like y'all's come in right? It's like we know that IA is the thing enough that we want to hire somebody to do it for us. But only in this specific kind of context and then depending on how good the IA consultant is they can come in and do that one specific thing or turn it into a let's rock your world and turn it upside down just depending on kind of where you're at. So that's kind of like phase one. Etsy was in Phase One about three years ago when they hired me as a consultant to come in and assess their information architecture as a whole. They were like: come in, spend a couple months with our people, with our systems and tell us what the opportunities are. So I did that.
Dan Klyn: Wow.
Abby Covert: That’s phase one though. There's Phase 2. And phase two is we recognize the value of IA enough to understand that we need it in more than an ad hoc way. So let's bring somebody in and this is what I call internal consulting. So you bring somebody in, usually it's going to be a very senior person. You buy them off the market. Sometimes from a position like mine where you're an external consultant coming inside. You're buying that person from another product company, whatever it is. Then once they're in they basically are doing the same function that a consultant would do, but they don't have to write statements of work and they don't have to write invoices and so the efficiency with which the work gets done just increases and you can start to like kind of shop around the organization to see where are the biggest bangs for my time and presenting that back to the executive team and saying like I could be working on this, this, this, this, this. Tell me what to do.
So that model I think has worked really well for Etsy for the last two and a half years. I've gotten some really great work done. I've done some products and projects that I'm really proud of. we're getting to the point where that is no longer the need state and we're actually moving into what I'm starting to define in terms of that next phase. And so what I see is that next phase and, you know, this is before we've implemented it. so it's a hypothesis but it's something that we're going to be pursuing in the next year, year and a half.
Is that the next phase is to make information architecture an integrated skill within design and product management and engineering. So that IA is actually the common skill between three very disparate groups that all have to work together. And often the places that they're working together are on making the decisions about the information architecture. So we've identified that need state and we've said okay, so that's something we want to go towards.
Dan Klyn: Wow.
Abby Covert: The question there is like what is the role of senior IA in that world? Is it that you bring more people in to do IA on teams and embed it? Is it that you switch into kind of teacher mode and skill up but work in IA? There's a lot of different directions that we go in it. But yeah, that's sort of the first piece of that phase. And then the second piece, which I think is the only reason that the first will work, is that you also have to have some federated governance in place around the core IA of the business. And so, for Etsy, the core IA of the business really comes down to how do our products connect together through navigation that connects like the entire experience. And right now we do not have any kind of guardrails in place around that. The most guardrail we have, and this is kind of the failure of the internal consulting model, is my opinion. My opinion of our guardrail and depending on how much experience I have with the person who has the opposite opinion. I might win. It's not a very good guardrail. But, essentially, I think the pitfall of staying in internal consulting is that you do serve as someone who is still just shipping ideas. You're not necessarily responsible for shipping the product itself. I've been able…
Dan Klyn: Accountable to the ecosystem. You are in partness not working in terms of wholeness.
Abby Covert: Exactly and for every one of my internal consulting assignments, I was able to do that zoom out and say like: hey if we do that here, this is what the effect is up here. But I would say that I was only semi-successful in getting the things up here to even be paid attention to, so. You know by focusing down on the thing that we were doing, you know, it kind of adds to that conundrum on top, which I think the governance piece is really where I'm interested in fixing that. so, you know, what does that look like? We've talked about a couple different models. We talked about Navy. There being an advisory kind of capacity for people to serve on some sort of like a navigation committee where all changes have to kind of go through them. We've talked about me actually having a product manager and designer and engineer that own the navigation and that all kind of backlog. We go with it that way that things come through us and somebody wants to implement something. So yeah, we're currently kind of going through that conversation. It's also like a great time for us to be talking about this because I just got back to Etsy after being gone for six months on Parental leave. So it's kind of the right time for us to think about like, as I come back into this environment like what are we going to do different and how are we going to press? Yeah, it's exciting time to be, to be thinking about the stuff for sure. But I do think that there's that like, external consultants to integrated still like that's a really interesting spectrum that I've been doing a lot of thinking on these days.
Dan Klyn: That and if this is proprietary, please redirect. But, is the website then a product? Does the org? Is it a basket that has products in it? Is it a product like?
Abby Covert: Okay, so well, let's see is Etsy is not just etsy.com. Etsy also has our entire seller experience. So yes, yes, like, you know software that is web-enabled that sellers used to do all of their things. So like that's a whole other basket of products. But yeah for the most part when we talk about products at Etsy, we are talking about everything from the core buyer experience to a very, very specific feature that one team is working on. You know, like I'm trying to think of an example and I'm not going to say any because I'm worried. I don't understand.
Dan Klyn: Why I can throw. I can maybe throw something generic out there for you to respond to. Which I think is in the same spot because at The Understanding Group, we've been working with a retailer and we've been focusing on navigation and in the walking around since in the org that mostly means what's at the top of the page and at the bottom of the page, but it also means some other stuff too. Yeah and what occurs and in this organization. The website isn't a product from product governance and product management standpoint. It's a lot of things. And we, by working on the navigation and resituating things in space of the navigation space of the website, we're changing the product offering of the business. Yes. And so back seven years ago we might here. We're going to do the nav. One of- I know that's your favorite things. I haven't written on a post-it here: say “do the nav” to Abby. So we used to write, so we used to do the nav or what have you. But now when I'm looking at that and working with an organization and thinking about they've got seven things. And what if there were four and we re-nested some of those. That completely changes the business offering. The value of this. What that even is. So I'm curious about if that's what it feels like where you are. So could, can that ever be somebody's job then? You get to sit in the CEO’s lap with an iPad sketch. And be like: how about like this? How about like?
Abby Covert: Man, that’s a fun way to tackle this. I’ve proposed that is one of the options. No, I think that like. One thing that we've done in the last year or so, which I think has been really really powerful is we've arranged our company differently. Our company used to be arranged into buyer experience/seller experience and the products that were managed within those had to do with, like, whose eyeballs were on the thing. What we've now shifted towards is initiatives that are based on customer problems or customer value that we're trying to proof. So rather than have somebody who's responsible for the home page and then someone who's going like I would love to say somebody who's responsible for the nav. But let's be honest. No one's been responsible for the matter. He's just like, you know Etsy is about search. We don't care about the nav. We didn't have categories on Etsy until five years ago. I like it's just
Dan Klyn: It's a thing.
Abby Covert: It's a thing. No one's doing the nav around at Etsy. It's, like, more like they're not doing the nav. The nav is desperately in need of being…
Dan Klyn: I'm just up here and they keep putting things in me.
Abby Covert: I will say Jenny Benevento and I were able to impact the nav. Not do. Impact the nav. Quite significantly both the header nav of categories and the sweater nav. Those projects were in pursuit of really short term business goals, and it was really just like an opportunity for us to get something crunchy gross bits out of it.
Dan Klyn: And when this becomes a podcast, I'll put a note you presented some of this at the IA Summit. The last IA Summit I believe. Correct?
Abby Covert: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: So that'll be when this becomes a podcast someday. There will be a link to that presentation that Jenny and Abby did.
Abby Covert: Yeah, it was great. And that was a really fun project because it kind of brought attention to the nav for the first time in a long time. We're pretty much, for the first time since the nav had first been developed, because it had not barely been touched since then. So yeah, I think the idea of dividing something that is really large into silos that people are working on. It’s a dangerous idea right? Because that's the way that things start to get crowded up at the top layer.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Abby Covert: We definitely have tried to combat that with the way people are arranged. But it still doesn't work sometimes. I'll give you an example. Another product manager who's working on something for sellers last year. And the designer who is working on it with him brought me in because he really wanted to stick it at the top level of the seller nav and she really felt like that was the wrong decision and we talked about it. He was like if I don't stick it at the top level no one will see it and my goals are based on how many people click on that thing and explore it in the first 90 days of its existence. Like that's what I'm being measured on. So if it's not at that top level it's not going to get the action.
Dan Klyn: And no bonus for me.
Abby Covert: No bonus for me. And so I went around, and she and I had our case. And let’s do a treejack. Let’s have some user sessions with the prototype. We will see which one's more findable. We will see what people think of it and no matter what we came at him with he was just like: nope. Going on the top level is my decision and I'm going on the top level. So, you know, we'll fast forward to I go out on parental leave. I come back. One of my first meetings back was with this designer because she was over IA office hours for me while I was gone. So I'd known she was like, hey guess what? Had to move that thing under that thing we wanted to move it under. And I was like what? She is like mmmm. Nobody found it. Even though it was on the top level, which was this assumption that like droves of people will come to my thing. Because it's a shiny new item on the nav and I was like: dude, I don't think that's going to work. I think putting it in context. It was a very small feature too, it was. It was a feature that was just very obviously attached to another feature in like the user.
Dan Klyn: But it completely proves the Wurman point of the creative organization of information creates new information and the new information of that thing tucked in where you thought it would make sense. That created more information then people get it. Then people click on it, up there. It's like: what the hell does that mean? You just ignore.
Abby Covert: I wish I could tell you the specifics on because it's just so obvious.
Dan Klyn: So visual prominence doesn't trump always ontological like appropriateness or whatever the hell you want to say.
Abby Covert: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: I would say it that way and then you would get bored.
Abby Covert: That's the thing, you know back to the sort of soft skills part of IA. My approach, if I had done that 10 years ago. My approach would have been like escalate, escalate, ,escalate, escalate, escalate, and being loud. My approach is different now. I'm okay with him making that decision. Learning on his own that it wasn't the right one. And then coming back. And then I try really hard to not do the nana- nana-nana dance. Told You So. Told you, told you, told you so. Because that's not productive and honestly, it's kind of a fluke that it happened to be so obvious that the other direction was more powerful. If anything I just wish he would have let us have that moment with users to inform the decision, which he cannot allow us to have because ours was as much of a hypothesis as his.
Dan Klyn: Hit those two percent of traffic on a Thursday and we'll and then let us show you how it works.
Abby Covert: Man.Yeah. Getting 2% of Etsy on a Thursday is that's a big deal.
Dan Klyn: This doesn't seem disconnected from the bigger point and to the “how do you teach somebody IA.” Sounds like you now default to or focus more on the soft skills than here's what a deliverable should look like.
Abby Covert: I mean, I would say that I would say it's probably 60/40 okay with 60% being soft and 40% being theory and practical. Templates, I suppose would be but I mean. If you look at the context that I've taught in the academic sense, so outside of like conference land and workshop times would be so I started at persons, undergrad. And that was IA for traditional design students are much heavier on theory. And honestly, it was kind of my answer to a McDonald's IA class from when I was at Northeastern. It was kind of like if that class was being taught today. It probably wouldn't be about posters. It would probably be about digital sites.
Yeah, so the first time I taught that class I went very hard on the web. The second time I taught that class was right around the time that I was starting to write the book. And so I was starting to kind of pull out reference to any specific medium and I let my students pick the medium that they were working in. So some of them chose to do web but often they did not. So that was great. And then when I moved to SVA, my job, teaching information architecture, was in pursuit of them doing a TED style talk about their thesis. And publishing a book about their thesis journey. So, you know, once again digital websites and navigation of those things were just not what I was teaching. So I didn't. I spent more of my time on not what I would say
the soft skills. I would say it's more the like. The “think work”, the “thought work” of IA. Just like how do you actually push against something in terms of what it means. And have a meaningful conversation with people about meaning. It gets very meta very quickly.
And if you don't tell graduate students to have those conversations with each other, they're probably just having them in their head. So a lot of my job was just getting them out of their head and using their colleagues as information architects to reflect back to them what was in their work. The model that we could throughout the five years that I taught that class was that every class would start with a little sermon, 20 minute sermons. That's where I would like to talk about something about the theory of information architecture. There's usually some kind of reading or something beforehand. So we'd have a little discussion and then there was an exercise. And the exercise was something that they could do with their classmates to clarify a piece of their thesis project. So, you know, one week it would be prioritizing users. Another week it would be developing continuums for guiding their creative process. And another week it would be trying to figure out what the context model is for the things that they were creating and how they work together as an ecosystem. So we just kind of pull out these practical moments from the theory and then apply them through the lens of their thesis project. and I learned a lot about practicing IA just watching them do that.
Dan Klyn: Huh.
Abby Covert: Because it just be I refused to be in the conversation. And that was really awkward for the first time.
Dan Klyn: I bet they hated that.
Abby Covert: They hated that.
Dan Klyn: Tell me what to do.
Abby Covert: They want to me to come over and say: no move that post-it here. That's where it belongs. And the truth of the matter is: it takes a lot for someone who you know is being hired as an expert in their field to come in and teach a thing to not do it for people and to not say like this way is the way because I said so. When I'm trying to get across to them like there is no one right way. And you know, it is about making progress through this not some perfect solution. In order to do that, I had to remove myself. Because if I'm going to dive bomb into every group. Let's just think about this. So there's five groups in the room, three people each, and they're all talking about big greedy topics. I mean, “gender-in-tech”, “prosthetics that don't make people feel disabled”, “people redesigning the experience of being an AIDS patient”. In the like late to that. It's just these are huge subjects. And if I dive bomb into them. And be like: we'll have you thought about this. What about that little bit. It's like, no, I had to trust that that group was doing the deep artwork that they needed to do to get through that subject matter.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, we’re giving them frameworks and they were doing the “work” work.
Abby Covert: Yeah, and it was very, very frustrating for them. And I still do that when I teach workshop. It occasionally will drive people crazy when I teach workshops. They will be over there organizing their produce department into a way that they think makes sense and they want me to come over and tell them if it's right or wrong and I won't do it. I can come over and talk about a challenge that they're having between themselves or listen to a subject that they're punting back and forth and weigh in on it. But I'm not over and be like, that's right. That's wrong. This is good. That is bad. It's just not. It's just not the way.
Dan Klyn: I'm curious the continuum's exercise that you did with your students at SVA. Were they using those with Allen, with the department chair, to dial in where their project was going to be? Or where they using them only like self reflective?
Abby Covert: They were often used as a…the continuum exercise. It's pretty early in the semester in the way that I design that class. And the reason is because they've already done a semester where they've kind of had ideas and they've made prototypes of things that are related to their subject and they've done a lot of background research that they've talked to. We require them to reach out to talk to at least, I think, ten experts in the surrounding field that they're working in.
Dan Klyn: And so this program, just for the people listening in, his the “Products of Design” is the name of the program. It's a master's degree at the School of Visual Arts in New York and what else can.
Abby Covert: It's like Hogwarts. It's amazing. They're just they're basically taught magic. They're doing 3D printing. They learn to cook. They learn to sew. They learn to Arduino program like it's. It's everything. if you're a designer who is not a designer, we have lots of people that start from like the “not-a-designer” field as well. But if you're the kind of like looking to find yourself in the larger design community, that's a really good place to go and figure it out. But yeah, when they go to the Continuum exercise specifically they've amassed this whole, like, half a year worth of baggage, basically, of stuff. And so the Continuum exercise is to, I have them start talking about their goals for the work. And they're supposed to be talking to their partners about those goals. And as they're talking, we talked about goals, and we talked about fears which I think both worked together in that exercise pretty well. The teammates are taking notes on Post-it notes. They're writing just adjectives basically. and they're just like writing all these adjectives and they're separating them into kind of two piles: good and bad. And then they use that big ol pile of words to determine what might useful continuums be. To drive their work. And so once they've made their continuum, I asked them to plot where they think they are at this moment. And then where they think they should go by the end of the semester. And then every decision that they make is supposed to be in reference to that continuum. You’re like: is that thing that you're about to spend time on? Is that going to get you from there to there? Or is it actually going to push you back?
Yep. I've actually have them. One thing that I added a little later. I think it was probably the third time I taught it. I have them do it a little bit more nuanced. It was: where do you think you were at the end of last semester verses where you are now? And where do you want to go? And those became the most interesting examples because there were people and I could have called it for these people that would happen where they realized that from last semester they were actually walking backwards. And they were walking towards something that they weren't actually excited about. They didn't actually want to be their focus. But maybe it was the shiny thing that got a lot of attention from somebody at the defense presentation in November.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Abby Covert: So having those conversations with them early enough in the semester to be like: hey, no. Smack. And there were some moments where that had to go to Allen. And it was like hey, we know that this person who critiqued at the defense was really excited about this. And it can still be a part of the journey of how they got here. But we're walking away from that work. We're not pursuing that work any further. That work was in service of understanding that. That's not what we want. And then yeah. I also have to encourage them to not edit their books to the happy path. You know, a lot of them want to throw out all the work that they did the first semester if it's not in that continuum going from there to there and I have to really encourage them to be like: no, it's part of the journey. The individual journey that you went on is the story that we want that book to tell. So, you know figuring out that part of it is also an IA assignment of like: how the places that you didn't go in service of the place that you ended up. Because that can be really interesting too. And some of the best presentations have come out of that space. When my students have had the actual guts to say: and I went down this path which was really not a waste of time. It taught me a lot.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Abby Covert: In these ways, you know, and sometimes that has to do with them understanding the context of the realities of the world. It's like: they just haven't pressed up against it enough. And that's fine.
Dan Klyn: Well, that's fascinating to me that that tool that you and I developed back in the day to do a two points on a line. That's a correlation. and that works with stakeholders to figure out where we are, and where we want to go. But by adding that third point you go from correlation to causation you go. It's a story map now more than a, “we this” but “now we must do that”. I love that.
Abby Covert: It's more like shades of thing.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, seeing how...Apollo just sent a question. and I'm still gonna have you
Abby Covert: I'm not gonna try not to look at these questions yet.
Dan Klyn: Well the question is. And it's related actually. Apollo wrote and sent me a message privately about the using that intention modeling process as a way to get continuous collective decision making. Have you, have you had any check-ins after you know we've both done it as a ”okay, we're going to do this thing. It's going to help us get strategically aligned.” and then we have the “thing “and then you go do stuff. Have you had any instances of going to do stuff in a world where there is an intention model, and having to go back to it and change it? Or acknowledge that we are deciding to not think about it right now? Like curious about adaptations. Like how about three points of comparison?
Abby Covert: Yeah, I feel like. I feel like the power of that exercise is in the moment.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Abby Covert: And so I feel like any time that I would have been back to revisit. Which I mean the only the only company that I could think of that might have been like that would be for Etsy.
I just feel like we would start again. We'd start fresh from winning combatting today because it really is a very tactical way to have difficult conversations about change. Yep, it's not. Honestly if its continuum that's not showing any difficulty or change then why are you showing it as a continuum? It's like we don’t know.
Dan Klyn: Oh, yeah, that's that's the proof of how do you know? When there is no travel.
Abby Covert: I'll give you an example when I was consulting both for TUG and Ford. I feel like there was a moment where like the focus of whether or not to go after mobile was like a thing. Well, I don't think anybody's writing those continuum's anymore. Like there are things that we have moved on from.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Yeah, I remember that one. That was the very first time.
Abby Covert: So I'm kind of like well, I feel like if I did come back around on something like the continuum exercise would still be useful but not to revisit the original ones. I mean, I want to know if somebody had done and central model before this to have that background, but I don't know. Depending on how baked it was into their culture. I guess we might have to change it. Yeah, if we practice long enough, I'm sure we'll come back around on some of these.
Dan Klyn: Lo. May we stay in orbit long enough to catch the consequences of our decisions.
Abby Covert: Yeah.
Dan Klyn: Or not. Depending on how good decisions were really good at the moment.
Abby Covert: Yeah, the decisions were really good at the moment but not now. That's the thing. It is that like all the decisions that we make in service of creating things for other people like they're all fleeting. They're all momentary. Everything that we make is especially in the digital world. It is just going to be, you know, hold it over eventually. Some of it's still out there. I mean I have. There's like client websites I worked on 10 plus years ago that I still occasionally will go to just to see like: is it still there? Is that a terrible decision? I couldn't talk them out of in the main navigation still there. I'm going to do it right now.
Dan Klyn: Well, I have one more question about Etsy world and then a couple questions about your book and then I will open up to all of our patient participants out here.
And the last question about Etsy is…
Abby Covert: It’s gone! Yeah bad decision is gone. A set of bad decisions. Or not they're not part of a project that I was on. So...
Dan Klyn: The world keeps turning hooray. Okay last question about Etsy land: are there content strategists at Etsy. And what does that mean where you work?
Abby Covert: There are no content strategists at Etsy. I would say every three or four months someone says the word content strategy at meetings, and everybody goes oooh. But no. We do not have any content strategists. We do have an editor in chief, which is amazing, and he's amazing. Wow, he has been really diligently working his way through the backlog of content needs at sea. He's hired really good people. We have our first UX writer who has started now, which is amazing. We do have copywriters who write for interfaces on our design team. So they handled the UX writing, and portrait for product. And then now we have a specific UX writer who's serving more as an expert that can kind of make that more of a practice. But yeah, from content strategy standpoint, we do not - I mean, obviously, people do content strategy at Etsy, we just got to, of course. But yet, mostly, it's done by marketers. So our marketing team will put together the content calendar for where they want to put things and the types of things that they want to have to market the thing. We also have a ton of content from the help standpoint. So there's people working on that in terms of figuring out what the needs data is for help content so we're all doing things that one could call on content strategy, but in terms of having bench strength in that as a skill, we do not have that. But it's something that we've actively talked about. It just hasn't been hasn't been prioritized over all the other growing team needs that we have.
Dan Klyn: Yep, that makes sense. Yeah, I'm curious because it's so it's like information architecture, every place where it is, it means something a little bit different. And I'm a student of it, since I don't know much about it. And I want to be able to work better in terms of content strategy. But part of that is understanding if there's a boundary if there's a useful boundary between information architecture and content strategy, what the nature of that boundary is, and one way that I've been, you know, really simplistic for me is, is content strategy is about filling containers. And is IA about naming and situating containers could it be? Could it be like that?
Abby Covert: Yeah. I feel like I'm starting this. I was talking to someone recently. I was talking to someone recently at a company, kind of similar to mine, that you told me to talk to you.
Dan Klyn: Oh, yeah. Okay. I know who you're talking to. Yeah.
Abby Covert: I was talking to that person. Yes, they were. We were having this exact discussion. And I used the metaphor that I believe I heard first from Karen McGrane. But I don't know, I think I've been saying that for as long as I've been talking about it. So I'm going to give it to her for now.
Dan Klyn: It's more truth.
Abby Covert: Yeah. It's her truth. It's my truth. It's both of our truths. I love sharing truth with that woman. So she said, I think that
information architecture is like building the car and content strategy is making sure you do not run out of gas. And the problem that I see is that in a lot of cases, companies are trying to fix a really crappy car by just putting lots of gas in it. You cannot turn a really crappy car into a good car.
Dan Klyn: We know. I love that. I love that because it isn't even about gas. It's not saying content strategy is the gas. It's the making sure. It's the planning. It's the appreciating. What kind of road are we on? What kind of car is this? What are we trying to do?
Abby Covert: In some cases?
Dan Klyn: Oh, I love that
Abby Covert: Filling a gas tank with fuel that is leaking out onto the ground cuz there's a hole in the goddamn tank, but they're like, well, we don't have a better car. So I think that smart content strategists are starting to say we need a better car. And I think that the smart content strategists that are saying that do recognize that information architecture is how they would get a better car. But I think that is kind of the right now what I see in the market is you either have one or you have the other. Either you have IA or you have content strategy, but not many companies have both. So I think that'll be it'll be a really interesting conversation. As we move forward in this industry of like, we do have two completely different industries that have kind of like they come together and events and we read some of the same things and we have some of the same speakers at conferences and notice some of the same training but you know, in terms of how the value of those things is sold into businesses, I don't think either one of us is doing the other a good service by not representing both sides because sell a car and world with no gas and you can't sell gas in a world with no cars. So we do need each other but you know, how how's it gonna go? I don't know.
Dan Klyn: I love that. Thank you that that's super helpful. So lastly, for the hogging you to myself part of this program. I have a dummy of your book from before it was published. Remember.
Abby Covert: Oh, yeah.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, so so I love this is one of my favorite things that I possess, as an object in the world. And I also happen to have one of these, which is a Spanish language version of your book. Excellent. So I want to know about translation.
Abby Covert: Forget about that one.
Dan Klyn: So is that Japanese? Okay, so, first question is how many languages is your book in now? And the second question is, did the translator help you find anything about what you did in English that you will change in a second edition or, or in a future world where you are given? You know, here's a million dollars rewrite your, you know, update the book?
Abby Covert: Yeah. Somebody's going to do that? Somebody's gonna give me a million dollars to do that at some point?
Dan Klyn: Sure. Why not?
Abby Covert: I'll just do it. That's all Oh, wait. Oh, wait.
Dan Klyn: Thoughts become things.
Abby Covert: Yeah. Um, okay. So first my book is in three languages, English, Spanish and Japanese. Yeah. I would say the Japanese translation was much more of a black box because I just I sent all of the things to them and then they were like, (boop) it's done and then read it and react to what it is. I mean, just all I could do was translate on the cover and certain pages. And I did that with Google Translate. And somewhere on the cover of this book, it says the words goodbye confusion, which I think is better than anything I ever wrote
Dan Klyn: As tattoo knuckle tattoos. Goodbye confusion.
Abby Covert: Yes, yes. So that you know I was tickled through that process also just like looking at the diagram in Japanese just they're just so freaking cute.
Oh, you'll love this one. You'll know what this means because
Dan Klyn: Oh, why, what, and how?
Abby Covert: Yeah, now you know Japanese. Lucky you! Dan Klyn can read Japanese, y'all. Did you know that?
Dan Klyn: Somebody made the complex clear for me.
Abby Covert: Or like. Oh god did you know that...this one is based on that. That company that you mentioned earlier with the exact. This drawing is based on that because that big ass math remember that big ass math that
Dan Klyn: That math was taller than you.
Abby Covert: It was. I have a picture of myself next to it. It is taller than me. Anyway, okay, um, yeah. And then in terms of the Spanish translation, so shout out here. So this, this was the love child of myself and Viviana Nunez. She translated this book, and we hired an editor, a Spanish language editor to work with her on that. And during that process, I mean, she was just so so thoughtful, and their attention to detail on it was really impressive. They also were just doing it from their hearts like we self published this, because we both thought: Yes, it should be in Spanish, like a passion project. And yeah, there was some interesting conversations about like, terms of grades and she also found a lot of typos in English. Thank you. So yeah, there's definitely if if I ever do another edition, the typos will be fixed. But yeah, I'm just, it was really, it was a really fun process to go through. I really enjoyed it. I hope I get to translate into other languages. I'm considering doing an audiobook next that's like, on my mind.
Dan Klyn: Yes, please.
Abby Covert: I'm not sure it would work, honestly. There's so many diagrams, and there's so many lists, and I just think it might be boring. And then I, this company reached out to me, and they're like, Hey, we're really interested in producing your book as an audio book. And I was like, Okay, cool. So I took a call with them. And they tried to convince me that my book would sell better if it was read by a British man. And then I was like, ready to die.
Dan Klyn: No, he screwed you. That is just wrong.
Abby Covert: Yeah, no, but they're not wrong. They're not factually wrong. Yeah. Christina Wiki and others that I follow on Twitter have posted, quite disquieting links to studies about changing the gender of the author and then watching how sales change.
Well, sorry.
Dan Klyn: Not gonna happen?
Abby Covert: Now you're gonna have to listen to my annoying voice otherwise you're not listening to my voice at all. Like, it's just, it's me or nothing. I'm either recording it in my own voice or it's not gonna happen. So we'll see.
Dan Klyn: Maybe a Marie Kondo could read your book
Abby Covert: In Japanese?
Dan Klyn: Sure.How about English too.
Abby Covert: Her English is not so great.
Dan Klyn: I wonder if she ever gets called the Abby Covert of spatial organization.
Abby Covert: I'm gonna ahead and say no, that's never happened to her.
Dan Klyn: About the inverse. May I presume that folks have connected what you do and that culture role phenol, whatever that is.
Abby Covert: Oh, yes, that absolutely happened. Yes.
Dan Klyn: Are you? I'm oblivious to Miss Kondos' work. Where do you know anything about it?
Abby Covert: Yeah, I'm a huge fan. Huge fan. I've read her book I've used her book. My husband and I have cleaned out our entire lives basically by her methodology. So yes everything behind me y'all sparks joy lots of joy all over. Yeah, no I'm a huge fan I think.
Dan Klyn: Oh my god. Is that one of the rules if it sparks joy you get to keep it.
Abby Covert: That's the only rule.
Dan Klyn: Oh, I get to keep all my shit then. All right.
Abby Covert: Yes. Damn this is this is up your alley entirely. It's basically get rid of everything you own unless it sparks joy.
Dan Klyn: Okay.
Abby Covert: She just she leads you through the she has like a prescribed way that she does it and and that's really interesting too, because
Dan Klyn: Does that process look anything like how you architect information?
Abby Covert: Well, it's kind of like an audit. So yes, it looks a lot like it. Basically it has you audit in certain areas of yourself in your home. And, interesting thing is the way that she orders it. Because she says like, if I start you on ephemeral, For example, and memorabilia, we're never gonna
Dan Klyn: We'll never get there.
Abby Covert: So she has you do clothing first.
Dan Klyn: Oh
Abby Covert: Clothing is like this kind of like, really, it's first of all, it's really easy for most people to get rid of lots of clothing, right? Like not many people are in a situation where they don't have a semi pile of stuff to get rid of at the end of that kind of session, and just go through and you like, it's so, it's so thoughtful. She has you ask yourself if something sparks joy, but then she also, if you're going to let it go, she has to thank the item. Thank you for your time, t-shirt. You've been really great. I remember that one time I wore you to that picnic.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, fun. Oh my god.
Abby Covert: Yeah. And then she's like, and then you let it go. And you let it go into the world knowing that it's going to bring joy to somebody else. And that is very powerful. And I think that's just more the way people should be. Should be thinking about possessions. You know? Yeah. How it's like, I, The thing that I think she's gotten some heat recently on is like, can't throughout your whole life because it's really wasteful? You know, oh, you're gonna fill the landfills with everything that's in your garage and it's like, well, it's eventually going to make it there. So you know, the things where they are in space. So yeah, I find her work to be fascinating. And then a little personal story. I watched her entire Netflix show. think the Netflix show that came out on the first of the year. Well, what was I doing on the first of the year, Dan?
Dan Klyn: You're having a baby in a non comfortable way.
Abby Covert: Yeah. So I had natural labor for 24 hours at home and what did I do? I watched Marie Kondo show on Netflix. And that that was like so much a part of my life. My labor story is me watching her lead people through cleaning up their lives and getting to a better place. So yeah, it was perfect timing for that show to be released.
Dan Klyn: Amazing. Okay, with much reluctance. I'm going to pivot into the portion of this program where people who are not me ask you stuff. And I see that Paulo is, he wrote me a question, but we're pals and your pals with him. And so I'm going to unmute him. And
Paulo: Hey guys!
Abby Covert: Hello. How are you?
Paulo: I'm fine. I guess I can't speak because I'm in a swimming pool in a public swimming pool.
Abby Covert: Amazing.
Paulo: I was Yes, I'm watching your videos.
Abby Covert: Oh, that's amazing. Okay, well, Dan. Dan will be your speaker.
Dan Klyn: I will read. I will read your question then. Paulo. Yeah, you don't have to.
Paulo: Okay.
Dan Klyn: But everybody else gets to speak.
Abby Covert: Happy swimming.
Dan Klyn: Don't drop your phone.
Paulo: Thank you. Okay.
Abby Covert: Oh, you're muted Dan.
Dan Klyn: No. I thought I was muting Paulo and I muted myself. I'm going to mute you again, Paulo.
Paulo: Okay.
Dan Klyn: And I will ask,
Paulo: Okay, bye.
Dan Klyn: I just cut him off. So he says: a question for Abby would like to know, how do the tools and practices of IA. How do they integrate in a design system and developing flow in a design system? And there may be some Italian to English wiggles there but ..
Abby Covert: Great question. So when I was first hired at Etsy, I was hired into the design systems team and the value that information architecture could like most obviously provide was within that team. That team was disbanded about three months later, when we went through some serious corporate stuff, I will say, and what came around is that it took us about two years to get back to the subject of that exact thing. How does information architecture affect design systems? So my hypothesis on it and I'll know a lot more as I work over the next year. With our newly formed and invested in design team doing design systems is that we're really focused on that federated IA governance piece, right? Is designed systems, the ones that actually own the containers that contain everything else, basically. So if no one owns the navigation, for example, from a product perspective, is that a place where a design system team or design system resources should be spent to provide that ownership and that attention to iteration over time? I think that that's an interesting way to go. We're, also at Etsy, really interested in making sure that our design system is not just a component library. So thinking about things like hierarchy, typography, the way that we can deal with context and cross context kind of experiences. We - I just got out of a meeting ended a Friday a bunch of the staff designers and I got together to do a critique on a flow that we were pretty sure would have a lot of crunchy bits in it. And we were right. It was the flow of trying to favorite an item that you saw Etsy post on Instagram.
Dan Klyn: Oooh, good one.
Abby Covert: Yeah. Cuz it crosses all these bounds of like, you gotta go through, you gotta
Dan Klyn: You gotta go to the profile, you got to click on the URL or type some shit in.
Abby Covert: Yeah, exactly. And then we end up on like this weird landing page that we made. So that that was easier, but it also made it kind of crunchy or so there's all these conversations, it was really interesting, because the reason we were doing the exercises, because we're trying to get to the idea of what does it mean to have good quality from a design perspective? And so we're trying to kind of assess these flows, and then bring out what is the quality that we found or the lack of quality that we found and how would we combat that? So what we found through that exercise was that really quality or lack of quality comes out in the places where you're kind of going between the products that we actually purposely built, not particular flow because you're within the Instagram browser. Single Sign On doesn't work, right? If you're logged in on your phone on and web or mobile web and in the app, even you go through Instagram and you're just you're logged out. So analysis and you're dealing with kind of this weird flow in between of like having a login and asking you to connect with Facebook and kind of like am I already on Facebook. I'm pretty sure I am. What is happening here? So yeah, yeah, I think like when it comes to the interaction of, of IA tools and design systems, I think there's a lot of conversations happening in design systems teams, that would be very well aided with information architecture discussions. And I also think that design systems teams, in a lot of cases, make sense as the gatekeepers for kind of poor IA interfaces like navigation bits.
Dan Klyn: And are you seeing that I know you're involved with some conferences, in addition to all the other stuff that you do? I'm curious if I've just been noticing design systems more or that there's more design systems, interest and content being generated in the world of UX from a submissions to conferences that you do curation for. Is that a thing? And then what else? What else? If there are things that are emerging? Have you seen anything else like that?
Abby Covert: So the conference, I'm working on two conferences right now. One, it's in very early stages, and we're just doing some sort of market fit analysis on right now around research. But the one that I had been working on for the last three years is the design ops summit with Rosenfeld Media. And design operations, I think is a really interesting place. But it's rife with IA challenges and opportunities as well. But yeah, we are seeing a lot of focus on design systems and the emergence of them. I mean, I think it makes total sense.
Like if phase one was: get design a seat at the table, right? Which like, that's done. Now that design has a seat at the table. Now we're seeing teams that are like going into the multi hundreds of designers. How do you take control of the creative quality of a group that large, especially a group that large of creative people? You know, it's like that's the place where design systems is obviously going to have a hotbed of possibility. So I'm not surprised at all to see it. I'm really energized by the idea that there's operations people who are interested in solely focused on making designers lives easier and making our jobs less painful. And fixing some of the challenges that we've had our whole, like, careers slash industry length of life, like file naming constructs, I mean, how many times do we need to talk about final final, really final dot,
Dan Klyn: Underscore,
Abby Covert: Underscore? No, for real this time underscore final, final, final final. This is, you know, those kinds of challenges are just there. They're just so ready for somebody to tackle from an operations standpoint. And I find that like in the review of proposals and also working with speakers for the last two years, that summit, I do feel like there's a lot of overlap with IA skills and operations people because they're, they're making complex things clear too.
Dan Klyn: Paulo had to leave
Abby Covert: Public school in Italy y'all. Get out of here!
Dan Klyn: We've got another question here, though, from a friend of mine in Romania, I believe is where Ronan is. And I'm curious if he wants to ask you himself or if I need to broker this question, so I'm waiting for the little chat thing to come back through. Um, how about Kelly Griffith while I wait for Ronan, whether he wants to talk or not. Kelly Griffith says any suggestions on how to find and work with an IA mentor. Whoo. I'm especially interested in finding one who can help me work on both my technical skills, and wait for it, being nicer.
Abby Covert: Whoo.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you, Kelly. Kelly Griffith. Do we know you from because you sound like we already were already friends?
Abby Covert: Yeah. Do we know you? We should know you. We should be friends. Yeah. In terms of finding mentorship. I feel like my suggestion is outdated. And I'm not sure the quality of it, which would be to reach out for the Information Architecture Institute mentorship program. Does anyone on the line including yourself, Dan, have any information on whether or not that program is still in existence? Because I have not paid attention to anything and about let's see, my son is almost seven months old. So seven months. Is that still a thing?
Dan Klyn: It is still a thing as many who will listen to this after the fact. No, there has been some upheaval in the IA community with professional organizations and conferences and things. And so, right now, I believe the IA Institute's mentorship offering is that once you become a member, you then have access to the membership directory. And that it is on you to peruse the directory to find somebody to ask for help, which is different than the entire model did not scale which was it was me. And then we would write an email. And then I would personally find people a mentor. And so for Kelly Griffiths, one way that we could do this, that doesn't necessarily scale to much bigger is just send me an email and I can help you. But assume that I get hit by the beer truck tomorrow. I mean, don't but Abby, what are other ways to get mentoring help in information architecture?
Abby Covert: I mean, I would say so I have entered into several relationships that I would consider myself to be the mentor and I have one with someone who lovingly refers to herself as mini manatee because she does not like the idea of a mentee. The first time
Dan Klyn: Mantee that's so much better.
Abby Covert: She actually, she sends me manatee themed things every once in a while, which is very, very cute. So yeah, I would say all of those interactions started not from somebody writing me and being like, will you be my mentor? They all started from somebody writing me an email that had real questions in it. Real questions that I had to really think about. Like I'm gonna I'm gonna call him out. David.
Dan Klyn: I was gonna say David Peter Simon. Oh my fucking god.
Abby Covert: I know like.
Dan Klyn: ...Are my friends on a Sunday?
Abby Covert: David Peter Simon is a lovely gentleman. He lives out in the Bay Area and he wrote down this email in like, I want to say like, 2011.
Dan Klyn: I'm down a bowl. You couldn't not answer it. It was so full of the right questions.
Abby Covert: Right questions. And he, I knew that it was an email that was going to start something in terms of a continued conversation, because Dan and I had to have a call to talk about how we were going to answer the email. Like it was just, he was just asking real questions. And the warning that I'll give you is that those emails take a really long time to get answered. But I will always answer them. And I feel like every other community member that I've spent significant time with in the community will also answer that email eventually.
Dan Klyn: Eventually, yep.
Abby Covert: Yeah. In that email, I would just say and you're writing to somebody who you believe has the, you know, the vision of whoever the next version of you is, and you can kind of work towards that vision with that person. I would just encourage you to ask questions and not assume the bounds of like now we are in a mentorship. It's sort of, it's kind of like dating, you know, like you I think it a lot of cases, people and this happens to me occasionally is somebody will write to me and be like, will you be my mentor? And it's kind of like, will you be my girlfriend? I'm just like, I don't even know you.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, could we kiss now?
Abby Covert: Could we go in like kind of see what's up? I feel like some people have reached like when I lived in New York City, it was very common that I would - I had a semi office hours where I would have people come and meet me for coffee. And then I've had other ones that are mostly remote and have been over the phone or video chat most recently and then also other ones that are like mostly in person like David Peter Simon, I don't think we had like an actual face to face interaction with him until like months and months later and just happen to be at a conference and you know,
Dan Klyn: By that we were already best friends having never been Yeah,
Abby Covert: It just - it's - I feel like those things when they're right they’re right. I would also say that like that relationship, in all senses, the ones that I've stayed in touch with and the ones that are still in my life, those relationships go both ways. I learned a lot through mentoring these. And I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about my teaching style. I learned a lot about my insecurities. You know, like, when somebody asks you a question, it pushes up against the edges of what you're actually grappling with yourself, having the ability to say, you know, I don't know. or I'm currently exploring that too. Also like being able to reach out to those people when you're struggling with something. Like I've, I've definitely had moments where I've had conversations with people that I've mentored where I feel like they're mentoring me by the end.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, it flips.
Abby Covert: Then end with friendships. So it's like, at a certain point, it's kind of like I wouldn't say that I'm currently mentoring David Peter Simon. I consider him to be a
Dan Klyn: He mentors us at this point.
Abby Covert: Exactly. So yeah, I would definitely say and then the other thing, Kelly that I would say is like, please email me because I will answer it. And if you're, if you're an angry person, or how to be a nice person. I got you, girl. Let's talk. Yeah. So you know me.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, I'm probably way less helpful in the what to do about
Abby Covert: Dan's too nice.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, I'm already too nice.
Abby Covert: He's too nice. If you have a mentor for Dan on how to not be so damn nice.
Dan Klyn: I need one of those. I super need one of those. Sometimes, Sometimes Christina Woodsey helps me with that.
Abby Covert: I think it's called therapy.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, we could all, we can all use more of that for sure. Another question here and this is from Ronan since he's happy to have me convey it. Um, do you see in your imagination and our experience, information architecture applied to organizational structure and culture? Can IA be used to shape how the company itself operates?
Abby Covert: Heck yes, of course. Um, so there's a really great book out there. I don't I don't know Dan if you've read this, but Kristin Skinner and Peter Merholz wrote a book called "Org Design for Design Orgs"?
Dan Klyn: I have.
Abby Covert: And that book is a perfect example of how information architecture can be used in pursuit of organizational structure and kind of trickled down into culture. I think that like that is, is one of the core places that IA is being practiced in most organizations is at the org chart level. I mean, if you look at an org chart, it's a hierarchy diagram.
Dan Klyn: It's already information architecture.
Abby Covert: It's already in the literal sense information architecture, even down to the deliverable. So yeah, I think there's a lot of potential there. And I think that like, changing the way that people are organized, and the way that they're incentivized is, is the same as changing the way that things click together and the way that things are measured to determine whether or not they're good. So yeah, I'm much more in that conversation than I used to be. I didn't see that connection before the world of design ops entered into my brain but now that I'm there. I definitely see a lot of opportunity.
Dan Klyn: And that book, for those of you that didn't catch it is organizational design for design organizations. It's on O'Reilly. And I know one of the authors is Peter Merholz. Who's the other author?
Abby Covert: Kristin Skinner, who's also one of my co curators with Design Op's conference.
Dan Klyn: Oh, nice. Yeah. So highly recommend that to everyone. One of the lines that Peter uses, I don't know if he uses it in the book, but I've seen him give a talk about it. That when he was at that place in Chicago. Groupon! He worked at, he was a design director, a big shot of running design teams at Groupon. And he said he had a realization that where the sales guys sit in the building is information architecture.
Abby Covert: Oh, yeah. For sure. Etsy is really interesting. We, when we move people around, we move their desks as well. And that's always really interesting to hear about because, you know, it shakes everybody up, and it also like the colocation aspects of that is interesting. As a remote person that's very interesting to me just because I can't move my desk, my desk is in Melbourne, Florida. One time I did turn it around and everybody was like: What? this is a much better view than the other way around. Trees and stuff not as not as fun.
Dan Klyn: Well, while I wait for other folks to indicate their willingness to ask a question, I still have a big piece of paper here. Maybe I'm that the topic of conferences and design op's summit being one of them that you work on.
Uh, there's been problems in our community, with conferences, and I personally feel like there's no finer way to generate knowledge. In a nascent field. I don't know about anthropology, but for information architecture, some of the most important ideas that I use every day are ones I didn't get from a book. I got from sitting in a conference session. And so conferences as a way to generate knowledge. Not only do I think that's a good idea. Every day I benefit from that. And at the same time there's this weird or maybe it's not weird. Maybe all conference communities have this, but it seems like ours is got way too much garbage going on.
Abby Covert: Are you talking about interpersonal dynamics in conferences?
Dan Klyn: Yeah, bad behavior. Me, two things at conferences.
Abby Covert: I mean, Dan, I'm, I hope for, I hope for your sake that you understand that that's not just IA conferences.
Dan Klyn: Well, I only go to. That's the only kind that I go to.
Abby Covert: So if that's not just IA conferences, that's not just conferences, that's literally any interaction where people of different types are interacting with each other.
Dan Klyn: Yeah.
Abby Covert: So I mean, I think that we are, we are falling victim to the trends and forces of the time that we're in. And I think that it's really a shame that our community is plagued by these things. I think that for a long time, we all thought we were above it all. And that was like, not at our conference. No, yeah,
Dan Klyn: No, we make the complex clear. How can there be these bullshit intrigue all over the place?
Abby Covert: I just I want to make it really clear that like that is not. First of all, it's not something that started happening recently, because of, you know, back in the larger world, influencing, you know, the people who go to our conferences. This has been a reality for the now 21 years that information architects have been meeting in places to talk about information architecture across the world, that this has been happening and by this I mean, harassment, most women, but not exclusively, just overall misogyny. I can say as a woman who started in this industry in her mid 20s, I was also the victim of it. In the most broad and specific sense. And it's disgusting. But it has nothing to do with being an information architect. It has nothing to do with the IA community. It is just a function of where there are people, then people. Yep, they will, they will do bad things. And that is a reality of our world. And that's a sad reality of our world. And I hope that our community can do something to create a shining example of how to make a community feel safe. And I think that in the past we've not done enough towards that. I think there's been a lot of box checking. You know, we wrote a code of conduct. Yes, we're good. check that box. Yeah. Reality that's, that's only part of it. Like that's, it's that cultural change that we're after. And honestly, it's not just about affecting our culture, it's not affecting the larger culture. So, yeah, I'm sad about it. But um,
Dan Klyn: Is it changing at all? Like when you think about when you came into the field early on in the experiences that you had compared to,
Abby Covert: Yeah, it's changing because I can see other people like me now. You know, like, going to a conference in Etsy. I started going to IA conferences in 2007? Yeah, in 2007 was the first year that I ever did anything, the Idea Conference. At that point, I'm trying to think whether it was or like, for abundance of people like me at that club. I mean, there's probably I know there were other women in that conference. It wasn't like, there were none. But there was literally a joke at conferences that there was never a line for the ladies room. You know. There's a line for the ladies room at most conferences I go to now. I would say that the majority of people who, like reach out to me after talks are women, which is amazing. Like, it's something that I have noticed that change. I see women taking a lot more leadership positions, I see a lot more thought leadership coming out of people that look like me, as opposed to, you know, I mean, I, for years have talked about like my IA brothers. But, you know, it's like, it's lonely to be everybody's little sister. Yeah, there have been moments and I feel like our little tribe has been pretty open about the moments where I have stood up and said, Hey, this doesn't feel right. You know, there have been moments where I've had to reach out to friends of mine, male friends of mine in this community and say, Hey, the way that you treat me in front of other people when we're having discussions about information architecture theory, makes me feel like you don't think I am a peer. And I don't know if that's because of my age, or if that's because of my gender. But it feels bad. And it doesn't help this community to act like that. And I'm your friend. So I will tell you this, and you're most likely doing this to other people who do not tell you about it. So, but it took me a lot of years to get there, you know, to be able to actually go to someone and say that and be like, Hey, this is something that you're making me feel bad, because you're doing this thing. And not only that, it's probably something that you're making other people feel as well.
So yeah, I feel like if, if you're looking to change it, it's like, believe women, number one, yeah. simple. Believe women. Believe people of color. Believe people. Just believe people when they say that something makes them uncomfortable. It makes them uncomfortable. It's not that's not a that's not an opinion. That is a fact.
So yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how productive conversation we can have about it, but it's not new. It's not more. It's not less. It's different. And it's obvious. Whereas maybe it was only obvious to some of us before.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. Austin D... You may know this chap, he's unable to unmute himself because I hold the keys but I believe I have just unmuted Austin. And if he wants to turn his camera on, he could even do that.
Abby Covert: Whoo.
Austin: I was actually still muted. Your powers are off, but I can't unmute myself because I have a 18-month old running around banging pots and pans and screaming.
Abby Covert: Okay, so, do you want Dan to read your question?
Dan Klyn: You want me to read your thing then?
Austin: Yes, please.
Dan Klyn: Okay, you're going back on mute and give your little one a kiss for us.
Abby Covert: And this is amazing, by the way, like I can't even tell you how tickled I am. Like people are taking their time away from pools and Italy. Sundays with family to listen in.
Dan Klyn: I'm telling you Sunday at 11 I just had this feeling we need to do this and I'm so glad that everybody's here. So Austin asks, a lot of newer designers lack core IA design skills like Sitemaps and wireframes. And IA literacy overall seems to not have risen along with the rest of the design tide. Why does the world hate IA?
Abby Covert: Um, okay, alright. So, let's see. Where do we even start here?
Dan Klyn: Sitemaps and wireframes people you like I stopped teaching that. I stopped teaching that personally because I thought well, that's covered. everybody.
Abby Covert: Yeah, I mean, I'm working wireframes can be called dead now. I don't know. I mean, I can say that at Etsy they're dead that we do not use them. And it's not because it's not because they're not useful. It's just because the speed at which designers can work within a design system and a pattern library to create interfaces is just as fast as gray boxes and lines. So we just that's just, that's just we've gone from that. In terms of Sitemaps. I would say that there's a perception out there that apps aren't sites and they don't need maps, which is very wrong and very flawed. And I feel like in a lot of cases, those diagrams are still getting made, if only in people's heads, and whether or not
Dan Klyn: Somebody has to have it somewhere.
Abby Covert: Yeah, but I mean that I don't think that that's that new. I think that that's been a struggle for designers for a long time. I mean, if you think about it, it's a different skill set to zoom out on something. I've actually had been working on at Etsy. One of the charges that I have is this like, integrated design skill place for IA. and so I've been trying to break down like, what are the actual assessable skills. Not necessarily the deliverables, but the assessment skills that might map to those deliverables. And one that I've identified is the ability to zoom out on the problem. And some people, just, it's not that they're not good at it, it's just that they've never been asked to do it, they've never thought to do it. It's just when I design interfaces, I think, from like, here's an interface. And if I click this button, I go to this interface.
And what they realize when they're taught, the idea of zooming out, is that they can actually be a whole lot more efficient at designing the pieces of it if they look in advance at the way that those things might need to connect together. So I feel like that lesson is something that needs to be part of design education.
I don't know why it's not or why it's not enough. But I don't think it really has to do as much with the deliverable of sitemap. I remember earlier in my IA career, we spent a lot of time iterating on site maps and like getting sitemaps approved, and then what would happen is as you go through the rest of the process, the site would change, and then everywhere. I guess the sitemap was bad. But that was also when we were setting IA up, IA up to fail. I gave a talk at World IA Day two years ago called "How to set IA up for fail". And one of the ways that I pointed out was set it up as the front of the train and have it never expected to change after that part of the train. Yeah. Like, you can't. I've never seen a sitemap not not changed through the course of the rest of the program that is around it.
Dan Klyn: That might be the answer. That might be the answer to Austin's question about why does the world hate IA.
Abby Covert: Okay, so why does the world hate IA is
Dan Klyn: Because they were on a train with IA on the front and it had to change so much. It was fucking useless.
Abby Covert: Yes, exactly. It was like, Well, why did we spend all those months talking about that sitement? Why are we in revision 30 of a sitemap? That is now not even correct. When? And I think that like we as an industry as IA industry, we are overly focused on deliverables for a really long time. We are also really insecure in our ability to deliver value in a way that I think personally and I can tell you this because it happened to me came out as: anger. Determination. Bullheadedness. I have been told by many, many people that their first interaction with an IA was a terrible experience.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, bossy pants,
Abby Covert: Egotistical bossy pants, everything was about like, if the user wanted it, there was no there was no back and forth with what the business needed. There was just this my way or the highway. I'm the highway. And I just don't feel good for our profession. And so I think that like, there were some really thoughtful folks within the IA community, who I think recognized that and started a rebranding effort. And that rebranding effort ended us with user experience design, in its most basic sense, and then design has kind of had its own problem of they define themselves at such a level that they ate the world, then all the sudden, everything's UX design, and then nothing is. So, you know, I feel like it's kind of it's, it's suffering from a similar fate in that you're now seeing like a departure from UX titles for example, you're now seeing like, the return of other names for things are dropping the, the deterministic word altogether, I'm just the designer. Hmm, give me my medium. It's like, what do you design? Well, mostly things users use. Why aren't you a UX designer? Product designer, that's what I do. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like it's interesting because information architecture has never been good as a community of projecting, like, a clear position for itself. And, and really, like, going deep on that. I just don't think we've, we haven't done a good job of that.
Dan Klyn: Austin's follow-up is: In parentheses, that the deliverable is "understanding."
Abby Covert: Exactly. Yes, yes. I talked to my students about that. It's like, as an information architect, I am not making interfaces for end users to use. I am making stuff sometimes. I mean, sometimes this stuff is just like a conversation that's happening amongst designers. But it's my end users are the people who are making those interfaces for users. And so thinking about it from that standpoint, just like you would think about designing something for an end user, if they think about like, what, what is this person going to understand about the world different from having this interaction with this thing that I'm making. Is a map sometimes that thing is a simple text document. Sometimes that thing is like a facilitated workshop. But yeah, I think I think Austin's right. That's the actual deliverable is not a sitemap or wireframe. It's understanding. And I, to your point, also, Austin, I do not think that we are teaching that enough in design programs. I think that there's a perception that if you, If you can do a modicum of user research to say that you did it and the interface looks slick AF and the business goals, boom, UX designer.
Dan Klyn: UX. Did you hit it with a UX stick?
Abby Covert: No, I'm product designer. Sorry.
Dan Klyn: Product there. Yeah. Yeah, yet. The sitemap thing is interesting to me as a consultant, I think I'm over it now. But for the last seven and a half years, I've been serially incredulous. At the start of an engagement. Sort of fists on hip just like why don't? Where are the maps and models? Where, where is the visual explanation that your enterprise uses to tell itself about itself? Yeah, nobody has that and I and I've, I think I'm done being incredulous about it.
Abby Covert: Well, I mean, I don't How I don't know how well a sales tactic that is but maybe it's working. I I would say having a map of what exists is a very useful asset. being able to point at things to each other and say, This doesn't make any sense or this is the problem with this flow is right here. Being able to visually depict that for people and pointed it is very important.
Dan Klyn: I wondered if we shifted the label to business cartography? We would have any better success with that.
Abby Covert: Do not throw academic words at it and make it think it's gonna be better No, no, Dan. but I think like a...
Dan Klyn: Or business mapping
Abby Covert: I think that sitemap. Okay, let's let's take the term when we say sitemap, it could be sitemap in the surface of what we're making. like are we make we're making these changes to a site? How are we going to change a site? That I think is one application of hierarchy map, which means then refer to as the site map if it's a site. But if you look at the other implementation of it, you're actually using that same method to reverse engineer a visual of how things connect to each other. And in my work, I use that way more than I use, sitemaps about what we're going to do. It's like, Hey, this is this is how it looks zoomed out, so we can talk about it. And then we make decisions to go towards what the new thing is. And then sometimes that creates like a before and after moment, which I quite like. We started from here, we identified these things are wrong. And now this is the new thing that no longer has these problems. We're going to build some prototypes off of this idea, and we're gonna test it with users to see if it if it does better, hopefully, there's research in between of that of, you know, both with our stakeholders from a business perspective and also with users about what they do or do not understand about it.
Dan Klyn: Yeah I think I would be happy with a diagram that is a literal representation of an implementation. Like if they don't even have that, like the thing that that I make or my team makes is this really great map of the thing that is being talked about that we are probably going to change. And not. It is not a diagram of an implementation. It's a zoomed-up-and-zoomed-down abstraction.
Abby Covert: Yeah, exactly. And I think like the problem with and I think the reason that people don't have those at hand, is because those things change pretty quickly. Yeah, like last year, we invested really heavily. And I'm very proud of us for doing that. So we've invested really heavily in accessibility in the last two years at Etsy. And one of the things we had to do for our accessibility vendor that we were bringing in to do some work with us was we had to make a site map because they wanted to be able to see all of the places that they were going to have to touch. And so I partnered with a product manager, and we tag team to it and we reverse engineer the site map of the entire Etsy ecosystem and it was beautiful and for about a month. It was like, you know, like, oh my god and I could just I could slack its people and they were like what?
Dan Klyn: This. Yeah, you could point like, it's this. It's this.
Abby Covert: But then things started being old. And then things started changing. And in an order of 1000 people were many of those people are able to willy nilly screw with those bits. No one person could keep up with that. So it became like a governance issue of like, how do you actually govern a document like that over time to make sure that it actually keeps up with the pace of change?
Dan Klyn: Yeah. How many times does it have to get redrawn?
Abby Covert: Exactly. And like who, who decides how often it gets redrawn? And then also, we are constantly experimenting. So in some cases, an experiment might run for a month on Etsy that changes something in terms of the nature of the structure or the labeling of a thing. How do I represent that on the map? Is it that it only gets accepted into the map after it's been in the wild for a certain amount of time? You know, it just got very, very fast to think about how would you keep that up.
Dan Klyn: Yeah. What's the stopping rule for updating? When are you done?
Abby Covert: Exactly. And then it became like the question of how important is it to keep it up to date, because it was very important for that accessibility moment. But honestly, after that it was just a shiny object that everybody liked to know, that we had. And the next time that somebody needs to zoom out on a problem, that, you know, that map would have served that purpose. To be honest with you, from a teaching standpoint, I think I'd rather than redraw the map. Yeah. Because the drawing of the map is part of the process of understanding the material that you're working with. It's like going to the job site and look up building the building before the building is there. I mean, you have to go there and you have to spend the time. And I feel like in in times where I've been given something to work off of in terms of like a, oh, here's an audit your sitemap I want to do it myself. Like it's part of my process to kind of do the digging and then translate that into something for me to then use to communicate like part of the job?
Dan Klyn: Well, I think there's something very powerful embedded in what you just said there. Abby, which is maybe maybe artifacts is is not the game. And to ask for permission, I'm thinking of myself selling a scope of work to do not a picture of an implementation but one of these right level of abstraction kind of zoomed back and zoomed up that the process of making this map is what you're investing in. Yeah, this thing in me internalizing your world. But But I guess maybe I thought that people would rather buy a deliverable than then buy an investment in me and maybe I just have to not be so.
Abby Covert: That's good. I think that's pretty insecure, like for our industry. Yeah. I think that we convinced ourselves that if we didn't, I remember at some point, we were like, I don't know if you ever did this, but when I was back in agency land We leather bound wireframes. Leather freaking bound in books where I had to produce my wireframes at such a high degree of quality that not only were they going to be viewed on a screen while we go through them and get some critique, we would print them out professionally and send them to someone who would leather bind them so that we could drive in our fancy business casual clothes and go present them. And the clients would have their leather books where they could take notes as we go. I mean, like this is just we're in a different place with it. But I feel like that was all hiding. Because if well, if I look back at those wireframes I'm like, where did those come from? Where did those wireframes come from? They came from my brain, they were my opinion of the way things should go. At that point we're investing very, very little in research in an ongoing way, especially at the beginning of a project. It was much more likely to see usability testing after the fact then to have upfront research and it became this function. Like it's all about the deliverable. It's all about getting sign off on the deliverable. And getting signed off on the deliverable is all about moving on to the next part of the project.
Dan Klyn: And do that off so they can work on it and move to the next thing.
Abby Covert: Exactly. But that was all based very much like a waterfall kind of method to where we're handing things off. And then maybe, if we're lucky, coming into QA at the end to like gut check. Yeah, yeah. It's just, I think, it's just a different. We're in a different time. We're in a different understanding. And hopefully, I mean, I think the word artifact is really interesting, right? Because like, who would expect that an artifact would actually be timeless.
Dan Klyn: No. They're time locked and in recording or in a photo. Artifacting isn't something you want.
Abby Covert: Right. It's a moment. It's a - it's a leave behind? Yeah. It's not something to be like realize
Dan Klyn: It's exhaust not what you did.
Abby Covert: And same thing with deliverable. Like, deliverable is literally like, your this is the thing you're going to give to people to prove that you did the thing. Like. Okay...
Dan Klyn: Yeah, this is what we brought people we brought of this.
Abby Covert: Yeah, so we leather bound it for you. They also, we embossed the client's logo onto the cover of the leather binding. I'm not kidding you this really happened,
Dan Klyn: Boy. Well, we're almost at the end of our time, which makes me very sad. But I get to talk with you a lot. So I'm going to try to work into more attendee questions. First one is from Danny or Donnie, I don't know how to say the name but thanking us for the conversation and then saying, “I've taught information architecture and UX related postgraduate programs. But this year, I'm going to start teaching in a design degree with very young folks. Any tips?” And I sent a clarifier. I was hoping it was going to be like 11 year olds, but it's like 19 or 20 year olds. Yeah. So advice about how do you teach IA to undergrads?
Abby Covert: Well, so one thing that I would say is the examples that you use really matter. Younger folks, sticking theory into the brains of younger folks without real concrete examples is much, much harder. So I would focus heavily on examples. I would also say you want to focus equal time on lecturing and practical application, like getting their hands dirty in stuff. They have a really short attention span at that age. So hour long lectures. That was one of the reasons I ended up with the, like, 20 minutes sermon. Yeah, Dan, I'm looking at you.
Dan Klyn: My three hour lectures. Yeah.
Abby Covert: I mean, yours are master's degree students, so I mean, they're not they're not
Dan Klyn: Yeah, it's still more about what I'm enjoying than what they would prefer, though.
Abby Covert: Yeah. Um, so I would say practical application workshops and having them do like actual project work and try to frame that as realistically as you can for them. Like one thing that I do, which I find to be really successful, not just with younger students, but just with students in general is making sure that they have all the things that they would have in a dream scenario at work. So for example, if you're asking them to think deeply on the structure of something, you should probably be preparing them with some sort of user research that's already been done. And here's what you can consume, so that they're not being taught to make shit up and structure it into an IA deliverable, because that's very easy for you to let people do. So, for example, I have an example I've used for years now, is the product idea of Instagram for food. And I wrote up like three different personas that they might use, and yes, they're all like made up. They're roughly based on people I know in real life, so their shades are real. But the point is to give them the constraints that actually users might provide. And then to have them use that to go through and have some of these more IA related discussions. So I would say concrete examples and then preparing them with the materials that they would need to kind of position the IA work within the larger, like design work. What are the other things that might have already happened by the time you get here, for example?
Dan Klyn: I like that. So focus on being a response to a constraint. Yeah. As opposed to maybe the opposite of that would be something brilliant that you ideated. Then you mushed into a place where the constraints are, this is no, here's the constraint. What are you going to do?
Abby Covert: Yeah, no, I mean, they already know how to design something with no constraints.
Dan Klyn: Because they’re are people who have imaginations.
Abby Covert: So I mean, it is is literally your job to teach them the constraints exist, that their reality is not the only reality, that they have bias, that users are only one part of making the decision because that's another direction that people can go some people are so egotistical that they want to push their ideas through. Other people are so obsessed about this idea of user centricity that they want to foolishly push that through without understanding.
Dan Klyn: Yeah, they subtract themselves as, like, whatever the research says is what I do.
Abby Covert: Yeah. And that's, you know, that's, that's not. I had somebody who recently was working on a card sort and the results came back. And they were like, none of these seem right. And I was like, What? And they were like, well, the users, they came up with, like, 70 different ways to organize these cards, and none of them seem right now, what do I do? And I was like, Oh, my gosh, did you think that a user is going to do your job for you? That's not how this works. That's research. You understand from watching, or looking at the results from what those 70 people did. You now have to make some interpretation of what option might work. And then you got to go back and test it with them to make sure that you didn't lose anything in translation. But like no one, I think they thought that one of those 70 would be the right one. And it was right. It was like, let's not
Dan Klyn: Look for a trend that looks right. And then whatever sessions did that then those are the correct ones. And those are the ones we will choose to interpret.
Abby Covert: Exactly.
Dan Klyn: Awesome. Well, I think we have one minute left. Is there anything that is not in the world of IA and your job and stuff that is giving you pleasure these days? Something that a listener could be introduced to through you - through information architecture, that's awesome?
Abby Covert: Something came to mind. I was on a call with somebody who was giving me some advice about the IA phases that we're working through in terms of maturity model. And at the end of the call, they were saying something like, Oh, yeah, I'm just like, I'm a little overwhelmed. My to do list kind of a mess. And I was just like, hey, have you ever heard of bullet journaling? And they were like, Whoa, what's that? And I was like, Oh, you gotta look that up. So if you haven't -
Dan Klyn : Looked up, bullet journaling,
Abby Covert: Bullet journaling, there's a book called The Bullet Journal Method by an author named Ryder Carroll. I am obsessed with it, currently. Because I believe it to be the most accurate expression of personal information architecture I've encountered.
Dan Klyn: That's saying something.
Abby Covert: Yeah, it's really neat. And it's also like, I, as a new mom, and I'm going back to like, a month or so back to work. Now, I'm working on my side projects, like I got a lot of balls in the air, and I consider myself to be a really organized person. But earlier this year, it got to the place where I was like, oh, my gosh, I need to, I need to get organized like I do not. I got, like, I got pushed through the YouTube algorithm towards journaling videos. And for whatever reason, it just made sense to me at that moment. I've been doing it for the last three or four months. And I just, it's changed my way of working. It's allowed me to really compartmentalize my work from my life in a way that feels really comfortable. Yeah, so I would say bullet journaling, if any cool, high minded people like myself trying to convert James recently into bullet journaling. He's just like frustratingly told me my brain doesn't work like that. So if your brain works that way, it might be something really cool for you. There's also just a wealth of, if you look a bullet journaling on YouTube, you're gonna find all these beautiful illustrations and like hand typography kind of moments. Yeah, the thing is about. But that part of it makes me very happy so I'm kind of one of those scripty letter people now too.
Dan Klyn: Nice. Well, that's awesome. Thank you for - I bet none of us knew about that. So sad to close this off, but it's Sunday and we need to go do other Sunday shit. Now all of us do. I suspect.
Abby Covert: I'm gonna go in the pool with a baby. It's gonna be awesome.
Dan Klyn: Oh, I'm gonna go in a pool with a 17 year old if I can persuade him to get away from his digital audio workstation.
Abby Covert: Good luck with that. Tell him that I say hello.
Dan Klyn: I will. Once I get a couple of them Lynn Boyden is my next guest.
Abby Covert: I already have it on my calendar.
Dan Klyn: There's gonna be a podcast and Garrett wrote bumpers for me, it's gonna be sweet. So someday this will be a podcast. But today is not that day. today is that I am so grateful that you spent time with me, Abby Covert, and to all of you on the thing in my left hand pane and Zoom. Thank you all. And we'll be back doing this in a month or so. So thank you.
Abby Covert: It was very nice to be on. And yeah, everybody that attended. Thank you so much.
Dan Klyn: All right, I'm gonna hit the end meeting button and that means the recording will go up into the sky. The robots will start trying to figure out what the fuck we said. It's gonna be awesome.
Abby Covert: Yeah, can't wait.
Dan Klyn: Thank you, everybody. See you next time.