Season 1, Episode 3: Lynn Boyden
With special guest Lynn Boyden, IA educator and community organizer + Information Architect at USC Information Technology Services.
Dan: My guest today is Lynn Boyden, who is an information architect in the great state of California, in the United States, and, she works at the University of Southern California, I believe, is that true?
Lynn: Currently, I work there. They're involved in a reorg, and I'm looking for my next opportunity.
Dan: Ah, so, interesting. You are interested in information architecture, and you need one for your team, and you're in California. That's something we could talk about too, right? Where are the jobs for information architects and how much is travel, something that is expected, and what do people like you and I who have families, how do we do our thing in our field?
Lynn: Yeah, I'd love to touch on that.
Dan: Maybe we could start with that, Lynn, and, the two of us have many things in common, and one of the things we have in common is that we both come to this from a background in library and informations.
Lynn: It's true, we do.
Dan: And so, what is library and information science as a background? What does that mean? If somebody's never heard of library and information science, how does that relate to UX and information architecture?
Lynn: So, one of the other things that I do in, um, my copious spare time is I teach user experience design and information architecture. I've taught in the library school for the last almost 20 years, 19 years at UCLA. This year I'm actually branching out, and I’ll, in a couple of weeks, I'm gonna start teaching at Santa Monica College, which is very exciting to me. It's a very different, student demographic.
Dan: Congratulations.
Lynn: Thank you. I'm excited about the opportunity. They've asked me to pick up a couple of classes, and I'm really looking forward to sort of branching out into kind of a new area I've, I'll be teaching…It’s not the first time to teach undergraduates, but it's the first time to teach an under- an undergraduate class. But when I start my class at UCLA, and it's likely that I'll probably start my class in Santa Monica College the same way, I really strive to make that connection, right? I trained as a librarian. I started school in '95, and graduated with my master's in library information science in '97. Literally, like, we were the first class...We were the first cohort making websites, right?
Dan: Yeah. Yep.
Lynn: So when I start my class, I talk with the students. There's a, there's a very...Yeah, I mean, you know this, S.I. Ranganathan, right? A lovely Indian gent. he worked with, Ponizzi, I believe, in the British Library, to, um…But maybe I'm getting that wrong [laughing].
Dan: No, no. I'm just marveling at the fact that we...Because I...Same story for me, same years in library school, and Ranganathan was, for me, when it all started to light up, the idea-
Lynn: Yeah.
Dan: Just, just the system’s-..
Lynn: Yeah.
Dan: …thinking...
Lynn: So, this…He has five laws of library science, and the first is, um...Now I'm blanking on them all. The second one is save the time of the reader. Um ...
Dan: Is the first one for every book, its reader?
Lynn: No, that's the third one.
Dan: Okay.
Lynn: The third one is every book its reader, every ... the fourth one is every reader its book, and the fifth one is the library is a growing thing.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: The first one i- ... Oh, books are for use, books are for use. That's the first one. Books are for use, save the time of the reader, every book, its reader, every reader, his book, and, the library is a growing thing. That maps perfectly point by point to websites and web applications, and information architecture. There's literally no dis-alignment between those. So, that's, um ... People say to me, "Oh, librarian. How did a library get to be working in the web?" And I say to them, "We're organizing information so people can find it and use it. It's what we've always done. We're doing it with bits instead of books."
Dan: Well, I'll push back a little bit there, because in the rear view mirror, for me, I wonder if librarians really were the right people to be organizing information on websites in that first generation of information scientists who worked on websites, because from a certain point of view, you could look at librarianship as, people with specialized knowledge who use an expert system that they do in between the user and information.
Lynn: So they're gatekeepers.
Dan: Right. They're gatekeepers-
Lynn: I've always, I've always regarded good librarianship as ... Like good librarianship when it's done properly, so, the information is organized in a way that people can find it, use it, I've always regarded as completely invisible. And that's actually the problem with good librarianship, [laughs] is that's, it's, it just gets out of the way and connects the user to the, or connects the customer to the information, right? The needy to the information. So, yeah, I, I, I'm gonna push back on that. I don't think ... I don't, I don't see either the librarian or the information architect as gatekeepers. And they, they talk a lot about that in library school, about being gatekeepers, but, I think of it less as gatekeepers and more as gate openers, right? Like ...
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: ...[Crosstalk], "No, here's the keys [laughs]."
Dan: [Laughing] You know, and, and ...
Lynn: [Crosstalk] How great I am.
Dan: [Crosstalk] Wonderful, you know, the cynical version of that is, yeah, here's the keys, and, it's the little monkey ... It's the little baby keys that, Ben Stiller's character gives to the naughty monkey in Night at the Museum. It's not really ... You don't really have access to the information, you have access to a meta level of descriptions of the material. I think that's one of the reasons why I geeked out on Ranganathan, is the idea that you could at least retrieve cards from a catalogue yourself as a user with a weird series of rods and, ...
Lynn: And strings, right? That was amazing.
Dan: ...[Crosstalk] Like it's, it's, it's completely, ... There were other, futures we could have had, and that analog punch cards and, and, and, and dowels thing, really, excited me as a library student.
Lynn: [Laughs] As a geek [laughing]. As a young geek.
Dan: Yeah. Well, back to, back to librarianship as a basis, one of the things I was hoping to be excited about in my career when I left library school, was that librarianship was a field where sexism didn't seem to be as severe as in other parts of the world of computing, because librarianship, at least ... Of course, not at a managerial level in the library.
Lynn: Absolutely. Haven't you heard, haven't you heard the joke, what's an information scientist? A male librarian.
Dan: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Right. So, anyway, so I had, you know, an illusion of, librarianship as a more humane basis to start helping people connect with information.
Lynn: I loved library school, and I found it incredibly insular. Right? And, one of the things that I did that, I was kinda in my bracelet kind of confound- confounded b- both my peers and my professors was, I took classes in other departments. I, I took a, I took a Java programming class in the architecture school, which was mind bending. This was in the, in the heady, heady days of, you know, the. the late '90s. And ...
Dan: CAD. Oh my, oh my gosh, CAD.
Lynn: ...Java was super exciting.
Dan: Yes, yep.
Lynn: And this teacher was incredible. She would, she would go and she would sit in front of the class, and she would teach us a new thing, like a new concept or whatever, and, and ... So in order to get into, into the library school program, I had to take a programming class, so I took C++ in the math department, as a prerequisite, and, you know ... 'Cause I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna just satisfy that with like, how to make Microsoft Excel work. I'm actually ... Like, they want me to know programming, I'm gonna go and get me some programming. So, I took C++. It was me and like 30 middle school boys. It was hilarious. There, they would, they would run ... We'd be in the lab all working away, slaving away over the assignment, and they'd run over and they'd show me their code, "Look, look at how good this ..." I was like their mom [laughs], and, and I would look at their code and it would be fabulous. Like, "Wow, you did that in three lines [laughing]," which was a little humbling, but ... Like I'd had exposure to coding, but the, the way that the assignments in the math program were, was like, "Okay, we're going to teach you this concept in class. And then here's your assignment. This is your input, and this is what the output has to look like," right?
Dan: Okay.
Lynn: So, taking, taking the Java programming class to the architecture school was completely different. She said, "Here's this new concept that I'm going to teach you. Your assignment's due next week, go use it." Like, "What?" Like, "Give me some structure." "No, just go use it." So, it was really freeing, at the same time, I kind of would have appreciated a few, shall we say, design constraints [laughs]. So, um ...
Dan: Well, that's a, that's a-
Lynn: It's a common art of design.
Dan: Well, I was gonna ask you, it, isn't that a common complaint about students, when they ... Like an undergraduate who wants to get a job in UX, that, if they try to use their student work ...
Lynn: Mm-hmm.
Dan: … Or even like it, you'd ... So, you do, do an intensive thing at general assembly, or got some kind of table stakes as a student, you know, you've worked hard and then, and then, and then they say, "No, you didn't have real constraints. That isn't a real world problem, so it isn't, isn't valid."
Lynn: It was ... I mean, it was fine for an introduction to Java class, right? And I get to see a lot of different interpretations of things that you could do with it. So in that way, it was illuminating, because we, we all did ... I mean, it was architecture, so we did public crit, right? But to go back to my point, and yours, too, about gatekeeping, I took a, I took a class in the business school, also, in addition to the, in a class in the architecture school, because I've always had kind of a strong follow the money bent, even, even after a lifetime working in nonprofits. So, -
Dan: One might say, especially after a lifetime working in nonprofit.
Lynn: Yeah, maybe it's especially after, but, you know, a very ... Even, even,...
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: ...even when, however many years ago it is now, I had a good understanding of, you know, business, and there was an internet, designing internet things class in the business school, which was very exciting in 1995 or 1996, whenever it was that I took it. And, the students ... There were some of the students, but then, I went over with another bri- a- another brave woman from the architecture school, Deb Wolfe, who, eh ... Well, she was my best buddy in, in libra- in library school. She also took the, the class in the architecture school with me. And we, we're working on projects together, and we were sitting through these, these presentations, and of course, we could ask questions, and these guys got up and presented their project, and it was very much a kind of a librarian-ish type of project, they were going to connect users with information, and a particular thing, and blah, blah, blah. And one of the questions, I said, because, in the library school, there's a lot of emphasis ... There's a lot of talk about gatekeeping and access, right?
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: And, access is a big deal in library school, and your point about so much of it being submerged, right? And that, and how that impacts access. So, we ask, Deb and I, this guy, like, "How are you gonna guarantee access for the disenfranchised members of the, the you know, people who have this need?" And he said, he, he just said, "Not our target market." Question answered [laughs]. So, it was really ... I mean, I learned a lot, right?
Dan: Well, it sounds like you were as a student running into real constraints by going outside of your field kind of to, to feel where ...
Lynn: Well, it's a, it's fascinating to me ...
Dan: ...where they were.
Lynn: ...that librarianship touts itself as being interdisciplinary, and yet they were freaked out when I was taking classes in other schools. But, you know, I managed to make it work. I did, I did another project, it was an independent study. There's a famous architect in Los Angeles, Koning Eizenberg, is a fairly well-known architecture firm here.
Dan: Okay.
Lynn: Julia Eizenberg is one of the principals, and she's on the faculty at UCLA. And, she, I ... She and I had met through another connection, and, she had asked me to be the client for her graduate architecture studio. And, she wanted to do the architecture. She wanted to, to have the studio go around being a children's library. And so, I was the ... It was my last year at grad school, and I was the client for the class. So I decided, if I'm gonna do all this work for Julie Eizenberg, and her, and her thing, I'ma bloody well get some credit for it. So, I, worked with the, the youth services specialist in my department. I knew better than to do an independent study with Julie, and I pulled together an independent study where I did a whole bunch of research into how children use space, and then also, sort of their psychological needs around space for learning, for, for optimizing learning. And again, in this ... Most, most of the research was for cognitive normal students, right?
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: I mean, that's not the ... I know that's not the right phrase, but, -
Dan: Neuro-typical ...
Lynn: Neuro-typical, that's the word I'm looking for; for neuro-typical students.
Dan: Yeah. [crosstalk].
Lynn: But I, ... There wasn't really any literature about libraries, in particular. There was about sort of healing spaces, and there was about medical spaces, and there was about learning spaces, but there wasn't really that was focused on libraries.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: So, I ended up, simultaneously being the client for this class, and also working on a big annotated bibliography that I made into, in 1996, this was very exciting, I made into a web page. And [laughing], it may still be out there, who knows?
Dan: I was gonna ask, is it still out there?
Lynn: [Laughing] It may still be out there. I don't know if they still have that web server up, but, um ...
Dan: Well, that's amazing. Well, you did ... I know you worked in archives with film as the medium being preserved and made accessible. Did you work in a “library” library at any point?
Lynn: [Laughs] So, I have to back up just a sec, I didn't actually work in an archive.
Dan: Okay.
Lynn: I was the program coordinator for a brand new program in moving image archiving, that was ... It was a joint degree program between the film school and the library school, and they were bringing it up. And they ... I was, ... I had been laid off from my second [dot-bomb 00:17:12] position. And so [laughs], they convinced me to come on board and help them bring the, bring the program up; sort of get the courses to the academic senate, yup, you know, handle the registrations for, and, and admissions processes for the first ...
Dan: Wow.
Lynn: ...cohort. So, I handled the administrative side of all of that. We built their first website. So, I didn't work in the archive, I worked, on this on, this course. So, the degree program has since been disestablished and rolled into the library school. What you had was the UCLA Film School, which is a culture of exclusion, and the UCLA library school, which is a culture of inclusion, and they were trying to work together, and we were always the redheaded stepchild of the, of, really, both of them. So, I think this is a good move to move it into the program.
Dan: Hm. Interesting.
Lynn: But, but, I have actually worked in a library, but not as a professional librarian. I worked ... My first job in high school, I was a page in my, my local public library, but it was very small, and, as such, I had the opportunity to do everything. I did readers advisory, I did reference, I did circulation, I did all those page lead duties where I shelved and read all the books, and I helped out with the, story hour, and I tidied up after story hour, which is always exciting. So, yes, I've worked in library, but no, not really. I did that all through high school, and it was very satisfying, and it was great because, I grew up in Texas, and we didn't have air condition in the house that I grew up in, and during the summer, I would work eight hour days. [laughs]
Dan: [Laughs]
Lynn: And I was happy to do it.
Dan: The function of a library like that, the way it makes a place where you can go that isn't your house, that isn't school, that, I think people call it a third place.
Lynn: Yeah.
Dan: Are the-
Lynn: It's the la- it's the last public space where you ... The last indoor public space where you aren't expected to buy something. I don't think there are any others.
Dan: And I've been wanting to see a trajectory into some kind of a future where there's a digital ... There's some sort of an equivalent of that in digital, and when I ... The reason I asked you about the, the archives piece, and the date range for that, was that in the late '90s, when you were working on that program?
Lynn: No, that was the early aughts.
Dan: Okay.
Lynn: Yeah. So, 2001 to 2004 was when I, when we were bringing that program up.
Dan: Archives is funny because they have that duty to preserve, not just provide access, but also to protect and make it so that [inaudible] don't go obsolete and things of that nature. Do you recall-
Lynn: Archives is just some of the, some of the most thwarted and also forward thinking people on the planet, right? They literally work every day in a space with just … the basic premises of archivist practice and archivist theory, are in conflict, right?
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: Preservation and access.
Dan: And back to the Ranganathan, books are for use, and to, yeah, in an archive ... There's an asterisk there. So, I'm curious in what you saw of what it takes to prepare archivists from a LAS standpoint.
Lynn: Hoo. I'm gonna-
Dan: And when you look at ... A- and I'm asking you to compare sort of how archivists would be trained at that time, and, and now look at something like YouTube, which, for better or for worse, has become a repository, a collection, an archive, and when I think about film as a medium and all the unique ways that you wanna get at film, it seems like just a big pile where every third thing is a Nazi propaganda, is good enough for most people. So ...
Lynn: So, um-
Dan: What happened? Librarians knew about all these great ways that we could have something, a common access, and people don't seem to care. They just ... It's lateral scrolling through lists on a movie site, and then a big old pile of garbage on YouTube, and that's okay.
Lynn: So, it's hard, is what I'm gonna say, and it, and it's especially hard to keep up with the internet.
Dan: Yes.
Lynn: Which is, it ... That sort of, I guess, like triples, the internet was born pregnant. But in terms of the training at UCLA, especially—UCLA’s library program is a two year program, a two year master's program. And they put um—they—we—put a lot of emphasis on the theories behind the practices. So they don't get so much on the practice. The practice is the outcome of the theories.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: And that they do it that way is because practice changes, and if you are versed in the theories, then you understand when the practice changes what's good, and what you should keep and what you shouldn't keep, with the new practice.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: [Crosstalk] If that makes sense. But, you know, a lot of archival theory is grounded really in understanding description in a way that—like describing materials in a way that, preserves their integrity for future researchers, and at the same time, documents what's there. One of my, one of my favorite sort of Twitter memes is archivists who are angry about people who’ve discovered something in the archives, and it's like, "Well, yeah, the archivist already knew it was there [laughs]." Right? It wasn't discovered. It was, it was—
Dan: It was staying. Yeah. Yeah.
Lynn: So that’s kind of the difference between archivists and librarians, and librarians are all about like getting you out there and getting your hands on it, and archivists are less so about the hands.
Dan: Does that, does that [inaudible] of description that we know about there that, "I'll just make it be about you." Knowing about how richly-described information resources can be, and then back to looking at what 1.7 billion people use on the web today, or however many connected people we have now. It doesn't seem—it seems like the difference between black and white and technicolor, or maybe even a, you can't get here ... You can't get there from here.
Lynn: And still people find things. People are so resourceful, people are amazing. It's, you know, I have a friend right now who, he's a little, let's just say he finds the current political situation a little Tim snaking. And, um ...
Dan: That's reasonable.
Lynn: One of the ways that he copes with that is he is posting absurdities to his timeline, and this last week, he began on a whole tear of famous people on bicycles, and so, I was just ... I threw a whole bunch of ... I threw a whole bunch at him, so, "Phil Oren on a bike," and he's like,...
Dan: Oh, that's great.
Lynn: "Yeah, so Phil Oren on a bike." And I was like, "Dee Snider on a bike." Bam, Dee Snider on ... Like, he's, he just ... And yeah, he's the son of a librarian [laughs]. So, let's ... We, we do have to call that out, but, you know, people can find things, and people are pretty resilient, people are persistent. I'm always—
Dan: Although that, that even seems like a means of fighting back. So, that's like a—that’s fascinating to me. I hadn't thought about absurdity. I know about shitposting, but, it seems like what you're talking about is not that, like it's, it's different.
Lynn: It's easy ... Well, it's, it's, it's things that are absurd, and it's, and [inaudible]. There’s a penchant for really, really bad puns. So, I ... If I see Steve's, if I see Steve's post on Facebook, and the puns are really, really bad, it's like I have to go check the news to see what's going on.
Dan: Are you talking about Steve Portable?
Lynn: No.
Dan: Okay [laughs].
Lynn: [Laughing] You don't, you don't know this Steve.
Dan: Okay.
Lynn: He lives, he lives in Ochsner. We're, we were colleagues from way, way back. We worked together at Symantec. He was a contractor when we were doing a Verity implementation, of a ... Verity was a search engine, and we were ... I actually designed a way to test, the difference, the performance difference in search engines across a test environment. And so, he was our, he was our ... I don't know what the, what the term is, but he was like our implementation engineer for this Verity search engine implementation. And we were tuning the Verity implementation to see if it could match the performance of the Google search appliance. This is 2004, maybe 2005. And they had just rolled out this Google Search appliances, and suddenly we're trying to see which one performed better.
Dan: That seems like a fairly, if not ahead of its time, a really smart way of practicing, and I'm curious if you were called information architect in the project, and if ...
Lynn: I was. I was, um ... I had ... So, I'd, I worked at the, at UCLA bringing up the moving in- image archiving program. The guy ... It took me ... It took a lot of convincing to get me to take that job, and the guy who hired me extracted from me a promise that I would stay for at least a year. And I was like, "Okay." And I ended up saying for three years and graduating our first two cohorts, before the guy that I worked with ... A guy that I worked with at one of the punk ass web shops that had folded, recruited me to come and work for his team at Symantec. And, in our, in our first one on one, he said to me, "What's your passion?" And I said, "I really am super geeky about search, and making search work, because, you know, librarian."
Dan: Mm-hmm.
Lynn: And he said, "I want you to own search." And I was like, "Okay."
Dan: Okay.
Lynn: He said, "Own the search UX." We were, we were a user, a small user experience team inside of a larger customer experience team, and we reported up to the VP of customer experience. And…it was great. So, as part of, part of that, I did, I did that project, which was really great. Like they, they had, they had no idea how to compare the performance of these two search engines, and I didn't either, but I just, like, put up one halfs, and made it up. And then kinda like, people would say, "But what if ..." I would like, " um … let’s do this!” Right? So, we ended up, what I ... I mean, I could talk about that, I can geek on about that if you want, but ...
Dan: Please, yeah.
Lynn: ...but what I did was, I looked at the current query logs on our site, and identified key at ... I mean, at the time, we didn't have the language for that, but sort of key user stories, and, and the associated terms that were related to that, and then I identified like, what's the target information source? What's the target document, or what is ... What are a ... Like, what characteristics would a target, target document have? And then I created a scoring system. Like, it got zero points if it got no results, or if none of the results were relevant, and it got one point if, if a relevant result or the target result was on the first page of results, and it got two points if, the target source, resource was in the first three...
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: ...first three results. And then I distributed it out across the team, and we just sort of everybody hammered on these engines for a couple hours, and logged it into a spreadsheet, and then we shared them back. We didn't have shared spreadsheets back then, so everybody worked in their own [inaudible] was very exciting.
Dan: Burn.
Lynn: Yeah, yeah.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: And then, we just kind of pulled it together. And even the engineers were like, "Whoa, whoa, what ... Didn't, didn't expect this." But, [laughs] but they were, they were on board with it. Like this is an acceptable way to test the, the squishiness of, you know, relevance. As a librarian, you understand relevance, right? Relevance is this ... I always tell my students that relevance is a sliding scale. I could go to a website today and search for something, and get some relevant responses, and I could go to the exact same website tomorrow and search the exact same thing, and get the exact same thing, but they wouldn't necessarily be relevant to my query. Right?
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: So, I'm, you know, adjudicating relevance is a really hard thing, but, at least we were able to kind of get a sense of the way that the, the differences between the two engines. And I will say that, even very finely tuned, the Verity K2 engine just could not stand up against the Google search appliance. So ...
Dan: Did you learn how to make a framework? 'Cause that's a, what it sounds like to me, is you made a framework, and then other people helped populate it.
Lynn: I guess I've learned how to make a framework maybe by using frameworks. I'm not really sure I've made ... I seem to have made another framework for decision making.
Dan: Well, I was gonna say, it's, it seems like it's of a kind of a behavior pattern with you about quantifying qualitative ... things in the environment that are qualitative and may be hard to get a, a handle on.
Lynn: Yes. So the business loves numbers, right? You can't ... I mean, this goes back to my focus on the business. You can't ... It's really hard to pitch something to a business, all qualitative, right? they can talk about being for it all the time, but when push comes to shove, when the rubber hits the road, when all those cliches wrap up at the end of the day, they wanna know the numbers. And so, being able to show them numbers is really helpful. So, yeah, I have a, I have a little talk that I give. I gave it at last year's IA conference ... This year's? This year's IA conference. At the most recent IA—
Dan: At the most recent IA conference.
Lynn: I've done it a couple of times here in, in ... At meetups in LA. It's called quantifying qualitative decisions, and as you said, it's a framework. It allows us to ... It's, it's a method that I've used with great success in a lot, a huge variety of settings, ranging from very, very small and personal, to really big and professional. What it does is, it's a participatory and transparent way of involving stakeholders, and by stakeholders, I don't just mean people who own things, but people who have a stake in it, people who touch it.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: Just like, involving them in big, gnarly decisions. And if you think about most of the big gnarly decisions that we have to make in life and in business, they're hard because there's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of stakeholders that have conflicting or different agendas, and, and there's an ... Or different success measures, right?
Dan: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Lynn: There’s a lot of ... There's a lot of things that would make for a good outcome, but some of those are more important than others, right? So the example that I like to use is buying a house, right? Me and my kids, we were living in a high rise apartment in West LA, and we were looking to buy a house. And so, I, I took them around, drove them around to try and get a sense of what it is that would be good for them in a house, right?
Dan: Yeah, yep.
Lynn: And, we'd looked at a whole bunch of places, and we sat down and we made a list of all the things that a good house would have. So, first we look at, at the outcome, what is our desired outcome? What are the qualities of a good outcome for this situation? So ... And, like, I have, I have some criteria for what makes a good house; I want it to be at a good school district, I want it to have enough bathrooms to, you know, handle me and my 21 year old daughter and my 16 year old son, I want it to, you know, have a kitchen that I can use to cook good food, I would love it to have a fireplace, I would, I would like it to have secure parking, I would like it to be in a good school district, I would like it to be safe, I would like it to have fruit trees in the backyard. Right? I would like it to be near mass transit, so that I could, don't have to drive my car to work in Los Angeles, which I don't. It is and I don't, it's a blessing.
Dan: [Laughs]
Lynn: But my son who's 16 has different criteria for a house. He wants a bedroom with windows, and he wants ... And, and to him, those things are more important than others, right? And, I have different priorities. So, what we could do is, we, we go through and we make a list of all the qualities, and then each of us assigns a weight or an importance to each of those qualities, right? So, for me, fruit trees in the backyard, it's not a deal breaker, it's a nice to have, right? So, I give it a one on my list, my little my little Likert scale. For my son, he absolutely, you know, wants a kumquat tree in the backyard, and will settle for nothing else. And so, it's the two on his, right?
Dan: Mm-hmm.
Lynn: My daughter doesn't even live here, lives in Chicago, does not care for trees, not a, not a concern. So she gives it a zero, right? So we go through, and then we aggregate all of those scores, add them up, and that's the weight for each quality.
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: And then ... I mean, you asked me to explain my framework.
Dan: Yes. Yeah.
Lynn: Then, you look at each candidate. So, we looked at the candid—we looked at the condo in Santa Monica, we looked at the house in West LA, we, you know, we looked at the apartment in, you know ... I'm just making this up at this point.
Dan: Pasadena.
Lynn: Yeah. But ... and then each of us, me and my son and my daughter, scored each candidate on each quality. So, does it have fruit trees? I give it a zero, he gives it a one, she gives it a two, right? How well does this candidate meet this quality? The, we do that for each candidate, we, we add up those scores. So you have the raw score for each candidate, for each quality, and then you take the qualities weight, and you multiply the raw score by it, by the weight, and you get a weighted score...
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: ...for that quality. And then you add up all the scores for the candidates, and at the end, it totally blows out the differences and it becomes very clear where your best choice lies. I've used this ... and the benefit of it also is, it's quantified-ish. Right? There are numbers, you can—
Dan: It's not too precise.
Lynn: Yeah.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: But y- but you can also ... It leaves you an abstract, but it leaves you a document, right? You have a spreadsheet that you can show to the business and say, "These were the factors that we considered in our decision. These are the people who participated in the decision. These were the candidates, these were their scores."
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: So, you have something that can explain to the business, your decision, what the criteria were. And it changes every time. You can bring, you can get the same people to do the same thing, and it'll, it'll ... What happens often is you end up with the same result, but the qualities are different.
Dan: Right.
Lynn: I'm-
Dan: Well, I'm curious, I'm curious about that in a governance way. I too like to make frameworks. I think that might be one of the distinguishing characteristics of information artifacts as we-
Lynn: Especially the librarian one.
Dan: We not only like to design things, but we like to make things that generate design things...
Lynn: Mm-hmm.
Dan: ...and so, framework ... That's what a framework does. And, I want and seldom get what I want; what I want is that decision making tool, that framework that gets everybody participating, that makes the complex clear. It gets everybody explicitly on the record.
Lynn: I got you, fam.
Dan: I wanna be able to refer back to that on the front side of the second diamond in a double diamond world,...
Lynn: Mm-hmm.
Dan: ...and check for drift,...
Lynn: Yeah.
Dan: ...and use that here.
Lynn: [Crosstalk] These qualities, absolutely.
Dan: Have you ever successfully got people, once they use that up front, to then keep using it?
Lynn: No, but now I'm, now I'm gonna have to.
Dan: Well, it's ...
Lynn: I mean, for this like ...
Dan: I hope you can do it, 'cause I-
Lynn: ...like in the same, in the same area. Most, most of my uses of it have been at like bottlenecks. Right? The example that I bust out in, in my ... I, I, I actually have three favorite examples that I bust, that I bust out of this. One is, we used it, at a, a major private university where they had implemented Workday, the, you know, the massive enterprise HR software.
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: And, the business, business analysts team had ... it was a really rapid implementation. It was sort of like, "We will have Workday." Boom. [laughing] And so, they deployed it, and we used it for a year, and over the course of that year, the business analysts did a ton of research plus work, they interviewed people at all different levels, power users, you know, base users, all the different flavors, mapped it all back around to the business's needs, and they came up with 16 different enhancement projects that they could roll out over the next three years, and focus resources on, but they needed leadership to say, "Well, what's the top three, top five?" Right?
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: The leadership team was composed of people who had had multiple death matches, right?
Dan: [Laughs]
Lynn: So, it was, they were with each other. There were, there were laws-
Dan: [Crosstalk] to colliding in the deciding world.
Lynn: Long histories of conflict, and, and mostly personality driven, not so much philosophy driven, right? So-
Dan: But better or worse, by the way?
Lynn: [Laughs] Yes.
Dan: [Laughing]
Lynn: So, we, we ... They, they came to me and they said, "We hear you have a framework." [laughing] And, "And can you walk us through this?" So I walked them through it, and we gave a little test run like in the meeting...
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: ...and, and it was interesting, because they were very clearly interviewing me for this, this thing, and one of the interview questions, was the very last interview question was, "Do you have any ... Hmm, how should I put this?" And I said, "History with these people?"
Dan: [Laughs]
Lynn: And they're like, "Yes." And I said, "No, thankfully, none." but, what we did was, we gave them auction paddles, this is zero, one, two, so that there wasn't gonna be like, "Oh, she said, zero, so I'm gonna say one." Like everybody voted at the same time. And we had ... We distributed ahead of time very concise descriptions of all of the different enhancement projects, and we seeded the qualities with things that we knew that were important to them. And I found that in, in using this framework, multiple times that, that's actually a really good practice. If you can seed the qualities, it makes the whole thing go a lot more smoothly, because there's examples for them to work from, right? And, and you can come in and they can, they can focus on tweaking those. if you present them with a blank slate, they get a little panicked.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: So, we seeded the qualities with things that we knew were important to them.
Dan: Did they generate a couple of their own in addition?
Lynn: They generated a couple of their own, we split out some others, we rolled some others. Leo, Leo Frishberg and Charles Lambdin have written a great book called Presumptive Design, and it's a lot richer than this. I'm totally simplifying it, but one of the basic tenets of it is, a really good design method is to just build something, anything, knowing it's flawed, knowing it's broken, and put it in front of your customer, but then they're telling you where it's broken and how it's broken. It, it gives them something to point to and say, "This is wrong," right? Whereas, when if you go I mean, we, we all know the, the perils of going and asking them what they want, but this is, this is giving them something to bounce off. So, it's presumptive design. So, the, the seeding the qualities has a little bit of that flavor to it, right?
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: And so, we got these five people in the room, we gave them their auction paddles, they had done their homework. We explained what we were doing. We worked through the qualities super quick, refined them, and then we went through all 16 projects, super quick, you know, one liner, "This is what ... This is what it is ..." They, they ... We had them weight their qualities, right? Ahead of time. And then we had them evaluate the candidates using the zero, one, two. And I use zero, one, two as a Likert scale for a number of reasons. I get a lot of pushback. People want three or five.
Dan: Yeah
Lynn: And I-
Dan: Why not three or five, Lynn? Come on.
Lynn: On ... Okay, I'll tell you why not three or five. First off, one to five, the median of one to five is three, which skews everything towards the five. Right? If you're running averages on a one to five Likert scale, everything is gonna come out skewed towards five, because ... Right? Because, the mean is 2.5.
Dan: Yeah, I know, I'm, I'm, I'm cogitating, I'm, resist- ... I'm trying not to resist, I'm trying to not stop [crosstalk].
Lynn: Also, also, what's the difference between, what's the difference between ... Like, you've done it, you've seen that damned NPS, Likert scale. What's the difference between a six or a seven? There is so much cognitive load to determining between a seven or an eight. Zero, one, two, bam, forces a commit. It's not ... It's super ... And this is a, is this is a, a framework that requires a lot of those decisions. So keeping it zero, one, two, makes it go really fast, right?
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: Every person that you ... It's a matrixed thing, so every person that you add, every candidate that you add, every quality that you add is a geometric increase.
Dan: And you had how many participants in the session?
Lynn: Five, and we-
Dan: And they got a paddle, and somebody is, got a spreadsheet open, and when the powers go up-
Lynn: They had, they had a pre-coded Google spreadsheet, and, and people were recording the paddles, and we, and we projected the spreadsheet live, so that people could see that we we're recording their scores properly. and in 90 minutes, we had a decision from these people. And they were happy with the decision.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: They were happy with the decision. They were so happy with it, that they asked us to replicate the process with the campus advisory council with 50 people in two weeks. Boom, go. [laughs]
Dan: And, tell ... What happened? Did you do it?
Lynn: Of course we did it. I'm Lynn.
Dan: [Crosstalk] 50 people with paddles?
Lynn: No, no.
Dan: Okay.
Lynn: We did not replicate the exact process, but we did replicate the decision making framework with 50 people. So, in two weeks, it was kind of a scramble, but we took their existing qualities, put them into a survey...
Dan: Mm-hmm.
Lynn: ...asked the folks to weight the qualities as part of the survey, provided space for them to add qualities as they felt, as they felt, was needed. We sent that out before the meeting, and used that for the weighting for the qualities. What we got back in terms of these additional qualities, there were only three responses. One was pretty much d- was already duplicated, one was ... I don't remember what the second one was, but the third one was, you know, I have an open text box, so I'm going to complain about all the things.
Dan: [Laughs]
Lynn: So, we, we addressed that very briefly in the meeting with the folks. We used ... I noticed that they had tech, but we ... I work in academia, and so…we used clickers, classroom clickers, you know, polling devices. So we issued everybody a clicker when they came to the door, and, we'd set them up so that they could click zero, one, two. And so, we had the room full of people. You know, we, we ran a little test to show 'em, make sure everybody's clicker work, and just show them how it worked. And so ...
Dan: Wow.
Lynn: And then ... So we replicated it with this room full of 50 people. They all turned up, right? They all got their clickers,...
Dan: Wow.
Lynn: ...and this was the amazing thing: the top five projects were the same. The leadership was aligned with the people, and this framework allows that.
Dan: [Crosstalk] Prove... You're provable. Yeah, you could quantify the degree to which they were aligned.
Lynn: Yeah, yeah.
Dan: Yeah. So, one of the back-
Lynn: And the business [inaudible] was super happy.
Dan: Yeah. Well, back to my question about governance, and being able to go back to a tool like this, maybe, maybe it's for making the kinds of decisions that you can't go back from, and so, the desire to-
Lynn: You know, I mean, the, the other example of this that I've used, it's just really very funny, is, this, the CIO announced it in all hands that we were going to have an app in the App Store, we needed an app in the App Store.
Dan: Okay.
Lynn: [Laughing] That was kind of our response. So, our guy, Don, calls a meeting of people who were gonna work on an app, and it's literally me and 13 developers, turn out for this meeting. And-
Dan: That sounds like a party.
Lynn: It was, and, I, and I'm the only woman in the room, and they ... We spent ... The meetings were 90 minutes, and we spent six meetings. Now, bear in mind, these are all like senior level developers and me. We're probably ... I would say our average salary is probably, call it 100, 110 grand. Right?
Dan: That's a meeting.
Lynn: That's ... Yeah. So, that's, that's 13 of us in 90 minute meetings for six weeks, where the developers argued, and, ... Don't get me wrong, I'm not, I'm not saying a thing against developers, I love developers. Some of my best boyfriends have been developers. They really could not talk about what this app was going to do, until they had decided what platform they were going to build it on. And I sat in, in these meetings, and, and argued for, "Well, maybe the project requirements might have some impact on what platform we choose." No, they had to choose the platform before they talk about the requirements. And so, we went round, and round, and round, and round, and round, what's the best platform? And everybody had their opinion, and, and they were ... Everybody was being very well behaved, and we were welcoming of all the opinions, but nothing was done, and said, "Hey, you know I have this framework ..." And walked him through it, and, and he said, "Yeah, sure. Let's try it." So at the end of the second meeting, we d- we did one framework, we did one meeting for qualities, and then we did one meeting for, of the evaluations. At the end of the second meeting, we chose a platform. “Oooh,” the angel sang, and then the developers were able to turn their attention to requirements. Once we figured out what the app was gonna do, and how we were gonna do it, we realized that the platform that we'd chosen was not the right one for the job, and so we threw out that decision and chose a different better platform.
Dan: So, in that case, it was to, -
Lynn: It removed the bottleneck. I mean, decision points are bottlenecks, right? And the, the danger of making the wrong decision, is really ... It's, it's hard, and so, by getting more people's thoughtful opinions into the decision making process, I think you make better decisions. And the other thing, you know, we get a lot of, lip service about ethical design.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: And, I think one of the strongest things that gets you to ethical design is participatory design. Right?
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: And, by making decision making participatory. I think you get stronger decisions, and people are happier with them. The third story that I tell us about this framework in that vein, is the time when, I used it with my daughter and her father. He and I had just recently separated, and she was starting high school, and she wanted to go to the French High School in town. And, wow, it wasn't ... It just didn't seem to me, like, you know, it was the best choice for her]…
Dan: Mm-hmm.
Lynn: ...but she was really ... She wanted to go, and there was a lot of discussion back and forth about it. So, I busted out this framework, and the three of us sat ... I mean, and, you know, it was also kind of a loaded, emotionally loaded period, right? For all of us.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: So, I'm sitting at the kitchen table, busted out this framework. We sat, and we listed all of the qualities of a successful high school experience, everything. And, everything that she said, got written down, everything her father said, got written down. Then we went through all the qualities and rolled them up, and, you know, eliminated ... And we touched on everything from cost to, you know, the types of people that we would be hanging out with, right? Social opportun- ... Like all of it. and, and then we went through and weighted them. And then we evaluated the two schools on the different qualities, right? And, it was very clear, the differe- ... At the end of the process, that the public high school was really the best choice based on all of these, qualities that we had identified. And so, the decision came down contrary to her desires, but she was chill with the decision. She was at peace with it, because she saw it wasn't just us saying, "You can't do that, it's too expensive."
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: That w- ... And, she participated in it as an equal, right? Her voice was heard. So, the best, hands down, the best thing was when it came time for to choose college, she called me up one day and she said, "Mom, you know that thing that we did where we chose a high school? Can you walk me through it again, because, I just think ..." Right?
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: And then, four years later, she called me up and she said, this was last year, she said, "I have a bunch of friends who are graduating and they have job offers, and I taught them how to do that thing." [laughing]
Dan: That's, that's, that's awesome. That's like, hit, you know, where it counts,...
Lynn: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Dan: ...that, you had a repeat customer, you, you did something that was so valuable that the participant wanted to participate more, and then wanted to give it to the people she cared about. That's ...
Lynn: Yeah.
Dan: Talk about a way to measure, ...
Lynn: Yeah.
Dan: ..."success" impact.
Lynn: I believe's the term you're looking for, measuring impact.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: and you know, I gave you, I gave you ... Go ahead.
Dan: Were you a participant in the ... When you did the high school one, did you facilitate and participate?
Lynn: Yeah.
Dan: I'm curious about that. I worked as an external consultant for a, long while now, and we tried to make sure that the faciler-participant that, that that isn't a thing.
Lynn: Mm-hmm.
Dan: And, and just like anything that you sort of set aside and say, "No, that's, that's not gonna work," you're walking away from some ... There's something good about it too. And so, I'm curious about-
Lynn: Well, I was a stakeholder in the decision. I was gonna have to drive to that school every day, [laughs] or, or every day, every other week. Yeah, I was a participant. I have not been a participant in most of the other ... Well, no, that's not true, in the house choosing one, I was a, I was a participant.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: Yeah, generally we try to ... And it's, it's ... This is, this is a discussion I try to have—
Dan: 'Cause we're just a row in the spreadsheet, you're not necessarily a big fat thumb on the outcome.
Lynn: No.
Dan: Are you?
Lynn: I'm just another, another voting member. And the nice thing about this is, it's kind of hard to ... Especially the first time you go through this, it's kind of, it's, it's very hard to, to ... What's, what's the word I'm looking for? To influence. The big ... It's very hard to big thumb, right?
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: You have ... With, with the weights and the different stakeholders involvement, you really do get a, a fairly true picture of things.
Dan: Yeah, that's great.
Lynn: And she didn't feel being ganged up upon. That was the other nice thing.
Dan: Yeah. Is there a video? I think the ... At the IA conference, they had videos or some sort of recording of the sessions, is there one of you teaching this method?
Lynn: They didn't video record them this year, I think, but, I have a video recording of a presentation that I made for CHIFOO in, or in Portland. They invited m- me to come and speak last summer, and I'm pretty sure they recorded it, but I think it's behind a paywall. You have to be a member of them. There is, again behind a paywall, it's in, the UIE All You Can Learn Library.
Dan: Oh great. Well, a lot of people, a lot of people have that through their job, or, they just invest in it for their own, and betterment. So ...
Lynn: Yeah, so, there is a, there is a video of it there. I'm working on a draft write up, I'm trying to get it published. I've been rejected by some of the finest [laughs]...
Dan: [Laughs]
Lynn: ... but, ... Yeah, who was it? I sent it to A List Apart, because, you know, start big, right?
Dan: Oh no, and, and they, big, big ups for A List Apart. They, they publish ... I love this new information architecture book that they put out, so yeah.
Lynn: It's a good one. It's a good one. But they told me that it wasn't sufficiently relevant to web design, that it was more general, and ... It was too general, and that I should try Lifehacker.
Dan: Mmm.
Lynn: And I ... [inaudible] it was like, "Really? Lifehacker?"
Dan: Well, can I, can I use that to get out a little thing that, that you know that I love that you may not love, which is, "This is architecture not design, dammit."
Lynn: [Laughs]
Dan: Is that, is that part of it, that this framework-ey helping people do participatory deciding that, what designers need or think they need is an internal process of making your own decisions as a maker, given the—-
Lynn: I don't know.
Dan: No...
Lynn: I don't know.
Dan: ...don't wanna go there.
Lynn: I don't know. I don't, I don't have an answer. How's that?
Dan: Okay. Fair enough.
Lynn: You just don't have an answer, but, you can use this framework by yourself. I use it all the time for just, you know ... You, you, you just don't weight the quality as zero, right? If, if there's a quality that you're weighing zero, why is it even on your list if you're using it by yourself.
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: But sometimes it's helpful that way.
Dan: Well, we, believe it or not, we've been yacking for an hour already. And some very fine people that we know on both sides of the world are on this little list here. So I'm curious if any of our participants have a question for Lynn or an objection to anything that you've heard so far and it looks like somebody named Austin here. I'm gonna guess it's Austin Govella, I hope it is. Bogdan, hello.
Lynn: If it is Austin I, I have your book and I'm going through it with a fine tooth comb.
Dan: I don't know who Brooke is. I don't think. And Joe SoCal, our good friend. Hello Joe? Glad to see you and Julie's Strauffman, I don't know that I know Julie.
Lynn: I know Julie, hi Julie. Thanks for coming.
Dan: Hey, Bogdan turned his camera on and let's see if he can, yeah. Hey Bogdan?
Bogdan: Hey. Just, just wants to say thank you because there's so much to unpack from this conversation.
Dan: [Laughs].
Bogdan: I, I was trying, I was trying to take notes and then I gave up. It's like now, it's better to follow the conversation but I just want to say thank you and—
Lynn: Aw, thank you.
Bogdan: It makes for a better Sunday.
Dan: Well, you are most welcome. What, I just saw that you, is this, there were announcing talks at Euroa. We can say this Bogdan right? That your-
Bogdan: Riga-
Dan: Okay. You're our IA in Riga?
Bogdan: Yes.
Dan: Is that next month?
Lynn: Riga is a beautiful city.
Bogdan: At the end of September I think it's 26 to 28. Cannot wait.
Lynn: Riga is a beautiful city, Oh, my goodness. The, The architecture in Riga is phenomenal. I was there in, when was I there 92, 93. So it wasn't too long after the, you know, they'd achieved independence and it was super joyful. The food was amazing. And the architecture, I just love, that, I don't even know what the style is, but they have, like beavers and bears and, and eagles and things all kind of built into carry at it.
Bogdan: Yep.
Lynn: It's just fabulous.
Bogdan: Christina told me and we're going, as a family, so it's gonna be great.
Dan: That's fantastic. Well, I just want to ask, Bogdan and Lynn or anybody on, on the, on the call, knowledge generation in our field through conferences. That's how we all know each other. And, and we have been doing this for a while. Is it, is it, and there's been a lot of bad things that have happened in conference land over the last little while. So I'm just curious about your, anybody's take on knowledge generation in our field in conferences as the place where that happens. And is it, is it safe? Is it, do we need to find a different way to do that?
Lynn: No, there's nothing better than a face to face.
Bogdan: Yes. But I'm gonna say conferences changed for me a little bit and it's mostly me, because I've been changing fields and I had to attend other conferences and all the UXI Conferences kind of, took a step back. And I'm, I'm, I'm going because, I'm going because of the people.
Dan: Yeah.
Bogdan: I know even if I'm in town, it makes me feel good, right? So at the, at the IA Conference in Chicago I couldn't go, I couldn't attend the full conference because I was there for work and other conference and I just took a workshop. I registered for that workshop I knew I could spare half a day but then just being around people, just, just going to the hotel…restaurant and seeing everyone and saying “hi” and giving people a hug. And, so that was good enough for me, you know? I would say, I would say the conferences don’t move, the content doesn't move at the speed of the industry. So I w- I would score that as a, as a minus.
Dan: Yeah.
Bogdan: It's, it's hard to catch up and you see that with, with academic research, right? So the schools are not trying to, or not able to catch up with, with the industry. The conferences are not doing that anymore. But, but 10 years ago, 12 years ago, I was learning, I was learning a lot, right?
Lynn: Yeah. I would-
Bogdan: I hope-
Lynn: ... I would say conferences are probably a lot more useful for folks who are less senior than we are, right?
Bogdan: That's right.
Lynn: For us the, I see a lot of, sort of churn in the conference topics, right. I've been, we've been going to this IA conference for, I've been going almost as long as it's been in existence. And I was trying to describe it to a friend the other day and I said, you know, "It's a conference for information architects and for information architecture." And when in the, in the early aughts, or the mid aughts we were having, we were sort of observing who our participants were and we regarded it as a, as a bad thing that 60% of our attendees were newbies every year. And, I kind of put forth the notion that, you know, maybe information architecture isn't an end point in a career and that we're just a way station on their way to their personal end point, right? And anything we could do to kind of prepare them for the larger context of the practice would be of a blessing and not just to them but also to the profession. And so they've moved away from kind of, "Oh, we must retain everybody to how can we make this relevant for these people where they are."
Bogdan: I agree. Where, where else do you see everything in almost three days, right? You get, you get exposure to so many topics and so many people. So it's great for the, for the people entering the field or junior in the field. At the same time, I'm gonna say Lynn, you, you want to keep the, all the attendees, right? Keep the new people to 500 and increase the people that are coming back.
Lynn: Mm-hmm.
Bogdan: I wish the conference was, you know, this monster conference of 10,000 people, right?
Lynn: Oh God, no. I would hate that.
Bogdan: [Laughs].
Lynn: I would hate that. I would never find you in the crowd, dude. Plus there'd be so much competition for your time [laughs].
Bogdan: I still think that, that would be a sign off of the relevance of the field, the penetration of the field in the industry. Because I see that with other fields and other industries, right? Computer science conferences…
Lynn: Yeah. But I'm not seeing, , I'm not seeing... I, I, forgive me if I'm offensive or, or, or horrify you, but I don't really see information architecture as, like a career capstone, if that makes sense, in the practice of UX. I see it as a portion of UX, an essential portion of user experience, the larger user experience picture. I think I probably align with Jesse in this way. It's, it’s, like you, like you can't build a house, not a good one without an architect, right? But you need all those other practices and everybody brings their piece of the pie to the table and then you have a really nice house.
Bogdan: I agree with that. It's, it's just you wish more houses had architects, right?
Lynn: Oh, indeed I do. Especially when I was buying one [laughs].
Bogdan: That's what I'm trying to say, if we want every company to hire a designer, if we want every company to hire an information architect why don't we see that in terms of community of practice coming together from 300,000 companies, not just 200, right? I, it, it's in a broader stance I want, I want to see people being present. They are coming together, sharing their learning and I'm not sure if that's happening, or maybe they changed careers. They change job titles and they don't feel a relevance to be in a conference called IA something.
Lynn: See, I've often thought that we should, we should... And I have no idea how to accomplish this, but it's just kind of a harebrained idea. I've often thought that we should take the IA Institute or the, not the IA Institute, IA Conference, and break it apart and infiltrate other conferences [laughs], right? So, but not-
Dan: Like a Ralph Lauren pop up shop inside of JC penny.
Lynn: Exactly-
Dan: [Laughs].
Lynn: ... like a Lauren pop up shop but, but like in, like new medical products, have an IA pop up booth, right?
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: Like places where it's freaking desperate banking, right? Financial services-
Dan: Well I was gonna ask, I was gonna ask Bogdan-
Lynn: [Crosstalk] our own conference with our own selves, where we sit in a circle and talk about how awesome we are. Why do we not go to places that will hire us, who desperately need our services?
Dan: Well to your, to your point Lynn, the friggin’ like the finance, you were like financial services, "My God, they so need us." I was gonna ask Bogdan since you've shifted into healthcare, one would expect that information architecture would be more important there than in some domains based on the life-and-deathyness of it all. Have you, does it have any more presence in healthcare than in any other industries you've worked in?
Bogdan: You know, it's funny because I, I, I touched healthcare and I moved on and now I'm in a different field. I, they do have, so I would say in Pharma, in Pharma they have a lot of taxonomists and really good taxonomists, right? You're dealing with substances chemistry-
Lynn: But that's for their SEO.
Bogdan: No.
Lynn: [Laughs].
Bogdan: It's for making drugs, it's for making drugs, right? So, so you need that, you need those. I would say the roles are more specialized there. I think the industry overall, is, is in a way behind the time. It's been an industry that's been running one a, on a different business model that is changing. The role of the designer has not been perceived as it is right now, right? If you, if you talk to a doctor, or anyone in the hospital administration they probably think a designer is the guy who made the poster behind you.
Dan: Yeah.
Bogdan: Right? And it kind of stops there, it's still, they're still putting brochures out. They publish a magazine that's next to the elevator. So, you know-
Lynn: [Crosstalk] glossy, glossy couples.
Bogdan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like that, so, but, but there's a range, right? So let's not forget this. There are, they're brilliant people in healthcare, in hospitals and insurance companies that are doing amazing work, right? And you have the people that are left behind by, you know, a few decades. So it's a range, it's not…
Dan: Yeah.
Bogdan: Yeah. But so, I, I don't want to take everyone's time, so please, please—
Dan: Well, I'm curious, Joe SoCal, organizes in education and UX conference in, in the United States on the Eastern seaboard.
Joe SoCal: Hey, everybody?
Dan: Hey, Joe. So I'm curious if, anything we've been talking about has a different color, from where you live and where you, operate?
Joe SoCal: So we have several-
Lynn: [Crosstalk] that you're not sitting [laughs].
Joe SoCal: [Laughs] Yeah. No, I'm actually, I'm actually at a festival in my neighborhood. So I'm walking through the alley so it won't be quite as loud [laughs]. So I used to be involved with the EDUI, the UX conference focused on people in the EDU space, museums, archives, universities, colleges that were doing, interactive design and communication of some sort. So a lot of different people came to that. It ended last year, it was the last year, the 10th year. I'm also this year the director of experience for the IA Conference in New Orleans reporting to Noreen Weisel as one of the chairs. And so, you know, we're ramping up and starting to do things. My job and that is largely to deal with the kind of experience that people have onsite. To what y'all said earlier, I completely agree. The conferences are the best, fast track to education and understanding. You know, we can all go to classes and we can take classes either in traditional, uni settings or, in nontraditional online, Udemy, LinkedIn, you know, whatever, you, all these different potential online things. But again, it is that humanity that inspires people more that we talked about this for years. It's the hallway conversation to the extent that this year one of the goals in the IA conferences to increase that time. But I, I, I do reject the idea that IA is dead sort of thing, that it's just a minor thing or is that it needs to be subsumed in that…So I'm working consulting and one of the things that's largely missing still from a lot of the IA work is the external consultant coming in to do something for an internal organization, right? And unfortunately too often we're sold things like, okay, we have a hundred websites that we're gonna reconcile it to one.com brand and we needed a taxonomy for that, and you've got eight weeks to do that and a brand strategy and a visual style guide and a content migration plan.
Lynn: And we, that's ambitious [laughs].
Joe SoCal: Eight weeks, oh, I think it's ridiculous. -
Lynn: But you said, we're gonna need a bigger hammer.
Joe SoCal: Part of that is, yeah, definitely need a bigger boat, that's for sure.
Lynn: A bigger taxonomy I think is right [laughs].
Joe SoCal: And then my question was, and you know, I mean, I look at the work that Bob [inaudible] done has really informed me. Ren Pope, Marsha Havarti, Andrea Resmini, and y'all on this call have really influenced me and a lot of that has come from meeting at conferences. If it weren't for conferences, I wouldn't know y'all and I wouldn't know a lot of the stuff that I hear, which means that by having that education I can get reinforced in that. So I can bring those things back.I brought up something in a call just the other day with my team, about using enterprise information architecture sprints. Based off of a, poster that folks from Cosa and in Japan had presented last year in Orlando. So, I mean, I would say that the conferences are critical to me and I think they're critical to a lot of other people.
Lynn: Yeah. My, my, my hair brained idea of breaking up the IA conference to being at a cross multidisciplinary conference is probably...Probably what needs to happen is both of those things, right? We need the, we need the gathering of our people but we should also be more evangelical and infiltrating.
Joe SoCal: That comes into play though. You're, you're right but you know, and again, I wasn't involved, but when Lou Rosenfeld changed the Enterprise UX conference to be the Enterprise Experience Conference with his goal of, it's not just UX people, it's not just IAs, it's not designers. I felt that there was a brand loss there, especially among the people who are not associated with quote unquote our community. Somebody who is a, honestly, somebody who is a product developer says, why should I go to this thing? It says, experience in it, that must mean UX, I don't want to go to UX. I mean, there's not that kind of overall thing. Secondly, I spoke a couple of times at the Agile conference, the big Agile conference and Bogdan this is one of those conferences, I know you've been to that I think, where you have a program book, it's this thick and there are hundreds of sessions and thousands of people, a hall with vendors. You know, we're lucky if we get 10 vendors at, at a UX conference that has 500 people, you know. But part of the problem with that is, the whole thing about humanity and people and what we do with people is marginalized to a very small part of that. In Richmond, Virginia, there was a group that tried to, they call it innovative Virginia, if I recall correctly at the time. And they came to us as Richmond UX and said, "Hey, could you run the UX track?”. And again, similar to what you're saying, I think Lynn and part of the problem was it kind of died on the bond. It did, we had I think three years, but the numbers of people coming to this overall Agile-oriented event, the numbers actually attending the UX-oriented sessions were small. That's a, that's not a fault of the presenters. It's not a fault of, the, it's not a fall of the presenters. And I don't think it's necessarily fall to the organizers. I really think there are reasons why if someone's gonna spend their time and money going to an event, especially travel, they want to focus on what they're interested in. So…
Lynn: So I'm-
Joe SoCal: ... it's something worth considering. But I…
Lynn: I'm kind of-
Joe SoCal: ... I would be cautious.
Lynn: I'm kind of, of the opinion that we should, infiltrate, wear their clothes, use their language. Basically take our own advice and easel our way into other industries and show them the benefit of user experience design somehow without calling it back to not scare them off beginning until then they can get into it and find out what it is. I don't know, it's, it's, it's an argument that we've been having all of us for 20 years now, right?
Bogdan: Yeah.
Joe SoCal: It, it is I, and I still honestly, I just, God I just finished a project where, you know, there's a few interesting and innovative in a lot of ways, but yet there was this period of doing user research. Their user research was looking at other user research and talking to the customer. "Who do you think the user is?” And half a dozen interviews with people on the telephone, mostly closed-ended questions. Again, you know, I'm observing a lot of this and you’re taking a week to do that and then another week to synthesize it and then to come up with plans to the extent that the traceability from what we observed to what we design often gets so diluted that it becomes extremely depressing and it usually gets diluted because as you know, the story Lynn that you told them, you know, the platform being chosen at the beginning constraints the user experience immensely.
Lynn: Yeah I was very-
Joe SoCal: 20 years ago I was talking—
Lynn: [Crosstalk] that platform out.
Joe SoCal: Right, right. But, but look at the expense and effort to have done that. I've said for years, why is it that we have time and money to do it over but never to do it right.
Lynn: [Laughs].
Joe SoCal: I want to start with that premise, you know, give me the chance to say, you know what? You want a taxonomy of 65, 150 sites put together and you want it to be both navigation tax-taxonomy as well as an information-finding taxonomy as well as meaning and sens—and sense-making taxonomy. And, okay, fine. You know, we'll start at a six month timeline but that's a scale that people like, "Whoa, that's not Agile." It's like, "Of course it's Agile." Agile has no timelines associated with it.
Bogdan: [Laughs].
Joe SoCal: And when motherfuckers tell me, "Oh no, Agile means two weeks sprints." It's like show me in the, in the, tablets that were given down from, you know, Mount, Palos or—
Lynn: From mountain [crosstalk]
Joe SoCal: You know, mount, from moun-tain-view of where that two weeks is really pulled out of somebody's Ass number and I'm tired of it as sprint is nearly or any of these things. It's just a way to get to understand it. That's all they are. And I think that there's a need for that in enterprise information architecture especially, especially. Startups, small SAS platforms or SAS platforms, things like that. I think you can fly a lot more seat-of-your-pants. I think you can fly with a lot more generalized people who are doing multiple things. The problem is that people who do multiple things or who are generalists, who are product owners, product managers who are supposed to be involved with voice of customer, never realize how has that crap organized, how do you organize, classify and find stuff. And when I hear people say, "Oh, we'll just put a search, you know, we'll just have a search."
Dan: [Laughs].
Joe SoCal: What search engine? How are you going to create that? What choices are you going to make on that? Someone has to make those decisions
Lynn: I don't think we're evaluating search engines? [laughs].
Joe SoCal: Well there you go. So, but—
Dan: Julie turned her camera on and I think she might want to get in on some of those. Hey Julie?
Julie Struffman: Hey there. I finally turned my camera on in case you recognize me by picture instead of me [laughs]. So I'm hanging out at the IA Conference. But anyway, and mostly I chimed in by chat, you know, I think, I think these conversations are amazing just for, accessibility where some people can't make it to a conference because of distance or cost or what have you. And also like the small nature of having, having these like quick, I need somebody to, I want to talk with 10 people about some particular topic…
Lynn: I think, I think Slack is gone. Yes Slack is-
Julie Struffman: …these conversations are amazing for that.
Lynn: I was, I was gonna say, I think Slack is also, ... Every, every woman that I know who works in our field has said to me, "I'm in an amazing Slack with these amazing women and we're all just talking about our practice and we're mentoring each other and it's just been so helpful for me." Right? , I think Slack is kind of providing a way for people who are bound by a thing, right? Who are, could be, can talk about a thing but also have that kind of unstructured experience that we were talking about the hallway conversations, right? So I'm, I'm in several Slacks of amazing women primarily, one of them has a couple of nice gents in it.
Dan: [Laughs].
Lynn: But [laughs] But it's, it's exactly that. We're asking each other professional questions. Here's my situation and some of, sometimes they're sort of interpersonal and sometimes they're the work. But it's that same kind of fluid conversation and people will drive through them, right? And people will walk by them and add a few words or, or people will jump in and argue and there will be threads and side conversations. So I think that there are some tools that are kind of helping us connect with each other in that way. And this, as Julie said, it's a really nice way to do that. But I, there's something about taking me out of my place and putting me in another place.
Bogdan: Yeah.
Lynn: That is filled with people who do things similar to me. I mean, we used to joke about going to the IA conference and having a major geek and for me the best thing was like, I didn't have to explain what information architect was. I could talk about what kind of information architect I was.
Dan: Well it was like being on the Island of misfit toys and you're a Johnny-in-the-box and all of a sudden, "Oh, look, everybody else here is like this too." There's something very important about—
Lynn: But it's also the being out of your regular context that's important. It doesn't quite duplicate that in this or in a Slack or, you know, very other channels.
Dan: Well, I'm curious, -
Lynn: Sleep deprivation, you know, all of that is, is kind of essential to the whole…
Dan: Well, I've, I've definitely heard from my, my, lady friends that lady Slack is essential to the web of connections to understand what's going on in the world. And that seems great to me.
Lynn: Yeah. The lady Slack phenomenon is just, I mean, and it's not just user experience. I have, I have librarian friends, I have archivist friends, I have real estate friends and they're all in Slacks with, you know, colleagues all around the world.
Dan: The, are any of those slacks, operated by an organization. I guess that's where I was trying to get to is—
Lynn: So I'm actually having serious conversations with people about major topics in our field inside of other Slacks [laughs]. Slacks built for other purposes [laughs].
Dan: Yeah. Well, I guess my question is about the organ-institutions like the IxDA or the IAI or, SIGGRAPH. There used to be these entities who made a place where people did something along these lines like we're doing today. They were there a little while and then they kinda went away. And now private groups are constituting themselves and we like this. But…
Lynn: People wanna talk.
Dan: People definitely want to talk about why don't we want to talk under the impremature of an organization? How is it that, that, it seems like the ones that cohere the best are either glued together by commerce…like we have a commercial relationship, we're working on a product or a private, like, like, I don't know, I, I'm, I'm, I'm logging for a world where we could all go and connect and not have to know somebody or not have to have a company trying to market itself in the process or not have to, you know what I'm saying? Does that make any sense?
Lynn: And people are sending those up all over the place.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: The, the two Slacks that I was referring to are completely dissociated from any kind of company or owning organization.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: They deliberately don't have the paid version just so that they are an ephemeral conversation.
Dan: Ooh, I like that. Yeah. Makes it safer if this is all gonna go [Crosstalk].
Lynn: Julie we can hear you but you're, you've got a lot of reverb going on.
Julie Struffman: Yeah. All right.
Lynn: Well that's better.
Julie Struffman: Well, my internet [inaudible] keep punking out. I have one that's not associated with a company but where one of the people in I are now employed at the same place and it's like, "Ooh, how's this gonna change the dynamic?" , you know, 'cause it-
Dan: Has it?
Julie Struffman: It has been a safe place to share what's going on at work and it's just interesting.
Lynn: Yeah. That's an interesting aspect. When this, when this, I mean, one of, one of the Slacks I'm in, we work really hard to vet the people that we invite to join us partly because there's a lot of vulnerability in the Slack that we're, it's a safe place where we're open with each other and we can, we have a whole channel. We have, we have a bunch of channels actually dedicated to...we have one that is literally called “emo baggage is sexy” where we talk about things that are just dragging us down and, and the purpose of that is kryptonite and boundaries, right? These are the things that get us down and these are the things that keep us safe. So, it's, it's an interesting phenomenon, but like I said, I'm seeing it not just in our field but in fields all, all over. So people want to talk to each other, people want to, you know, I think it also kind of goes back to that “adage information wants to be free”, wants so badly to be free. So, a lot of these Slacks have sprung up to deal with the question for instance, of safety, personal safety in our profession, personal and psychological safety in our profession. One of the Slacks that I am in, we do a lot of coaching. People say, this thing happened to me today at work and is it just me or is this unacceptable? And so with that external validation of no, that's not acceptable, right?
Dan: Well my gosh, one of the, one of the best questions, somebody who is a protege to a mentor, one of the most valuable questions I think is how bad did I just fuck up?
Lynn: Yeah. And, and-
Dan: I, I got that from somebody the other day and I was like, "What a gift. What a.." 'Cause, , everybody has said this, right? Success is a lousy teacher. And so, I've had, I have memory of, of just completely freaking out early on in my career, lacking the sense of perspective that my manager had. And so being able to, to ask somebody else, how badly did I fuck up is—
Lynn: And then, and then you can, in like in one of these Slacks, you can get a range of opinions on that.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: It's like you get a second and a third and a fourth opinion.
Dan: But if you did that at my work you would have been walking out with a box with your personal effects and somebody else like, "Oh, you're fine. You just had to establish dominance in that meeting and you were a little rough with somebody and you can go around and apologize." Yeah. The, the ability to help each other through these, these mechanisms—
Lynn: And that's really what these Slacks are about, right? I mean, the ones that I'm in are about helping us, helping us do our thing and be better at our thing. And that's what the conferences are for, helping us do our thing and be better at our thing. And I've always felt that all of the people that I've met at conferences and who I've met through this profession have helped me do a better thing. Do a thing better than, than had I not. Had I not done it, I mean, every, pretty much, every time I go to a conference, I bring home something that I then try and use. And I don't know if that's everybody's experience, or I've just been lucky or, but—
Dan: My gosh, I was just trying to connect that back to what you said at the very top, Lynn with Ranganathan's five laws and, conference content is for use.
Lynn: Mm-hmm.
Dan: That's a, that would be a powerful, that would knock a lot of talks right off of the docket if we, if we applied those, just that first one let alone the next criteria.
Lynn: Well, I mean, I, I think that, I think that, and I said this in my talk this Spring. I think that the, what I call the keynote, right? The, the exhortative talk to go in and do your best work and, and think about these things…
Dan: Or that architects the information.
Lynn: …these are very important but, it's very hard to do what in the Academy they call translational work that is, bench to bedside. So you've got the research, you've got the extortion, you know, the exhortation go and do a good thing. But we're a little short on the practice. Like, how do I go and do this good thing. So I was super happy at the, at the IA conference to hear Kim Goodwin's talk about, and she literally opened it with ethics, like, like experience is made of decisions. And I was like, "Oh, I'm giving a talk about decisions tomorrow morning." [laughs]. So I was able to kind of rewrite my intro to say, you know, last night Kim talked to us about decisions and how important they are and these are very important exhortations, but everything is kind of short on practice. And so what I'm here to do is offer you some practical ways to make decisions transparent and participatory, right?
Dan: Yeah. Well that word gets short, that, that word is pejorative somehow, practical and—
Lynn: I put more translational.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: Translational, it's one that they use in the, in the Academy, in higher ed, especially in the sciences they talk about translational research. So it's how to translate it, how to move stuff from the rarefied world of the controlled experiment to the messy practical world of, you know, mucking about in it up to your ankles, up to, up to your hips, you know, like really weighed into it.
Dan: Yeah. To get, to get dangerous with it.
Lynn: Yeah, yeah. You can, you to go and break it, go and break it and I mean, that's the best thing for me. Like I, I go and give my talk about quantifying qualitative decisions and people take notes in the talk, I kind of make them do it. Usually I didn't defy a conference because I wasn't sure, but like when I do it at meetups, I actually do a breakout session where we, where we choose the best pet for the kindergarten room. That's my little in class example. And, and then we come back as a, as a group and talk about what we learned. And inevitably people break it. Inevitably they want to add five points to the Likert scale. Inevitably, you know, that.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: And so we talk about, and it's in the breaking where the learning happens. When I teach my class at, at, you know, in user experience design and information architecture, my students have to do projects. I would go out and recruit real projects, real clients, dot-orgs who need some kind of UX strategy work.
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: And my students work on those all term and they present to the client their recommendations and findings from the research that they've done. And, the deliverables but the deliverable for the class is not what they presented to the client. The deliverable for the class is a post-mortem or a retrospective of the class project. Or a couple of years ago I had a pair of students come to me and they said, our project—it was, it's a 10 week class, they came to me in eighth week. And they said our project is so fucked up. And it had gone really, really badly and it wasn't their fault. The clients, the client, like I don't know what happened in their life, but they blew up and it was just not, they weren't a good client.
Dan: Not a good client.
Lynn: And these students they had A's in the class and they were gonna drop it. And I said, why would you drop the class? You have A's so as far as eight weeks you've done all this work. And they said, "Well, the project is really fucked." I said, "Have you learned something from it?" And they said, "Oh my God, so much." I said, "The deliverable for the class is a documentation of your learnings. So I think that your learnings might be really helpful for this class." To your point, right? Nothing's succeed, nothing, whatever. You don't learn as much as from-
Dan: Success is a terrible teacher.
Lynn: That's the one. So they came and they presented on their failure, right? [Inaudible] their project. They got A's in the class because of course they'd done a ton of really good work and it had failed. And they learned a ton from that. And they've both gone on to be librarians with a strong user experience basis, right? For their work.
Dan: Nice.
Lynn: But, and it, and it did things for me but, but the students in that class afterwards came to me and in my evaluations too, it said, I learned so much from their failure, moreI could have from the success of my project. So, you know—
Dan: Is your class, is it a 13, 14 week class in total?
Lynn: It was, at UCLA it's 10 weeks.
Dan: That's okay.
Lynn: And I started-
Dan: As I’m listening to you tell this I think maybe we've missed something. We've heard about a fail fast and we've heard about move fast and break stuff, but what it sounds like we need is to go slow and break stuff, to fail in a interval where you aren't just discarding what you think is—
Lynn: Are you familiar with the Japanese, ceramics practice called Kintsugi?
Dan: I'm not.
Lynn: Kintsugi is this amazing practice of Japanese ceramics where they take broken pottery and they repair it using gold and beautiful joins and fixes so that the repair becomes a part of the work. And I like to think of that not—
Dan: Can you spell that word? Do you know how to spell it?
Lynn: K. I. N. T. S. U. G. I.
Dan: Thank you.
Lynn: It's a metaphor for my life really right now [laughs]…
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: ... but it's part of the, it's part of the Wabi-sabi ethic, right? Where you embrace things, how they are but you can also observe them and learn from them. So it's a repaired bowl but it still works as a bowl, right? So I'm not thinking so much of like the deliverable when I talk about Kintsugi, but more about the practice. So I did a thing, it was awful. My thing broke the pieces.
Dan: Yes.
Lynn: I learned from that and I pick those pieces up and I put them back together and the joins are all gold and shiny. And so now I can go and do the thing again and I have this beautiful gold and ceramic bowl that I can put my work into.
Dan: That's lovely.
Bogdan: I love that concept
Lynn: Pardon?
Bogdan: I love that concept. Yeah…It tells me two things. I got to work with a designer on a logo that kind of replicates that. It's like a, it's a circle and it's broken and you fill it with gold or whatever material-
Lynn: Mm-hmm.
Bogdan: ... and it almost in the end becomes this like even more beautiful object.
Lynn: They are, they are so beautiful. They are exquisitely beautiful if you click on the images.
Bogdan: Right.
Lynn: Fabulous.
Bogdan: You started with this idea that nothing is perfect to begin with and it's never gonna be perfect.
Lynn: Yes.
Bogdan: But it's better by filling all the gaps?
Lynn: Mm-hmm.
Bogdan: I feel like everything we do is like that, at every single stage. It's never perfect. It doesn't matter how many weeks of research you do.
Lynn: We are the gold infill.
Bogdan: Right. Because you moved to a different state and that state is something new and then it's still not perfect and you still have to move. And it's a fantastic concept and it's, and it's great because it's visualized.
Lynn: Yeah, yeah.
Dan: Well, and it's so different than the idea of seamlessness that, that is demanded the—
Lynn: Perfection…
Dan: Aesthetic experience of simplicity that, that the world of end-use seems to demand. We're not talking about that. It seems like the, what we're talking about is a, it's the—
Lynn: Yeah. It's, it’s—
Dan: It’s where the meeting starts not something you want to cover over.
Lynn: It's way more Craigslist and Headspace.
Dan: Yeah.
Bogdan: And to connect that with, with business. I, I, I've been introduced to this several months ago by a friend who came up with this idea of business reconstruction. Not transformation, nothing— [inaudible] business for a while. You have a foundation, you don't have to break down everything. You just have to reconstruct certain elements of it. And that's what we do. You, you, you, you know, think of any, any repair. Repair sounds bad, but you know, you're reconstructing to adapt to a new environment.
Lynn: Mm-hmm.
Bogdan: But the foundation is still, you know, it sounds awful for a, for a designer. I think that's one of our faults, to go into a business and say, "Ah, this sucks. Just take everything apart, destroy it."
Dan: You can pay—
Bogdan: I will design the right thing, right?
Lynn: It's so, it's so dismissive.
Bogdan: Yes. Yes, right? So, you know, they employ you, they, they, you know, they've been going on for a hundred years or whatever and you come in and say, "No. This is bad." So I, I love, I love that concept, I love the business reconstruction concept.
Lynn: Yeah, I wanna hear more. You and I have to take that offline. I wanna hear more about business reconstruction 'cause I'm in the middle of being transformed and it's very painful.
Bogdan: Yeah. Agile or—
Dan: Well, the joke, the joke here at TUG is that when people say business trends, digital transformation it means that they have purchased the Adobe experience manager platform. But that's what that means.
Bogdan: Hopefully not.
Dan: Always that's what that means. And exclusively, it's the deployment of the experience manager, which is the digital transformation.
Lynn: In our case I believe that this is something that Deloitte brought us. So maybe Deloitte brought bought the Adobe product [laughs].
Dan: Yeah. They, I believe are qualified reseller of that fine platform. Today's podcast in fact, is brought to you by Adobe experience manager. Do you have content you need to, no, that's actually not true [laughs].
Lynn: [Laughs]. Okay, good. Then I was like, "Whoa, that suddenly—”
Dan: Talk about product placement. I was waiting, I was waiting and then boom, there it is. No, I don't have any, horse in that game. Although Jeff Veen, who you all might know, who's been involved with Adobe, he's from Grand Rapids, Michigan. And we like to claim him as a local UX Michigander.
Lynn: And you once, like, saw him in a coffee shop? [laughs].
Dan: I did. And I had a little, like starstruck moment. I didn't even dare to talk to him.
Lynn: [Laughs]. Yeah. I saw Jacob Nielsen in line at the Art Institute, at the cloak room at the Art Institute. And I was like totally fan-girling like, "Aaah." And so I managed to contain myself and just go up and say, "Hey. I'm a big fan of your work." I think he smiled.
Dan: I think it's important to do that. People that I am with tend to not have that sense and they don't want me to go pierce the bubble of anonymity. But I do enjoy engaging with them.
Lynn: I live in Los Angeles where the art of not seeing is really important.
Dan: Tell me more.
Lynn: Well, you know, we have celebrities among us all the time, right? It's just like you go to the farmer's market and they're the celebrities and some of them are celebrity chefs and some other TV actors and some of them are movie actors. And frankly, I can't tell the difference between them and somebody that I might've worked with at UCLA 10 ago, right? Because it's like, "Oh, they're, they're familiar.” But one of the things is like you go to dine at a restaurant and there's some A-list celebrity having dinner at two tables over and so you see them but you're very careful to not intrude on them so you…
Dan: Right-
Lynn: ... [Crosstalk] them, right? It's also very useful for driving in LA traffic, not seeing someone. Chris Chandler laughs at me when I drive him places because he's, inevitably it's rush hour when we're driving because I think it's kind of a constant now in Los Angeles.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: But I have this approach like somebody is trying to like violate all the traffic rules and force their way in and I, I don't make, I don't meet their gaze, right?
Dan: Right.
Lynn: I don't eye contact because the minute you make eye contact, they know you seen them and so [Crosstalk]
Dan: “You are going to let me in” so you don't do the, you just do this.
Lynn: I, I actually I see them but I deliberately turn my head the other way. I can still see them but I'm not seeing them, if that makes sense. I am saying to you that I do not see you. [laughs]. It's signs, symbols, semiotics. I'm not sure which that is.
Dan: I believe it is both. There's an interdependence there, in between those entities there.
Lynn: I'm way over my, over my head here. [laughs].
Dan: But let's take it back down to the ground then to talk about Los Angeles generally.
Lynn: God's city.
Dan: I have been a visitor to your fine city a number of times over the last eight or nine years and it seems like information architecture—
Lynn: And I have only seen you here a couple of times. Hmm.
Dan: It seems like information architecture is not a fixed invariant in the environment. It seems like it's wiggling around. Can you talk a little bit about differences between LA and other parts of the world, if you've noticed them when it comes to how people do it or how people talk about it?
Lynn: I've never lived in other parts of the world. I've lived in Los Angeles since 1986. I was born here. My parents followed aerospace boom to Texas when I was too young to have a voice in that decision.
Dan: [Laughs].
Lynn: But LA is huge. Like, I think Los Angeles is... Like, what we think of as Los Angeles. And people call me all the time that, "Oh, I'm gonna be in LA, let's get together." "Oh, where are you gonna be? I'm in fountain Valley."
Dan: San Diego [laughs].
Lynn: Yeah, [laughs]. It's like that's the Imperial Valley. That's not LA, right? So LA is ginormous. Chris Chandler and I in 2000 founded the LA UX meetup. He was on the, he was on the thing but he and I had just sort of started it and we had, like CIGIA was the, was the channel through which we organized it, the, the ASIST meeting, the ASIST listserv for-
Dan: Was it ASIST or was it STS 'cause the Society for Technical Scholarship had a CIGIA too.
Lynn: No. It was ASIST. And we just like chose a place and I sent out an email and a time and send out an email and we s—I swear we expected maybe five or 10 people to turn up. So we just had it at a corner bar in San Juan and there were 45 people turned up. The bar was super angry with us 'cause we hadn't like organized our party with them ahead of time. People were turning up at the front door and asking for the information architecture group and they did not know what to do or where to—we were stunned, right? Just flabbergasted. So then a few years later meet up debuted, and we started the, the, Chris started the meetup and in 2010, in the early teens the ownership of that sort of transitioned to a woman Chrystal Airleg and she became very, very, enamored with the notion of really growing this group. So this group has like 5,000 people in it. I mean, it's huge. And lately, like I got to meet ups and I know no one, no one, not a single person and there'll be 40 or 50 people in the room and I've been doing this for 20 years, right?
Dan: Well that was gonna be one of my outsider observations is that in LA people show up.
Lynn: Mm-hmm. Yes. There's usually food involved, food or beers.
Dan: Okay.
Lynn: But also, you know, I do, I encourage my students to go to meetups, especially when they're looking for jobs. I haven't found it to be terribly effective for me because I tend to be the most senior person in the room.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: I'm not meeting people who are doing the hiring. I think I need to take my own advice and haunt other meetups.
Dan: Yeah like a business—
Lynn: ... the business side of things. Yeah. But we've also spawned a whole bunch of little mini UXs we have the San Gabriel, my, one of my former students, Grace Lau, who plus, I mean she's just amazing.
Dan: She—oh may her name be praised, Grace Lau.
Lynn: Yeah. So Grace Lau, like makes a professor proud. She has organized San Gabriel Valley UX, right? She, and we have Northeast LA UX. We have LA UX, we have South Bay UX. We, you know, it's just, it's so big. We in the, in the aughts, in the early, in the, in the, I guess the late aughts I drove a VW bus as my main and it was brown and white had Paisley detailed, like on the side it was very satisfying to drive. I'm a little bit of an attention whore, so I really liked driving that.
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: And the meetups, we still just had the one meetup group and we would alternate having them on West side or the East side because traffic is like a living thing in Los Angeles and it must be considered at all points. So…
Dan: I know a lot of East side people too, right? With the Disney contingent and people in Pasadena.
Lynn: Yeah. And ADP is in Pasadena and, Cap Group is downtown. There's a whole bunch of stuff sort of in that area, and so when the meetups would be on the East side, I would post to the list that I was driving. I had six seats with-
Dan: Van load of designers.
Lynn: I, you know, you can reserve a seat in the LA UX meetup bus and we would drive as a group. I would take six cars off the road. I was the Lord's work. And I would drive us to the meet up. And then like we'd have a group text and I would be, okay, it's time for to go everybody. You know, the bus is leaving in five minutes and this was before Uber. So it was kind of like you, you were on the bus or you're off the bus and we'd drive back. And it was amazing because so many deals got cut in the bus but also like we would form bonds, people who hadn't met, we'd ride the bus together. And by the time we got there, it was, they, they had like a buddy for the meetup, right? And then they could, sort of, go out. And then on the way back we could talk, we wouldn't have conversations about the presentation and talk about what was good and what, and it was, it was kind of what we were talking about before. It was that, that small group hallway aspect to the larger group meeting that allowed us to take it apart and have the side conversations. And it was, it was just really wonderful. We had, and mostly it was self-interest. I just didn't want to go by myself. I wanted somebody to talk to while we were all stuck in traffic. So that was why I did it. But—
Dan: Self-interest. Two thumbs way up for self- interest.
Lynn: I would always reserve a seat, a seat for student, for one of my students so that they could get a chance to connect with the more senior practitioners, right? I would rotate that seat out.It was, it was super fun.So I'm, I'm all about community. Community as a vehicle for knowledge sharing is, it's got to happen.
Dan: Well it also seems like you're all for finding different kinds of structures for people to, to interact with. And maybe in a... Got a little bit of time left, so I'm gonna use every minute of it. Tell me a little bit about the IA Slam as a modality of learning.
Lynn: Oh, man, IA Slam.
Dan: I, the first one that I saw was in Memphis and I didn't know what I was looking at or doing. I think I participated in it a little bit and then I peeled off because I was like, I don’t—what is this?
Lynn: Was that in Memphis? Memphis was the first year we didn't do one.
Dan: Okay. So it might be-
Lynn: What was the theme? Tell me what the theme was.
Dan: I remember the place. I don't remember any of the content. I remember it being a tile floor, basement situation. So was that Phoenix?
Lynn: That's Vegas, I think.
Dan: Okay.
Lynn: Was it the time travel one?
Dan: I don't know. Tell, tell me about it. Anyhow, pretend. Pretend I don't know.
Lynn: So the IA slam-
Dan: I go back, I go back in time, I see this thing, It's very strange, I come back upstairs, I'm like, "What the hell was that?" Talk me back into the room. Like, what the, what, what, what the hell?—
Lynn: The IA slam, , we invented it in 2004 and it came about because we'd been to the previous three or four conferences and we were really, it was a very young profession, right?
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: We were literally making it up as we went along. And the, the presentations at the conference seemed to really fall into just two categories. There were there were case studies which were super important. We really needed those. Like, this is what I did. This is what I learned. This is how you can do it differently, you know, very, very helpful. But after, you know, two or three years of a lot of case studies—“okay, yeah, another case study,” and the other type of piece where what I call the snake oil pieces, my IA is the one true IA, right? -
Dan: I probably did a couple of those [laughs].
Lynn: You did some of those? Yeah. I mean, I, I, I will say that I've never done one of those. I'm very proud of that.
Dan: Okay. No, I think history will look back on this Lynn and say, she was doing it right and some of these other ones meh…
Lynn: [Laughs] Well, I just, to me it seemed an affront to come to people who were making it, making it up and tell them that they were doing it wrong. So and we were, we were all taking ourselves very seriously. I don't know if you remember, but I, we, it was, we were deadly serious.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: And so we were a little for, I mean, we're troublemakers, you know us, we're troublemakers. We like a good laugh.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: And we wanted something that was gonna be fun. And the tagline of the IA Slam has always been “The pleasure is ours.”
Dan: [Laughs] oh, that's great.
Lynn: And that's kind of been our guiding principle. If it's not fun, we ain't doing it. So we came up with this notion of a, a, an IA contest and it was like, how do we get them to play, will we give a prize? And so we decided Olympic style medals…
Dan: Yeah-
Lynn: ... for the win team. Hell yes. And so then it was like, okay, well we have to pre-present a design problem it's meaty enough. And we, one of the things that we kept wrestling with was we have people at very different levels. We have the newbs, we have the senior folks. How do we, you know, how do we keep that playing field level if we're gonna do random teams, right?
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: So that we don't have somebody on one team that says, "Oh yeah, we did a peer to peer music sharing app. Let me walk you through it." Right? So that was the reason why the problems were like crazy out wacky. The very first one, which doesn't sound so crazy and wacky now but in 2004 was way out there, it was the internet fridge.
Dan: Oh right.
Lynn: So the internet, the internet fridge. Literally we brought in a bunch of UX consultants. We, we of course didn't plan for research or design in our project timeline but things were going horribly awry. And, and so we, it's a lot of improv. We present a problem to you guys. We divide you arbitrarily and randomly into teams and we give you bam 45 minutes to solve the problem and assign a presentation which you solve, present back to us. With one eye-popping page and everybody has to present. And part of the problem is you have to figure out what's the problem to solve. We serve you a lot of whacked out problems in our little presentation. And then we while you're working on it, we stay in character and we go around and advance our agenda. Every character has a backstory. Everybody, every character has more information in their pocket that you don't get unless you ask about it, right? Whether that information is true or fake—
Dan: Or helpful right,
Lynn: Or helpful is utterly, you know, part of the thing. But a big part of it is understanding the business model, figuring out which is the right problem to solve. I mean, it's basically real life, right?
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: And you get extra points for embracing the wacky.
Dan: Yep.
Lynn: Right. Because we bring a shit ton of wacky to this party and if you aren't gonna play, then you don't get a medal. That's just how it is. So we've done problems like the internet fridge. The second year a company called Ballmart bought a company called Fordstrum and wanted to provide an integrated customer experience across all their platforms and channels. So that was a fun one. We everything from like a Guggenheim style building connected by an upstairs bridge to like a sort of a square skyscraper building to, you know, wire frames for online things. But like, and, and that one, that one was really remarkable because Dave Robertson, who I ended up working with at Symantec, he's a Canadian. He, he's kind of a provocateur and he, it's just like he said he was trying to figure out who was in charge. And he provoked a fight between my character and the character was playing the VP and had the two of us standing in the conference room in full costume screaming at each other about this imaginary problem because we were so into our improv, right? But we just took it there. That was what the characters would do and he got his answer who was in charge and thanked us and walked away [laughs]. And I was a little surprised at the strength of the improv because I, I'm not an actor, right? I have to...so that's been really fascinating was kind of leveraging that improv thing in me. But we have a really good time. We make a lot of, we put a lot of clues into the printed collateral that we give you.In Chicago in 2017 or I'm sorry, 2018 we did a [inaudible] that involved the creation of a whole Instagram account that we all work together on over a couple of weeks to kind of build up a backlog of posts.
Dan: Wow.
Lynn: So, so that it would, it would be like, we, we kind of do too much for this.
Dan: Yeah, no, it sounds like it's... So I want to know is, is there gonna be or are you all going to submit again in the future? Is that done now? What's the?
Lynn: We're talking about it. Part of the problem now is that we are all sufficiently senior that the… just the cost of doing it, not even the cost of preparing it but the cost of doing it, you know, all of us paying for hotels and coming and registering for the conferences and stuff is kind of prohibitive at this point, but we haven't discarded the notion completely. There's a, it's interesting, there's a lot of hard to quantify learning that comes out of it. People have said to me, and I know we're running over time, but people have said to me like it's an unbreakable bond. If you're on a slam team with somebody and you've gone through 45 minutes of hell, it is an unbreakable bond. People are fast friends, right?
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: Just because they slammed together.
Dan: Yeah.
Lynn: And so we also regarded that as kind of an icebreaking feature of it in that it was a nice way to just randomly connect newbs to senior practitioners. So…
Dan: Great.
Lynn: But it's also like you get to see how different people work. You get to actually—
Dan: It's like an IA escape room. You all were like miles ahead.
Lynn: Honestly, I think we might have invented the design slam, the sort of the, the design, the, you know, the onstage. I can't find any references to anything like it before then. And it may have been one of those ideas that just, you know—
Dan: [Crosstalk] yeah, yeah.
Lynn: Yeah. It may have been a zeitgeist kind of thing but I really think that we were one of the first people to do it.
Dan: Well, I think the pedagogical, what you can learn in that modality, there's, it's been attributed to Mark Twain. "There's something, a man holding a cat by the tail nose that can be known that no other way.”
Lynn: Yeah [laughs]. We brought some wacky-ass problems. We did a time travel one where the, the, the client team came from three different periods in the future and we all had conflicting experiences and conflicting goals. We did one where…
Dan: You wrote Avengers End Game years ago!
Lynn: Yeah, we did one...Well, it's been very fascinating because every single slam that we have done has come true within three to five years.
Dan: Well, that's the other reason that it needs to keep happening is it's predictive power. You all are tapping into some deep, deep cosmic shit that's allowing you to channel the future.
Lynn: But mostly the pleasure is ours.
Dan: Yeah. Excellent. Well the pleasure has certainly been mine, Lynn, thank you for being up for this and thank you to our fellow travelers, Austin and Brooke hung out the whole time. We will make this recording available in a podcast in a couple of like a month or two.
Lynn: Oh, awesome.
Dan: When I get my stuff together, yeah. And transcripts. I hope to make this content live beyond today, but, but the emphasis is on being live with a person in a place and so fun to spend a morning with you in Los Angeles, Lynn. Thank you for the—
Lynn: Well likewise I'd love to see you in Los Angeles.
Dan: I can't wait to come visit. I am overdue. I was just in—the bags under my eyes, I was just in Pacific time all last week. We went up to the sea ranch in Northern California. So I love California. I cannot wait to get back to California. Let's find ways to to hang out in LA.
Lynn: Cool, I'm down.
Dan: Thanks Lynn-
Lynn: Thank you. Bye.
Dan: See you soon. Thanks everybody. Bye, bye. I'm gonna turn how, learn how to turn this thing off and then.
Lynn: Yeah me too [laughs].