Ambient Findability – Librarians, Libraries and the Internet of Things
Information that’s hard to find will remain information that’s hardly found.
Presented by Peter Morville, president of Semantic Studios, author of Ambient Findability, and adjunct faculty at University of Michigan.
The ballroom at the Renaissance Hotel was PACKED, even though Morville’s presentation was competing with Julie Andrews’s book-signing.
Morville’s presentation dealt with the role of findability in defining the user experience. “Ambient findability” is a phrased he coined so that he’d have a place to “stuff anything into.” Findability is his “personal passion.”
On the definition of “information architecture”:
- in the “polar bear” book (1st ed.) on information architecture there was no concise definition
- in the 2nd-4th eds. there were four definitions!
It is important to provide multiple paths to the same information. See Stanford University’s website. Many times, global navigation schemes are challenging – there’s too much pressure on one or two words. Web designers should bundle up subcategories, like ConsumerReports.org has done. Users need visual clues.
Information architecture is an element of the user experience. While many web developers view it as a software development challenge, others see it as developing online collections of information, such as online encyclopedias and digital libraries.
The Elements of the User Experience (book by Jesse James Garrett)
Morville’s “User Experience Honeycomb” illustrates the facets of the user experience.
Morville contends that even though the term “usability” has grown synonymous with valuable, usability really encompasses much more.
Useful
- we need to ask ourselves “is it useful?” and “could it be more useful?”
- we need to keep up with human-computer interaction research in terms of usability
Desirable
- attractive things work better; image, identity, brand, and marketing are all important
Findable
- we need to know if 1) our users can find our websites, 2) our users and find their way around our websites, and 3) they can find products and information despite our websites
Accessible
- can people with disabilities access our information? What about people with mobile devices?
Credible
- what are the elements of design that influence whether people believe what’s on our websites?
All of these qualities relate to and affect each other. We need to keep them in mind along with OUR business goals and missions.
Morville says that users trust the things that come at the top of Google search results and that credibility and findability are becoming increasingly connected. He gave an example from his work with the National Cancer Institute’s cancer website. He pointed out that while the single most common search term used for finding the NCI site is “cancer,” there are also searches on specific cancer types, and these constitute more than 70% of searches. Absearch on the term “melanoma” doesn’t make doesn’t make NCI’s site come up in the top 10 sites in Google. This is an example of designers needing to engage in search engine optimization, etc.
“Good things happen when you focus on findability.”
There are still huge barriers to access, so Morville asks “how do we break down the walls?” He gives the example of Thomson Gale’s AccessMyLibrary. This site aims to “break down walls” by exposing more information from articles to the open web so that search engines can find them. The service then provides users with ways to find the articles in a local library. BUT, Morville showed that articles can’t be found via Google unless the search query includes “access my library.” We need to be awary of Google’s supplementary index, which he calls “Google Hell.” Thomson Gale has a good strategy, but there are still problems.
Another example Morville showed is University of Michigan’s MLibrary 2.0. They are applying web 2.0 concepts in order to come up with new and exciting ways to serve customers (see Jessamyn West’s presentation slides and notes from June 8, 2007 here: http://www.librarian.net/talks/mlibrary/.
So, what about the future? Morville suggests that we have one foot in the past and one in the future. We need to be designing for the future.
Where are things going LONGER TERM?
Findability
- object (physical/digital) – what are all the different ways that somebody could find this object? how can we make it more findable?
- wayfinding, navigation and retrieval
Ambient
“the ability to find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime”
BUT perfect findability is unattainable. Not everyone lives in information age; lots of folks are starving for information. Morville showed us John Wood’s website about his book, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World.
“World change starts with educated children.”
According to Morville, we live in the world of information anxiety - there is an absurd amount of information.
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” — Herbert Simon.
“Information is gushing toward your brain like a firehose aimed at a teacup” — Dogbert.
In an age when we can pick and choose our news, etc., what does this mean? Morville says it means that “things are only going to get weirder.” As an example of this, he first showed us Ambient Orb, “a [$150.00] glass lamp that uses color to show weather forecasts, trends in the market, or the traffic on your homeward commute.” According to the ThinkGeek website,
The Ambient Orb is a device that slowly transitions between thousands of colors to show changes in the weather, the health of your stock portfolio, or if your boss or friend is on instant messenger. It is a simple wireless object that unobtrusively presents information. Imagine if you had to go to your computer and type in your zip code whenever you wanted to check what time it was. Your important information should be as accessible as looking at a clock, now the Ambient Orb can make a variety of information just a glance away.
The Orb arrives set to indicate the Dow - glowing more green to indicate market movement up and red to indicate movement down, or yellow when the market is calm. If the market is up or down more than 1.5% the Orb will pulsate. It can be customized to a set of free channels, such as market indices (Dow, Nasdaq, S&P 500) or weather in select cities. Optionally, you can upgrade to access more premium channels, such as your customized portfolio, local weather, pollen count, or IM buddy watch. There’s also a developer interface where any semi-savvy web programmer can control the color of their Orb with a simple http “get” call. Track how full your hard drive is, traffic on your website, Slashdot posts, or your credit-card debt.
The Ambient Orb is simply plugged into any standard 110V power outlet and it is up and running on a nationwide wireless network - no internet connection required. The Orb does not attach to a PC. The channel for the Orb can be selected via a web interface and will update in a short period of time. Depending on which channel the Orb is monitoring, it will receive updates every few minutes, or perhaps once per hour for some channels.
This is just one example of the alternative interfaces to digital networked information that we are beginning to see. Another example is the Microsoft Surface, a giant touchscreen computer that “turns an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, interactive surface.
We are also importing vast amounts of information about the physical outside world into our digital environments. According to Morville, we are right on the verge of a convergence of mobile devices and location awareness (i.e., our devices will know where we are and will be able to share that information with others). For example, Amazon.com sells a wristwatch with a built in GPS that you can lock onto your child’s wrist so that you could check on his/her location. It also has a breadcrumbing feature which allows you to see where your child has been. Interestingly enough, the customer reviews of this product on Amazon.com mentioned nothing about privacy (or lack thereof); to the contrary, comments included complaints that the watch doesn’t work well enough!
Indeed, the technology is just about here, but we need to determine just how we want to use it. Where is it useful?
Morville told us about Tim Hibbard’s website where you can know where he is at any given moment. This kind of service will become more popular when we can control who can access the information.
And look at the iPhone. This is truly having the web in our pockets; rich, full featured. Morville speculates that soon Tim will be able to wander around with his iPhone and watch himself move!!!
The Internet of Things
Morville thinks it will be about 30 years until this is fully propagated. Imagine having the ability to lie in bed and do a Google search in order to find your socks.
Cisco has a wireless location appliance that gives you the ability to use RFID to tag and track highly valuable objects. Hospitals apparently misplace wheelchairs all the time, so they use this technology to save staff time in searching for wheelchairs. Who knew? So, what are some potential ways we can use this technology to save time and money in terms of tracking objects? Perhaps we can use it for wayfinding.
Morville mentioned Jennifer Tomblin and Amal Graafstra, the couple who had RFID chips implanted in their hands so they can access each other’s computers and front doors (works like a key card). They consider this the ultimate expression of love.
Google Street View
Google is taking pictures and posting them so that anyone around the world can see them. This is interesting, true, but it poses some serious privacy questions. Imagine being caught on camera in some compromising situation…
David Brin, in his book The Transparent Society, asks an interesting question: “do we want to be able to watch the watchers?”
More questions from Morville
- how do we create bigger needles for the bigger haystacks?
- how do we describe the uniqueness of our information objects?
Well, it won’t be with something like Microsoft Bob and it won’t be with information visualization either.
“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”
So who is really going to help us? In his article “Revenge of the Librarians,” Morville argued that the Internet would turn anyone into a librarian.
Now people can’t shut up about metadata. The stuff from catalog cards is now the subject of intense discussions. Metadata has become sexy:
- free tagging of flickr and del.icio.us
- religious/political zeal for folksonomies – let the users do it!
- it’s a free world!
David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous, says, “The old way creates a tree. The new rakes leaves together.” In other words, tags self organize into clusters.
BUT…
This morning, Peter Morville said, “Clusters of leaves eventually rot and return to the ground and become food for trees which live a very long time and come in many sizes shapes and colors.” He wrote a response to Weinberger’s book called (Not) Everything is Miscellaneous.
Morville asserts that we need to find ways to bring the old and the new together. We need to find ways to take the fast moving world and create a feedback loop to the lower layers. There are a lot of websites that are experimenting with this now, such as Etsy.com, “peer-to-peer commerce with tagging. (There is a good overview of the site by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch.)
But Morville doesn’t think we shouldn’t be throwing tags everywhere – look at Amazon.com. Tags don’t work well on Amazon.com, even though the similar setup (user tagging) of LibraryThing does. LibraryThing’s founder, Tim Spalding, wrote an article on this topic called “When Tags Work and When They Don’t: Amazon and LibraryThing.”
Morville’s opinion of Web 2.0:
- there is a lot of traditional information architecture that goes into designing web 2.0, but
- there is a whole lot of info architecture that goes on OUTSIDE web 2.0
On the future of findability
- we will still be entering keywords 10 years from now
- the search interface is a primary interface for commerce and government
Is this the end of browsing, then? “No,” says Morville. Even at the end of a Google search, we find a page that needs to be browsed.
One size will not fit all
we need to look at search as a system
- we need to understand who are users are and what they are looking for and how they search
- we need to look at our interfaces – get rid of rot, etc.
The Long Tail
We need to continue exploring distributed algorithmic approaches but we shouldn’t ignore the what Morville calls the “Fat Head.” Search is a true learning process – search is the most important way that we learn - and we should be careful not to optimize for simplicity at the expense of associative learning.
Endeca is a good example – faceted classification:
- works the way users work
- the results provide many possible next steps for refining query
Some examples of Endeca implementations include
- NCSU’s new version of its library catalog
- UC Berkeley’s FLAMENCO interface:
The Flamenco search interface framework has the primary design goal of allowing users to move through large information spaces in a flexible manner without feeling lost. A key property of the interface is the explicit exposure of category metadata, to guide the user toward possible choices, and to organize the results of keyword searches. The interface uses hierarchical faceted metadata in a manner that allows users to both refine and expand the current query, while maintaining a consistent representation of the collection’s structure. This use of metadata is integrated with free-text search, allowing the user to follow links, then add search terms, then follow more links, without interrupting the interaction flow.
FLAMENCO stands for FLexible information Access using MEtadata in Novel COmbinations.
BUT, this sort of thing is hard to replicate on the public web. Clusty, the clustering search engine, is an attempt, but it doesn’t work very well; it can be more confusing than useful.
Possible solutions?
- Google’s new universal search with links across top of screen - but the interface is problematic (need to get rid of ads!)
- Flickr’s automatic clustering based on tags - they let the tags speak for themselves
- Google Book Search - expansion of the searchable web
- Everyzing.com - uses automatic speech-to-text software; provides searchable transcripts and then links to audio and video clips
The intersection between people and content
There are areas like “social search” that are being researched:
- Google’s page rank algorithm is a good example. Ever notice how Google favors blogs in its search results?
- Wikipedia – an interesting mashup of old and new; traditional global navigation on top and sides – supports findability and establishes perceived authority/credibility; plus the ability for user editing
Morville says that things are not going to stay tied to the web; people are experimenting with ways to tag physical things, like with Semapedia.org:
Our goal is to connect the virtual and physical world by bringing the right information from the internet to the relevant place in physical space.
To accomplish this, we invite you to create Semapedia-Tags which are in fact cellphone-readable physical hyperlinks. You can create such Tags easily yourself by choosing and pasting a Wikipedia URL into the form above. Once created, you put the Tags up at their according physical location. You just hyperlinked your world! Others can now use their cellphone to ‘click’ your Tag and access the information you provided them.
Another example is Delicious Library which allows you to scan barcodes and create your own personal digital library. You can even link up with your neighbors and create a neighborhood library. Wikipedia gives the following overview about Delicious Library:
Delicious Library is a media cataloguing application for Mac OS X, developed by Delicious Monster. The software allows users to manage their collections of books, movies, CDs and video games by either entering them manually or by using a Bluetooth scanner, an iSight camera, or a USB-keyboard-type barcode scanner (such as a modified CueCat). In its first month Delicious Library generated $250,000 worth of sales.
Some additional reading suggested by Morville:
But this is not enough, says Morville. He told the story of the three stone cutters, each of whom was asked “what are you doing?” The first said “I’m making a living.” The second said “I’m doing the best job of stone cutting in the county.” The third said “I’m building a cathedral.” It’s this third stone cutter who gets the big picture.
We need to apply this to libraries. Libraries lift us up and inspire us.
Morville concluded his presentation by providing a list of links:
IA Therefore I Am
Peter Morville
morville@semanticstudios.com
Semantic Studios
http://semanticstudios.com/
Ambient Findability
http://findability.org/
IA Institute
http://iainstitute.org/
A PDF file of the slides from Morville’s presentation can be found at here: http://semanticstudios.com/alcts.pdf
