Mike Atherton: Beyond The Polar Bear

Mike Atherton’s presentation Beyond The Polar Bear at UX Brighton outlined the next steps for information architecture. He argued that traditionally IA has followed the principles of a library; Organise the content based on the principle that some content is less useful than others. But whats next?

I enjoyed Mikes presentation because it was so practical, but also because he argued for the need to prototype in the browser; something which I am a big believer in.

Slides: Beyond The Polarbear

Here’s the slides Mike Atherton uploaded to slideshare for Beyond the Polar Bear:

View more presentations from Mike Atherton

Notes: Beyond the Polar Bear

Theres very few editorial decisions gone into these notes, but hopefully I’ve done the core message of Mike Atherton’s presentation justics

• “Beyond the Polar Bear” refers to the traditional bible on IA, published by O’Reily Media.
• How many people have gone through an extensive IA process only to find that users don’t start their journeys where we want them to
• Traditionally UX has sat on top of the presentation layer. Mike argued that its should permeate all layers
• Domain modelling is a technique ever-one involved in IA should understand.
• In IA we are trying to understand users mental models: “How do you think about X”
• Domain experts understand that model, because they understand the subject. They don’t need to be technically minded
• There is always a difficulty in talking to users about IA. They can articulate “heres a difference”, but not “heres what the difference is”
• Cool URI’s should be persistent, human readable, hackable (I can guess it)
• Mike stated that SEO is massively important as “Google is the homepage for your site”
• The BBC believe in “The Web is your CMS”. Need content, grab it from wikipedia. Need better content? Improve the wikipedia entry
• The web is a single shared space, your content is not a silo
• Think bottom up: CSubject, then content, then peronas & wireframes
• Team with a developer & design in the browser, don’t produce 1000px wide wireframe documents
• Mike stated (& I agree) that with a good designer/developer its easier to prototype in code and less wasteful as prototype can become production

More Notes from UX Brighton

This post is one of 4 posts on the presentations I enjoyed the most at UX Brighton. You might want to check out the other UX Brighton Posts