[IxDA Discuss] Bill Moggridge talk at Ideo tonight

[Peter Morville]

The iPod is a nice example. Faceted classification, which provides access by
format, song, artist, and album (plus shuffle) is a key part of the user
experience at the device level. In addition, the iPod is wedded to iTunes, a
large, complex information system that relies on organization, labeling,
search, navigation, personalization, and recommendation systems. It would
strike me as unfair to argue that information architecture has nothing
unique or significant to contribute to the design and improvement of similar
transmedia experiences.

I've included (way below) a relevant post by Peter Merholz and (just below)
a couple more relevant resources.

http://www.greenonions.com/portfolio/dbrown_ia2005_musiclibraryarchitectures
.pdf

http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/0201/0323.html

Cheers!

Peter Morville
President, Semantic Studios
http://semanticstudios.com/
http://findability.org/

 


-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com
[mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com] On Behalf Of Edwin
Booth
Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2006 8:58 AM
To: Christina Wodtke
Cc: 'ixda'
Subject: Re: [IxDA Discuss] Bill Moggridge talk at Ideo tonight

[Please voluntarily trim replies to include only relevant quoted material.]

To be a devil's advocate (can't resist) ...

Christina, why should they care? What is it that the 'IA scene' actually,
tangibly brings to product design and development? How does IA help design
teams create more innovative hardware/software products? If IA is rooted in
library science does the contribution boil down to taxonomy and
classification? If so, how does that help you create a cell phone that will
best the RAZR or an MP3 player to beat the iPod?

As somone who has worked on web sites, web applications, device-side
application UI and hardware UI, I don't see the obvious and unique 'eureka'
insights that IA brings. There are shared techniques, parallel concepts and
interesting notions, but you get that from a lot of other
practices/professions. Perhaps this is obvious to you, please share.

Ted

---

 [iai-members] Apple pays $100MM for ipod information architecture

From: Peter Merholz <peterme at peterme.com>
To: iai-members at iainstitute.org
Date: Aug 24 2006 - 10:14am

Apple to pay $100 million in iPod patent disputes
http://tinyurl.com/g86qj
"Creative, developer of the Zen digital media player, had sued the
Cupertino technology company this year, charging that the iPod took
its patent-protected technology to sort and organize thousands of
songs."

If you look at the patent:
http://tinyurl.com/fvu8n

You realize that this was a patent on information architecture for a
portable music player.
"1. A method of selecting at least one track from a plurality of
tracks stored in a computer-readable medium of a portable media
player configured to present sequentially a first, second, and third
display screen on the display of the media player, the plurality of
tracks accessed according to a hierarchy, the hierarchy having a
plurality of categories, subcategories, and items respectively in a
first, second, and third level of the hierarchy, the method
comprising: selecting a category in the first display screen of the
portable media player; displaying the subcategories belonging to the
selected category in a listing presented in the second display
screen; selecting a subcategory in the second display screen;
displaying the items belonging to the selected subcategory in a
listing presented in the third display screen; and accessing at least
one track based on a selection made in one of the display screens."

There's also a description of faceted classification without using
either of those words:
"One aspect of the invention includes an overlapping hierarchy of
categories. Categories include items that can also be included in
other categories so that the categories "overlap" with each other.
Thus, a song title can be accessed in multiple different ways by
starting with different categories. For example, a preferred
embodiment of the invention uses the top-level categories "Albums",
"Artists", "Genres" (or styles), and "Play Lists". Within the Albums
category are names of different albums of songs stored in the device.
Within each album are the album tracks, or songs, associated with
that album. Similarly, the Artists category includes names of artists
which are, in turn, associated with their albums and songs. The Genre
category includes types of categories of music such as "Rock", "Hip
Hop", "Rap", "Easy Listening", etc. Within these sub-categories are
found associated songs. Finally, the "Play Lists" category includes
collections of albums and/or songs which are typically defined by the
user."

--peter

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