Interview with Stacy Surla

By Lisa Goldberg

 

What are you working on now?

I’m on a project that’s a redesign of the Nature Conservancy’s public site that also includes a comprehensive intranet/extranet project with a new content management system being plugged in, too - so creating a new taxonomy and all this kind of stuff. On the one hand, it’s a redesign of the site. On the other hand, I’m getting to be plugged into some of the other interesting bits that I’m really interested in learning more about, for instance the content management side.

Do you get input into the design of the CMS as well? Is it a custom CMS?

No, it’s an implementation of Oracle. The neat thing about working with Ironworks is that it’s really kind of a design-build shop. There is the user experience team, or component, actually. It’s one of the three legs of the company. There is sort of the technical backend that encompasses a whole lot of things, which includes installations, maintenance, and systems, and then there’s the project management side as well. So that’s the three main things that the company does.

We work together as a team. It’s not separate. We’re not creating something for some other company to build, and we’re not in the situation where we’re making designs that get thrown over to another department. So we’re integrated. It’s great - which is also another reason why I’m trying to get into as many interesting projects as possible because that gives me the chance to work with people on the technical side.

Which is always important when you’re working with systems.

Yeah, it does help. (Laughs.) Learning how to talk...what do people need who work on that side? And how does what I do fit with what they need and all that. It’s a big question, honestly.

It helps if you have good tech leads, who you can communicate with over there. They are critical, I’ve found.

Yeah, yeah. In fact I wonder how much the difficulty in talking with the technical side of things has to do with individual tech leads or a culture that might be surrounding those people, you know? I don’t know the answer to that yet. I tend to want to think it’s more cultural than individual.

What I’ve found is that a lot of times the tech leads are the people who can go beyond the technology and actually communicate about it beyond the target audience of their peers. They may be more conceptual about the technology. And from that perspective I actually think it’s a great match when IAs deal with tech leads. Do you agree? Because you’re coming at the same problem from two different sides.

Yes, exactly. But that points out too, then, the importance of having some grounding on the IA side in the technology. And people have different layers of experience with that, familiarity with the technical side. But you’re right, it’s sort of a key to the IA role, I think, intrinsic to the IA role is the, at least willingness and hopefully the ability, to talk across that boundary to those folks. That’s actually a really good point about the tech lead and where that person is coming from. And that should be a person who can communicate about bigger...talk about it in more generic terms at least.

Otherwise I don’t see how you can talk to clients. So, how technical are you trying to get?

Not too technical. Not to the point where I would be someone who would build out some of the stuff. But I’d like to understand what they need. I’ve always wanted to be involved in a real CMS project. Involved with them, not just on the sidelines of that. Because I’m sure there are interesting ways that things are connected and there’s a plumbing to that, right, that has got to be to some extent straightforward but in other ways very creative in its possibilities. I’m just imagining that this is the way it must be. So I’d love to know more about that sort of thing. But I don’t want to build it myself.

Speaking of the social domain to architecture, it seems like as a side project you have a lot going on with IA and Second Life. How did you get into that in the first place?

I’ve been interested in that since the olden days of interactive roleplay, but I never did it, I’ve always been interested in it but I’ve always known that if I got involved I would not do anything else! For instance, when Myst came out, I’d watch my friends play Myst and I thought, that is so cool, if I started doing this, I would spend all my life in my room doing this and I wouldn’t have anything to show for it, so let me build a crystal radio set instead. At least I’ll have something that I can show as an artifact.

But then at one of the IA Summits, Andrew Hinton talked about serious games. In the sense of looking towards the tropes of the future, younger people are growing up with certain expectations about how their computer systems are going to work for them, how they’re going to communicate with them. [How do you] message to this them?

Say you’re working with your desktop: You could imagine a desktop which communicated with you in a way that’s sort of like how a game communicates with you, about system status stuff going on, and things you need to attend to now with a central focus ... but our interfaces don’t look like that.

Except on TV, on the crime shows. When they say “show location of criminal acts” and in two seconds they bring up the dot on the map and no pixelation at all in the photograph.

But you can see in the realm of imagination and certain actual interfaces you can get that kind of thing going. One of Andrew’s points was, we have to think about how our 13-year-old daughters are interacting with computers now and make sure we’re designing systems that are going to work for them, because they’re going to be entering the workforce any minute now, right?

This is true from a corporate level - what is that workforce of the near future going to be like and what are they going to expect from their interface? People who companies want to hire are going to expect a certain level of sophistication.

It’s OK for me to go play there now and find out what is this about. In particular I thought, if this is true, if something like these virtual worlds are going be some part of our future, what’s the role of information architecture in this? Because these are information spaces as well as social spaces. So, that was my big question.

With the help of the IA Institute, I started to look at some of the information architecture problems in a shared virtual environment like Second Life. I haven’t come up with a lot of solutions yet. I think there will be a point at which that will start to become more evident, but ... you know. In the meantime, we have a place where we can have meetings and IAs have used it to meet one another. They have whole IAI team meetings or whatever across geographical regions.

How well is that working?

When it works, it works really well, actually. Adoption rate, not so high. You have to have the computer power to run that kind of simulation on your computer. But once you do, it’s really very compelling. It’s very easy.

I know you did a couple of the presentations in Second Life at the IA Summit, for example. Did those get a lot of attendance?

We did two things, because we’ve been doing this for two years. Two years ago, we had reduxes of sessions from Second Life and we had time to schedule them, promote them, and then we had 20, 30, 40 people come to these meetings, which is pretty good. And it worked great.

At the summit this last time, we did an experiment to basically simulcast at the time. And I wasn’t even sure at 9:00 the night before the first one whether it was going to work. I was still on the phone with technical assistance.

It wound up being actually pretty simple and straightforward to do, but I was just figuring out how to do it. We had a lot of people from Australia for some reason who came, and it worked for them. So the point, I think, was that it could work and it’s not very expensive to do.

You can’t go back after the fact and look at it, can you? Once it’s over, it’s over?

Well, for the simulcast actually I captured them all. Posting the .mov files is on my list of things that I need to do before, I don’t know, some date. (Laughs.)

How did you decide to get into the field of IA in the first place? It looks like you came from a communications background initially.

Communications and literature. It was perfect for me. Coming to the web, first of all, made great sense to me. It was a big relief to me that all of a sudden there was this thing that everything I had been working on up to that point would definitely fit into. An organizing principle for all of this other apparently unrelated stuff.

I found myself again in more of a producer role than in a make the page role, which fit better for me. Then I found the SIGIA list, and reading those conversations I realized this is it, this is actually it, this is the bit of it that is really my bit.

I have tried to explain what that is and what the difference is between IA and usability and interaction design. Some people say there’s not a lot of difference and some people say there is. I don’t know what they say, but for me the difference is in how people talk, not necessarily what they bring to the conversation but then how they talk about it, that distinguishes IA from other domains.

Usability comes from this long background in the design of things like chairs and desks and things that need to fit the human form. There’s all kinds of economics to the background of that, and workflows and things like that. All of that is venerable science in practice, but information architecture wasn’t necessary until there was a web. There was no call for it before there was a sort of nonlinear narrative going on that needed to be organized.

I guess you’ve always had library science and things like that though.

Yes, but library science didn’t need information architecture, right? ... Though many librarians are drawn to information architecture. I wonder if librarians are drawn to usability or not so much?

I do think there’s quite an overlap between how librarians think about the world and how information architects think about the world. Again, it’s not one to one, it’s not black and white. It’s like an overlay of different facets, sort of a mosaic. Because I certainly know very systems-oriented people who are IAs and graphics design oriented people who are IAs who wouldn’t say they have much in common with librarians.

There’s a range within IA, obviously.

Right. Think about, OK, rich internet applications. We have the capability to create richer experiences through client side processing versus heavy really intensive server side processing and apparent disappearance of the page versus pages being delivered.

It seems to me that IAs think and talk about that, not so much from the technical side as from what possibilities does this provide us for thinking about information in different ways?

For example, what possibilities does this provide us, say, looking not only at what little individual craft stores there are at Etsy but also what layers of information can be seen all at the same time?

So are you saying you think usability people would think about it more in terms of the system?

Right then I was comparing interaction design with information architecture. So usability, what would a usability person’s interest be in a system like that?

I think their interest would be, can they use it?

Can people use it? That’s pretty straightforward, and it’s good. (Laughs.)

That would be my guess.

Yeah. So what can they do with it, do people use this.

Some people are saying that there’s a real blend between the professions but you think there’s really these distinct layers.

I think distinct points of view about it. Clearly to me. I don’t care how much you talk about, does IA exist anymore, has it gone away, is it really something else. The fact that we keep talking over and over and over and over about it just goes to show first of all we love to talk and discuss and define, OK? Just an IA thing to do.

Secondly, it’s not going away, it’s not gone away. The best I can do to describe what the differences would be it’s a point of view. And I’m totally not saying that IA is people who practice IA, or people who call themselves IA don’t do all this other stuff too, but there’s a bit of it that you can call IA and for me it happens to be the most interesting part of it, of the whole realm of things that can be done. But others maybe no, it’s just like a little bit of what they do.

Well this is a nice lead-in to my next question, which is how involved do you get personally with usability testing and analysis? Do you find it challenging to test your own designs?

Well, I think it would...maybe because I’ve been in situations, like we all have, where we have to do everything or it just doesn’t get done at all. Being an evangelist for usability testing has been important to me. Maybe it would be even more perfect if we could more scientifically separate the designer from the testing of the design, obviously.

With the Nature Conservancy project right now, we did card sorting and then we did paper prototype testing and we’re about to go into a usability test very shortly. I was more involved in the first two rounds, and I’ll be playing a supporting role in the third round, which is actually a relief to me to be able to step back that much, you know.

So, yeah, it’s really important to do that work. It’s important to be able to figure out how to get the client to see what the role of usability testing is in the process of developing a design and to get them involved and participating in that part of the process, too. Even a little bit of exposure can make such a big difference to the client, to their perspective on it.

So how do you sell it upfront if they’re new to usability and so forth, and you’re trying to persuade them to work this into a project?

Well, there the arguments that you make about the investment of the time upfront versus an ongoing life of figuring it out after it’s already launched. But there’s also the possibility, especially with low-fidelity prototyping or really low-fidelity testing, to get some of that in early and convince that way.

Again, if you get the client to sit there and participate in some way, observe or maybe be part of the monitoring of it or something, they see stuff they’ve never seen before and they get to see that there’s a difference between how they think about their stuff and how other people might think about their stuff - that opens everybody’s eyes up. Of course they’re going to want to know more when they see that.

What do you feel personally is the most motivating factor for the work that you do?

Gosh, I’ve always wanted to be an expert, OK? It’s been one of my ambitions from a long time ago. I wanted to be the person who knew something about the thing that people would listen to me. (Laughs.) And it happens now sometimes. (Laughs.)

That’s a great feeling because on occasion, I do really feel like I know what I’m talking about, that I have something valuable to contribute, and if people will just listen to me, things will go better. (Laughs.) And that happens. And that is so rewarding.

You said earlier when you started reading about IA on the listservs, you said that well, that’s for me. So how did you know that that was your specialty?

Well, it was in that conversation. That’s why I keep thinking that it must be a key for me. Because for me it was in how people talked about the problems that they had and what they brought to bear to try to solve them. One thing about IA right now is that it’s pretty shallow. There’s a lot that’s broad and shallow. That is, a lot of people know a little bit about a lot of things.

Especially when you bring a group together in a discussion list, you get lots and lots of people who know a little bit about a lot of things, a lot of which is directly relevant to your practical problems of that week ... but that’s another true thing about IA, that sort of state of the discipline, is that it doesn’t have a deep understanding of a lot of things, right?

I think usability is a great example of a domain that’s really is important to be close to IA, because there’s a practice, there’s a history, a whole body of knowledge.

And IA doesn’t really have a very deep body of knowledge that you can codify, and it doesn’t have a deep understanding of other disciplines’ body of knowledge. They just tend to say, oh that’s part of what we do, you know?

So that sort of shallowness is something that’s exciting about the direction of the discipline. But all that said, all that aside, it was very exciting for me to be in a space where people were pulling all these references and they were using them to solve specific problems at the time.

Do you think over time it’s going to become deeper?

Yes, definitely. It’ll become deeper. That body of knowledge will be developed that will be the IA body of knowledge. But at the same time I hope and trust that the exciting edgy forward-looking agile conversation about all that stuff will continue, that it won’t become anytime soon this is how we do it and you have to enter the portals before you can even start practicing IA.

At the IA Summit, I saw all these programs starting to come up with IA degrees and certifications. I thought it was interesting, but when I tried talking with some of the academics at the conference I felt like they had a lot of trouble communicating their ideas, and when I went to talks, I felt like they had trouble communicating their ideas. And I wondered, do we really need to give academic credentials to what we do or can we just develop that practice? How do you feel about that?

You bring up a really good point. It’s clear we can practice without the academic side. But I do think there’s a very important role for the academic leg of it. For that to exist will allow some of this other development to take place.

First of all, it will allow more people to come into the practice because it will be a recognized degree to go for or a specialty you can go for within some other kind of program. And I think there are some straightforward practices, methods, and so on, that can be taught. An exercise can get you to be better at that.

And I really want to see more people conducting research, and I want people to write more meaningful, thoughtful articles or books even about the relationship of information architecture and its different parts to other disciplines and their domains, a field guide to what the role is. That is going to come out of a more academic approach.

Most IAs are working in some sort of business-type environment, so how are they going to effectively translate this theory, if theory is what they’re trying to create, to what people really need to know to work effectively in the business world?

That’s all the more reason that I think there needs to be a strong academic side to things. The cycle of work in an academic setting is very different. You may not have something very practical or applicable, that’s not your objective, that’s not the point of it, that’s all the better, because people need to have an environment in which they can think about those sorts of things. Pursue them, study them, publish about them.

Clearly you’re passionate about what you do and you seem to take on a lot of volunteer projects for the IA community as well. How do you find the time?

I have no idea. (Laughs.) And now I have a 2.5 year old daughter too, and there’s no time. But gosh, I don’t know. In order to do everything I want to do, I need to also be doing the volunteer work. Even as IA is becoming more understood as a big to-do in the workplace. Certainly early on I definitely needed to do the volunteer work because I was not going to be talking to people who were thinking about the same kinds of problems I was if I just stayed at work.

The only project that at all seems like it might be relevant to mention as an interesting project was not a complicated project at all but it was a project that I did early on as a part of a way of growing the DCIA local group, and that was ASIS&T needed to redesign its website.

I volunteered myself to get a bunch of people together from the DCIA community to come up with a redesign plan for ASIS&T, and we did, and it was fun. We spent a lot of time at Barnes and Noble talking about these things. But we had specific projects. I got to meet a lot of people that I now feel like I’m really strong colleagues with them because we did that project. And overall it served a lot of purposes.

It worked, and it was super-interesting. So I count that as being the most interesting one.

If you could offer one piece of advice for people who are entering the field of, well, since this is UPA I’m not going to make it just IA. UX, say. What would be that be?

It would be hard to offer just one piece of advice because the range of people choosing to enter the UX field is so broad. It could be people working in their fields for years and years, whatever their field is now, so they have a high level of competence in some stuff, or people who are just entering school and are trying to see whether they want to bring it all together.

I think reading broadly is the main thing and to exercise talking to other people. Being in, putting yourself in situations where you’re in conversations with other people is absolutely key because you need a community to do this work well, I think.

Well, thank you very much. This was great.