The day I left to take a job at a computer research institute at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, I was very upset. I remember thinking: all this special knowledge gone to waste! My brain was full of information I would never use again.
It was another decade before I realized that nothing had been wasted.
I came to understand that I had learned wayfinding and navigation systems. My experience in listening to my passengers taught me hu-mility and empathy. The people moving through the network were the most important source of knowledge. Getting lost taught me that I could understand a system I didn’t know by using it. Understanding was a matter of seeing the patterns in the information. Seeing the pat-terns requires a fresh and open mind, listening to the users and exam-ining the data. In 1995, Richard Saul Wurman asked Krzysztof Lenk for a contribution to his new book. Kris and I had been collaborating for five years at that point, creating overview diagrams. It was our way of simplifying information, drawing our clients away from their fixa-tion on the microcosm of specific features and banners and buttons, to make them see the larger system. We wanted them to see where all the electronic neighborhoods connect and the user passes from one district to another, accomplishing a task. Wurman called his book “Information Architects”. It was at that point that I understood. I had received my training in information architecture driving a taxi in Boston.
About the Author
Paul Kahn is a leading international consultant, speaker and author on information architecture and visualization. His activities in the United States included director of the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS) at Brown University, co-founder and president of Dynamic Diagrams and adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is managing director of Kahn+Associates in Paris, France and teaches in several Mastère Multimédia programs in France and Finland. Since 2005 he has been editor of the annual NEW Magazine, International Visual and Verbal Communication (www.new-mag.com).
Paul Kahn is co-author (with Krzysztof Lenk) of the book Mapping Websites (Rotovision).
Web: www.kahnplus.com Twitter: pauldavidkahn Facebook: Paul Kahn
The truth is, that for the better or worse of my design, I’ve never read a book about UX. Not in my thirteen years of practicing. I’ve started read-ing many of the books, but I get a few chapters in and I start lookread-ing elsewhere for the kind of fiction I prefer to spend my time reading. It’s not that the UX books or their authors aren’t any good, it’s just that—
and how do I put this diplomatically—doing UX is about as much fun as I can have sober, but reading about UX is duller than watching paint dry.
I wonder then, is it not just a little hypocritical to expect you to read my story about UX, when quite frankly, I wouldn’t be likely to do the same myself. My plan is to try not to write about UX at all, but rather to tell you sordid stories of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, that will be much more interesting and entertaining. It would be for me anyway, when I was younger I wanted to write porn for a living …
The thinking behind this solution gains its inspiration from what my brother remarked as he handed me Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I was in my early twenties and, although some-thing of a drinker, I was a clean-living kid in drug terms. My brother is a fine artist and reading, fiction at least, is not big with him, so when he handed me the book, I made sure to pay attention to what he said: “I think for a full six months after reading this book, I couldn’t say no to drugs.” And that was that, more evidence of a brilliant book an impres-sionable young man could not ask for. The thing is, my brother’s six months kind of became my next six years, but there’s no denying it, it is one good book.
That isn’t quite the effect I’d like to create from you reading this story, but in my early years of doing this kind of work, UX, I guess there was a
Gonzo Journalist, a postcards-from-the-edge, a b-grade wannabe rock star hoping to express himself through sitemaps. I actually was a b-grade wannabe singer in a grunge band in the early nineties but some-how that career path morphed into UX.
If I think of the hell I raised in the agencies I worked in, in retrospect, I really wonder how I got away with it. All the mornings I came in late, smelling of booze, the fool leading everyone off to the bar after work, night after night, bar after bar, Johannesburg, Cape Town, London. I guess something about agency culture lets you get away with this.
The delayed-response hangover arrives at about noon, just as you think you’ve finally managed to avoid it all together. Actually, you were shoot-ing gold tequila and smokshoot-ing joints with your friends until three in the morning, in the middle of a big project, at a pool bar trying to get into the pants of the oh-so-cute new junior designer, and you’ll stay a bit drunk and high until noon the next day, even if you managed to get two hours sleep. When the delayed-response hangover does kick in, it does so with a vengeance. Your monitor makes you nauseous, the air conditioning closes in and constricts your breathing, you develop beads of sweat below your hairline, your bones ache and your muscles feel like jelly. And like a total and utter fool, I sincerely believed, every single time this happened, that a toasted bacon, egg and cheese sandwich would magically make it all better. I’d rise from my work station and like a scarecrow in a strong wind stumble my way to the canteen, cor-ner café, local greasy-spoon (depending on the agency, city or country) past all the other people studiously working.
Be it the grease, time passing, or the nap in the toilet, I would finally settle down in the late afternoon to get some work done. I look up from my desk, my monitor and pad and there is total calm. Some eletronica is flowing through me from headphones and as if by magic there are pages and pages of hand drawn designs all around me: thumbnails of interfaces, annotations, mini sitemaps explaining where the little
drawings of interfaces sit in the structure, a line joining a box with an idea for a navigation device, task-flow boxes and lists of the things I imagine my users will want,
con-tent ideas, special offers, down-load calls to action, accelerated paths to purchase.
I breathe out, at peace. I feel as though all this occurred in that
one breath, but three hours have passed. This is the magic of design and creativity: the receding of things as you drift off, unaware of time, temperature, or the movement of people around you, unaware almost of page after page, of drawings and notes and ideas and your true Da Vincian genius. Fantastic. LET’S GO DRINK!
At around eleven one morning (an hour before the delayed-response hangover kicks in) my project manager taps me on the shoulder. I take off my headphones (now playing: Underworld, album: Beaucoup Fish, heard: 1572 times), swivel around to face her, and she asks if I’ve come up with the five suggestions for names for the brand and CI intranet we’re creating for a large local investment bank.
“Sure. Sure,” I say, “When’s the meeting?”
“At twelve,” She says.
“Here or at the client?” I ask.
“Here,” She says. She smirks, turns and walks away.
Fuck. I totally forgot. I wheel over to my graphic designer and beg her for help. In order for you to appreciate what is humorous in this, you’ll need to know, 1. That the bank’s primary colour in their brand and corporate identity is green, 2. That in South Africa, marijuana is sold in