I began looking for a new city. Where do you start with a task like this?
Well, I did start with “A”. Atlanta, Austin, Amsterdam ... Amsterdam!
Definitely a great city. What else was there? Barcelona, Berlin ... Berlin!
Hey, I even happened to speak the language. That was it. I decided to move to Berlin and become ... err, well ... someone.
Flash
At school, I was editor in chief of the school magazine, drew comics and wrote short stories. When I mentioned to a school friend in Frankfurt that I had ended my career as a biologist, but didn’t yet know what to do instead, he reminded me of my “creative schooldays” and suggested I’d learn Macromedia Flash4. He himself had just dropped out of medi-cal school to work as a Flash developer—instead of becoming a suc-cessful surgeon, like his father and grandfather. (Actually, this led to his parents kicking him out of home, which led to his girlfriend leaving him, which led to a serious drinking problem, which led to some more very bad habits. But in the end, he got everything sorted out and be-came a successful Flash and PHP developer.)
His deductive logic did sound pretty sensible to me. I installed a 30-day trial of Flash 4 and began to familiarize myself with this animation software. A month later we were having a barbecue at some friend’s backyard and I was practicing my new role as Flash “expert”. We had cider and sausages. The latter was hanging out my mouth when I offi-cially proclaimed I was going to Berlin to work as a Flash developer. My friends were surprised, to say the least. Since the banger didn’t enhance my pronunciation they assured themselves: “sorry, did you say Fresh or Flesh?”
It was just 10 years after Berlin had become the new capital of a reunit-ed Germany. Heretofore, I had never been to Berlin myself. In a faraway
4. Back then Flash was still owned by Macromedia. It’s Adobe Flash nowadays.
place called Silicon Valley, a bubble was bursting, and here in Frankfurt some drunken biologists were making fun of me.
It was definitely time to move on.
Berlin
One morning, I threw my things in a rental car and drove off. I put my Sinatra tape in and cranked up the audio. Start spreadin’ the news, I’m leaving today. Why Berlin, again? Well, it’s the capital. I figured If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere.
Luck favours the prepared mind, said Louis Pasteur and I am also very reluctant to turn up somewhere unprepared. Prior to my departure from Frankfurt, I had specifically approached a few people from Berlin in an online forum, so as not to be completely alone in the city. I had applied for various jobs and had bought two new books about Flash.
Barely a week in Berlin, I got an internship as a Flash developer in a small up-and-coming agency. As the payment for a position like this is generally not very high, I also worked on weekends, doing night shifts in a nursing home. During the day, I animated digital stories, and at night, I listened to stories told by old people. It was actually a pleasant combination. The elderly are often outstanding storytellers.
A few months later, I was a full-time Flash designer and had left my nursing home job and all those sweet grannies behind. Well, that’s how it is when you’re on a journey. You face new people and turn away from old friends.
At that time, Flash was only found on websites, somehow embedded in HTML. I learned HTML in order to do a better job. At some point, I realized that HTML was very closely associated with something called CSS, and that it would look bad if I had no idea about it. So I learned CSS as well. Meanwhile, Flash really started gaining ground, and its
strange proprietary programming language was replaced by JavaScript.
So I learned JavaScript, too.
What is it they say? It’s not rocket science. These are all languages and programs that are not incredibly difficult to understand. Hey, even an ex-biologist can learn them. Seriously: how hard can that be? It’s just one step after another, and sooner or later, you look back and think,
“Wow, did I get this far already?”
Usability
I had now been at the agency for three years. We had grown from 20 to 120 employees and I had become a front-end developer and no longer merely their Flash monkey. Don’t get me wrong. I did love my job. I was part of the Berlin Flash developer community. I had great colleagues and a good boss—and there was always something new to learn: where HTML and JavaScript are concerned, accessibility is not far away, espe-cially when creating web pages for government bodies like we did back then.
I got to know the subject and began to advise clients on accessibility.
It is only at a stone’s throw from accessibility to usability—and even back then everyone thought usability was just great. At least in theory.
Although we didn’t exactly know what it meant in the context of web-design, everyone thought highly of it—even the clients. Oh yes. And all those websites—how much better they sold when they came with build-in usability.
I started to get my head around the topic and read everything I could find about it on the Web. The good thing about usability is that there are guidelines to which one can refer to. By guidelines, I mean interna-tional industry standards—we’re talking big guns here. I don’t mean a top ten list that some blogger has hacked together to fulfil his weekly link baiting quota. No, I’m talking about long texts with titles such as:
“Human-centred design processes for interactive systems” (ISO 13407),
“Ergonomics of human-system interaction—Part 110: Dialogue princi-ples” (ISO 9241-110) or “Ergonomics of human-system interaction—Part 151: Guidance on World Wide Web user interfaces” (ISO 9241-151).
These documents are absolutely worth reading, but they’re as dry as they sound. I went to borrow them from a library.
A young librarian pointed to an old computer. “You’ll find everything you are looking for in there,” she said.
I sat down in front of an awful monitor and stared helplessly at the complicated user interface of the software. After ten minutes of unsuc-cessful clicking around, I stood up resignedly and walked back to the information desk.
“Could you help me, please? I don’t know what to do; I’d like to borrow some usability standards, but I can’t use the program to find those stan-dards ...”
“Oh. I’m afraid I can’t help you.” She shrugged her shoulders with indif-ference. “I don’t know how it works, either. Try reading the manual.”
So I went back to the workstation and read the yellowed manual. At one of the tables nearby, an old Turkish man sat reading a thick book.
The title on the cover said “HTML 4” in big, bold letters. I watched him for a few minutes, intrigued. Then I reminded myself why I was here, and turned to the manual.
Reading the manual really did help (who would have guessed?). I clicked my way through the complex web of queries, alerts and meaningless icons, and indeed, I was soon done.
“Finished already? Did you get it to work?” asked the librarian in disbelief.
“Yes,” I said and smiled. “It worked like a charm.”
I looked at her encouragingly and waited for a moment—was there per-haps something she wanted to ask? But she had already returned to the magazine she was reading. Consequently, I left and took my knowledge with me.
One of the ISO standards I was looking for was the aforementioned 13407. In the evening, I was lying in bed, leafing through the pages, when suddenly I looked at illustrations of urinals. “Those usability stan-dards are even stranger than I thought,” I said to myself and leafed for-ward. There were urinals everywhere. Almost on every page! “Wow, this author must be really obsessed with those urinals,” I thought.
I realized my girlfriend was looking over my shoulder to see what I was reading when she asked: „Are we getting a new bathroom, honey?”.
I flipped the document and looked closely at the cover. I had wanted a copy of the ISO 13407 standard “Human-centred design processes for interactive systems”, but instead, I had taken home the industry stan-dard “Wall-hung urinals—Functional requirements and test methods”
(German version EN 13407).
Wow, that was a surprise! Sure, there is a certain human-centred aspect around urinals and they probably can even count as interactive systems, but somehow I couldn’t help but think I had taken the wrong document home.
I looked at my girlfriend. “The urinal business is a tough one, but the wall-hung ones do sell pretty well.” She looked at me in disbelieve.
“I bet we could make a living selling those to tourists visiting Berlin.
They could have images of places of interest printed on top of them,” I suggested.
She stared at me. “This is definitely the worst idea you had—this week.
This will never work. You will lose everything and we will have to live on the street and eat junk like rats. Is that your plan, darling?”
“Aren’t you a little bit too pessimistic?” I asked and tried to score by cit-ing Clint Eastwood: “If you think it’s gocit-ing to rain, it will!”
She shrugged her shoulders “Predicting rain doesn’t count, building arcs does.”5 She turned around, signalling the end of the discussion.
I remember staying up that night for quite some time. How could there be two completely different standards with the same number? Slowly I began reading. Hey, did you know that Europe has basically three types of wall-hung urinals, and that they must be able to bear a load of one kilonewton for one hour?
Information Architecture
On the lookout for conferences, I stumbled across TED and Richard Saul Wurman. I was fascinated. In the evening I told my girlfriend about it. She said, “Wurman? Wait a minute, I’ve got something for you.” She went into the study of our small apartment and came back with Richard Saul Wurman’s book, Information Anxiety 2. “Everywhere I go, this girl is already there” I thought to myself. But I didn’t say anything.
Richard Saul Wurman: here was someone who was devoted to making complex things simple. Someone who said “The only way to communi-cate is to understand what it is like not to understand.” I was intrigued.
I wanted to learn more about information architecture. I bought the
“polar bear” book by Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. I read About Face, by Alan Cooper and books with amusing titles, such as Don’t 5. “I violated the Noah rule: Predicting rain doesn’t count; building arks does.“ (Warren Buffet)
Make Me Think, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things and The Inmates are Running the Asylum.” In Eric Reiss’ book6, I read about information scent for the first time, and Erik Jonsson’s book explained why people lose their way7. This was not dry reading. No, this was amazing stuff and I wanted more of it.
In the end of 2004, I began once more to study: library and information science. My friends shook their heads again. Why would a front-end de-veloper care about dusty books? By that time, however, I had lost inter-est in front-end development. No, interinter-est is the wrong word; I had lost my enthusiasm.
I began preaching the “Do IT with an Information Architect”8 gospel in our office. But you know it’s pretty hard to get rid of a label. In our company I was the front-end guy. It’s impossible to change roles with-out a top-down by-in. A JavaScript developer who can do Flash and CSS and even knows about accessibility is worth its weight in gold. I did understand the business side of things. But fact was, my focus had changed and first signs appeared on the horizon that there would not be a vacancy for an information architect anytime soon. Not in that company at least. I was looking for IA jobs but I didn’t get many. So I looked elsewhere. There is always something to do for an information architect—especially in the open source community or at communities such as the Information Architecture Institute9.
6. Practical Information Architecture by Eric Reiss 7. Inner Navigation, by Erik Jonsson
8. See my DIWAIA Blog: http://diwaia.blogspot.com
9. The Information Architecture Institute (IAI) is a global organization that supports individuals and organizations specializing in the design and construction of shared information environments. (http://iainstitute.org/en/
about/our_mission.php)
Seth Godin writes in his book Tribes: “It turns out that the people who like their job the most, are also the ones who are doing the best work.
Making the greatest impact and changing the most”.
In 2006, I completed my studies and received a Master of Arts in Library and Information Science. “Another pointless degree!” my friends laughed. Who knows, maybe they had a point. But I believe a degree is only pointless if you genuinely consider it to be the end of ev-erything rather than the beginning of something.
“My next project will be whatever occurs to me” said Richard Saul Wurman in an interview, and went on, “Anything you do should come from your age, your ignorance, your curiosity. Think differently at dif-ferent ages. “
Ignorant and curious? That’s me, or as the actor and comedian Steven Wright once said: “Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect.”
Though I’ve always preferred the journey to the destination, I’ve always been quite reluctant to travel unprepared. “Invest in preparedness, not in prediction”, advises author Nassim Nicholas Taleb10 and that’s what I did.
Learning about genetics and organic information processing, learn-ing Flash and HTML and CSS and JavaScript, havlearn-ing done accessibility consulting and building websites adherent to usability standards and having studied library and information science, I finally felt ready to work full-time as an information architect. The more I had learned, the more I realized what I didn’t know. I understood what it is like not to understand.
10. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In 2007 I felt my time had come. Again. It was time to move on. I want-ed to help build our German IA and UX community. I wantwant-ed to meet and connect with new people and learn from them as much as I could.
It was time to ram some piers into the ground and start building arcs.
About the Author
Born in Prague, Jan Jursa has grown up in Germany and lives now in Berlin. He works as an Information Architect for T-Systems Multimedia Solutions, one of the leading companies for web-based solutions in Germany.
Jan is a co-organizer of the German IA Conference (http://iakonferenz.
org) and Country Ambassador for the EuroIA Summit (http://www.eu-roia.org). He is also the co-organizer of the Berlin IA Cocktail Hour and the first European IA BarCamp called InfoCamp Berlin 2008.
Web: http://about.me/jan.jursa Twitter: IATV
Madrid, Spain
to Teaching
I had been invited to teach User Centred Design (UCD) at a university.
Being a 32-year-old User Experience (UX) consultant with a work ex-perience of ten years, should be a great background for transmitting my know-how to 19-year-old Design students. Suddenly, I realized that most of my knowledge in the field has come from non-university meth-ods: jobs, blogs, Internet references, books, etc.; all not very scientific stuff for teaching at the university. So I started to research what was taught in other places about UCD and found that very little was done at universities. (Or public information was very difficult to find.) Then I turned to the places where I had learned and noticed that this disci-pline (I still don’t consider it a ‘science’) is mostly done by non-scientific professionals of design, librarianship, engineering and hundreds of other different backgrounds and profiles that had all given their “two cents worth” based on their experience. So here are my “two cents worth” based on my experience, what I learned and what I teach on my courses.
Courses and More Courses
I grew up in Alcalá de Henares; a little city close to Madrid, Spain, so when I started the Journalism Degree in Madrid, I couldn’t believe there were so many people in the class that it was difficult to even find a seat. Besides, the syllabuses were so antiquated that teachers merely repeated their old, moth-eaten notes. My marks were not very good that time, probably because I spent most of the classes in the computer room, a place where you could try that new thing called ‘the Internet’.
It was 1996: I forgave the bandwidth (you could try a search at Altavista, read a book page, and were still waiting for the results), and the limited
amount and diversity of content available. So, while my teachers were insisting on some stupid stuff about Gutenberg, I was discovering the real communication revolution on my own.
So here is the first thing I want to teach: critical self-reflection. Think by yourself; do not let others decide what is interesting, even if they are university professors.
As time went by, I saw clearly that my future was not going to be as a journalist, but as an Internet-things-maker. I now cannot remember how I did it, but I got a scholarship at a prestigious design institute. I had previously taken some courses in Photoshop and Freehand at the college, but this part-time, demanding Design Master taught me how multidisciplinary a designer should be: programming, networks, sound and so forth, although I did not see myself becoming a specialist in any of them. When you have to manage a group of people it is critical to know a little bit about your co-workers tasks. Therefore the second message for my students is: learn the basics of related disciplines, as you will find it easier to bear them in mind when you work in a group.
Despite my disappointment with that old-fashioned Journalism Degree, I finished it and some years later I started taking e-learning doctoral courses in Multimedia Engineering. This was my first contact with e-learning. The first thing I learnt is that it is pretty easy to give up when you learn through the Internet, especially if you don’t get the appro-priate support. The lack of communication with teachers and other students is not a barrier, it is the Chinese wall. Suitable content and self-determination will lead me to read my PhD thesis hopefully in 2011, which is eight years on from the beginning. The third competence I would like my students to develop is: Perseverance, if the goal deserves it.
I could go on about my courses for much longer, but I will close this section with my second master, also through a scholarship. This time I was offered a Master in Ergonomics. Classes ran for a year, Friday
evenings and Saturday all day. Actually, it was not a real Master in Ergonomics, but in Workplace Risks Prevention, with three special-izations: Ergonomics, Security and Health. Since in Spain there is no
evenings and Saturday all day. Actually, it was not a real Master in Ergonomics, but in Workplace Risks Prevention, with three special-izations: Ergonomics, Security and Health. Since in Spain there is no