Information Architecture Research Agenda

I participated in the "Setting the IA Research Agenda" panel on Saturday, March 25, 2006 at the IA Summit. Here is an overview of my points, with links to background information I compiled in prepration for the panel, as well as some of my notes. A copy of my presentation is attached below.

Fellow panelists: Don Turnbull (panel organizer), Peter Morville, Jamie Blustein.

What is Research?

• "Active, diligent, and systematic process of inquiry aimed at discovering, interpreting and revising facts" (from Wikipedia entry on Research)
• Also, a collection of information about a particular subject

• Basic research: to further knowledge for knowledge's sake
• Applied research: producing results that may be applied to real world situations ("Research phase" within our ordinary projects)

• Exploratory: to help define the problem
• Constructive: develop a solution to a problem
• Empirical: collect data to test hypotheses (see scientific method)

• Research methods (a sample): Action research, Case study, Observation, Intuition, Interview, Data analysis, Simulations & models, Controlled experiments

Examples of IA empirical research:

• Peter Morville's September 2004 review of the literature with sections on Information seeking behavior, Structure and organization, Navigation, Search
• Larson & Czerwinski, CHI 98, Implications of memory, structure and scent or information retrieval (PDF)
• Yee, Swearingen, Li, Hearst, CHI 2003, Faceted metadata for image search and browsing (PDF)
• Bernard, Developing Schemas for the Location of Common Web Objects

What is a Research Agenda?

Agenda

• A list or outline of things to be considered or done (e.g., meetings)
• An underlying often ideological plan or program (e.g., political)

Research agenda

• List of things you want to see researched
• A bunch of questions you want answered
• Structured list of issues, that when researched, will serve some greater goal

Examples of some of my IA work where I include research agenda questions:

• Breadcrumbs
• Faceted browsing
• Personalization

In November, 2004, Peter Van Dijck posted A research agenda for information architecture with follow-up comments from various mailing lists. His research agenda included: Cognitive science (categories, search terms), Business theory (process model), Social Science & Anthropology (information sharing). Donna Maurer later posted that Maybe we do need IA research with these agenda items: Genre, Cognition and categorization, Facets (mental model, UI elements), Re-finding information.

A sampling of existing research agendas that are related to information architecture:

• Hypermedia, semantic web: Hypermedia and the Semantic Web: A Research Agenda: Links vs. relationships, Embedded links, Time-based hypermedia, CSCW
• American Library Association: Research Agenda for Library Instruction and Information Literacy: Learners, Teaching, Organizational context, Assessment
• Gartner: Enterprise Architecture Research Agenda Set for 2005: Management and Governance, Trends and Directions, Methods and Tools, Architecture in Practice by Industry, Cultural and Organizational Issues
• ACM, Human-computer interaction: Strategic directions in HCI: Strategic themes (Universal access to info, Education/learning, E-commerce, End-user programming, Information Visualization, Computer-mediated communication), Technological trends (Ubiquitous computing, Hardware, Natural modalities, VR), Design & evaluation methods, Tools
• Digital libraries: Interoperability, Scaling, and the Digital Libraries Research Agenda, Research Agenda for the Intelligent Digital Library, Metadata for Digital Libraries: a Research Agenda
• Shneiderman: Universal usability: Technology variety (supporting a broad range of hardware, software, and network access), User diversity (accommodating users with different skills, knowledge, age, gender, disabilities, disabling conditions, literacy, culture, income), Gaps in user knowledge (bridging the gap between what users know and what they need to know)

How would these overlap with an IA research agenda? How were these agendas built? How do they relate to funding?

Research agendas will have a lot of overlap with curricula. For example, the HCI "inventory of topics" figure from the ACM SIGCHI CDG gives the same overview of the field that a research agenda would provide.

A small sampling of IA curricula:

• Kent State IAKM: Information architecture, Information use, Knowledge management
• Indiana University SLIS - MIS: IA & design, HCI & communication, Strategic infomation management and leadership, Information retrieval systems design
• University of Texas - Austin IA Proposed Curriculum (PDF)

The punch line: Treat the IA Research Agenda as an IA project

• A research agenda is a framework for classifying existing research and (more importantly) planning future research
• Research agendas have an IA
• Apply our IA methods to create an IA research agenda

My notes

My notes from the discussion during the panel session, the BOF later in the day, lunch conversations, etc.

• Don's slides (insert link here)
• Peer reviewing: nice-to-have for me (helps filter the research) but I am also interested in less polished research
• A journal is neccesary but not sufficient
• What are the boundaries of the field?
• Jamie's slides
• Hypertext's aims and goals match pretty well to IA's
• Tenure challenges are key, IA research needs to be recognized for tenure
• Peter's notes are on flickr
• Agenda must be bigger than findability
• Yes, we do need IA research
• Label it "IA research" - semantics matter
• Good sign: practitioners getting stalked by graduate students
• Basic vs. Applied research
• Closet research literature review in industry
• Good sources of IA research: ACM DL, JASIST
• Karl Fast's comments: Agenda is about asking the RIGHT questions, respecting other disciplines
• One goal for an agenda: $50mil grant from NSF
• Information literacy as a key agenda item (long term , hard to do)
• usability.gov and SURL as examples of making research usable by practitioners
• "Best practices" may be all that we need for the current set of problems
• Tools to help with IA research (e.g., a way to analyze web page layouts across a lot of sites)
• Directory of IA researchers: list of people who are doing research, updated overview of each project, easy to contact them
• Takes special skills to summarize research for a practitioner (researcher cannot do it)

Panel coverage

Blog entries and other discussions of this panel. If you know of others, please add them as comments - thanks!

• Abe Crystal's report on the Summit includes the panel. "I believe integrating and applying social and behavioral science results to IA problems could reinvigorate both IA practice and social science research."
• The confluence of research and practice in information architecture - Karl Fast's recap of research at the IA Summit.