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Dan BrownDan Brown has focused his design work on information architecture for the past 25 years.
Along the way, he has written three books, designed a design game, and created one of the the most-used tools in the profession, the Information Architecture Lenses card deck.
Dan is very thoughtful about the practice of IA and has a lot to say about how the field has evolved.
We talked about:
- his information architecture work at EightShapes
- his recent podcast interview series covering his Information Architecture Lenses project and insights he had as he talked with his guests
- his discovery that even apparently solitary elements of IA practice always involve collaboration with other people
- the evolution of information architecture practice and thinking over the past 25 years and the increasing clarity around systematic thinking
- the relationship between information architecture and content strategy
- his appreciation gained in the study of physical architecture of the constraints that physical space has as a metaphor for IA work
- how IAs could benefit from using different metaphors – city parks instead of functional buildings, or something besides family trees
- ideas around his next deck of IA cards, which will be more about how we make design decisions
- the shift of IA practice from a “bridge” practice to a “hub” practice
- the movement of IA practice into the UX field
- the parallels between role-playing games and collaborative storytelling and UX design work
Dan’s bio
Dan, one of the co-founders of EightShapes, specializes in information architecture, user research, and product discovery. He has worked with clients large and small to tackle complex information architecture problems. He is the author of three books on user experience. He also designed the game Surviving Design Projects and created the essential tool for IA, The Deck of Information Architecture Lenses.
Connect with Dan online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 114. The practice of information architecture has evolved a lot over the past 25 years. We use different metaphors now to talk about our work, and the field has largely been incorporated into UX design. Dan Brown has looked at these changes from a number of different perspectives, most notably as the author of the “Information Architecture Lenses” card deck, a tool that has helped innumerable practitioners improve their view of their IA work.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 114 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Dan Brown. Dan is the principal and founder at Eightshapes, an agency that he founded and runs. Dan, welcome to the show. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you do there at Eightshapes.
Dan:
Sure, Larry. Thanks for having me on the show. I co-founded Eightshapes in 2006 with Nathan Curtis. He and I started it as a boutique UX design firm. And to this day, that’s what we’re doing. We do a lot of work for clients of all sizes, helping them think through complex information architecture problems. Nathan, of course, is focusing a lot on design systems these days. So that’s what we’re doing here at Eightshapes.
Larry:
Yeah. Design systems are everywhere. We have to have a whole other conversation about that. But what I wanted to talk to you about today is really focus on your core competency, which is information architecture. I always have, in fact, I have it right here, I’m holding it up for the folks who are watching the video, your information architecture lenses. I refer to them every IA project I do. They’re-
Dan:
That makes me so happy.
Larry:
Yeah.
Dan:
That brings me so much joy.
Larry:
Well, and what brings me even more joy is that you just did this series of interview where you had A Lens A Day. You’re up to about 45, I think, at this point.
Dan:
Yeah. I’ve recorded 51 interviews because there are 51 lenses. I woke up one day, early summer, 2021, and I was like… The words “lens a day” popped into my head, which really just goes to show you that the things that pop into your head are not always great ideas, but sometimes you’ve got to go, “Well, I wonder where this is going to go.” So I pitched it to my colleagues at Eightshapes. I was like, “So here’s what I’m thinking. I release a new interview every day about one of the lenses.” And they were like, “That is a terrible idea.” And I was like, “I’m not even listening to you. I’m going to run with it.”
And it turned out not to be a terrible idea because I got 51 really interesting people to come and talk to me about these lenses. And I really, really enjoyed the conversations a lot. I really enjoyed sort of getting this kind of swath of information about what’s going on in the field of IA. It turned out to be a lot more work than even I was anticipating, which was the terrible part. But the conversations themselves were just an utter joy for me.
Larry:
I can confirm that there, and I’ll link to that, of course, in this. They’re just fun. And I love that you had a format that I think you stuck to in every episode, I’ve listened to anyway. You sort of talk about their process, how they approach information architecture. Then you pick one of the lenses in the book and work through one of those.
Dan:
Right.
Larry:
And then you always conclude with little bit of advice for anybody who’s, newer practitioners. I wonder if in that last section of each of those interviews, if you had any, maybe not take homes, but further insights about how IA is practiced today?
Dan:
That’s good. Yeah, I haven’t really thought… I haven’t looked back on all of those. What was really striking to me was in the first question that I asked, which was usually about, “How do you draw people into the IA process?” Information architecture has a reputation for operating in the abstract, operating in this space that’s not necessarily very tangible. So I was asking folks how do they drop people in to that process, and it was really, really cool to hear some of the techniques that folks used. There was a lot of humility involved, just sort of an understanding that the stakeholders that people are involving in their processes bring a lot more expertise, a lot of reasonable and helpful perspectives to the table.
And then the other thing that I learned, I started asking the inverse question, “What do you do when you’re by yourself? What do you do when you’re not engaging other folks?” IA, like other design practices, sometimes involves just sitting and thinking. “What does that look like? Tell me what you’re doing.” I really wanted to understand what that part of the creative process looked like. And almost everybody said, “Well, when I’m thinking through an IA problem, I go and I talk to someone else.” And I was thinking, “Am I not asking this question very well? I want to know what you’re doing when you’re by yourself.” And almost everyone they would go engage with someone on this process. And I was like… I came to understand that the greatest assets that we have when we’re working through these problems is each other, this idea that the conversation, the dialogue, using of each other as sounding boards is crucial to working through these problems. So those are two big things I learned.
Larry:
I love that, especially that last point about our best asset is each other and-
Dan:
Right.
Larry:
… circling back around to that. But there’s still… At least in most of the IA stuff I’ve done, there’s still some reflection or cogitation. Something happens somewhere that I’m assuming it now results from these conversations more than just kicking your feet back. Because it’s kind of like any kind of creative work, some people would look at you while you’re doing it and think, “What is he napping?”
Dan:
Right.
Larry:
Are people consciously collaborative about it, or is that just sort of like a new default mode?
Dan:
I don’t know. I don’t know. But I do think, something that you said, there’s this kernel of truth there, where there’s this feeling where, “If I’m not talking to someone, if I’m literally just sitting and staring at my screen or staring at the wall, that I’m not being productive.” And I think it’s a… This is just a hypothesis on my part, but I think if that is true, it’s a shame. Because I do feel like some of our best creative work can come from merely turning an idea over in our own minds. Not that we can ignore or exclude others from the creative process, and it’s not even a balance, but there is a little bit of a dose of individual thinking that I think is worthwhile to kind of help us dig into, or expand our thinking on a set of ideas, and then we can draw other folks in.
Dan:
As soon as you start saying it out loud, as soon as you start talking to someone about it, even if they don’t say anything, just the mere act of trying to articulate something, I know we’ve all had this experience, helps me see it and understand it differently. But I do feel like as an industry, as a field, just even as big as design, we’ve really discounted the value of sitting and thinking about something.
Larry:
Yeah. And I’m all of a sudden picturing an amoeba or a lava lamp or something just sort of like amorphous us, them, me, you, conversation.
Dan:
Right.
Larry:
Is that sort of how you… If that makes sense.
Dan:
Yeah. Yeah. I was working with someone who was really keen on sort of pointing out parts of the design of a screen, say, that that person came up with, or that person came up with. And it was really alien for me to think in those terms, because what I’ve come to appreciate is just how melded all of these ideas become, how a genuine creative process really pulls together lots of different perspectives. And it makes it incredibly difficult to sort of tease out, “Well, that person came up with this idea, and that person came up with that idea.”
Dan:
Because, at the end of the day, what we’re hoping for is, I’m not talking about consensus building, but I’m talking about sort of pulling together the best perspective, the most helpful perspectives to arrive at a design that addresses a wide variety of needs and perspectives, such that… So I think the lava lamp is good. It’s lots of ideas and concepts moving around and recombining and things. And that is something that, yes, I can do on my own, but it is better to do it in the company of others, or a combination of a bit on my own and also in the company of others.
Larry:
And this is reminding me of why it’s hard to explain information architecture to some people, because it’s, yes, there’s that, in our process, it’s this messy amorphous lava lamp thing, but the end result is usually like nicely, tidily structured stuff.
Dan:
Very structured. Yeah.
Larry:
Yeah. How do… Are information architects just wired weird or something? How do we… Because I…
Dan:
I don’t know. I mean, I would’ve said that’s true 20 years ago, 25 years ago when I started in the field. We were definitely of a type. But I think you might call it sort of systematic thinking is not… It is far more widespread and can come in many forms. There are visual designers I know who think systematically, and there are visual designers I know who don’t think systematically. So I feel like that there’s a mindset, what’s the right framing? A mindset or a set of tools that we use to think systematically about different things. So I’m not sure that it’s all purely an information architecture thing. I think it’s, “How do we apply the systematic thinking, the tools for systematic thinking?”
Larry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). No, that makes sense. That’s the foundational principle that can make these different modes work well together.
Dan:
Right.
Larry:
Yeah. That makes sense. Hey, one thing, as we’re talking, I’m thinking I should honor the title of my podcast. This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, and so you had-
Dan:
Wait, it’s what? I didn’t know… I’m just kidding.
Larry:
Wait, I didn’t know that. Yeah. No, and I know you had… I’m just trying to remember who. Like, Torrey Podmajersky, and I know you had a number of content people.
Dan:
Yeah.
Larry:
In your series, how do you see the interaction, and the overlap and the distinction between content strategy practice and information architecture practice?
Dan:
I mean, I’ve got out some theoretical ideals. And I want to emphasize that they’re theoretical, because in practice, there are problems that need solving. And those problems sometimes relate to the words that we’re using. They sometimes relate to the kinds of messages that we need to put forward. Sometimes they relate to the structures in which those messages live. And I think it’s artificial for us to draw lines between them and say, “Well, you do that, and I do that.” I don’t know that there’s any value in that in practice.
Dan:
But I think in theory, there are potentially interesting distinctions to draw. And for better, or for worse, I’ve come to look at design, or one of the definitions of design, as the integration of multiple perspectives. And if I were to say that the most interesting distinction between, say, an information architect and a content strategist, from my perspective, is the fact that they bring different perspectives to the table. They may be thinking about the same kinds of things. They may have the similar kinds of outputs. They may have lots of overlap in the kinds of tasks and activities that they do, but they’re bringing different perspectives to the table.
Dan:
My aim as an information architect is to create spaces. And to ensure that I’m creating spaces, that whoever is in charge of those spaces has a means to understand what goes in them, or that when they have something new, they understand where it goes in that virtual space. Spaces is a very physical metaphor, but by space, I also mean this idea that there are connections between different pieces of content, different features, different, whatever, different things that live inside of our digital products. And an information architect’s perspective is, “How can I realize those connections? How can I make those connections exposed so that people can take advantage of those connections?” So the converse, besides working for the folks who are filling those spaces, is working for the folks who need to navigate those spaces.
Dan:
And my role as an information architect, again, is to craft spaces that are, one, easy to fill, but also easy to navigate. So I know where I am. I can look around, I understand the context, I understand where I can go for from here. I understand what might be available in this space. I’m not a content strategist. I don’t identify as one. Maybe I do content strategy work. My understanding, my sort of very cursory understanding, of what content strategy is, is that it perhaps it deals with this same kinds of issues, same concepts, but maybe doesn’t think in those terms, or doesn’t bring that perspective to the table, or maybe it does. And that’s why we’re sort of operating at the theoretical level.
Larry:
Right. And I think the reality is that on any one project or in any one team, it’s like, whoever’s there, who happens to have, “Oh, you got some content chops, you have some IA chops. Great-“”
Dan:
Right.
Larry:
… “that’s how we’ll give you up the work.” I think that’s a super common way. As you were just talking about spaces and navigating them and creating them and stuff, it reminds me of the actual architectural foundations of this discipline back in Richard Saul Wurman’s work and things like that. Have you ever studied like architecture architecture, or is that-
Dan:
I mean, have I studied architecture? I thought I was going to become an architect when I was back in college, but that’s before there was something called an information architect. So I did think a lot about the design of physical space. Not a lot. I thought a little bit about it, and then I got a C in modern architecture history, and I was like, “You know what, maybe this isn’t the field for me.” And I took a drafting class my junior year of college. So I did dabble in it, and I find it interesting. But I also understand, or I’ve come to appreciate the constraints or the limits that physical space has as a metaphor for the work that we do.
Dan:
I’m recording the second season of the lenses podcast, and I was just talking to Ashleigh Axios. And we were talking about physical metaphors for information architecture and how we often look at very functional buildings. We use functional buildings like an airport, or a bookstore, as the metaphor, but we started speculating, “Well, what if we talk less in terms of very functional buildings where that kind of wayfinding is made explicit, and instead talk about open spaces, like city parks or things like that? How does that change our perspective when we use a different physical space to talk about information architecture?”
Dan:
So I would love for us to come up with better metaphors than purely physical ones, but we use a lot of metaphors in this work. Another is the family tree, the parent child relationship, or sibling relationship, or cousin relationship when we’re talking about different nodes of content. And again, there’s value in doing that, but it’s not the be-all and end-all way of talking about structures.
Larry:
Right. And all of a sudden, as you talk about that, there’s been numbers of attempts over the years at different ways to categorize the categorization, like the LATCH acronym.
Dan:
Right.
Larry:
I always forget location, alphabet-
Dan:
Time.
Larry:
… time, category, and hierarchy.
Dan:
Hierarchy. Right.
Larry:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was… Are there… And also, as you’re talking about using different metaphors, even within the metaphor of architecture, using different types of architecture as the model-
Dan:
Right.
Larry:
… and you wrote the book about lenses. You actually focused on this from a number of different directions as you created that. Do you think there are any directions we haven’t explored yet that are maybe on your to-do list for further exploration?
Dan:
So I’m the early stages of creating a new deck of cards. So the Lenses was not a book. It was a deck of cards, which I think is… I love cards and very tactile experiences. But I’m in this phase of doing IA now where the lenses are super important because they offer distinct perspectives on looking at the work that you’re doing. But I’m also recognizing that part of IA work is acknowledging the trade-offs that I am making. So by choosing to do one thing, I am explicitly choosing not to do something else.
Dan:
I mean, a very basic example here is, “Am I going to organize my content by terms of nouns or in terms of verbs?” That’s the trade-off. And if I’m doing it in terms of nouns, then I’m thinking about all the topical things that I want, that the content is about. If I’m thinking in terms of verbs, I’m thinking of maybe in terms of all the tasks that I can accomplish using this content. And maybe we can mix and match, but generally, that’s a no-no. Generally, we say, “Well, when we’re coming up with a menu of options, we want those to be internally consistent with each other.” So nouns is one starting point, and verbs is another starting point. And that’s a trade-off that I’m making.
Dan:
Another trade-off that I might make is, “Should my menu, my main menus, be comprehensive, or should they just show what’s important to some depth? Am I showing breadth, or am I showing depth?” So again, this is another trade-off that I’m making. And these are maybe similar to lenses, but I want to be really explicit about the way we make decisions, about how to expose structures and how to design digital structures for our products.
Larry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. And what you just said that exposing the structures, because so often, like I just had Donna Spencer on a couple episodes ago, I’m actually producing that episode around the time we’re recording this one. And she was talking about nouns and verbs as the difference between the structured information and information architecture versus the more flowy, verb-oriented interaction design process. But that’s just another lens, I’m realizing now, as you talked about it this way, that that can also be just a choice made internally to anyone organizing a project.
Dan:
Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think any of these sort of… I mean, you asked about other ways of categorizing stuff. Using these language categories, like nouns and verbs, give us these hooks that we can use to think about different mechanisms for creating structures.
I mean, another trade-off is that every element in our structure has the same weight, or some elements in our structure have more weight than others. We have to make a decision. “Are we going to treat every category the same way, or do some categories have more prominence, or more importance than others?” So in a sense, what I came to realize is, there’s this almost constant stream of trade-offs that we are weighing as we design structures.
Larry:
Yeah. And as you talk about that, I’m reminded too of the way the practices evolved over the last 25 years, that it used to be more back end kind of stuff. It feels like there’s much more of a user experience. I mean, it’s part of a user experience design practice now, I think, and it’s… Where it used to be… Because I think some of the heritage of information architecture comes out of computer science, the old foundational, like how to build databases and stuff like that. But can you talk a little bit about the evolution of the practice, how we’ve gone… Whether I’m even right about that, that kind of moving from the back office to being more interested in and curious about the end user journey and how what we’re doing serves that?
Dan:
Yeah. I mean, it’s an interesting question. I remember when I first got involved with IA, it was often seen as the glue between the user interface work and the technical work, this bridge, I guess, is maybe a better way of thinking about it, between, “How do we take the experience that we want to put in front of users and create an underpinning technical framework that is at once meaningful for the users, but also translatable for computers, for systems?”
Dan:
And I feel like one of the changes that I’ve experienced is that IA has moved out of that bridge position, and maybe its product or product management that is now in that more hub position, serving a lot of different spokes. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it does feel like a change that’s happened. One of the things that attracted me to IA in the first place is the fact that it was, in a sense, multidisciplinary, that it was, in a sense, trying to sit in the middle of this, trying to create kind of a cohesive picture across all these disciplines.
Dan:
And I agree that I feel like it’s moved of that center position, more as kind of a specialized aspect of user experience, even though certainly my practice hasn’t changed all that much in so far as I do feel like part of what I’m doing is, in part, technical, that what I’m doing is, in part, trying to think of the underpinning structures, which a user may never see, but is important for us to understand what the underlying framework of a product is and how that gets translated so computers can understand it.
Larry:
Right. That’s really… I hadn’t thought about that rise. And that sort of mirrors the rise from the web as the organizing scheme for our work to product as the organizing scheme, and somewhere in that transition, the information architect was kind of not displaced, but assumed a different role in that coordinating, connecting role.
Dan:
Right.
Larry:
That’s-
Dan:
Pushed into user experience. Pushed into this umbrella of user experience. I mean, I don’t think it’s… And pushed, it suggests that there was no agency on the part of the information architect. I think some of us were attracted to user experience as well, or drawn to user experience, because we were also doing that work as well. And it seemed like a more reasonable place for us to be because IA incorporates a lot of user-centered desire, presumably user-centered design practices. So I think this kind of push into UX is not entirely… Is somewhat of our own making as well.
Larry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. And I think it’s all… I was reflecting on that journey recently. I used to… I come out of book publishing, and it took me years to quit identifying as a publisher and start identifying as a UX practitioner, even though I was a Jakob Nielsen and Alan Cooper and Jared Spool fan back in the late nineties. They were the main guiders of my work. Anyhow, it’s super interesting how, yeah, just the arrival of UX as an organizing scheme for so much of this.
Dan:
Hey, Dan, I can’t believe we’re going close to time already. These conversations always go way too quickly. But I want to make sure, is there anything last, anything that we haven’t talked about or that’s just on your mind that you want to make sure we get to today?
Dan:
You told me you were going to say this, and I did not prepare anything.
Larry:
You don’t have to. But-
Dan:
I… Did Donna talk about D&D at all?
Larry:
A tiny bit, but I almost didn’t… Because I hadn’t listened to your interview with her yet, but you two talked about that when you talked.
Dan:
We did.
Larry:
Tell me a little bit about that.
Dan:
I talked to a bunch of people about… I talked to Jeff, Jeff Eaton about games. I talked to Chiara Ogan about games. I think… I mean, anyone who knows me knows that I love games. I play a lot of board games. I play a lot of role-playing games. I’ve got a new person on my team, who’s really into role-playing games. And I think, especially if you’re interested in information architecture, especially if you’re interested in systematic thinking, there is something very fulfilling about role-playing games. Role-playing games are a means for us to collaboratively tell a story. We all contribute to that story. One person at the table, you may have heard the term dungeon master or game master, I prefer the term facilitator or something else, acts in a way to arbitrate the rules, but also propel the story along.
Dan:
And what I have found, at the same time, we are operating within the constraints of a game, which provide a set of rules, provide a set of constraints, as I said, provide a set of guidelines for how to work. And what I’ve also just described is the design process. A bunch of smart people sitting around, coming up with really good ideas within a set of constraints, guided by principles, et cetera, et cetera.
Dan:
I am, in my older age, becoming an advocate for getting involved with this hobby. Not because I feel like we need to do… Everything that we need to do needs relate to our work, but actually quite the converse, that the things that draw us to user experience design, the things that draw us to solving difficult problems in a collaborative way while acknowledging and understanding the underlying systems behind them, the fact that we are drawn to that kind of work means that there are other of things in the world that allow us to exercise those interests as well. And the fact that they might feed each other is just a side benefit. So that’s it. I’ll get off my role-playing game soapbox.
Larry:
No, I love that. I’ve never really got into that world that much, but now I’m really tempted because the way you just described that. And I think part of it is that, yeah, avocation-vocation. It’s like, no, you’re just live in your life, and they happen to coincide nicely. So great, enjoy both.
Dan:
Right. Yeah. I mean, I think also, the role-playing game space is dominated by the 800 pound gorilla that is Dungeons and Dragons. That is a particular style of play, and is a particular approach to role-playing games. But there are – and I am not exaggerating – thousands of role-playing games these days. When I was a kid and I first got into this hobby in the early eighties, there was maybe 10. And now, there are literally thousands to fit all kinds of genres and all kinds of play styles.
Larry:
Yeah. Well, that… And anybody who does have an interest in that, there’s going to be a way in.
Dan:
Oh, yeah. Definitely.
Larry:
Hey, one last thing, Dan. What’s the best way for folks to stay in touch, to follow you on social media, or find you-
Dan:
Yeah. I mean, I’m on Twitter, for better, for worse. And I’m @brownorama on Twitter. I believe my DMs are open. So if you want to get in touch, you should do so there. I like talking about information architecture and user experience. I love talking about games.
Larry:
Nice. Well, thanks so much, Dan.
Dan:
Thank you.
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