[Music] [Music] let's go to the end of this series yeah you are crazy whatever you your microphone it's you have to put close your mouth no it's work no it's i don't know maybe i disconnected something yeah yeah let me see problems in the backstage i will not catch this part of the video everybody hello yeah bring the microphone close your mouth please i can't because you stay here yeah there is some some something strange with your microphone i don't know what happened maybe i broke yeah maybe you broke trying to scream he thought oh my god [Laughter] congratulations whoa wow the good thing this is the last video yeah yeah and we buy it other yeah yeah oh so sad what is your expectation for today for this episode of the problem i found the problem oh yeah in the in the zoom the microphone was changed it was i was unplugged okay yeah so uh going back to the the subject uh what we are feeling rosie rose is barfing yeah what is your oh don't worry that is not what is your feelings about this episode oh i'm exciting yeah i'm excited yeah i'm excited because well i i we we choice an amount of subjects that we love it and it's not uh different for episodes but today we finished with this content this subject that i love who knows me knows that i am the information architecture guy i talked so much about this content i builded my um mba program in impact with this this base the basis of elements of user experience from the the the last video with jesse or jazz i realized that that because in english jesse it's not make sense yes but okay uh i builded the mba program with uh the elements by jess and the mba has this this basis in information to actually act information architecture but uh because that this this content is very important to me and abby it's uh incredible professional she wrote a beautiful and amazing book totally free totally free yes yeah yeah it's some i don't know it's it's not common a free book with this uh powerful it's a power of this content and because that i'm excited so excited yeah yeah me too i think she will bring a good conversation good talk with us because i think she's special not only for the book but the the reference inside the market right bringing discussions the background uh live so she's a special professional so i think will be very very good and like you said when you ended end up just series of interviews with the golden key yeah our teach our teacher probably is taking a screenshot he's screaming now you're writing oh my gosh i'm trying to help these guys to speak in english and they [Laughter] won't yeah if you if you didn't uh watch the the the video with our professor or our teacher you're the first one i'll tell you so you can act for the first one yeah yeah yeah it will be it was fun it was fun and the experience it was amazing so uh let's start it right let's bring yeah our guest let's go yeah so with us today abby covert [Music] well abby thanks so much for being here with us i will be grateful all the time okay i'm sorry thank you think i'm sorry and thank you for having me oh thank you and the first question to open this conversation i would love for you to introduce yourself and talk a little about yourself to those don't know you from from our audience please sure yeah um my name is abby covert i am an information architect working in florida in the united states um i've been an information architect for about 17 years now so i've been in it for a while and over the time that i've been practicing i've really specialized into helping people make sense of messes whatever that might mean to their particular context so i got my start in consulting so i was a microsoft consultant for several years i did some time in-house at fidelity investments i did some time in agency work i ended up starting a consultancy called the understanding group which is still in operation today and then going out on my own to service clients i've worked for brands like nike international house of pancakes most recently i just retired from my position at etsy as their information architect i've also spent some time speaking and teaching so i taught at the school of visual arts in new york city for several years as well as at parsons the new school for design and now i live in florida and i'm working on my second book my first book is called how to make sense of any mess and the second one is a book about diagramming that is forthcoming so that's me in a nutshell oh and it's a good news to know about this yeah it's spoiler for us exciting yeah well i will start with a controversial question i don't know maybe uh doesn't it seem like design professional professionals are ignoring the importance of information architecture more and more nowadays hmm okay so this is definitely the question on a lot of people's minds and it's definitely on mine um i think there's a couple perspectives that you can take on it i think that information architecture as a named skill set is probably not getting the attention that it deserves in most organizations and even more importantly in a lot of educational contexts information architecture is specifically being left out of ux curriculums by name interaction design curriculums by name research curriculums by name so i think that there is sort of a named entity problem um but i think that the opposite is also really positive which is information architecture not by name is practiced more and more by more and more varied people by a more diverse workforce than ever before and i think that people are understanding um concepts like metadata and algorithms at like a really base level even if they don't understand the technology which i cannot say was the case when i started working in nia so i think that while as a named thing it it doesn't get a lot of attention it actually is the thing that a lot of people are talking about as the key to sort of um that massive mountain of technological challenges that we have oh yeah so it's a matter of the name because it's older right yeah yeah i mean it's not that old but tech moves fast and i think that ultimately like ia has the same fate as all other forms of systems thinking where the incentives dictate the results and if you are incentivized to move fast and break things information architecture is not going to be part of your jam and that's sort of been in the ethos for our whole industry in terms of design and tech um you know especially in the like silicon valley kind of like uber tech vc world you're seeing a lot of like that is the sole focus and systems thinking and information architecture content strategy like all of these longer term focus specialties they don't really have a clear place at those tables they only at best have a clear seat at those tables as deliverables so websites will still have sitemap documents we'll still make flow diagrams to figure out things but calling them information architecture or focusing on them at an architectural level as opposed to documenting the architecture however bad that can be a different result agree rafael do you have some questions yeah i yeah i i can't ignore the fact that you still calling you yourself as an information architecture and it's it's it's funny and curious for me because i am what one of these guys um why a um information architecture lover because i started my profession during my my my life with as a web designer uh i started to study studying information architecture into uh wide frames flows from card searching and today i suppose i don't know the people um feel um i don't know not afraid but a little shame to call himself as a information architecture yeah what do you do you think about that this this feeling in the market yeah i think that there's there's definitely been um pendulum swings between our respect for specialists and our lack of respect for specialists in tech and design and i think that ia um suffers a similar fate to other uh professions in that realm like i think about people that are working in the uh machine learning and ai space now uh well they're the cool kids at the table but 15 years ago not so much right they were they were trying to make their way in um i think from like an ia perspective there have been times where saying that you're an information architect was a credential that you could sort of like put out in the world and you could find jobs and you could find programs and you could find networking events as those things have continued to not be invested in by organizations they've been going away from a community standpoint or at least being challenged so you're seeing a lot of information architecture attention being held only by those that have a very special place in their heart for it as a specialty but it's being practiced by everyone so that's i think a really important distinction especially for your viewers is like you don't need to be calling it information architecture or calling yourself an information architect to be doing information architecture work and people are doing it all the time now the question becomes if you don't know what to call it how do you get better at it and i think like when you ask why would i continue to call myself an information architect why would i continue to use those words it's really in service of that like i don't think that using the word information architecture to describe your work will make you any better at it but i do think that collectively our community will be better for it if we call it what it is and without that what i see is people ending up in my inbox far too late in their career having never heard these concepts before because they are not googleable right they don't have the keywords and so they type in sitemap and they get something super generic well you all know learning to make a site map is not learning how to do information architecture it's one very specific deliverable in one specific use case now if that's all they know is the names of our deliverables and the names of those deliverables have just basically been washed into this like ux sphere it's not really a learnable skill set anymore then so i think that for me and several other people that have really doubled down on ia from a teaching perspective and a community building perspective it is really important to hang on to that label um now i also have the privilege of not having to go get a job with that title right now you know and not everybody has that privilege so i think that it is really um required of all of us when we're positioning our own work in the ways that we can to talk about information architecture even if the word architect is not kind of within the grasp of our our career path right and and this make made you wrote this book so how to make sense of any mess really that came from me having the opportunity to teach information architecture to art school students so i'm not talking design school students i'm not talking ux students i'm talking art school students and they it was an evening elective when i started teaching at parsons in an undergraduate capacity so i had all matter of ages all matter of backgrounds and they were coming from you know traditional architecture fashion design uh fiber arts and they were all coming to this thing called information architecture and i didn't quite know why except maybe it fit on their schedule but over the course of that first semester teaching there were a couple things that i realized one was that the things that i wanted to teach them about information architecture would make them better at whatever their specialty or their medium was regardless but the second thing i noticed was there was no book that i could give them that wasn't completely medium dependent so if you wanted to go down the print design realm i could go down the richard solrum and edward tufte kind of direction if i wanted to go in the web design realm we could throw into the polar bear book and you know information architecture for the world wide web or the content strategy books that have been written but in that spot of like just the skill set without the medium that thing did not exist and so i identified that need and started to prototype a textbook originally the textbook was called make sense information architecture for beginners christina woodke told me on a road trip uh in california that that was a terrible name for a book and i'm so so thankful that she did and yeah a friend of mine one night was reviewing an early draft of the table of contents and at the top of it i had written how to make sense of any mess and he said that's the name of your book and i was like you can't name a book that it's a freaking sentence um but then it just kind of grew on me and i'm so glad that i did it now because it really did change everything oh yeah also name yeah no i i think the name of the book it's amazing because the explain everything the name yeah yeah yeah totally in in your book you you spoke about the your intention or your goal thinking about the target audience um you talked about the the beginners but i don't know i am i i have this the experiences background information architecture and i love the book do you think uh this book works just for beginners or for everyone ah i think that it depends on your mindset so if you are a person which i'm starting to pick up that you two might be like this where you're a lifetime learner that doesn't ever think of yourself as an expert in anything because there's always more to learn i think that you could get a ton out of this book even if you have 20 years of information architecture experience but if you're not that type of person all you got to do is read the bad amazon reviews to hear what those types of people think they do not like this book this book is uh new age self-helpy too high level not enough concrete examples not advanced enough um and i love that like i remember the day that i realized that my negative amazon reviews actually proved that page in the book where i talk about my intention true because i can directly find amazon one star reviews that illustrate every single thing that i was purposefully walking away from um so yeah i do think that in a lot of cases i get you know fan mail from people who are really good at information architecture that tell me that they learned something in this book that they didn't know and i can tell you with somebody who was fairly experienced when i wrote it you know this is seven years later now um there are things that i'm still learning like i just did this really interesting um thing in october where i ran my own book club rereading my book for the first time uh in seven years i learn things like i actually learned things from what i wrote about information architecture which like i said if you're a lifetime learner you can get that kind of value out of it even though it is written at a sixth grade reading level and you know incredibly brief so yeah we will never stop learning you have to think that right i mean some people don't think like that they're like yeah yeah yeah you're right that's another way to live yeah and some people some people can i don't know uh looking for a content more technically not so so um so inspiring content because your books more to to provocative to inspiring about that to thinking about the the informational type to not so oh how can i do the information like touch it's not about your book your books open up our minds about this content and some people can't understand that i don't know probably it's uh connected with the the maturity i don't know maybe yeah i think it comes back to like your incentives i mean the same reason that an organization adopts or doesn't adopt systemic thinking or information architecture practice i think that it comes down to the individual too like if your current position is incentivized to sort of like keep your head down nose to the grindstone just keep going forward get the thing done my book might completely ruin everything for you you know because maybe you don't have the power to make big changes right now maybe you're following somebody else's intention that you don't actually believe in or agree with but you need it to support your family like in those cases my book would be maybe a little bit destructive for some people um and so i think that like that's also a determiner of the the reader's experience so it's it's interesting to see it it's sort of like um it's like a harry potter sorting hat of things like i definitely self-selecting to people that i want to talk to when they reach out about this book oh yeah yeah definitely a smaller there is some problem here in brazil uh if we look at every corner of companies it seems they are asking designers we need ux designers if you are not just take a course and we will give you a job this is not the main problem and something let's face it we will end up accepting the wrong way and in all of this it seems that we are skipping steps skipping concepts skipping structural views so with this problem and kind of madness how information architecture can make a difference in this disruption in your opinion oh so first of all i think that unfortunately that's not just a problem in your country it's a problem worldwide from what i can tell and i think that it comes down to a couple of things one is that you know the whole idea of being customer-centric is sort of new and information architecture and user experience design and the associated specialties have kind of been mixed into that bigger pot of like customer experience which is very much driven from two places right you have the technical side of customer experience which is gonna have the information architectures the content strategies uh the systems thinking the technical architecture those kinds of things but you also have coming from the marketing side which is coming from a completely different incentive structure right it's like getting people to uh agree to use a thing is different than them liking using it so you sort of have um two very different uh incentive structures and potential aims that are both competing for the same executive attention so both are fighting for more resources both are fighting for better tooling both are fighting for more dollars spent in their particular specialty and i would say that um hey guess what marketers have a leg up and they're better at marketing themselves than we are um and so i think in a lot of cases that's sort of gotten that's gotten the goat right like um i see a lot of those training programs that are set up as as like these boot camps and you know to be honest the upward mobility that that provides to a whole generation of people in a creative profession i think is kind of inspiring um but on the other side i fear that those people end up in roles that while they came into it very altruistically wanting to make things better for people what they find is that that's actually just kind of like a candy shell over like a really yucky you just make wire frames and do what executives tell you to do and move buttons around um so i mean i think in the in the short term each individual kind of has to know what they're getting into and i hope that you know from the whisper networks to the mentorship things that are more solid i hope you all are talking about it especially within your own communities in your own country because that's where people are going to learn especially the younger folks because they're you know those salaries they're throwing around aren't nothing and when you just got out of school and you got a boatload of debt and everybody tells you just 15 weeks and a little bit of money and you get a little certificate that'll get you a job that makes this much more they're going to do it unless they hear why they shouldn't and it's really important that we get that message out that like things that are too good to be true often are um and that's one of them yeah we agree with you 100 uh so this is a global problem that we have to to fight against right with your content your if your book so yeah it's our mission right we have to to bring up the real message guys wake up yeah i mean there's been some really um i don't know if if you all have run into the thread about design theater um but there's been some really interesting articles flying around about like how so much of the design process has been reduced to theatrics um there's some just some really interesting thinking in that space i'm i'm really excited to see our own industry kind of calling our industry to the carpet and being like hey when you say that you do your ex what exactly do you mean because i don't think you mean what you think you mean i think it's getting very confusing for some people still still confused for for so many people definitely yeah well i i was thinking to to ask you about the another version of this book or a new book but you broken my leg in the beginning because you you spoil it oh i spoiled it i'm sorry well let's well that's the power of editing my friend we'll just spoil it go ahead you spoil it no yeah no no let's let's continue that um but i have another question an interesting question for me uh why did you launch larger your book for free what reason ah i mean a lot of it is that i just think that there shouldn't be any uh financially prohibitive reason that information architecture is not available to somebody like i really wanted anyone to be able to have access to it um i also i didn't expect the book to do well the way that it did and um the day that that free version uh how to make sense of any mess.com um the day that that launched was the one-year anniversary of the book and the lifetime value of the book was still unknown to me but the one year value of it was enough that i was like wow i really owe the the world a gift back because my goodness like that book changed my life um you know i've been all over the world i've been invited to speak to wonderful people like you all over the world and i mean it's just been everything to me so so yeah i it was never really a question of if i would it was just a question of when i would and um yeah that website just continues to tickle me i see how many people go to it blows my mind just like wow so cool um and i'm really hopeful that in the next year or so i'll be able to invest even more into it because there's some ideas i have for how to make it even better so there's some things on the horizon there that's another that's another spoiler you didn't even expect uh okay we can cut this part and another question rafael do you have one no no okay so with this growth in the ux design area mistakes and success will happen sure i i hope so a lot of change a lot of demand but we also lost a lot of things along the way how can we change our route to return to the base learning vision in your visual view think that calling a spade a spade is a saying that that we have in english that i think uh is the first thing that comes to mind like when you're on a project and you see an information architecture step or a ux step for that matter that's being skipped be okay with it being skipped but be loud about the implications of skipping ahead like don't be the stick in the mud that's going to stop the whole process and make it so nothing ever moves again because you're not happy with the way that things are going like that does not win friends and influence people in my experience but if you're the person that's like hey i really fear that if we don't think more about the metadata schema of this particular feature these things might happen the minute that you put that case out for people i mean unless you have a really zealoty egoist leadership generally people can see something through that and can either give you a timing when that could be accomplished or an okay for you to not be accountable for that when it does happen and i think either result is usually enough for for most people um to kind of move through so i would say like that's that's my number one advice is just like be honest about what things are and what you would do if you had your way and when those two things don't match call it out and go hey you know we can do it this way but if we don't talk to users about this this is what i fear and just be okay with everybody about that fear and then move on also very good very good so abby i don't know if you have uh bulichi do you have no no more now i'm happy with this conversation because for me it's it's clear it's not about stuck in a process or nice steps but it's about to be conscious about our work and and to to to to i don't know to be the others the the the peers conscious too about that and this is so much important i suppose for us thank you thank you so much for this uh this discussion discussion okay yeah and and and do you have a last message for designers from brazil or other countries who are watching us could be a tip a warning a course a book etc so feel free please i mean first i'm just so excited that you all have your own community to talk about things within your locality but that also you're giving back to the global network i think that that's really remarkable so i hope that your community has a lot of love for what you all do in case it's not said content creation is often a very thankless job so um hey supporters if you haven't reached out in a while about these two and how much they do for you that would be a good time you know hit follow hit subscribe all that stuff that the kids say um in terms of me if you want to keep up with my work i do a monthly email and it's all my process it's just kind of like a look into my studio each month um so if you're interested in that abbycovert.com has that and pretty much everything i've ever written or talked about so i hope to see you there again what a lesson what content i was sure i would learn a lot of from this quick chat with you so thank you thank you very much and if you are in we can do a new interview next year yeah for the next book for the next one oh it looks a little okay exactly yes you all are on my list of people to reach out to when there's a release no yes please respect me on your show again soon perfect so again thank you very much and a big hug here brazil love to to give you insane hugs thank you so much so that's it guys abby thank you very much bye bye [Music] wow it was amazing again and again and again and again yeah are you happy yeah yeah for for um two reasons because we finish it yeah it was and yes yeah and we made it we made it well very well and because we uh i don't know we finished with a golden key i don't know if this that is this this expression all the time you are creating new words in expression but no we finish very well because because i love information architecture yeah and hair right and yeah and i like it so much the the uh her book i um it's a reference for me because i i don't know he he explained very well the motivation the the reasons that i love the book and i suppose it's a good finish to to our project for our yeah uh challenge yeah we we end our goal to bring uh international content in design team for brazilians and global designers right yeah so of course we we we have another projects already in our minds because we are crazy always like we started uh we are crazy guys so if you don't know we are telling you we are crazy because we love to get some troubles in the way a chris personal person with confidence it's a a danger person dangerous person yeah yeah yeah a sociopath but no no no no no no no but i love it and i am very very happy and i expect that the the our audience our viewers yeah yeah it's in the the same way in the same feeling yeah i expect that yeah i wish i wish yeah i wish so please comment give us your feedback what do you think us do you like or not but give us a like please give your like comment share this content and yeah send us uh yes tinder's uh um names uh uh your name yeah questions suggestions for a new names to us uh and subjects to subject you were expected to to listen to to learn with us i don't know senator yes yeah please so uh and connect with us in linkedin uh instagram twitter telegram yeah all these links is in the description yeah so that's it and visit designteam.com.pr and and i suppose it's a good thing to do buy the book buy her book buy the book the others guess because they made this for us for for help the communication the the market and i don't know if you can buy buy yeah it's important yeah yeah it's important to to have these books in your library personal library because it's an important base for uh information and to be a learning person so yeah in my case i i i read her book i don't know try twice or three times but after i i read the first time i i read the in a freeway in the site but after that i decided to buy and i bought some kind of contribution right yeah yeah yeah uh so that's it okay subscribe the channel and i see you around here share this video in the all the the series uh tagging us in your posts bye bye bye bye [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music]