Facets are Fundamental

It seems that I’ve spent more time customizing my blog than actually writing it, although I have been keeping some private entries about my experience at IBM. They will be used to write a final review of my field experience.

But in other news: I recently read an article from Technical Communication by Abe Crystal, a PhD student at Carolina and presently a colleague at IBM. His article “Facets are Fundamental” makes an excellent point about he direction in which IA needs to move in order to continue to meet users’ needs. Presently, many IA professionals note that a faceted interface is built upon a solid, static organization scheme. Abe asserts that we should lose the static interface and allow the menu should be completely driven by facets. This sounds like it has real potential. I also appreciate the distinction between attributes and facets. While this is highly debated and I might even argue that they are both facets, this distinction is indeed important. While attributes are easily observed from an object, facets are more abstract and need to be created through a human sense-making process. It seems to be more challenging to choose metadata terms for the facets, which may be a challenge to consistency in a large-scale environment. It will be interesting to see where the field moves in the next few years. Additionally, his article seems to be quite relevant to my work at IBM, so I will be diving into it deeper in the next few days.