“Without culture there can be no growth; without exertion, no acquisition; without friction, no polish; without labor, no knowledge; without action, no progress and without conflict, no victory.” – Frederick Douglass, Self-Made Men

I attended the three day Information Architecture (IA) Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania May 1st through 3rd. Over the course of the event, speakers covered numerous IA and UX topics. Of the many topics, two stood out to me both in frequency and in potential personal and professional application. Let’s consider friction and complexity through the lens of taxonomy and ontology practice.

Friction

Friction is an interesting phenomenon in that it is both to be avoided and embraced. Friction is undesirable in machinery, requiring lubricants to keep engines running and avoid heat buildup. Friction in relationships is unpleasant and is avoided through tactful word choice and conversation topic selection. The friction of a space capsule entering the earth’s atmosphere can incinerate it and friction on the rink can stop a skater in his or her tracks. On the other hand, friction between rubber tires and the surface of a road is what keeps motor vehicles from spinning in circles in wet or icy conditions. Friction between the head of match and the striker produces the heat necessary to ignite a flame. Friction in negotiations can potentially lead to a better end solution than either party would have thought of in an uncontested proposition.

User experience (UX) friction is typically to be avoided because it can prevent the user from achieving their desired outcome, whether that be finding information or completing a purchase. The goal of a UX designer is to minimize friction so the user can achieve his or her goals without frustration or task abandonment. Is there good friction in a user experience? In some cases, friction slows the user’s actions for a more thoughtful and productive outcome. Friction may help a user from going down an incorrect navigational path or line of inquiry resulting in unexpected or inaccurate results. The friction is built in to avoid more friction. As one of the speakers pointed out, friction can be a hindrance, but, applied correctly, it can be a help. Specifically, people need friction in order to learn.

The topic of friction resonates with me as a taxonomist because taxonomy needs to be thoughtful and deliberately slowed to maximize the long-term intent and outcomes. Frictionless keyword and tag creation seems like a fantastic idea in the democratization of making information findable. However, as tag clouds, folksonomies, and cumbersome repositories of user-generated tags can attest to, a little friction can prevent a lot of garbage. The nature of taxonomy work is one of calculated friction in the form of strict governance and maintenance processes. Users are not allowed to enter concepts directly into taxonomies and, if they are, the taxonomist’s job is to research the concept thoroughly before adding it permanently to the semantic structure. Governed friction slows the taxonomy creation process to ensure it is accurate, consistent, and serves as a definitive source of information for the organization.

Coincidentally, the topic of friction came up as a common theme in both our work when my wife was describing building redundancies into safety procedures. In her work as a safety specialist, she described the need for two safety hatches when closing an underground water tunnel for maintenance. A single hatch can fail and the workers could drown. With two hatches, one can fail, flood a chamber between the failed hatch and the next, and still allow time for the workers to get to safety while working behind the second hatch. A double safety redundancy is a form of friction. The obstacle between one potential point of failure and another creates a necessary friction which can save lives.

In taxonomy work, there are probably not as many examples in which the wrong taxonomy term can put lives at risk, though they do exist. Wrongly tagged content offered as medical advice can cause risk to a patient. Incorrectly identified drawings based on metadata can result in a manufacturing error. Machine learning models offering suggestions or identifying criminals based on training data tagged from taxonomies must be correct. For many of us creating taxonomies, there may not be the risk of lost lives, but there is probably some kind of risk to a company’s legal compliance or reputation.

In one of the presentations at the IA Conference, the speaker noted that the more friction there is in a system, the less people are likely to share information. We can see this in what can be characterized as the oversharing nature of social media. It is extremely easy to post text, pictures, and videos in any emotional (or inebriated) state of mind, resulting in an outpouring of information which should not necessarily be shared. The lack of friction makes it easy to share information, for better or for worse. Similarly, there is risk of creating too much friction in the taxonomy governance process, resulting in a reluctance to contribute to or use taxonomies. Users may seek out other options as a workaround; less friction, but inherently less quality. It is precisely this balance which must be discovered within an organization: how much friction will end users tolerate without abandoning the use of taxonomy altogether?

Complexity

I believe people gravitate to either/or solutions and black and white thinking because it reduces complexity. While reducing complexity to simple binaries helps us to understand and categorize the world more easily, it also creates a false embodiment of complex systems. Like friction, reducing complexity in user experience is generally a guiding principle. Finding and displaying information should not be complex. The user should be able to find what they need and understand the results quickly…and if not quickly, then efficiently. However, avoiding or obfuscating complexity can have unintended consequences. In one conference session, the speakers explored the use of storytelling to build awareness about complexity, specifically citing the work of Dave Snowden. Storytelling can be used to clarify the information coming from systems. Reducing complex problems to simpler components in order to better analyze or solve them is a good tactic, but there is risk if those components are analyzed or presented as isolated and independent rather than a part of a more complex and nuanced whole. 

My own presentation at the IA Conference also dealt with complexity (based on a blog I wrote on this topic, Specialty Skills and the Risks of Hidden Complexity), specifically the potential complexity of enterprise taxonomies and ontologies and how they can be displayed and consumed to maximum effect without overwhelming end users. Like having too much or too little friction, showing or hiding too much complexity in the form of taxonomies and ontologies can have several risks.

First, the user may not understand what is being presented and the intent behind it. Building taxonomies and ontologies can seem like an esoteric, academic approach to information management when users have to understand why taxonomies are structured the way they are, why they have strict governance procedures, and why complex semantic structures are useful. When all a user wants is a dropdown to select a few metadata values, providing a full set of faceted taxonomies can appear to be an overly engineered solution to a simple problem. Likewise, since fewer people in an organization have backgrounds in information science, the time spent carefully curating semantic models can seem to be a hindrance rather than a help, slowing the path to a deliverable project.

Second, users can be overwhelmed by the sheer scope of enterprise taxonomy models, especially as they mature to cover multiple domains within an organization. For example, if a user needs to apply metadata to data or content, a typeahead dropdown pulling from all possible concepts in a taxonomy will likely be too much for the user to select from. A consequence of this is that with more tagging options, there will be more tagging inconsistency. A complex set of taxonomies bound by a semantically rich ontology will benefit the organization, but presenting everything everywhere all at once will be a frustrating experience.

Finally, hiding complexity to make it easier for end users can have unintended consequences. Taxonomy work can seem simplistic, easy to do, and within reach of any business user. Being too good at hiding semantic complexity can result in users taking up the work themselves, leading to disparate efforts and data sources. Additionally, without a coordinated and governed effort, the “simplicity” of taxonomy work typically results in products which aren’t much better than user-generated keywords, filled with misspellings, variant concepts describing the same thing, a mix of full concepts and acronyms, and a host of other inconsistencies. By hiding complexity, non-practitioners may believe taxonomy construction is easy and quick to complete.

Like calculated friction, it may be beneficial to find a path toward calculated complexity. Determine which user experiences require simple dropdown selections and which may benefit from displaying the entire taxonomy framework, either as a hierarchy or as a visualized graph showing all components of the structure. Somewhere between these two lies a spectrum of user experience options combining simple flat lists, hierarchies, tabbed information displays, graphical representations, hover menus, and a plethora of other displays which are fit-for-purpose to the user goals. Revealing complexity, where appropriate, can expose the range of domain coverage, but also the possibilities that semantic models can offer.

Friction and Complexity

Communicating the value and guiding principles of semantic models and their supporting technologies can be extremely difficult in an enterprise. There are many ways to solve business problems and making the case for what semantic technologies can do, the use cases to which they can be applied, and the advantages they bring can be challenging for taxonomists and ontologists to convey. Considering the nuanced balance between friction and flow, complexity and simplicity, can have application to user experiences and the way we present taxonomies and ontologies to end users. In turn, thoughtful presentations providing the correct amount of friction and complexity can influence adoption across the organization.