On the flight back to Washington, I struck up a conversation with the gentleman seated next to me and when the discussion reached my job, he asked (and I paraphrase):

Do you think Republicans or Democrats use the internet more effectively?

“Neither,” I answered.

Let’s say the internet is a gun. Every politician knows what it is. Some have handled it, a few have loaded it, and some can even tell you its mechanics (it’s a series of tubes, right?). In the analogy, Howard Dean in 2004 came closest to inflicting injury and Ron Paul is waving one around in public this time around, but no politician really knows what it can do, its true potential for damage, the strategic considerations of its mere existence in a situation.

No one from either party has a killer instinct with it yet. They didn’t sleep with it under the proverbial childhood pillow; their blood doesn’t turn cold knowing the speed of its ammunition. None of them ever shot a man just to watch him die.

Had I visited Montréal when I was 19, buying too much second-hand music, attuned to markers of soi-disant hipness through vodka hazes, and leading a life of dissipation, dressed in dubious vintage, it would’ve been the place I would’ve liked to grow old. It strikes me as a stubbornly unique place, the one city in all of North America that acknowledges its European colonial heritage as integral to its identity — Vieux-Port cobblestones, haute cuisine, and all things vintage — under a Francophone umbrella. Aside from that, learning another language requires an investment of embarrassment and miscommunication, both of which I embodied excessively that awkward year, and the lazy passage of time in Outremont, Mile End, and Plateau would’ve synchronized to my innate rhythms before I accelerated them to workaholic speed.

From my visit with Ky Vinh last year came the recommendation to practice French in Montréal, though the temptation of fluid conversation in English proved overwhelming. I watched Cinema Paradiso at the end of the World Film Festival, tracing its weft and weave from college courses in Italian, my recent familiarity with a French phrasebook, and visual cues — following enough to make me want to understand it now. Sean recounted his screening of Babel in Poland without English subtitles for a section of the narrative in Japanese sign language. And while Star Wars III: Backstroke of the West is the stuff of legend, I personally had the surreal experience of watching “King of the Hill” dubbed en français.

In Chicago, I met Santiago from the University of Minnesota when he ordered a Boddingtons, and we discussed our respective months in the nations of our ethnicity — for him, Madrid. I asked him to advise me a course of activities from the perspective of a Madrileño, and he noted how bullfighting and flamenco as activities of upper-class Spaniards had gypsy origins. We discussed the beauty of Barcelona, the Catalan language barrier and how it stunted his exploration of the place. He had been working with the education-abroad program on campus and had been struggling to quantify travelling’s value in business. I told him: being in a place where one’s language is useless forces one to rely on context to exist and broad, universal gestures to communicate. These experiences where one is forced to rely on fundamental design principles — color paradigms, pictograms, and the like — not only underscore their importance but, and perhaps this is more important, endow one with a unique empathy for the people who rely solely on their consistent implementation for survival.

The father-and-son proprietors of Botines are Catalan. Sean’s description coincides completely with my opinion of the place, so I’ll simply quote it here: “the amazing curiosity/junk shop on St-Laurent, north of Mont-Royal. This is one of the most amazing stores in the world (and ridiculously cheap). I don’t remember what it’s called, or EXACTLY where it is, but if you walk north from Mont Royal on the east side of the road, you’ll come to it in a few minutes. There’ll be some lame stuff outside – bicycle helmets, used books, but STEP IN.” They speak Catalan to each other and communicate with customers in French and English, and they moved to Montreal when the son was one year old.

Over dinner conversation last night, someone else at the table had taken meetings at a Korean company that were simultaneously translated, and he marveled at the translators’ ability to receive one language as input and instantly produce another language — words, inflections, gestures — as output. He noted that once the translators understood the jargon they were repeating, they may very well have been able to add to the discussion in their own right.

The relationship between nationalism and language is a strange beast to me, partially because I hardly feel a sense of belonging anywhere my midland American accent is inconspicuous (and often enjoy places where it is scorned), but mostly because my professional calling has forced me to inhabit a staggering degree of nations. I’ve worked almost entirely in the United States, but producing work for musicians, artists, merchants, universities, and politicians has required me to learn their jargon, to trace the weft and weave of each profession, and pay attention to context. I picked up The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana at Indigo on Sainte-Catherine while looking for postcards, and the plot of it seems appropriate for the situation where I now find myself: an antiquarian book dealer loses his memory and the plot of the novel concerns its reconstruction from childhood onward, reliving the protagonist’s youth as a series of illustrated books, dusty encyclopedias, and pop songs and Fascist anthems on Tuscan radio. Regarding memory, I have the opposite problem, but I’m beginning to realize how my identity now is a sum of cultural experiences and the language I speak is its consequence.

By the way, I am firmly in the Saint-Viateur camp as far as bagels are concerned. Their sesame bagel is possibly the best food value in all of North America — I would love to pit its minimalist greatness against the myriad zings of a King Taco carnitas burrito that entertain the tastebuds. I can’t relive my 19-year-old existence with my 24-year-old knowledge, but it’s possibly more fun to revisit that reckless existence knowing I can afford the cuisine.

In other news, hardly two weeks passed that I was back in Washington — my Chicago trip was just three weeks ago and I’m currently reporting from San Francisco (well, Milpitas, but I was there earlier today and am returning tomorrow), and with not-one-but-two round-trips to Los Angeles in pre-production, a New York daytrip the week after next, and a day in-transit to Manila early 2008, it’s tempting to measure my life in boarding passes, foreign currencies, and postcards sent. And though it’s my spoken ambition to calibrate my existence to the basic unit of a transcontinental flight, my worst-kept secret is that I’d like to land somewhere and know, quietly, sincerely, that I’ll be understood.

While we had anecdotal evidence from our customers and the general public that the House search engine is below-standard, even the barest of data sets now indicates the degree of antipathy we apparently have for site visitors. After manually searching the most frequent queries on House.gov (see a table of the terms and top-ten results of each), I have arrived at the following initial conclusions:

• Most of the 970 results are found returned from the Energy and Commerce Committee’s website from the 107th Congress (2001-2002). Their webmaster at the time ([my current supervisor]) said he did nothing to optimize the site’s pages for the House search engine. Generally speaking, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to how the algorithm determines relevance.
• Queries are, in fact, case-sensitive. “Nancy Pelosi” and “nancy pelosi” produce different quantities of results, but the most “relevant” of each query are nearly identical. Commonly used search engines (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) are not case-sensitive.
• Queries for singular and plural nouns are identical. “committee” and “committees” produce the exact same results.
• The Pell Grant Underfunding PDF by the Oversight Committee that appears in the top-ten results of most state searches deserves further scrutiny. How this managed to be considered more relevant than any member-generated page in Colorado, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas is worth determining.
• Pages and documents produced by Energy and Commerce, Foreign Affairs, and Ways and Means Committees form a clear plurality of all results. I can proffer no explanation.
• There is no apparent weight given to the title of a document. Untitled documents are not subdued in the results.
• The search engine’s inability to discern titles of non-HTML documents (PDFs, MS Office docs, etc.) is a glaring drawback. In a screen reader’s links mode, “No Title Provided for This Document” is a sadistic running joke, a more verbose take on the “click here” gag.
• The decision to keep House leadership links off the home page of House.gov last year was made in insipience (not mine, thank you). Ten of the tested queries are for House leadership; six are variations on Nancy Pelosi or Speaker of the House, and two of those are among the top-ten most frequent queries. None of the top-ten results for any leadership queries is a page from any leadership site.
• I haven’t determined the criteria and percentage yet, but my generous estimate is that 15% of the results are at least relevant in the way that someone who can only write their own name is literate. The number of first-results that are relevant is less than the number of successful Apollo moon landings.
• I have not yet codified “valuable” as opposed to “relevant” search results, but we know them when we see them. Of the 97 queries, only two produced a valuable first-result.
• An enterprise search engine should provide reporting of this nature automatically, regularly, and with much more robust data (like click-through rates for different results, detailed session data, etc.). The existing search engine does not provide this kind of reporting, and without this information, it diminishes our ability to make sound information architecture decisions. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson: it is not only dull itself, it is the cause of dullness in others.

What I expected to encounter was a way to address customer complaints through improved metadata and other SEO techniques to compensate for a search engine that doesn’t dig deeply enough. What I discovered is that the current search engine doesn’t merely produce worthless results: it willfully and flagrantly leads site visitors astray. A piquant example of the insurmountable distance between visitors’ expectations and this engine’s results is that a search for ‘contact’ — the 14th most frequent query, and of the 97, the one with the most results (157,508) — yields not an overall House directory (which doesn’t exist) or any contact information of any kind for any House office in the first 25 results. Instead, the first 25 results feature testimony by staff of 1-800-CONTACTS from a 2002 Energy and Commerce Committee hearing, PDFs from the Foreign Affairs Committee (whoever ‘Dianne’ is should be determined and she should be consulted since she apparently also knows the secret to breaking into the top search results), and the 9/11 Commission report at #24.

I believe that this wisp of foul data not only crystallizes the argument to replace the existing search engine but that ceasing its use immediately — removing search from House.gov until a replacement is implemented — is an improvement and deserves serious consideration. Providing a search form is an affordance of goodwill and a best practice; attaching that form to this search engine is not merely indifferent but malicious. How this search engine was ever considered good enough for government work is an enigma, but that a half-decade of consideration has passed on how best to end its miserable existence is contemptible.

If my candor seems excessive, I recommend attempting the same 97 searches I performed; the mounting frustration from each scatalogically defective set of results all but led to a 98th search for a long drink and a short firearm. That site visitors give up on House.gov after one search is my hope. My recommendation is to spare them the experience.

This analysis is an early stage in a planned report of information architecture recommendations for House.gov and Member sites — I intend to parse this data further and research site traffic patterns to draw more conclusions and detailed recommendations. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to your feedback. Thanks for reading.

The preceding email was sent at 02:39 -0400 to all Web Solutions staff.

When I was first in Chicago, I was five years old, between a bus from Toronto and a train to Los Angeles — though not my official point of entry into the United States, it has defied its own insignificance — a mere fingerprint on The Bean, if you will — and, with Burger King French toast sticks, become an integral part of this immigrant’s narrative. My memory allows little more than that I was there, but this time, two days in the august company of squared-shoed and trapezoid-spectacled enemies of my enemies, I know to take pictures, to take notes.

Notes on An Event Apart, Chicago 2007.

“Dealing With The Both of You” by Jim Coudal was, depending on one’s ability to extrapolate useful information from sots and blood from rocks, either the total summation of An Event Apart or a phenomenally absurd rant. Local bar as “conference room B”? I get it, but this is not practical advice for people in conservative corporate environments who still are compelled to work creatively in order to support their families. Who in this context would seriously leave the office mid-day for a shot and a brew, even under the ægis of sparking productivity? Imagine this exchange:

“Honey, what’s the fifty-dollar charge at Neighborhood Pub on the 18th of last month?”
“That? I had a few beers because I needed inspiration.”

And I like I needed inspiration as a riposte for when the designer’s significant other leaves the designer’s unemployed verging-on-alcoholic ass for someone else.

Nevertheless, what I feel should have been expanded upon was that concept of eavesdropping, the idea that design is inherently social and (oh, this would’ve been an appropriate segue from Zeldman’s talk) while we all may not (want to) be drinkers and chain-smokers, we can still — even with families or uptight colleagues in tow — engage strangers and the unsuspecting public in developing our understanding of the social context in which our work will exist. And given that, the fact that I gained more from the individual seminars than the open bar in between its two days is a testament to the quality of the conference as a whole.

The two seminars that engaged me most were delivered by the two speakers about whom I knew the least — Lou Rosenfeld and Luke Wroblewski — rich in case studies and delving into facets of the field where there sadly isn’t much in the way of common sense, and completely applicable to present and future career development. I would have gladly alloted the latter presentation another half-hour or more (Luke unfortunately hastened his discussion of selection dependent inputs to not exceed his hour).

At the end of Lou’s presentation on Monday, I cornered him in the lobby outside the ballroom to discuss the application of his presentation in my workplace and the possibility of consulting my colleagues. When I revealed my employer to him, the discussion moved towards the state of information architecture on federal government websites — as we headed back into the ballroom at the end of the break, after he asked how long I’d been proverbially mining salt, he followed up with (and I paraphrase) “do you look forward to work when you wake up in the morning?” My incremental implementation of web standards and advocacy of accessibility and usability probably counteracts the few occasions I’m compelled to act immorally, and he agreed with me when I acknowledged that the impression these positive changes leaves in my present circumstance, however light, is made indelible in a way no other employer will likely match.

The rest of the conference had its highlights: the ethics of AJAX (Jeremy Keith), keyboard-navigable Google Maps (Derek Featherstone), and Dan, I believe in microformats now — time to get myself properly on XFN and cobble together a favicon for this place. In the company of a younger cachet of attendees (and presenters) at the Billy Goat Tavern, double cheeseburgers by the half-dozen. Derek also provided the oh shit jawdropper of the moment — before you click through, ask yourself the question: how does one semantically structure a crossword puzzle in HTML?

Chicago, as a city, is a fascinating read — I skimmed it briefly on a Sunday afternoon river tour — with all the tropes of American industrial cities for the last half century (including a present obsession with condominiums), colored by the permanent yet malleable memory carried by the survival of a tragic fire in childhood. I had a killer view of its outline from my 42nd-floor hotel room (your tax dollars hard at work) — it feels at once singular and indistinguishable, a Mies van der Rohe wet dream, like New York without the self-parody, like Washington without the dysfunctional grid.

I plan to return to there, to feel out more of the city than Wrigley Field (Cubs won), the Blue Line, and the bar crawl at O’Hare (actually, my flight today connects there), and I may have outgrown hostels for the B&B circuit.

Apropos nothing, when’s the last time you encountered Amish people at an airport?At any rate, my next travelogue will recap my coming time to Montreal (22 and 8, for those of you keeping score). Au Pied du Cochon, Librissime, Cluny ArtBar — good signs it will join Cambridge on The List. And three days of Chicago, two of An Event Apart — though they are but fingerprints on the surface of memory, that may be as much of an impression one may need to leave to be remembered forever.