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.

“Thanks for remembering,” she started to say after I’d wished her a happy birthday. “I thought I was special but then you have that crazy memory for numbers.”

There is something about numbers — their exactness, perhaps — that once allowed them to embed in my memory as a pincushion, but the etchings of California addresses, reed strengths, sports statistics, and phone numbers from my life before the mobile-phone era, before the days when all of my contacts’ numbers were at hand, upon my grey matter are eroding. My once formidable random-access reservoir of numerical memory now traffics only the arrays that I utilize most often — airfare averages, Chinatown bus schedules, and of course, hexidecimal color codes and percentages and pixel values of the grids of projects in progress — the stuff of cascading style sheets.

So I’ve remade this site, two years older than when I first set to refashion this domain as a portfolio of past works and an ongoing documentation of works interminably ‘in progress,’ what R. Buckminster Fuller anointed a chronofile, what is in contemporary parlance, frumpishly, a blog. The former is still, I loathe to say, in progress, but the latter and the peripheral-personal are dressed, and the time seems right to publish the whole of it if only to open myself up to greater external pressure to finish the remainder.

Then again, if not for the two-year delay, I would not have been able to build the scalable site I’d envisioned so quickly and independently but for the aid of the people PHP-slinging deities who developed WordPress for the human race — further acknowledgments for other methods of presentation are included with Specifications. I certainly wouldn’t have approached the enterprise with the present humility — experience in the trade, harsh reality, and a bit of traveling have scrubbed away most of my notions of an existence above topsoil, innumerable hair follicles, and of course, that bit with the numbers.

But I was never a savant. The secret to my retention of birthdays — in my 2000 calendar, I wrote the names of family, friends, and acquaintances in the days corresponding to their birthdays. As I entered new social circles, I added names to the calendar, and as the years passed, I wrote those names again, and later initials. This year, I represented each person with a hashmark on the line above their date of birth.

My first graphic design commission was a calendar, 9″ x 12″, one signature with covers, four-color. The whole of it was set in Myriad, laid out in Adobe (nee Aldus) PageMaker. I was 15 years old then.

And this thing is, true to form, tautly coded standards-compliant XHTML at the content layer, manipulated by modularized CSS 2 at the presentation layer. Browser-formatted text is rendered in Georgia (or whatever your browser decides is the serif typeface du jour); graphical headings are set in Univers Bold Condensed. Voluta Script Pro is also among the proceedings, though intentionally illegible. Despite that, it still conforms to Section 508 of the United States’ Rehabilitation Act. (Note: the accessibility testing isn’t yet done. There are still test environments that haven’t yet been resolved: all Linux browsers, the iPhone, and super-high resolutions (2000+ x 1500+). A CSS kill yields some weirdness — mostly me learning WordPress as I go, but I think I’ve picked out most of it.)

For as seemingly fussy as the code is, the content, and sometimes, the presentation is left a little more to chance — chalk this up to the two-year delay. The clearest (and most fun, for me at least) example of this is on my categorized list of Bookmarks — when you visit that page, try refreshing it a few times. Each list draws randomly from two arrays that give it its typographical formatting in addition to its overall padding values. The latter are sequences of four random numbers (in a range from zero to 35) I requested from family, friends, and acquaintances, because the numbers I used in the original design didn’t appear random enough.

The original numbers? People’s birthdays.

“The Road to Clarity” reminds me of the assignment from The Cheese Monkeys where the students of Introduction to Graphic Design have to hitchhike on a snowy day—it’s a flash marketing, personal branding/image management, and hand-lettering exercise with life-and-death overtones. And if you don’t appreciate the article, you’ll probably never understand the scope of my ambition (or fathom the true depths of my depression at its unintended thwarting). It’s a 4500-word parallel to my professional profile: aesthetics, psychology, history, geometry, the primacy of text, glyphs as polygons, words as constructions, the value of slow and imperceptible processes, the unheralded influence of Helmut Krone, design as social activism, quixotic frustration with bureaucracy, battles against halation, and the open road.

Double bourbon. She looks back, waiting for a call. Make it hurt.

She sets a pint glass before me filled to a third of its height as I down the last of my blacksmith. And another one of these. Kill the bourbon, pen down on the back of the report.

1. Hypothesis
An ethical and existential crisis of web design.
The semantics of a “virtual” presence; the problem of “virtual.”

First three pages on modes of technology adoption and diffusion. Then it gets ugly.

There was strikingly little effort by offices to proactively assess what constituents wanted. In fact, only a single office indicated any type of research into what their constituents wanted.

She checks my beer, half down. “You alright?” I’ve had better days. “Work?” I take my beer down another inch.

To be better at my job requires my clients to be better at theirs. My clients are members of Congress. Being better at my job has tangible benefits for this world.

In short, search (and diffusion) largely takes place at the tip of the iceberg—offices looking at each others’ web practices, but not talking to each other frequently, and when they talk to each, rarely delving into issues beyond vendor-related issues. We do not have a definitive explanation for this. This may be partly because offices do not look at each other as prime sources of best practices, as one individual explains:

[Q: Have you talked to other people around the Hill who are running their websites] I haven’t really, because, to be honest with you, there aren’t a lot of people who really know web design that well.

2. Solution.
Core: empathy.
Ultimately, the process of building a better website relies on being a better person.

Two tumblers of Jameson. Another blacksmith, shrugs a “well, how did that get there?” as she passes. More Jameson, “I hope this puts the day in perspective.” Jagermeister for three as the fellow to my left closes out his tab—to the lady in black. We sing Sinatra with the juke box. For it’s hard, you will find, to be narrow of mind …

I am so rarely disappointed with research methods these days, though I don’t feel similarly about the conclusions these easy discoveries suggest. Join the right mailing lists and reports like this will find you. We do not have a definitive explanation for this … there aren’t a lot of people who really know web design that well. Pushed content, semantic web browsing, meta keywords, friend-of-a-friend algorithms—in the rush to customize and personalize, what is the value of a bad search? Look at all you’ll derive just by being alive.

What are the benefits of a democratic form of government?

And here is the best part: you have a head start … she lifts her left arm above her head, the handle of the umbrella tattooed over her radial and ulnar arteries just above a displaced lock of black hair, just as every incandescent bulb in the room dilates and my glass goes transparent.

“The name on the tab?” I paid cash for the first blacksmith, after: nothing. She disappears. Good money in cauterizing wounded minds if you’ve a blowtorch and charge by the ounce—it’s my fortune on this night that she minds the flame but not the bill, but before I can register my gratitude in cash, a tattooed neck above an A-shirt demands I leave the premises.

Anyone can pass their days with a modicum of sensitivity; to truly excel at anything requires empathy. Sometimes that manifests as real constituent service, and sometimes that leads to getting a customer kicked-out drunk for the price of his first beer. And sometimes, if a modicum of sensitivity pays the bills, it’s pragmatic to pass a few of one’s days rather than burn one’s goodwill for those who have little of their own.

I learned today about Peter Schweizer’s editorial in USA Today about Al Gore not using renewable energy sources to power his own home even though they’re available in the metropolitan markets where he resides, Washington, DC among them. To which my first thought was not oh, the hypocrisy, but, why the hell am I not using renewable energy sources to power my own home?

So in ten days, I will be—though not without some effort. From the Pepco site where I track my account online, I finally located information on green power two branded websites away—through the DC Public Service Commission and then through the ostensibly separate Pepco Energy Services site (although Pepco will still be my electricity provider, though I’ve switched service plans). If this isn’t part of an effort to prevent residential customers from choosing renewable energy sources, then this is classically bad web design.

The first place I looked on the first Pepco site (and the only one I knew at the time) was under ‘Safety & Conservation,’ which turned out to be useful information like a refresher course on turning the lights off when you’re not in a room where there’s abundant sunshine filtering through a window and why you shouldn’t execute electrical outlets with Super Soaker firing squads, but didn’t answer my inquiry. The answer was (still reasonably intuitively) located under the heading of ‘Choices & Rates.’ Then it got dicey.

Choose the state—fair enough, since different laws apply. My first inclination here was to rifle through the column of links that appeared below ‘District of Columbia,’ which were illuminating insofar as deciphering the bill I paid blindly in my monthly ritual, although in fact, the pertinent link to follow is in the ten-pixel tightly-leaded Arial content of the landing page, one that leads to the aforementioned DC Public Service Commission site, then to Pepco Energy Services. The latter site is nothing special—a perfunctory electronic brochure—but its failure is that it functions like an eCommerce site insofar as it uses terms like ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Checkout’ but doesn’t visually cue the visitor (no global shopping cart link?) to expect the process when selecting their service options. I could go on, preaching how design can save the environment.

I watched An Unreasonable Man on Saturday night, met Ralph Nader, bought his book. And for as much as Democrats, liberals, and just an assortment of sane people have branded him the scapegoat for the horrors that have befallen American politics the past six years, consider that the official margin of victory in Florida was 537 votes, which was less than any candidate for any other party received—blame could just have easily been laid on the doorstep of Pat Buchanan. I’m not sure whether or not my mother blames Nader for the second Bush presidency, but when we discuss the 2004 election (which any Democrat should’ve won considering Bush’s miserable first term), it irks her that I don’t blame Karl Rove or swift boat veterans but web designers.

There’s no math on how much the growing internet-usage habits of Americans affect how they respond to politicians—I would know because I sought it out, and with contacts at the Pew Internet & American Life Project and FirstGov, attempted to parse it from pre-existing statistics. We came to no conclusions, but the circumstantial evidence is compelling. Not only is internet usage de rigeur, but broadband internet usage is becoming a norm as well—it’s not enough that it’s a phone call away, but it must be always available and always fast. And as it replaces television and print media as sources of news for the American electorate, who’s to say that an accessible and substantive issue-driven website for Gore in 2000 doesn’t pick up 538 indisputable votes in Florida? Again, I could go on, preaching how design can save the environment, prevent war, and save lives.

The New York Times ran Paula Scher’s graphical analysis of the two presidential campaign logos from 2004 that showed just how little analytical thinking was done by designers for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, and I wish I still had access to the two 2004 campaign sites to perform a similar dissection. Nevertheless, my first thought at the 2004 election results was not oh, Nader again—actually, it was cold, dread-driven escapism, spiked by one of the most surreal Irish drinking songs ever—but it tempered to, what the hell could each of us have done in 2000 and 2004 to have made sure George W. Bush would not be president?

For me, a better website is a start. Powering my dropped-ceiling condominium with renewable captured methane gas is something, too.

In my line of work, it would behoove me to have a precise definition of what Web 2.0 is. It’s been suggested that it’s marketing departments jerking off to AJAX. I think it has more to do with tag clouds.

The evening past I ventured to the PostSecret exhibit in Georgetown and bemused myself with the secrets of strangers (in the company of strangers, natch)—the gallery space was surprisingly well-populated, and among the crowd was the artist/curator himself. He asked if I wanted to buy a copy of his book, which I couldn’t at the time. I’ll come back in January. I complimented him nevertheless—the concept is ingenious and the execution is staggering (I say this with just the slightest envy).

I am compelled to execute a project at least the scope and breadth of The Minimalls of Downey, California, something that can similarly be made even through stretches bereft of intellectual momentum to construct and compose. What is PostSecret really but a compilation of shame and vulnerability, volunteered by individuals not directly involved in the creation of the phenomenon in the promise of closure with one’s self? What is Web 2.0 really but a compilation of hyperlinked personality traits, volunteered by individuals not directly involved in the creation of the phenomenon in the promise of finding a like soul?

What is my next move, I wonder aloud too often. (Just the slightest.)