This is a collection of information from the "Practicing Information Architecture" Special Interest Group meeting at CHI 2001. The SIG was held on April 3, 2001.
This report about the SIG appeared in the November/December 2001 issue of the SIGCHI Bulletin (PDF, 540K).
The purpose of the SIG was to provide a "round table" discussion about how information architecture is being practiced by SIG attendees. In order to set up the discussion, the organizers presented three scenarios for how they practice their trade in their different settings: a technology and business consultancy, a firm that specialized mainly in information architecture development, and a financial services company. This definitely was a hot topic with many attendees standing in the back of the room and many listening in remotely from the halls.
The presentations had an underlying structure of the IAs role in the product development cycle, the process and method for how they practice their work, and their focus on the project.
After the presentation, the floor was opened up to the audience. The discussions included thesauri development practices, challenges in the role of IA in product development, and the continuing debate of defining information architecture. With many flavors for how IA is practiced, it was only natural to hear SIG attendees discuss the overlaps of information architects with fields such as interaction architects, usability testing, and experience designers.
The organizers distributed a survey in conjunction with the presentation in order to understand differences as well as resource discovery in the overlapping fields. The highlights of some of the survey include who are influential people in the field, the education and experience of current practitioners, tools they use to do their job, as well as how they see components of HCI influencing their work.
The organizers provided a venue for the diversity of attendees to discuss the practice of information architecture, promote best practices and cross-pollinate ideas, evaluate tools to support the various stages of developing systems, and educate SIG members interested in entering the field. Expanding the practice of information architecture and leveraging the overlaps with other practices will advance and enhance the usability and satisfaction of information resources, information systems, and software. Workshops and tutorials on how to do information architecture and more venues for discussing IA with the CHI community would be the next logical steps.
These are the notes taken by Martha Breil during the SIG.
Goal: Highlight aspects of IA from Sapient so we (audience) can comment on how their experience relates to ours.
Background: Sapient moved into IA 3 years ago through acquisition of E-Labs in Chicago and Human Code in Austin. These acquisitions resulted in a team of 100 IA's and 100 experience modelers who collected user information from an ethnographic perspective.
Role: Worked with Creative Design team with IA's pulling together configuration management, design, researchers, etc.
Process / Methodology: Strategic: where the ethnographers' needs analysis goes to the IA's who would do iterative testing and prototyping moving towards rapid ethnographic/IA analysis similar to the RAD environment.
Focus: Collaboration: As a new way to build and equip teams within the appropriate information space.
Goal: Users finding information
Content Management: Owners must manage information so users can find it.
Role: Guides rather than doers. Doesn't focus on implementation.
Model: Used a simple, three-circle development model independent of the technology.
Focus: Content. Design focused on the look-n-feel.
Process / Methodology: Basic - fit with clients. Get clients to agree on the strategic direction of IA before moving forward. Used IA in a very strategic way.
Focus: Communication and delivering the right message to our customers/users.
Role: Guides content structure. Doesn't focus on implementation -- hand recommendations off to design team for implementation.
Background: Integrating IA within a Brand Marketing creative group where there was no pre-existing IA presence. Formal integration has happened but still working to more clearly define roles and responsibilities of IA vs. visual designers.
Challenges: 1) Getting in early enough to have impact and balancing IA with pressure to sell. 2) Educating creative group and innovating ways to drive involvement.
The purpose of the survey was to learn about the type of person who would come to a session about information architecture at a CHI conference.
We received 57 semi-completed surveys. We asked the SIG attendees a series of 7 questions that were related to the background, education, resources, and tools that support their IA work.
This is a short summary of the results of the survey, with a lot of links.
Most SIG attendees were from the US, with some nice representation from the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Switzerland.
We all come from a variety of work environments: business and technology consulting firms, academic researchers, academic employees, and Fortune 100 firms.
Listed here are the most influential people who were listed more than once in the survey results. The full list had an interesting variety of people that included academics, mentors, consultants, colleagues and gurus/experts.
The most common professional backgrounds for the attendees were web designers and programmers. "Life before IA" ranged from architects, software engineers, usability engineers and webmasters.
A sampling of some of the attendees' responses: Usability, card sorting methods, user-centered design, task analysis, goal and scenario based design, needs analysis, interaction design, field studies, interviewing, iteration models, mental models, user research, contextual analysis, psychology.
Attendees listed the following:
Software: Visio (33), MS Word (15), MS Power Point (14), Adobe Illustrator (12), Macromedia Dreamweaver (12), Adobe Photoshop (4) and a spattering of various text editors and graphics editors.
Artifacts: flowcharts, wire frames, sitemaps, prototypes, use cases, card sorting, content inventory, client audits, site hierarchies, conceptual diagrams, storyboards, requirements & narratives, blueprints, screen schematics, labeling schemes, outlines and many others techniques related to diagrams and charts.
Supply closet materials: paper, pen, pencil, post-it notes, white boards.