Notes - Practicing IA

These are the notes taken by Martha Breil during the SIG.

Presentations

Arnie Lund - Director IA: Sapient

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.

Keith Instone - IA: Previously at Argus Associates

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.

Fran Arble - IA Manager: Capital One

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.

Discussion

Thesauri

• Strategy to scale thesaurus development for smaller companies?
  • Hacks: small scale w/o worrying about compliance to ISO standards.
  • LOC: Pulling subject headings and using them to build thesaurus.
• How many targets do you need to make thesaurus navigation necessary?
  • 10 K?

Challenges in IA role

• IA - www vs. all technologies? Consensus of thread suggests we need to broaden the scope of IA to encompass technologies beyond the WWW.
  • Navigating.
  • Speech - process flow.
  • Wireless.
  • O'Reilly book specific to IA for WWW.
• Tension between the businessperson and pure usability?
  • To achieve IA goals and ensure product meets needs we must find the intersection between IA & process modeling and IA & brand marketing. Once we find it we need to tap into it as IA professionals.
  • Find meeting place between business and the user.
  • eCommerce/web compelling experience allows opportunity to sell and have fun.
• How to capture user's actual needs?
  • Contextual inquiry.
  • Know them.
  • Getting at user's needs depends on how you ask your questions.

Definition of IA

• Interaction Architecture vs. Information Architecture - what's the distinction?
  • Skill set Interaction Architect encompasses indexing but different skill set.
  • Information Architect = Problem solver - happens at lots of web companies.
  • Broadness of definition: Range huge because there is no 1 definition.
• Discrete words: Connotations -- you pull from them.
  • How sell to people who really have no clue?
• Split between people who work in companies with Interaction Architect vs. Information Architect.
• Struggle with clients: hard to sell when you can't define it.
• Someone suggested that the role of an Information Architect was one of a multidiscipline, liaison role.
• Information Architect as Renaissance man is gone. That's why liaison/generalist role might work?

Next steps

• Role based IA for Intranets.
• Adaptive design - changing roles.
• Poll organizations (maybe mail lists) to see expected roles of IA's and use this as basis of future direction.
  • We should expand poll beyond just lists to formal SIG with a committee of people or a team working together - use excuse of the same label to get professionals organized together.
• Interest in practitioners; low-level insight - pros & cons of doing things in different ways.
• Encourage grass-roots efforts and face-to-face conversations.