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.