Information Architecture Archives
Designer or Information Architect?
December 15, 2005 | 29 Comments (Closed)
I think I’ve said before that there is a pretty fuzzy line between IA and Design on the Web. Heck, on the IAI mailing list they are constantly “defining the damn thing” and it’s been that way for-ev-er. You’d think a bunch of people who make a living classifying and labeling things could nail down their own profession. You’d be wrong.
I know how it is though. I feel that my skills and experience (at least when it comes to that stuff) lie smack-dab in between the two. In my current role I’m tending to lean a bit more toward the “design” side of things and while I really enjoy it, I’m finding out that I’m much more of a strategic designer than I am a visual designer.
That’s not to say what I do isn’t creative — not at all — only that my approach to design is very strategic. For example, I find myself spending much more time trying to understand and define the structure of a page than I do the visual elements.
Nick (Finck, our “IA guy”) would say, “dude, you’re an Information Architect, don’t worry about it.” Which in many ways is true, however I feel as a designer I spend more time thinking about how things look than most IAs would. I also see IA differently than many. To me it’s more of an art than a science. Do you see where I’m going?
In my mind a Web designer has to be a bit of an Information Architect. When I work with Nick I take his stuff and tweak it so that it looks good, but I also put a whole lot of thought into the same stuff he does. I weigh business goals against user goals and I try to envision how people will interact with my designs as well as how they’ll feel about them. In the process I pull his wireframes apart and put them back together again.
A truly great Web design is one that looks great and is strategically well aligned. This is where Web designers and IAs should live. Embrace the grey area and learn to love the fuzzy-line between the two — that’s my advice.
Has anyone else thought about this? I’m curious to know if there are lots of folks out there in the same boat.
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Good Examples of Tagging
July 05, 2005 | 
12 Comments
As an information architect I spend lots of time thinking about how information is organized and how people go about finding that information. Findability is probably the main focus of what I do when I’ve got my IA hat on.
So, as you can imagine, I’m pretty interested in how folksonomies, tagging and user-organized systems effect how we organize and retrieve information.
I’m not one of the folks who’s either in favor of folksomomies or against them. I see them as being very useful in some cases and less useful in others.
It all depends on how they’re used and the goals of the project they’re used for. For user created content and micro-content, as an example, tagging seems to be a natural fit. Let’s take a look at a few examples where I think user tagging works well.
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Content Brief
May 16, 2005 | 8 Comments
I’ve written about, and we’ve talked about, the difficulties in dealing with content for the Web. I think many of you agree with me that content is probably the hardest part of getting any kind of Web site up and running and that it’s made especially so when it comes to working with content outside of your own control.
I know that over the years this has been the single largest source of headaches for me when dealing with clients and internal stakeholders. Even at Boeing, where I had dedicated writer and editors, the content issue would present itself as an almost daily problem.
At my current gig it seems that getting the content we need is the single biggest barrier to making sure our sites are as good as can be. I’ve been trying very hard, to varying degrees of success, to find ways to make our experience with clients and content easier.
One that shows great promise is the use of a content brief.
Filed under: Content | Permanent Link