Wednesday April 5, 2006 / 3 Comments
Classifying Information Architects - Another View
So, I was looking over my last post, wondering if there was a better way to communicate how the ‘Digital IAs’ (someone got a better label? Please!) have a broader, if less specialized, set of skills— doing both content IA and application IA only at a smaller scale. This is the resulting visual:
The scale of the project goes up and down (from a small business/startup to the large Enterprise) and the focus moves left to right from structuring content to structuring applications (which has more to do with interaction design).
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On Apr 11, 12:10 PM Dan Brown said
I find most of my work in the upper-right quadrant these days, and I hardly classify as either West Coast or Hipster. (Always trying to classify stuff…) I’m building enterprise-wide applications… Did this group get lost in your analysis?
Otherwise, I dig this diagram. I suppose the next step is, so what?
On Apr 12, 02:19 PM Stephen said
Odd. From what I heard, I’d peg you as the upper left quadrant. How much of the content/knowledge management UI and process flows are you structuring compared to time spent on controlled vocabulary, meta data—configuring [selected knowledge management app]? (The ‘west coast’ and ‘hipster’ labels came from various conversations I had.)
From my personal experience, most of the Bright Corner (now Geniant) folks have grown up out of the bottom half of this model, and are now clearly in the upper right—an example being an ongoing application we’ve been building which has 200+ unique screens. This is clearly different from say my side project, a small Web2.0 style app.
So what… (Always keep this question coming!)
Well, I’m using this as a simple communication tool internally to highlight that not all “IAs” are ready to tackle the same types of projects. At Geniant what is technically a User Experience team is cast/labeled as Information Architects, which presents some difficulties explaining why an IA (interface designer) isn’t the right person for an enterprise level content analysis type project. I’m trying out this and Peter Boersma’s model as tools for quickly explaining to a sales person the range of IA (and UX) roles. That’s one reason. The other intent (going back to my original post) is to comment on (and start a conversation among?) the range of people identifying themselves with the same title of Information Architect, who have very little knowledge of each other or what each ‘tribe’ has to offer the other.
On May 7, 02:15 PM Peter Boersma said
Well, since you were kind enough to mention my model, I thought I’d throw in my 2 cents :-)
I like this model, it’s got some good stuff in it, like the distinction between content-heavy and interaction heavy, same as in Jesse James Garrett’s layers of user experience.
I’d call the left-hand side Little IA and the right-hand side Big IA if it was more about design (and less about structure). And about the Nouveau Digital IA: wasn’t that called “web designer” a while ago? :-) My new term for this area is Guerilla IA, after Jakob Nielsen’s definition of Guerilla Usability; it’s about shallow IA skills that are used by non-IAs. Oh, and I guess Lou Rosenfeld would like to see the Enterprise IA’s be called just that: Enterprise IAs.
Good luck with explaining our field!