Everyone is an IA [Information Architecture] by Dan Ramsden.
From the post:
This is a post inspired by my talk from World IA Day. On the day I had 20 minutes to fill – I did a magic trick and talked about an imaginary uncle. This post has the benefit of an edit, but recreates the central argument – everyone makes IA.
Information architecture is everywhere, it’s a part of every project, every design includes it. But I think there’s often a perception that because it requires a level of specialization to do the most complicated types of IA, people are nervous about how and when they engage with it – no-one like to look out of their depth. And some IA requires a depth of thinking that deserves justification and explanation.
Even when you’ve built up trust with teams of other disciplines or clients, I think one of the most regular questions asked of an IA is probably, ‘Is it really that complicated?’ And if we want to be happier in ourselves, and spread happiness by creating meaningful, beautiful, wonderful things – we need to convince people that complex is different from complicated. We need to share our conviction that IA is a real thing and that thinking like an IA is probably one of the most effective ways of contributing to a more meaningful world.
But we have a challenge, IAs are usualy the minority. At the BBC we have a team of about 140 in UX&D, and IAs are the minority – we’re not quite 10%. It’s my job to work out how those less than 1 in 10 can be as effective as possible and have the biggest positive impact on the work we do and the experiences we offer to our audiences. I don’t think this is unique. A lot of the time IAs don’t work together, or there’s not enough IAs to work on every project that could benefit from an IA mindset, which is every project.
This is what troubled me. How could I make sure that it is always designed? My solution to this is simple. We become the majority. And because we can’t do that just by recruiting a legion of IAs we do it another way. We turn everyone in the team into an information architect.
Now this is a bit contentious. There’s legitimate certainty that IA is a specialism and that there are dangers of diluting it. But last year I talked about an IA mindset, a way of approaching any design challenge from an IA perspective. My point then was that the way we tend to think and therefore approach design challenges is usually a bit different from other designers. But I don’t believe we’re that special. I think other people can adopt that mindset and think a little bit more like we do. I think if we work hard enough we can find ways to help designers to adopt that IA mindset more regularly.
And we know the benefits on offer when every design starts from the architecture up. Well-architected things work better. They are more efficient, connected, resilient and meaningful – they’re more useful.
…
Dan goes onto say that information is everywhere. Much in the same way that I would say that subjects are everywhere.
Just as users must describe information architectures as they experience them, the same is true for users identifying the subjects that are important to them.
There is never a doubt that more IAs and more subjects exist, but the best anyone can do is to tell you about the ones that are important to them and how they have chosen to identify them.
To no small degree, I think terminology has been used to disenfranchise users from discussing subjects as they understand them.
From my own background, I remember a database project where the head of membership services, who ran reports by rote out of R&R, insisted on saying where data needed to reside in tables during a complete re-write of the database. I keep trying, with little success, to get them to describe what they wanted to store and what capabilities they needed.
In retrospect, I should have allowed membership services to use their terminology to describe the database because whether they understood the underlying data architecture or not wasn’t a design goal. The easier course would have been to provide them with a view that accorded with their idea of the database structure and to run their reports. That other “views” of the data existed would have been neither here nor there to them.
As “experts,” we should listen to the description of information architectures and/or identifications of subjects and their relationships as a voyage of discovery. We are discovering the way someone else views the world, not for our correction to the “right” way but so we can enable their view to be more productive and useful to them.
That approach takes more work on the part of “experts” but think of all the things you will learn along the way.
