[Sigia-l] IA Practice Maturation

[eric mahleb]

I left San Francisco a couple of years ago to work in
Europe. My main exposure has been Germany, France, and
a couple of other countries in "continental" Europe. I
am excluding the UK and Scandinavia from my remarks
since they tend to keep up with the US fairly well
when it comes to IA and Usability

However, from my personal experience, continental
Europe continues to be behind the US by a couple of
years when it comes to IA and Usability (and User
Experience, Experience Design, User Intelligence,
Interaction Design)

As a matter of fact, in most agencies or companies
that i have been in some form of contact with, the
terms IA and Usability are still fairly unknown.
Except for a handfull of avant guardists spread out
across the continent, most agencies still rely on
their designers (meaning mostly graphic designers) and
developers to come up with the concept, structure,
organization, interaction and usability, which is
naturally, most of the time lacking

Since i was working for a US company, we brought most
of the tools with us. While i have seen some ideas
coming out of various European agencies or
institutions re. usability and IA, i have not directly
found or used any new "European" tools to help us in
our day to day work. Most of us found our inspiration
and knowledge in the latest from the US

Things are changing, but very very slowly...to this
day, i have seen very few companies here in Germany
who are willing to invest in IAs or Usability experts
without first being 100% convinced that there is a
strong ROI associated with it (after of course first
explaining what these fields are all about...)
This is the challenge that we face here: to go around
and preach the gospel of IA and Usability, the way it
was started in the US several years ago

For the minority of talented IAs and Usability people
in "continental" Europe, please do not take offense to
my comments. I am of course generalizing based on my
own personal experience

cheers
eric




--- Peter Merholz <peterme at peterme.com> wrote:
> So, last night we had a meeting of the San Francisco
> IA/UE cocktail hour.
> 
> In attendance was Very Special Guest Victor
> Lombardi, who works at Razorfish
> in NY, but was doing a stint in Razorfish's San Jose
> office. We took
> advantage of his presence to address the question,
> "Is there a difference
> between west coast and east coast IA?"
> 
> The answer, according to Victor, and quite a few
> others in the room: No.
> 
> This interested me. Back In The Day (oh, early
> 1998), there definitely was.
> I found myself in New York working on a 3 month
> project for Studio
> Archetype, and I was shocked at how far behind the
> New York New Media scene
> was, compared to the SF web design scene, when it
> came to information
> architecture. The following year, I spoke at
> Edgewise 99, and such disparity
> still seemed to be the case.
> 
> But now, in 2002, it seems that, for all intents and
> purposes, the practice
> of IA has matured to the point where, no matter
> where you are in the
> country, it's done pretty much the same way (recent
> transplants from Atlanta
> were able to confirm this). (There was, however, a
> lot of evidence that IA
> is practiced differently in non-English-speaking
> countries than in English
> speaking countries... I'd love to hear more about
> that on this list.)
> 
> At least, there doesn't seem to be a geographic
> basis for different IA
> practices. There is still something of a
> disciplinary basis for different
> practices -- those who come from an LIS background
> do things differently
> than those who come from a design-for-understanding
> background -- but even
> those differences are smoothing out. We're all
> recognizing that folks from
> other backgrounds have something to offer, and we're
> listening, attentively.
> This, for me, was one of the big takeaways of the IA
> Summit -- it wasn't
> about doing IA "my way". It was sharing all of our
> ways of practice.
> 
> Because no one else has said it, I thought I would
> -- I think this is an
> important step in the development of our field. That
> we're hitting upon a
> common toolset, methodology, and practice for
> approaching our work.
> 
> Which leads me to wonder, "what are the next steps?"
> And for me, the most
> obvious is figuring out how to expand/extend this
> methodological maturation
> and sensitivity to a wider area of interactive
> design. There are still
> hurdles when "IA types" work with "graphic design
> types" on Web projects.
> Let's be explicit in figuring out how to work
> together, from our particular
> backgrounds, to achieve common goals.
> 
> Another point of extension, which Victor mentioned,
> is building a bridge to
> more of the hardcore technical types--the database
> administrators, computer
> programmers, systems engineers, and other folks
> whose systems we will
> increasingly rely upon, and whose systems need to be
> increasingly aware of
> our requirements.
> 
> Anyway, some thoughts for hump day. I look forward
> to hearing others'
> thoughts and comments..
> 
> --peter
> ==========================
> Join me on Adaptive Path's Tour 2002
> http://adaptivepath.com/events
> 
> Content Management Symposium, Chicago O'Hare
> Marriott, June 28 - 30.
> See http://www.asis.org/CM
> _______________________________________________
> Sigia-l mailing list
> Sigia-l at asis.org
> http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigia-l


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