[Sigia-l] the "small agency" syndrome

[Anne Hjortshoj]

Maybe the correct answer is: the person who should handle the IA is the
person with the most talent in that area.

If a PM can translate requirements into a structural design, great.
Same goes for the visual designer.

However: In my experience, PMs have performed admirably when asked to
develop requirements, and less well when acting as IAs. I don't know why
this is .... the thing that seemed to happen most often when PMs acted as
IAs was that every web site ended up with the same structure.

I have also encountered designers who don't do well as IAs. But it really
does depend on the person.

-Anne

On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, Saffer, Dan wrote:

> Speaking as a former PM, back in 95-97, before the IA role had been established, it was usually the PM who did the IA work, especially at small agencies like the ones I worked for. There were typically four roles: front-end coder, back-end programmer, visual designer, and PM. Anything that the others didn't do, the PM (or Producer) did. This included IA, copywriting, business requirements, etc. 
> 
> It's not necessarily a bad thing to have someone like a PM with a grasp of the whole project doing the IA work--I usually end up having to know a little bit of everything about a project to do it successfully anyway--as long as the person can switch hats and can focus on user goals, not business (or technical or visual design) goals. As Jesse James Garrett pointed out in an essay recently (http://www.jjg.net/ia/recon/#part5) most of what we think of as IA work isn't going to be done by specialists, but by jack-of-all-trade types (like PMs).
> 
> Dan
> 
> d a n   s a f f e r  .  sr. ui architect
> datek | big think    .  dsaffer at datek.com
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