[spam] Re: The Value of "IA" or Whatnot, was Re: [Sigia-l] The New Nielsen?

[Andrew Hinton]

It's not hard to overemphasize one thing over another when someone's
approach feels unbalanced to us.

What is hard: trying to get our heads around the thing we work with.

The Web is a world unto itself. To reduce it to any level of simplicity that
would be absurd in the physical world would be just as absurd in the Web
world.

The problem is, we don't understand the Web world yet. Even though it's our
own creation, it mystifies us. The more we know, the more we don't.

The business web is as different from the entertainment web as a board
meeting is from laser tag. It's so tempting to graft rules from one to the
other, since it's all the same bunch of clicks and widgets. But, hey, there
are fewer letters in the alphabet than there are HTML tags, and look how
endless the variations get with language.

We really don't understand what we've wrought. I'm not sure we ever will.

Of course that could just be the doughnuts talking. Krispy Kreme has this
new triple-chocolate thing that's evil. Evil, I tell you.



::cwodtke at eleganthack.com::wrote on 7/16/02 10:03pm:

> Everyone from Jakob to members of this list (including me) want a simple
> answer we can use to work from. It is not a luxury we get-- we chose a
> complex medium. So we don't get to say "it's all about seeking" and dot
> along merrily to that single solution. We have to understand
> user+business+medium and work from there. We have to do the hard work of
> thinking. 
-- 
:: s y m e t r i ::
andrew.hinton ÷ information.architecture ÷ [ahinton at symetri.com]