[Sigia-l] Strategists (What do they do that IA's don't?)

[Saffer, Dan]

I wouldn't necessarily put 

-Gather and validate business goals

under the IA's role. In my current position, I am typically given the
business goals as a baseline to start. Then my job becomes balancing
those goals with those of the user.

When I worked at agencies, strategists were also charged with coming up
with a long-term business plan for the project: ie. how the company was
going to make money off the website, how much to charge for the
services/content/products the website trafficked in, analysis of
competitors from a business- success viewpoint, and researching overall
web/technology trends that the business may profit from. Few of these
things are currently done (or want to be done) by the IAs I know. In
truth, few could be done well by most of the IAs I know, as we don't
usually come out of MBA programs.

The information and analysis strategists can provide can be extremely
helpful. As they will likely examine an industry closely when doing
their analysis, they are often very capable of answering questions about
that industry and the users in it. I've bounced everything from
nomenclature ("Is this a common term in this field?") to in-depth
industry knowledge ("How would someone use a trailing-stop to sell
stock?) questions at them.

As long as strategists aren't suggesting solutions to design problems,
they should be one of the IA's biggest allies.

Dan

dan saffer  .  sr. interaction designer
ameritrade  .  dsaffer at datek.com