[Sigia-l] Re: Usability in fancy clothes

[Andrew Dillon]

I tend not to get too involved in these discussions but I have to say that
Whitney's response below is right on the money, and one of the best
expressions of the problem I've read in a while. I really like the term IA
as a descriptor of the big problem, and I despair that it continually gets
carved up and fought over, with people trying to fashion hard distinctions
between it and usability, or HCI, or UE, or graphic design or.....you name
it, as if those distinctions could be so firmly drawn that we would all see
the differences in one 'true' way. The terminology settlement will occur,
but right now we have bigger issues to worry about, such as learning how the
design of information systems that work for all stakeholders can be
accomplished. As far as I am concerned, this is what the field of IA covers,
and we better allow self-titled 'others' (whatever their vector or clothes)
to join or we have no hope of making progress.

Best

Andrew


On 10/21/02 9:01 AM, "sigia-l-request at asis.org" <sigia-l-request at asis.org>
wrote:

> At 05:49 PM 10/18/2002 -0400, Paul Bryan IA wrote: Did someone say user
> experience design is usability dressed up in fancy clothes?
> 
> So, would it also be fair to say that information architecture is indexing
> dressed up in fancy clothes?
> 
> I know that we are in the midst of a struggle for clarity in terminology,
> but I wonder why we so often seem to do it by denigrating others.
> 
> Making a site or application or product that works for all the stakeholders
>  (business/owners, users of all types, authors, etc) takes a lot of
> different skills........
> 
> What I think is that it's a group of vectors. We all started in different
> places: library science, hypertext, graphic design, tech comm, quality,
> ergonomics, usability to name just a few. Somewhere along the line, we
> noticed that we needed more than just the "small xx" skills, and started
> redefining the discipline to "big xx" as we moved along the vector from
> isolated skill to integrated result. So now, we all call what we do "
> xx" and we're seeing the sparks as the terminology meets.
> 
> The terminology will settle down. Not in my lifetime, perhaps, and not
> necessarily with the words we are using now -- but it will.  In the mean time,
>I wonder why we feel the need to be so angry at everyone=
> =20 we think is "not us"
>