[Sigia-l] Re: Usability in fancy clothes

[molly w. steenson]

actually, i think there's a big amorphous thing in the middle of all these 
things. otherwise, why would everyone be so keen on negroponte's teething 
rings, you know, the venn diagram of users, technology and business?

lots of things sit at that intersection. user-centered design, or user 
experience design, or experience design sit at that intersection. so does 
content strategy, and if you're specifying requirements for a content 
management system, that perches right there too. you might say that CRM 
development is at that nexus. and hey, it's even project management, if you 
have the opportunity to do it right.

i think to call it usability in fancy clothes is to negate a whole lot of 
interpretation and analysis that goes on in the development of a system. 
but i think to say that, "voila! it's IA in the middle!" is to negate the 
richness of system development that we experience.

molly



At 12:59 AM 10/22/2002 +0100, Ray Sharma wrote:
>Coming to the conclusion that IA is the integrator between the
>Stakeholders, Content (& Users), programmers and design, bringing sense
>to the information being portrayed through a product.
>
>As an IA I work to ensure the programmers, database people etc are able
>to do their job. However, I am not thought of as a programmer or treated
>like one (sometime it's even made difficult to work with them!), despite
>having to understand somewhat how the technology will handle the
>information. At the same time, and what I see many stakeholders identify
>as more important, I work with the interactive/graphic designers in
>presenting that information.
>
>In my experience, I am asked to identify flow and create wireframes (not
>exactly IA) however while doing so I have needed to understand the
>information and its structure thus performing the role of an IA. What I
>have found is the stakeholders want to understand the IA and to do so
>they want to see it in the form of Sitemaps, Content Mappings, Item
>Types and wireframes. As a result I must be proficient in Usability to
>ensure the information I am presenting will work for the intended
>audience and designers can design from it (or at least add their design
>elements to the wireframes!).
>
>So to raise the debate I do not feel IA is Usability or dressed up in
>it.
>
>Often stakeholders (in the current climate and age of IA), need to
>quantify what the IA does and measure their effectiveness. What they
>want is to see stuff that makes sense to them and not know that you had
>to sort 1500 items of content into meaningful relationships (remember
>they don't really want to see what a programmer does to get to a working
>product, they just want a working product). In order to do this we must
>present this information in usable formats for those handling it
>(programmers, designers, users, and stakeholder) meaning we must often
>provide total solutions from raw content to final presentable and usable
>information.
>
>Just a small task really - having just completed the IA on a local
>government website!
>
>As time goes on the will become more and more defined, IA will find its
>own space next to programmers, databasers', Usability People and
>designers relieving some of the pressure we face and helping to add
>clarity to the role - one would hope anyway.
>
>Ray Sharma
>
>
>
>
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