[Sigia-l] Building an Information Architecture Team

[Chris Chandler]

Wenjie,

Where I work we have 3 full time and two full-time contract IAs. Functionally, we all have the same role -- ie we are
all responsible for wireframes, user path or flow diagrams, and interaction rules, as well as whatever else is needed to
communicate or convince our "clients" (we are an internal consulting department) to do what we think is best.

On the large and complex web site (well, those are relative terms) we are almost ready to launch, each IA was primarily
responsible for a different section of the site. For example, I did all the IA work for the ecommerce section, someone
else was responsible for navigation, and yet another for various functional areas like search, or registration etc etc.

One of our group with an HCI background took the lead on designing and implementing the usability testing we did
(although I did most of the test design for ecommerce)

For a while, we had a contractor who was a "functional analyst" who was going to be responsible for the functional
specifications document. That didn't quite work out and we ended up sharing the responsibility among ourselves (argh!).
Although there was some debate about whether that role should be considered part of IA or tech, I always considered it
IA.

User Personas were created collaboratively by the Creative department -- IA, Content, and Visual Design.

The content matrix was a deliverable of the Content team, specifically the "content analyst," along with more LIS type
stuff like metadata and an extensive authority control list for the CMS (a lot of touchy brand trademarks and the like).

Over the next year, our work will consist of a number of much smaller sites. The plan is to have an IA lead for each
project, with support from other IAs working under the lead as needed.

Please let us know what else you find to present!

-cc



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Wenjie Qin" <wqin at hawaii.edu>
To: <sigia-l at asis.org>
Cc: <lquiroga at hawaii.edu>
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2003 10:53 PM
Subject: [Sigia-l] Building an Information Architecture Team


> Dear All:
> I am a graduate student at Information and Computer Science department
> at University of Hawaii. I am taking a class called "Information
> Architecture". I need to give a presentation regarding "Building an
> Information Architecture team", Chapter 15 of the O'Reilly Polar Bear
> book. One of the class activity I designed is to let the students form
> IA teams and each play a role in their team.
> I couldnot find any IA team in the real world on the web. My
> professor, Dr. Quiloga, suggests that I try ask for help from this
> list. I am wondering if anyone who had experience working in an IA
> team can tell me different roles in your team and general idea of the
> project you worked on. I would really appreciate any kind of help or
> suggestion.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Wenjie
>
>
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