[Sigia-l] Becoming an IA or UXA

[Peter Boersma]

Andrea Tanzi wrote:
> I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS cause of huge gaps in my knowledge.

We were all at that stage at some point, don't panic :-)

> 1- [...] three areas
> of expertise in IA: structural (site maps, content grouping, logical
> structure); functional (thesauri, meta data, logistics,
> interoperability); and interaction (design, user interface).

Judging from the first couple of concepts between the parentheses for
"funtional", I'd say this is Library Science stuff, or "little IA" material.
But the last couple ("logistics" and "interoperability") sound to me more
like the information technology definition of information architecture. Oh,
and I would have liked to see "search systems" somewhere in the list.

> 2- When going to a client for the first time how do you start and then
> develop your case for needing IA, what have some of you found that is
> (are) the best argument to the clients' ears. Cause here clients are now
> totally satisfied with a shop designing the front ends and programming
> functionality (forms and stuff) BECAUSE they don't know better!!! Can
> somebody help here?

Can you design the front-end and do the programming? No? Then make sure you
team-up with the people that do that work. If you can, you're brilliant :-)
Really, going to relatively ignorant clients and trying to sell your
specialty is hard, and probably useless (unless you're a project manager
too; somehow those get hired seperately). Posing as a generalist will get
you further in these cases.

You also wrote:
> And about changing my title from IA to UXA is cause I always end up
> helping the client with the changing of the processes in its traditional
> business model to better attend the input that the new user centered
> website starts to generate.

My definition of "consultancy" (sometimes also called "planning") involves
listening to the client and analyzing their problems (undertanding), helping
them formulate their problems (educating), helping them judge plans for
solutions (selecting), and making sure that the implemented solution matched
actually solves the clients' problem (follow-up).

If that's what you'd like to do, and the label "consultant" doesn't have a
bad name (like it has in my part of the world, where at one point it was a
synonym for "freshly graduated youngster with a lease-car") you may want to
start calling yourself User Experience Consultant. At my former employer I
was called "Consultant User Understanding".

> 3- I have lots of more questions but I guess this is a good start for now.

As I said before: don't panic.

Peter
--
Peter Boersma, Senior Information Architect, EzGov Europe
Wibautstraat 3-5, Amsterdam, 1091 GH, The Netherlands
Tel.: +31(0)20 5961216 / Fax: +31(0)20 5961511 / Mob: +31(0)6 15072747
mailto:peter.boersma at ezgov.com / http://www.europe.ezgov.com