[Sigia-l] The 3 Factors of I/A

[Richard_Dalton at Vanguard.com]

Andrew McNaughton wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Mar 2003 Richard_Dalton at Vanguard.com wrote:
>
> > On the web, however, (and on these mailing lists) i've seen a lot of
> > examples and disscusion about grouping based on Content Similarity and 
not
> > much based on grouping by User Task and I wondered if anyone else was
> > doing some User Task driven work?
>
> IA is primarily concerned with the problems of organisation of content.
> For a focus on designing for other kinds of tasks than colelction and
> consumption of information, you might be better to look at lists on
> Usability, Computer/Human Interaction (CHI or HCI depending on your
> emphasis) and User Experience.
>
> That said, plenty of people's work overlap these areas of interest, and
> you'll find plenty of useful knowledge around SIGIA-L.

Ah, i'm sorry - maybe i'm being overly pedantic (and please forgive me if 
I am) but I totally disagree with the statement "IA is primarily concerned 
with the problems of organisation of content" - IMHO, IA is primarily 
concerned with the problems of helping people find things - and if that 
means organizing content by its attributes then so be it, if it means 
organizing content based on user's higher level goals and tasks then 
equally great - the bottom line is the user found it!

 - Richard Dalton