[Sigia-l] Taxonomists (Was: WOW!..)

[Clifton Evans at Infostyling]

I just have to reply to this..

In my last position we had an entire floor of 'Taxonomy'. These 
people were solely looking at navigation labels, metadata, 
vocabulary, and other 'word' oriented perspectives. They were not IAs.

The UI and IA people were part of a small unit co-operating with the 
project managers, competitive strategists, visual designers, 
developers and the rest of the 'crack team' on another floor. As 
well, the usability evaluation was done as an external process. This 
model worked extremely well.

The point is that IA (oddly, a profession from the west coast, 
forgive me I'm now in London) is not Taxonomy, Librarianship or 
Content Strategy.

IA is architecture.

IA is for structural planners.

This is the structure of the information and not the information itself.

Let's give librarianship the respect it deserves. Taxonomists, and 
their respected cousins can work with IAs and should be given enough 
space to effectively think about the content of the boxes and the 
labels of the arrows.

Sound good?

Clifton.




>I'm tryign to find an IA who knows stuff like taxonomy design/classification
>and the like-- and I keep geting these site map+interaction types.. west
>coast IA's. How do you tease them apart? Anyone else go up aginst this
>problem? advice?
>
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