[Sigia-l] I Want My GUT of Information Architecture!

[Richard_Dalton at Vanguard.com]

Chris Chandler wrote:
> Let me ask you this -- would you consider the last five years
> of marketing material for a consumer product company
> structured or unstructured? In any event, I added more 
> "structure" to it when I modified the existing structure
> based on other sites in the same 'genre' and designed
> a faceted browsing mechanism for the product line. I also
> tried to keep some continuity with the existing labels/navigation
> to support those who used the old site. My model for how to
> structure the data turned out to be a matter of balancing
> many different forces. Perhaps this is too inexact and
> informal to satisfy the challenge to IA you pose above,
> but I believe IA is at least as much craft as science.

A couple of questions:

 - How did you know the site was successful after it went live?

 - How did you know it would be successful before it went live?

These two questions are critical if I/A is going to exist in a business 
environment and we'd better have some processes, methodologies, first 
principles, past experience, etc, that allows us to answer them without 
the fallback "well we'll usability test it" answer (I believe usability 
testing has a lot of value - but i'd rather get as close to an effective 
solution as possible before testing). IMHO this falls far more into the 
definition of "science" than "art" (although I acknowledge that its not 
black and white and that not everything can be 'measured' - there is, and 
should be, an element of creativity - but it should be just that, an 
element - not the foundation).

 - Richard Dalton