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

[Nuno Lopes]

Hi Chris, thanks for your post.

>That sounds good to me!

Excellent.

>... there have been numerous messages (even a new list) about
communicating to >business, all of which reminded me that a lot of the
value I bring to the >design process is as a communicator, facillitator
and outsider.

I don't see that as a differentiator but one of the artifacts of being a
consultant. System Analysts, Project Managers need to be that as well.
At the level of responsibilities that I'm talking about being a
communicator, facilitator and eventually an outsider (although stake
older are often poor facilitators) is a mandatory requirement. 

>I think we have a tendency to talk about focussing on the needs of the
>"user" in a way that glosses over how difficult and central this is to
what >we do, and how different it makes us from other members of a team.

Shouldn't that be the prime concern of a Software Architect and System
Analyst too? I don't really get how that can be different without
further context.

>NOTE: I >am NOT saying other members of the team don't, can't or won't
have >this >fundamental orientation, just that it is "baked in" to what
I do as >an IA.

The word usability has been used in this list in many different
contexts.

If usability is about human Vs machine (system) relationships then the
art and science of User Interface engineering have been studying the
topic for ages taking into context many different types of devices
(involving Interface Designers, Cognitive Psychologists etc). I guess
that people are awaking to usability problems of Web based systems and
wrongly call the solutions "Information Architecture" in most cases. 

>"Playground" is a good word for what goes on here.

I don't understand what you mean by this, please can you clarify?

>Let me ask you this -- would you consider the last five years of
marketing >material for a consumer product company structured or
unstructured?

I don't know. It depends what you mean by structured or unstructured. If
you use the word structured referring to semantically structured, then I
would argue that it is already structured, you just don't know the
structure enough to map it in the best manner to an electronic system.

If you are talking about structured in physical terms probably it is
unstructured unless the content is basically formed of data. The basic
difference between structured ands unstructured information when it
comes to its physical representation is if there is an explicit
structure or not. For instance the content of a form is basically
structured although it may contain some unstructured parts.

>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.

Have you modified, added structure or created a structure around it
towards some objective? If you modified than I guess you changed the
information structure not the information it exposes. While doing it I
guess you created a new structure around the information exposed by the
site but your approach was indeed ennovative if you tackled semantics
without modifying the inapt structure of information available. You
mentioned faceted browsing mechanism, what do you mean by this? Have you
used a mechanism based on Faceted Classification? My question is due to
the fact that all browsing is faceted.

>Perhaps this is too inexact and informal to satisfy the challenge to IA
you >pose above.

Not at all.

>but I believe IA is at least as much craft as science.

Humm, do you really mean that at the present state of the art?

Best regards,

Nuno Lopes

PS: I don't really care if you are an Information Architect or not, that
is simply a title, tell me what you did and how you do did it, I think
there might be were the innovation is.