[Sigia-l] at what point does IA et al. become meaningless?

[Alexander Johannesen]

Hi,

On 8/17/05, Skot Nelson <skot at penguinstorm.com> wrote:
> The list seems to be populated by people who are primarily working on
> large projects, with (presumably) sizable budgets.

My last 5 years of working has been small to big projects in both
commercial sector and government, and my experience is that in
commercial (Norwegian) sector we had projected IA in every one, no
matter the size, while in (Australian) government there seem to be a
more 'just get it done' attitude. I'll talk about this latter for the
rest of my post.

> I'm wondering if there's a point at the bottom end of budget where
> people simply abandon any pretense of dedicated IA? I'm not referring
> to it as a job, but rather as a role and critical path point.

We don't have a budget per se, but certainly a resource allocation
schemes. As the interface-designer I do all things IA as well as all
things HCD, programming and project management, so no one has a
designated IA role ... but, and there is a big but, I work at a
governmental agency that understands the importance of it, so we hold
a lot of HCD workshops with both our own people and our users. The
essense is that no one is *just* an IA, but we take it seriously and
do it well. (At least of late :)

> Is this common practice? Is there a budget point at which projects
> become 100% "just get it done" without all these steps to interfere?
> Where IA happnes on the fly, rather than in an organized manner?

I think you might be right, which I believe points back to the fact
that HCD / IA type things have a lower priority than functional
specifications, for example. But my feel is also that times are
changing, and, for example for my latest project, people higher up are
saying that user-testing *will* make the final descission on wheter a
functional requirement will be part of the system. There is hope. :)


Alex
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