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

[Eric Scheid]

On 17/8/05 2:31 PM, "Skot Nelson" <skot at penguinstorm.com> wrote:

> In my view, the IA deliverables are ALWAYS a critical point in any
> project - if nothing else, they coalesce the mind around site content
> and structure, and the process of "putting things on paper" (virtual
> or otherwise) creates a non-shifting reference point from which to
> proceed with an actual build.

The deliverables are a critical point, but they are not at the very bottom.
Even without deliverables, IAs are able to provide a benefit by guiding the
thinking of the stakeholders and other people involved. This is a pretty
loose free-form consulting service, imparting some very basic wisdom that we
pretty much take for granted: the content-context-users triple, that
different people have different labels for the same things, that different
people "chunk" and group concepts differently from others. Really basic
stuff.

In our local group we sometimes challenge ourselves with the question of

    if a client only has a budget of $300 to spend on IA,
    what could an Information Architect do?

The last time I asked myself this question, this is what I came up with...

Very first step: assess whether the budget fits the project scope. Are we
talking a sub-50-page website, or 10,000 pages?

Assuming we're talking a small site, that $300 would best be spent engaging
with the stake holders of the site. Two to three hours of consulting time.
There's no time or budget for actually dealing with real users, so we'll
settle for some approximate proxies and secondary research.

Arrange a meeting with the stakeholders, invite them to bring along some
design leads as observers. Be prepared to make notes or to fill a whiteboard
or two .. you won't have time/budget to write up a report afterwards, so
invest a little more than the usual care and detail in the notes.

Figure out what the business objectives for the site are, such as: brand
building, commodity widget selling, competitive positioning, lead
generation, part of a support infrastructure for offline or predominantly
email-based business activity. James Ho did a fascinating study evaluating
business websites in terms of a value vs function framework. Well worth a
read.
[http://IAwiki.net/DimensionsOfIA#FunctionPointsinaPurposevsValueFramework]

Ask who their intended users would be. The answers would mostly be in terms
of marketing demographics. Delve into the nature of these market groups -
asking who needs intro level content, who needs deeper content, who might be
impatient/busy types, who might be ready to spend right away vs who might
need more convincing, persuasion, and reassurance. See if there are any
common clusters of requirements or characteristics - these can be fodder for
personas.

Compare these market groups against the business goals (above). Consider
eliminating from design consideration any audience groups that don't fit the
business goals. Reconsider the business goals if there is a sizable audience
group which offers a different opportunity.

Find out what content they already have. Ask what form it is in, where it
came from, what depth of detail, and so on. Explain that print content
usually needs to be massaged or rewritten for web use. Ask them how they
came to have this content, how it tests against their market, how it has
evolved, what extraneous content have they eliminated -- this relates back
to the questions regarding their intended users, and they'll probably have
an anecdote or two to tell.

Compare the available content against the user needs, and compare against
the business goals -- will some content need to be made shorter, or made
longer. Will persuasive copy need be written, or for that matter eliminated.
Consider the voice of the content copy - does it need to be smartened up,
made more authoritative, or loosened up, made more friendly? Is there any
content which can be safely dropped from the design, are there gaps that
need to be filled?

Once you've identified the business goals, identified the audience groups
which match those goals, and sketched a content plan to suit both business
goals and audience groups, the IA can start looking at the detail of the
actual content. There's no point even thinking of labelling and card sorts
and taxonomies (oh my!) if the content in question won't even be on the site
in the first place.

All that would fit into a $300 consult with the principle stake holders.

e.