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

[Peter Boersma]

Skot asked:
> 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.

I think this is where Guerrilla IA comes into play, but in a rather reversed
way from what I wrote here:

A piece of IA pie: little, micro, lite or guerrilla?
http://tinyurl.com/c7tw4 (*)

In it I define Guerrilla IA as:
"simplified IA methods that can be a way for a company to gradually build up
its reliance on systematic IA methods, starting with the bare minimum and
gradually progressing to a more refined lifecycle approach."

In your case it's not a matter of building up reliance, but scaling down.
When I helped define our UCD process at my previous employers, I always made
sure there was a distinction between deliverables that were "mandatory in
every process" and "optional, based on project requirements". The first
category had deliverables like "usability test stratgey", "screenflow",
"wireframes" and "styleguide". Optional deliverables included "usability
test report", "content inventory", "concept presentation", etc.

Still, when starting a new project, we would look at how we could produce as
much of the deliverables (or actually: perform as many of the associated
activities) as possible in the given timeframe. For example: A 10 minute
conversation about the usability test strategy would help in setting
customer expectations, but no report would have to be written; we'd just
take the client through the table of contents from the document's template.

I think you can only scale down responsibly if you know what full-blown
means.
Peter
(*) Original, long and wrapping URL:
http://www.peterboersma.com/blog/2005/02/piece-of-ia-pie-little-micro-lite-or.html-- 
Peter Boersma | Consultant User Experience | www.UserIntelligence.com
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