[Sigia-l] Enterprise IA 95% un-sexy?

[Fred Beecher]

On 3/9/06, Billie Mandel <Billie.Mandel at openwave.com> wrote:
>
> It seems to me like many IAs think that enterprise work (intranets,
> enterprise software) is not as fun or "sexy" as working on
> consumer-facing sites/products. Do you agree?  If so, why?  I'm curious
> to hear your thoughts.

What? No, I definitely disagree. The EIA stuff is where we really get
to shine. It exercises all aspects of our practice: user research, IA,
and interaction design. Plus, the audience is often well-defined and
highly accessible. When working on consumer-facing sites, I've found
that there's usually some aspect that gets cut out. All too often it's
user research. It's really hard to justify cutting user research when
crucial business tasks are at stake. Same thing for interaction
design. And you can't cut out IA when you're dealing with piles and
piles of important/sensitive/business-critical information. So we get
to play in all our sandboxes for a change.

Intranets are one of my favorite things to do, actually. And although
I haven't had a chance to work on enterprise software (not the
shrinkwrap and ship kind, anyway), I imagine that it would be great
fun to work on defining consistent interaction patterns and
information display styles, etc. throughout the application. That
seems ultra-sexy to me.

Of course, I *have* been accused of being a huge nerd, so maybe I'm
not the best person to argue for the sexiness of EIA. : )

- Fred