[Sigia-l] Rant about bad IA practice.

[Antoine.Valot at ins.com]

Okay, I'll stop lurking for this one!

>'My anything'.
> [...]The site is having a conversation with you so when it refers to
the user it is logical for it to be you and your. 

Well... In a branding sense, "my" has lots going for it. It fosters a
sense of ownership. It's probably for that reason that "myWhatever", at
least in the site navigation context, has become a de facto standard,
and an established mental hook.

However, when the interface communicates to the user (instructions,
labels, anything apart from navigation), it should indeed say "you" and
"yours". The UI is conversing with the user, whereas the top navigation
also has branding and marketing roles to fulfil.


>'Site Map'
>
>Nah - that's not a map, it's an index. 

Nah, it's neither. It's a "site map", which is its own thing. It's also
a standard, and I think it's been around long enough that people don't
necessarily connect it to a map metaphor anymore. It's standard web
terminology. When I say "web", do you still think "spiders"?


>'Card Sorting'
> [...]The importance of these items depend on how they work in context
not in an arbitrary process on removed from the reality of what it is
you are creating.  

Bingo! You're right. Card sorting is really only valid if the end-user's
goal is to sort cards. 


>'Eye Tracking'
> [...]Eye tracking is snake oil as far as I'm concerned.  If your user
experience consultant suggests eye tracking - fire their carpet bagging
arse. Are you listening Jakob? 

I agree, although, to be fair, I did derive a nugget of value from
Jakob's eye tracking studies, namely that users start by looking for the
first text heading on a page. But now that I know this nugget, I won't
be needing eye tracking until the medium changes again. It's "pure"
science, so you don't need to reinvent that wheel for each project. 


>'Web 2.0 and RSS'
>
> [...]There are savvy users who understand what all those buttons do,
know what a folksonomy is and like tagging up things - but they are a
small minority.

And they're an even smaller minority than they think. They just blog a
lot. :)
All these concepts are looking for a metaphor that will make them
mainstream. "Feeds" might be it RSS, but somehow it still sounds a bit
nebulous. Oh well, Microsoft or Google will decide, and we'll all just
have to follow.


And lastly...

>'User Profiles'.
>
> The problem with may profiles I have seen is they have nothing to do
with the real information.  They are marketing profiles full of
assumptions and prejudice and therefore useless in the pragmatic world
of building a web site.

User "personas", done the right way (the Cooper way), are extremely
powerful. I especially like the fact that they can make developers
actually understand and empathize with normal humans (don't laugh, I've
seen it happen. It's beautiful.)

But if you don't intimately understand the principles and goals behind
personas, the idea is one of the most easily perverted. It gets even
worse if you allow a marketing person within a twelve-mile radius of
your persona effort. I've seen *a very large software company* offering
a case study where they proudly explained their "innovation", which was
to determine their primary persona in terms of market share! Oh the
humanity!


Antoine Valot  |  Senior Information Architect  |  INS  |  303.995.5618
|  antoine.valot at ins.com