[Sigia-l] Junk science or just lazy?

[Eric Reiss]

Ziya wrote:
"since when did word frequency counting become synonymous with
analytical insight?"

Er...pretty much since the dawn of search engines. This is also why
we include meta keywords in our code and tag clouds in our layouts.

What Rosenfeld Media did was certainly not junk science, but it does
leave some key questions unanswered. And that doesn't make it lazy
either, merely incomplete.

The Achilles Heel in the current report is that none of us really
know how much (or little) the folks outside our precious community
actually use these particular words and concepts - including "UX". If
people don't use these words, then they won't appear in a search. 

What if they had the audacity to use other words to represent similar
concepts? After all, we muck about with terms like "site map," "site
structure," "hierarchy" and "taxonomy." Why should the "lay"
population be any different?

I'm more and more convinced we're not all speaking the same language
yet. In fact, only yesterday, I was at a top-level meeting (read
polished conference tables and cufflinks) where I found myself in the
unfamiliar position of having to explain a "wiki." And these folks
knew a lot about e-commerce; they weren't total newbies.

Let's face it, even "information architecture" isn't exactly a
mainstream term, despite the fact we've been ranting about it for
well over a decade.

Cheers,
Eric Reiss
FatDUX Copenhagen
www.fatdux.com