Comments on Programming for Information Architects

Laurel — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:17 GMT

It depends what you mean by code. I can’t code, I design websites with XHTML transitional, which as we all know is markup.

Andrei — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:16 GMT

“user interface design has nothing to do with coding…”

Then I guess one could also say that designing a house has nothing to do with wood, steel, pipes, soil and concrete.

Andrei

jan — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:16 GMT

oh, come on. “These non-coding web designers” you talk about were probably no (web)designers at all. webdesign is more then being able to name the difference between CMYK and RGB …
user interface design has nothing to do with coding.

Andrei — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:16 GMT

“one last thing: ...Has anybody ever worked with a ‘web designer’ that doesn’t know how to write one line of code? yea. of course. i think those are the best web designers you can get, because their ideas are not contaminated and bounded to their own smattering. those are the people that push IAs and Coders further and further. those are the people that keep us trying to reach and delay technical boarders.”

My experience has been completely counter to this point of view. These non-coding web designers are the people that have completely set the field of user interface design back a decade or so by creating products that were both useless *and* horrendously complicated to implement, code and scale.

How many rules and guidelines of good user interface design were utterly destroyed during the web boom? How much damage was done to the practice of consistency, simplicity, and usefulness in interaction and interface design approaches that were ignored by all these people who simply did not have a clue?

Don’t even get me started here… If you use this reasoning to justify your point of view, I’ll let it alone as I find that reasoning utterly incredulous.

Andrei

jan — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:16 GMT

LOL – oh yea, i know some of those techies. it’s such an interesting species !

of course it is always good “to know”. and one should keep learning a whole live through. i totally agree. and please don’t get me wrong. i do like this article.

But i think IA is very complex. design is very complex. programming is quite complex too. i really don’t think an IA should ever argue with an programmer about OOP, about prototype-based inheritance versus class-based inheritance or Pattern-Models. i mean, why should he?

take one of our airports here in berlin for example. i think an IA should be able to think about the “best” signboard design and the best places to apply those signs and all that usabillity stuff without having to care about how exactly a lucent sign is build. i don’t care about glass making. i don’t care about plastic illumination. i don’t care about electrical engineering. and if a programmer tells me he can’t do it. i go and get myself someone who can do it.

can you really think of a case where an IA said “this has to be so and so, because of this and that” and then somebody from the coder department did reply “sorry man. this is technically absolutely impossible – and you should have known better if you just had an idea of recursive loops” ?

one last thing: ”...Has anybody ever worked with a “web designer” that doesn’t know how to write one line of code?”
yea. of course. i think those are the best web designers you can get, because their ideas are not contaminated and bounded to their own smattering. those are the people that push IAs and Coders further and further. those are the people that keep us trying to reach and delay technical boarders. ...

PeterV — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:16 GMT

Realize techies have often been conditioned by stupid project managers and will throw lines at you like: “We can’t do that – it will break the object encapsulation”, hoping that will end the argument. So the more you know about their world the better you can talk to them.

I think IA’s really should have some idea of the capabilities of the technologies they are working with: relational databases, object oriented programming, web services, the limitations of HTML, the possibilities of thin client interfaces. Lots of stuff to study.

andrew — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:16 GMT

Andrei, I think you are right in your comments above. This is really the “IA is a craft” idea: a real craftsperson not only understands her tools, but her materials and processes as well. (Actually, there’s a lot more about real “craft” that makes IA a difficult fit. Check out Malcolm McCullogh’s “Abstracting Craft” for more.)

I think many IAs do have programming backgrounds. But some don’t and might be surprised that “coding IAs” aren’t familiar with the academic literature on classification theory (for example). I wouldn’t suggest that one is better than the other, or even more capable. That’s what SIGIA is for! (Kidding…)

If one is really more of a UI designer or interaction designer as opposed to an “organizing-IA”, then I think that programming aptitude is even more important.

Andrei — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:16 GMT

“I can look at my DVD-player interface and tell what kind of surface-design and information presentation I don’t like and think about how I would have done it without having a clue how a DVD is programmed.”

You can try. Then you can put all of those ideas together and claim you have a better design until you try and get them implemented. At which point you might discover some limitations inherit in DVD recorders and programming them that disallows whatever you think of as the “better” design you just created.

To me it’s like this:

You can’t be a good architect without knowing physics and how real materials work in the construction of buildings.

You can’t be a good film director without knowing how editing a story, or how motion photography works, or even how to get actors into their roles to tell the story properly.

You can’t be a good industrial designer without knowing how the materials you want to use in your designs will work both in the manufacturing process and in people’s hands.

You can’t be a good carpenter without knowing how wood behaves in various circumstances.

I could make a very big list along these lines.

You can’t be good at a lot of things that require some sort of design or creation aspect on your part without detailed knowledge of the pieces that are used in the creation of your design.

I’m of the opinion you can’t be a good product designer / IA / interface designer without knowing how code works.

Note I did not say you couldn’t become any of those people without that knowledge. But I will be presumptious and claim that you can’t expect to be any good at any of them without that knowledge.

Andrei

jan — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:16 GMT

I don’t agree with some of you.

I can look at my DVD-player interface and tell what kind of surface-design and information presentation i don’t like and think about how i would have done it without having a clue how a DVD is programmed.

I can look at the design of a “search” and the presentation of results and tell the client or my designer what i don’t like about it, what i would expect and what will irritate most users without knowing how the search-algorithms are programmed.

ok. i am not new to programming myself, but still i don’t think you need the one to understand the other. the only thing one should understand is the idea and the power of abstraction.

Stacy Surla — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:16 GMT

Great article, and one I’ve been seeking for a long time. We need more readable, accessible writing about technical topics in this world.

I’ve found it difficult to get a useful understanding of certain fundamentals, like “what is object oriented programming.” I either find myself in the middle of a high-level, ongoing conversation, OR have to wade through inches of material, OR get the “Dummies” overview. Actually, I haven’t even been able to find the “Dummies” overview in most cases.

For instance, I’ve recently been trying to understand enough about XSLT to get some demo projects off the ground, with only my college Fortran to draw on. Yes, yes, I KNOW there are concepts I am missing, but I’ve had a very hard time finding the conceptual materials I need to move forward – in this, and in so many other cases. So, Andrew, are you going to write “XSLT for Information Architects?”

Kyle Pero — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:16 GMT

I don’t understand how you can be an IA without knowing how to code or design? I’m not saying you have to be an active coder or designer, but you should have previous exposure with both. The difference between an IA w/ this experience and an IA w/out is completely obvious in the architecture they develop.

This is not just an issue with IA’s… Has anybody ever worked with a “web designer” that doesn’t know how to write one line of code? You usually end up with a completely un-usable and un-intuiative design that just looks “cool”.

Even though an IA doesn’t do the development or the design they need to know these two other worlds that they are greatly impacting.

Andrei — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:16 GMT

Well… it’s a very good article. You’re definitely providing forward progress for those who want to advance int he field. Hopefully this kind of stuff will be heard by those who think they don’t need to knwo these sorts of things. And more importantly, acted upon.

Andrei

Andrew — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:16 GMT

Thanks for the comments, here and in emails.

Andrei wrote:
“I think you are being way too diplomatic here….An IA shouldn’t ‘show awareness’ IMHO. They need to be fully cognizant of the realities of how code works, and how their engineers wrote that code….”

No argument from me, and I’d like to know a lot more than I do now! (I think we should be competent visual designers as well.) I was being diplomatic because there are some IAs who definately don’t think this way, but who I thought could benefit from some new concepts.

Andrei — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:16 GMT

”... It?s important to focus on users during research and design, but to explain our ideas, IAs need to be able to create design documents that show some awareness of systems, programs, and other nuts and bolts.”

I think you are being way too diplomatic here. The design and strucutre an IA thinks of should always directly translated into how a programmer constructs the system. They always co-mingle, and while an IA doesn’t need to know the specifics of how the programmer constructed the code to execute the design, they must fully understand how code works from the same point of view as the programmer.

An IA shouldn’t “show awareness” IMHO. They need to be fully cognizant of the realities of how code works, and how their engineers wrote that code, what can be done and what cannot be done in the realm of code, if IAs want to be able to create fully realized designs.

I always put it this way: If you’re an architect designing a skyscraper, you have to know how steel works. How it bends, how the *physics* of steel operate in the real world. And then you need to know how the construction crew will put the thing together in order to know how to design the building. It’s impossible to do so without that knowledge.

Many people in the use interface design field, and not just IAs, need to educate themselves more on the nuts and bolts side of the equation, how code works, how programmers think, etc. if any real progress is to be made in the field.

Andrei

Boris — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:51:16 GMT

Well, bravo for the article. It is however disheartening for me to realise that there are Information Architects out there who know nothing about programming… or design… or databases… or webservers… or TCP/IP… or HTTP…

I morphed into an information architect BECAUSE I knew every aspect of web work. I cannot imagine how an web information architect can adequatly do his/her job without such knowledge.

Damn I should have moved to New York or San Fran or Tokyo years ago. Living in a place where the market is so small (like here in Montreal), means you really really have to not only know your stuff, but ALL the stuff related to it. I couldn’t pay my $425(canadian)/month rent if i didn’t! It’s a double edged sword!

Cheers. Good article.