Basil Alzougool — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 02:29:38 GMT

Donna, I come across your article accidently when i was searching for information architectures in order to give me feedback on my PhD work. Your article is great but it reflects only half of the picture because it only focuses on the demanded information that people want to have in order to satisfy their information needs. In other words, it is consistent with the available literature although it increase the “don’t know what they want to know”. however, there is another half of the picture which include the undemanded information that people do want to have and they in turn may not seek that information although they may satisfy these needs by their own knowledge for example.

I have been working for the last 2.5 years on my PhD in order to understand first the information need because it is important step before understanding the information seeking behaviour. This is true because having an information need does not necessarily mean that you will seek information to satisfy this need and vise versa (seeking information does not mean you have information need).

I have developed a framework in order to understand the information need in general as a first step to understand not only the information behaviours that people engage in to satisfy the information need but also to understand the design feature that assist in facilitating the access to this information and the information sources that people interact with to satisfy their information needs. This framework serves two goals the first it can be used as a methodology to identify the information needs and second it can be used as an organising tool (map) to understand the information needs which in turn affect the design feature, behaviours and sources. The framework consists of four dimensions of information needs as below:
1. Unrecognised Undemanded Information Needs (URUD)
2. Unrecognised Demanded Information Needs (URD)
3. Recognised Demanded Information Needs (RD)
4. Recognised Undemanded Information Needs (RUD)

My propositions were 1- these four dimensions are exist 2- each dimension has its design features, behaviours and sources.

I have applied the above framework on informal carers in order to understand their information needs and it is work successfully (the existence of these dimensions and each dimension has its information sources). However as the above framework can only provide the depth view of the information needs of carers so I have developed another framework to understand the breadth of the information needs of carers which includes also four major groups of information needs that are fit in the above general framework of information needs (depth view).

Currently I want to test the second proposition which is, each dimension has its design features, so I am writing to you (and all commenters) in order to help me testing this proposition and tell me how you (as information architecture) are going to use this framework in your work.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Basil Alzougool