Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Richard Dalton

Richard Dalton — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 12:05:18 GMT

The description of the “Enterprise IA Approach” is spot on – early thinking uncovering the strategy which drives the scope (to use JJGs planes) which then leads into more detailed research/thinking to define the structure, skeleton, surface, etc. HOWEVER, why is this exclusive (or more predominant) to an Enterprise environment? Many IAs (and people who have never heard of the term IA) are doing just that in a non “Enterprise” space.

Richard Dalton — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 02:05:31 GMT

I completely agree with Adam et. al. that this isn’t Kansas (“Information Architecture”) anymore, it’s “Strategic Consulting” or “Business Strategy” or whatever. However, find and replace “Information Architects” in the article with “Information Architecture tools and techniques”, i.e. lets stop focusing on IA as our identity and instead just use it as a name for a collection of things we do. The full title of the presentation Rob and I gave in Montreal should really have been “A Foray Across Boundaries: Applying IA Tools and Techniques to Business Strategy and Planning”.

Richard Dalton — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:44:40 GMT

But what better place to do “spring break” than in Miami? ;-)
IA Summit 2008 – “Experiencing Information”
10-14 April 2008, Miami, FL
www.iasummit.org

Richard Dalton — Wed, 16 May 2007 07:35:04 GMT

Juan – in many cases it does all come down to some kind of contact with external users. We’ve been successful at doing the kind of things James highlights with external users – see a presentation myself and a colleague gave at the 2005 IA Summit: A Foray across Boundaries: Applying IA to Business Strategy and Planning (http://www.iasummit.org/2005/finalpapers/104_Presentation…) – the Capability Discovery Map in the first case study was a way to bring together external user and internal stakeholder goals/needs/points of pain.

Richard Dalton — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 21:00:09 GMT

In a recent scenario / storyboard we used some team members as actors and did informal photo-shoots, then used Photoshop filters to blur them so that they were less detailed (and less distracting from the actual story). It actually worked really well!

Richard Dalton — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 18:02:35 GMT

Nicely written article Grant, I want to take one contrary point about the “insular” tag though – your description of the summit is very accurate – but being a strong community does not necessarily go hand in hand with being insular. I have seen many occasions when people or techniques from “outside” the IA community have been embraced and many occasions when people new to the “IA community” have been welcomed at the summit. Almost every summit lunch/dinner i’ve been to (many!) has included someone new to the summit or the community.

Richard Dalton — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 04:57:04 GMT

This is a good article about how to make forms better, but online forms are mirrored on paper forms (the only way we knew how to get written information from people before the web), has anyone done any thinking about how to break away (or whether its useful to break away) from the ‘form’ metaphor?

Richard Dalton — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 09:50:02 GMT

Well i’m not saying that we should throw away the metaphor completely – but paper in quantities large enough and cheap enough to support people using it to communicate (typically temporary) information is really only a 19th century thing. If you were going to sign someone up for a service who had never used a paper form (like many of gen Y/Z) would you start from that metaphor?

Richard Dalton — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 18:26:58 GMT

Please publish this i’d love to read it! (and consider submitting it for a presentation at the IA Summit in April (www.iasummit.org)

Richard Dalton — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 11:48:37 GMT

This is a great primer on search and its problems and ways to think about improving it. I’m curious if you’ve had any success with mapping specific problems you’ve observed back to one of the “5 variables”?

Richard Dalton — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 03:15:54 GMT

I’ll echo Michael’s comments – i’m in the same situation and would really enjoy seeing this written.

Richard Dalton — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 21:39:45 GMT

I think “personality traits” or more general “competencies” are actually more interesting and important in hiring full-time staff, I would have led with that for part one!

Richard Dalton — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:29:57 GMT

The AK47 metaphor is actually Andrew Hinton’s … see his Communities of Practice presentation.

Richard Dalton — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 05:08:41 GMT

Indi, we’ve found this technique very valuable at Vanguard – ever since I saw you and Peter present it in workshop form at Jared’s UIE conference years ago. I’m really excited to see that it has evolved over time to include aspects of the user experience such as emotion, motivation and philosophy – can’t wait to get the book and dig deeper!