Elizabeth Randolph — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 18:38:15 GMT

Cross-reference to the evolution of technical communication (aka technical writing) into the realms of IA and user experience. Try to cover the topic from both the outside (job trend) and inside (design process/web team trend). Get reports from people actually operating with this sort of title.

Elizabeth Randolph — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 18:51:47 GMT

Right on. Either do a two-part article, one focused on Google Analytics and one on “other sources,” or cover both in one article. Similar to Kyle, above, I talk about “Evidence-Based IA,” data-based personas being one arrow in the quiver as it were. In training and consulting I encourage clients to gather various sources of user data on which to base personas. For public sites – market research, competitive analysis, customer service data (call stats, knowledge base), usability testing, etc. For intranets, usability testing plus personnel demographics (M/F, age, degrees, job roles, tenure at job) and IT demographics (computing environment, platform, browser, security roles, etc.). Also sometimes you can segment employees according to whether they support customers (engineering, sales, cust. supp, service providers) or support the organization (IT, HR, desktop supp, etc.)

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Elizabeth Randolph