Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

David, I also didn’t want to claim to be an “IA”—although I do some of the same things IA’s do. That’s why I selected the title I did: User Experience Architect. See a description here: http://crocolyle.blogspot.com/2002_05_05_crocolyle_archiv…

I wonder whether *any* IAs actually do *all* of the things it is claimed IAs do!

I’m pretty sure most of the IAs I know don’t have any experience with facets, categories and meta-data beyond constructing a site map or carrying out a few random card sorts every now and again.

And I know that most people I talk to smirk when I say I’m a “Customer Experience Architect”.

Such is life… one day we will all be web designers again and that will be the end of it!

Cheers, d

What is with everyone beating the dead “identity” horse? Really, is it relevant what we call ourselves? By and large, most of us have responsibilites that dictate we take care of certain tasks and roles, usually moving through most of the IA, ID, UCD, etc. fields that we spend so much time discussing. I don’t care what we call ourselves…I may have at one point, but it seems so trivial now. The fact is, these different fields are the ROYGBIV color spectrum of a development cycle. Each is a crucial part of the whole, blending ever so delicately from one “color” to the next. Let’s stop worrying so much about what we call ourselves and move on to the work we actually do and how we do it better!

When I took on my latest job as Information Architect, I found that I was called upon to do IA (labeling, taxonomy, meta-data, etc.), UX (site flows and pathing), UE (usability testing and heuristic evaluations), and UI (page layout and prototyping) work.

So what am I? I prefer the title Information Architect because, in a literal sense, that is what I do. I craft the information presented by the business for presentation to the employees and customers of the business. I am essentialy an architect.

I guess what I am saying is that, as I see it, the title of Information Architect evokes the image of a professional that crafts an information space and a traditional architect crafts living space.

I see no problem with it.

Cheers,

Dave Fiorito

I agree with David. If you look at titles for other types of roles, such as Producer, Project Manager, and Product Manager, they encompass many responsibilities and skill sets. The problems I have had with titles is that they’re often too limiting. Even Information Architect, one of the more general titles for the discipline, has been too limiting. What do you call an IA generalist (as David has described above) who also does requirements, copy writing, and project management? Maybe all it comes down to is how to represent all this stuff on a resume. It usually doesn’t matter what your title is while you’re working within an organization.

Wurman’s defn. still resonates because it’s nearest to what a “real” architect does. The orchestration of many crafts, skills and knowledge-domains towards realising a vison, mainly that of the architects sponsored by a client which renders a programme of needs specific to a site.

The LIS-oriented view of IA doesn’t begin to address this, which is why the Wurman view, the “big IA” causes so much arguement.

“Why do they want to own the process?” Cause they DO! Sweeping generalisation ahoy: “real” architects could care less in the main about participatory or user-centred design. It’s about their vision of how to solve the problem as presented to them by the client and the site.

The vision thing is the driving force behind those who lay claim to the Wurman defn., and the struggle of identity with interaction designers, user-experience designers, and hey… designers…

which brings me to the particular dead horse I keep in a cold store pickled in formaldehyde so I can keep a-beatin’ it.

we’re *designers* when we exercise our vision in a specific practice of creating for digital mediums.

we’re *architects* when we orchestrate those who specialise in the specific practices necessary to render our vision (library scientists, coders, technical architects, writers, visual designers, brand strategists yadda yadda)

I’m not helping am I.

oh well.

Nurse! Nurse! My tablets!!!!

haha and also – the tao that can be described is not the tao, right…

two quotes:

“Even the finest teaching is not the Tao itself.
Even the finest name is insufficient to define it.
Without words, the Tao can be experienced,
and without a name, it can be known.”

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/taoism/ttcstan3.ht…

and finally:

“Names is for tombstones, baby” -Mr Big, james Bond: “Live and Let Die”
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Land/8672/lald/tomb.wa…

I find these discussions fascinating and bizarre in a ‘through the looking glass’ sort of way. As a self-taught freelance ‘web designer’ running a one-man operation, I wear all the hats and take all the beatings. Apparently there is a realm somewhere in the universe where design teams are enormous and budgets are gargantuan…a magical/mystical place where every nuance has a dedicated department of over-educated specialists who passionately wrestle with the most insignificant details. Wow. Can somebody tell me how to get there? Is there such a thing as an Information Hairdresser? That’s what I wanna be…maybe.

I’ve always thought the “architecture” portion of “information architecture” was a bit of pompous inflation, especially when used in reference to the LIS-IA school. I mean, “information organization” and “information classification” work just as well, and are probably more descriptive.

(But I think I’m coming around to Matt’s POV that “architecture” is a useful term when we talk about the coordinating functions of Big IA.)

Anyway, I see what we do as information product design. I like that term because a) it’s simple and (I think) easy to understand, and b) it focuses on things we can control (the product and the information it delivers) rather than things we can’t (e.g. user experiences).

iOMAR

That’w what I’m calling the work that my group does. I wanted to avoid IA at all costs since it was so associated with websites only.

It’s definitely a big dose of the user-centered
LIS-IA…

information organization
information management
information access
information retrieval

and we do not have a mascot named Omar…yet!

why a name is important?

Something for a company to put on a job list for one thing. I am tired of all these ass backwards job descriptions with the wrong title, or a weird title.

Designer can often mean production design.

It helps when it comes to getting a paycheck, title = money in a lot of classical work environments. I am aware though that web dev isn’t exactly a classical environment :)

It gives some people a sense of worth, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. People like to know what’s expected of them.

A long post. Sorry….

My team is wrestling with the whole “title” issue right now. For those who wonder “why bother,” I must say that in a large corporate environment, a title can help the many different players (technical and non-technical) in a project understand what you do and why you’re present. And in my experience (again, in a large, corporate environment), that title must be clear and not haughty, off-putting or overly academic-sounding. We already battle the notion of “what makes them the ‘experts’.” Calling ourselves “architects” is – IMHO – fraught with peril.

I like the inclusion of the word “customer” in titles associated with the IA/usability field. I think that resonates much more strongly with business-side folks. For example, see if your “look-n-feel” or “usability” issues get better attention/prioritization from a project’s business owner if those issues are re-identified as “customer experience issues.”

I have a meeting tomorrow AM to lock this down and move on. We’ve already done a few laps on this topic, and here’s how the meeting invite reads. Would love to hear thoughts/opinions.
– - –
OK – I know we’re sick of discussing this, but . . .

It’s a little bit like trying to name navigation—short but all-encompassing!

Perhaps I’m also over thinking it, but with our lack of direct and final authority over designs, do we want to have the word “design” in our titles? In other words, if we call ourselves designers but don’t always get the designs we want, would we be comfortable pointing to the website and saying: “I’m an interface designer, and I work on this site.”? For this vein of thinking, I wonder if we adopt the word “consultant”?

I also wonder about the absence of “usability” in our titles, (though many listings on Monster do not state “usability” in the title—rather, it’s part of the description/duties).

So, that said, here’s where I’m at, and I want to leave this meeting with the title decided so that it can be communicated in the full dept. meeting on Monday.

In no particular order:

1 – User Interface Designer
2 – User Experience Designer
3 – User Interaction Designer
4 – Interaction Design Consultant
5 – Specialist, Usability and Interface Design

Could consider dropping the word “User” or replacing it with “Customer.”

As someone pointed out already, this is perhaps mostly a question of self-identification. After listing all my diverse “hats” on a business card, then (joyfully) feeling empowered to lump them all under “information architect,” I now have settled on a tag line to do the job. My business is information design (encompassing more than Web stuff), I use the title “information architect,” and the tagline reads: “Content and the space it occupies.” So much better than a big stack of hats.

I think that people are missing the context of my article. I’m not trying to say that Information Architecture isn’t a good title. It is. It is a good title for those people who use information architecture as their sole specialty.

The point of the article is to say that it does no one any good to use the term Information Architecture to mean anything other than what it really means. Other terms are generic, and do a good job of being generic, but using a specific term to mean something generic doesn’t make much sense. User Experience Design is a good generic term because it doesn’t relate back to a specific discipline, or set of specific skills.

IA on the other hand requires quite a bit of specialization to be done correctly and that is what I’m trying to suggest. IA should be protected and loved and respected. IA can only be helped by this. This might mean pissing people off who have used the title but really don’t use IA. People who are general User Experience Designers who don’t really understand categorization, facets, thesauri, etc. Most people who call themsevles Information Architects don’t do this and thus dillute what would ordinarily be a very valuable title.

Most User Experience Designers do employ some level of IA, but aren’t really expert in it. So it is like the visual designer. Not all visual designers are iconagraphers even though most have created an icon or two in their lives. This seems pretty easy for most to accept, no? Why not w/ IA?

Lets not turn IA into “usability”. Lets keep IA as a specific term that carries its value.

I have always been intruiged, confounded and slightly amused by the way terms like Information Architect are picked up and used by people. In the 15 years that I’ve been around this field I’ve been a “Communication Designer”, “Document Designer,” and “Information Designer” at various groups. I have rejected the title Informaiton Architect, though. It simply doesn’t feel right for the general kinds of communications projects that I do, although I’ve come across others who have made Information Architect the next stop on the user-centered design train.

All the terms lack percision to me becuase they are picked up and used by so many people—and they certainly seem to confuse clients. I’ve yet to find one that I feel comfortable with. In my last group we all used the title “designer” regardless of our specific pont-of-view or the output we produce.

My all time favorite confusing term? A group that called themselves “Design Integrationists.”

David,

Thanks for reminding us about the original point you were trying to make. I can certainly appreciate it, and here’s why: In the one job I have had where my title actually was Information Architect, I did exactly what you describe, among other things. Most of my work was designing modular information products/applications and developing metamodels and data dictionaries. I considered this work information architecture because I was actually setting up a framework for content—i.e., architecture. The GUI design work felt, literally, like a different discipline.

The problem I have encountered since then is that as I look for a job now (after layoffs), most of the Information Architecture positions are truly User Experience Design and Usability Analysis positions, and I have developed a sense of inadequacy because those are not my strong suits. That’s my problem, but I just wanted to point it out because it supports your argument.

For many proprietary applications and web sites, usability engineering and user experience design may be more than enough because the app only has to work in one configuration at a time. For web services, applications often need to be flexible and modular, and that is where I think the IA work is mostly needed—to give the content and functionality contours in ways that correlate packaging from a sales & marketing perspective with user-centered design and database management. This can also be said of information distribution—content needs to be modeled and packaged in a way that it can flow from system to system more easily, and I think this is another job for the likes of an IA.

I can relate to Mike’s point that titles are constantly changing and going into and out of vogue. I recently talked to a vendor who called their consultants/contractors “momentum specialists” because they help companies “keep projects moving”. Needless to say, it was all I could do to keep my groan an inaudible one. I consider myself a UCD practitioner, and only chose “user experience architect” as a title to try to encompass that idea without using the term “designer” which might mislead clients to think that I do graphic design. Big-D Design is not well understood in my environment. One nice thing about using an unusual title is that you often end up clarifying it for people which gets you talking about what you do and don’t do…

I’ve avoided this dialogue until now, because I think it’s generally known that I have the precisely opposite opinion from David’s and I didn’t want to be a shit-disturber if I couldn’t add anything new or productive.

But I’ve been kicking this over for a few days, and I think I’ve come up with something that sums up my discomfort with his position. My POV probably stems from a few biographical and experiential quiddities – I’m *so* not old-school, I’m a generalist by instinct & have no formal training in anything even remotely relevant to the field, etc. – but I hope it resonates for some of you.

There’s a good reason we use the word “navigate,” as in “navigating informational spaces.” The primate nervous system evolved in physical space, and happens to be well-adapted to problems of finding its way in physical space. It maps other problems which feel (however incorrectly) analogous onto the problem of doing so. This appears to be true even if the “space” to be navigated has many more dimensions than the watch-out-for-that-tree three we’re used to.

Well, who is it that devises strategies for the organization of physical space? Traditionally, we call this person an “architect.” Too, as has already been pointed out, the architect marshals the resources of a team of designers, engineers, etc. in his or her attempt to find acceptable solutions. For all these reasons, I feel that “information architect” is a globally appropriate title.

To me, it doesn’t matter that the term first accidentally arose in this or that field (or that this or that visionary but sloppy conceptualist applied it to a book about practitioners who worked in a field that already had a perfectly good name, in an attempt to be marketable). *It describes to a high degree of fidelity what we do*, and to me this descriptive fidelity is the best index of the term’s usefulness: I surely architect information, but I’ve rarely if ever touched the LIS aspects of any job I’ve worked on.

I do agree that tribalism serves no one well, but my response is to point out more-or-less hard-assedly that if the title doesn’t sit well with you, you’re free to not use it to label yourself. In my opinion, you can’t argue away its suitability for the work that we do.

But Adam …
Why do you presume that I’m not a generalist? When I say I’m “old-school” I mean I’m pure slacker internet raised roots. I have no formal education, except for a degree in Anthropology that some feel I make use of from time to time.

I also said nothing about the use of the word “architect”. I love that word and when I own the process and can direct the resources used for design as well as the processes for design I will claim that word as part of my title. but I will call myself a User-Experience Architect, b/c IA is just a small piece of what I do as that architect: Interaction Design, usabilty testing, information design, etc.

I also said I came to this conclusion b/c I respect those that actually do use more formal IA. People like Peter M. (pick one), Louis R. and Jesse James Garnett use formal IA to categorize and organize content. They create vocabularies. They do Information Architecture. You can’t call it anything else but that. Not all of them have formal MLS degrees, but even without the degree they have formal understanding of what IA is in this non-generic sense.

So it is my ability to separate what I do from what they do, that I must stop calling what I do Information Architecture. You might do this level of IA and that is great. Join their club and be fruitful and multiply, but the vast majority of people on the SIGIA List do not, I guarantee it. When I was hiring IAs (your version) back a year ago, maybe 1 of every 10 applicants knew real IA processes and methods.

Louis is trying to promote IA … I didn’t read the results of his poll yet, but it seems to me the biggest thing that IA needs is legitimacy. I don’t mean User Experience, btw. I mean IA. IAs need legitimacy to get on the right projects, to be part of the right teams, and so that their jobs are better understood, and that their value-add is better understood. Confusing IA w/ UX is just hurting the cause.

- dave

Never meant to imply that you weren’t a new-school generalist. ; . )

Unfortunately, I’m just not sure there’s much of a middle ground here – or at least it will take someone wiser and more Solomonic than I to point it out. This probably stems from the fact that I *don’t* actually think “information architecture” is the best title for the JJG-style tasks – I think using that particular label for those tasks is acceding to entirely too narrow a definition of information.

I am actually working on a book explaining at appropriate length why I feel this way, so this probably isn’t the best or the most appropriate place to continue. For now, let’s just leave it at this: I respectfully disagree.

Cheers,
A.

Architecture is too big a word to fit inside the bottle of interactive LIS. I appreciate how complex, deep, and difficult LIS really is, and how much good it has done in the new world of Internet/Networked information environments, but I also appreciate the depth of knowledge, training, and excellence necessary for architectural engineering. (see definition at http://www.asee.org/precollege/disciplines.cfm#arch )But to confuse architecture with engineering is to ignore some very big things about architecture.
I keep wanting to give up on this point, but it keeps coming up, and until there’s some kind of referendum that tells me to say otherwise, I’m convinced that Architecture in shared information environments is the “virtual twin” of Architecture in physical spaces.

As a person who worked with David Heller, I find it interesting—and shocking—that one of the leading IA minds (oops – ‘experience architect,’ ‘interaction designer?’) had such a turn of belief. I must say, however, that I’m on the same brainwave.

Example:

A few months after I joined a web-telephony company as a Senior Content Developer. They asked me to re-brand the phone prompts for one of their products. While re-branding these prompts, I noticed a few usability glitches. I suggested they take out this step, re-write this step, etc, etc.

What I realized is this: no one in the company had ever bothered to take a look at the phone prompts and see if they were usbale. So, I used what organizational skills I had and re-wrote them. End-result—a more usable product.

So what do I call myself? Content developer? User experience designer? Copywriter?

Do I care? Hell no. As long as the paychecks keep rolling in.

As Clement Mok said, “Information architecture is not rocket science, it’s social science.” We work in a nebulous arena. We can’t call ourselves DBA’s, programmers or business developers. What IAs and experience/interaction designers do is considered by most to be a ‘soft’ skill—far less important to the average Director of Marketing than the 100 page demographic report. It is so very, very hard to tell the average business executive that if they only improved their user experience, they might retain more customers. For example, as a writer, I have tried to promote the fact that marketing fluff on the Web just doesn’t work. On the outset, my clients totally agree. But when that site is launched, I unerringly find my concise and user-centered text muddied by marketing jargon.

I do know this: as the world is filled with more information (or ‘crap’) there’ll be a need for people to sort it out. They are burying themselves out there. It’s so obvious! So worry about what to call yourselves later!

I am one of those Information Architects who actually is an Information Scientist but falls into the LIS category of Information Architects as I categorise information but don’t do UI design. I’d like to share with you the mission statement of my profession “CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals” (created when the Library Association and Institute of Information Scientists merged); http://www.cilip.org.uk/about/mission.html, and specifically the phrase;

”...support the principle of equality of access to information, ideas and works of the imagination…”

As you can see, we – including all of you on this discussion – work to achieve this aim because as Jonathan so neatly put it, “the world is full of information” and without us it would be (and often is before we get there) like trying to find a needle in a field of haystacks.

I am one of those Information Architects who actually is an Information Scientist but falls into the LIS category of Information Architects as I categorise information but don’t do UI design. I’d like to share with you the mission statement of my profession “CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals” (created when the Library Association and Institute of Information Scientists merged); http://www.cilip.org.uk/about/mission.html, and specifically the phrase;

”...support the principle of equality of access to information, ideas and works of the imagination…”

As you can see, we – including all of you on this discussion – work to achieve this aim because as Jonathan so neatly put it, “the world is full of information” and without us it would be (and often is before we get there) like trying to find a needle in a field of haystacks.

I see myself in a position similar to a movie producer with resposibility for making it all happen from the script to the special effects.

So, as someone involved in Website Production, I call myself a Website Producer. It can have more that one meaning.

We, you, they – are all IAs, part of IA. Building architects start at the superstar high concept designers like Normon Foster at one end, to people who draw out the heating duct plans for tin shed distributions centres. At one end you have big thinkers who want to change the world, at the other jobbing draftspeople who just want to make a living. They are ALL architects, because they all contribute. Isn’t that the issue here? If you need a high concept experience design you need one flavour. If you need a few extra pages deep in your finacial services website, then you need another. It’s a broad church. Ich bin eine IA.

interesting discussion

one observation: although “information architect” often strikes outsiders as a bit nebulous and pretentious, nonetheless it is now much more accepted and understood, certainly in Europe, than it was even 2-3 years ago. It is recognised as a valid job title just as much as “business analyst” or “graphic designer” – and more widely understood than, for example, “interaction designer” (I think)

Personally I´ve been amazed by how things have changed from a situation a few years ago where absolutely no one understood the term, let alone saw any need to employ information architects

so, from a purely practical point of view (i.e. getting work and gaining other people´s understanding/acceptance), the term “information architect” seems like a good one to stick with, even if not everyone in this field wants to call themselves that