Survey: IA for agencies
Published August 9th, 2008 in IA, Usability, User experience, Web designI’m running a survey and I’d like your help.
Best practice design of websites, and other digital media, involves a set of skills known broadly as Information Architecture (IA) which generally means making designs user friendly. IA is also known to people doing this work, by such terms as User Experience (UX), User Centred Design (UCD), Interaction Design (IxD) or simply “usability”.
A significant amount of this sort of work is performed by agencies—whether they be advertising agencies, digital agencies or communication agencies. As a practitioner and educator in the field of IA, I am interested in learning how people go about practicing it, in particular how agencies “do IA”. This is to both confirm and challenge my own understanding of the way agencies work and how IA fits into their processes, who it gets done by and how it might be possible to give agencies the skills they need to perform better in this regard.
To this end, I’ve launched an online survey to get some answers straight from the people who work in agencies (or used to). The survey will take approximately 5-10 minutes to complete and I’ll give away, to one lucky person who completes the survey, a copy of the acclaimed best-selling book by Steve Krug Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition. I recommend this book for anyone considering doing anything to do with IA or usability, so it’s only fitting to offer it as an incentive.
You’ll find the survey at: http://www.gurtle.com/survey/index.php?sid=61824
If you don’t work in an agency, you can still help me out by forwarding this to your clients, peers and friends who do work in agencies. I may run a more general survey in the future, but for now I’m focused on agency folks.
The survey will run until the end of September, so there should be plenty of time for word to get around.
I’ll share the results of the survey
Popularity: 13% [?]
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Our field is plagued by the vagueness and ambiguity of its terminology. Your paragraph quoted above certainly does not do much to improve that.
That’s a fair comment. But I think that a large part of the problem with defining IA is that practitioners get so hung up on terminology and titles. The fact of the matter is that there is much overlap between the disciplines I listed in that paragraph, and from the perspective of non-IAs they are all pretty much the same.
My target audience was agency staff, who are typically unfamiliar with IA or any of its related fields. So that’s why I essentially equated what can be very different beasts (for example IxD and core IA). I obviously could have communicated this more clearly.
Thanks for the feedback.
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