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With contributions from Amelie Sarrazin, Aleksandra Micek, Taylor Reese, Dan Brown, Daniel Cook, Kate Rutter, Eva-Lotta Lamm, Matthew Magain, Sunni Brown, Cristina Negrut, Daryl Meier Fahrni, Marc Bourguignon, Laura Klein, David Gray, Melissa Kim, Mike Rohde, Brian Gulassa, Andrew Reid, Rolf Faste, Raph Koster, Stone Librande, Robin Hunicke, Alicia Loring, Erin Malone, Stephen P. Anderson, Giorgia Lupi, Alex Osterwalder, Noelle Stransky, James Young, and Dan Roam.
IA is $. Interesting, is that money or cost? Your entry title made me think about the difference of approaches between IAs and usability testing folks. My impression is that the later spend a copious amount of time cost-justify everything they do – why is it so hard to explain the importance of something we know is important?
When usability was the new fad of the moment, money seemed easy, now they are between a rock and a hard place. Will IAs get there as well? I think not. IAs have an advantage: “If you can help a company sell more products, people will listen to you very carefully” Business people will favour planning over testing and iterating (regardless of how useful both things are). Information Architecture is much more linked to strategy in that sense, and this is where IAs can leverage their efforts creating successful projects.
It makes all the difference if you approach a project with your mind set on solving a problem or reaching a goal. Obvious? Maybe, but that is not the approach we see in usability testing – not from the business perspective – the business top-down perspective sees usability testing as the point where we’re going (back) to look for problems.
Usability testing is perceived as tactic, Information Architecture as strategic. Everything else is operational. But there is a hierarchy in business thinking that forces operational to follow tactic and tactic to follow strategy. Therefore, information architects have a privileged amount of business folks’ attention span.
IA’s should emphasise the strategy grounds in which IA work is based and play with it. Not only it allows for more space for IA work, but it also helps better integrating projects with business strategies. This also means more money. Now, there’s an approach IAs should try and use.
One thing puzzled me in this article: “One of the first things to organize in a site’s design is its navigation structure” Maybe it’s the generalization or maybe it’s about the size of the site, but for me (at least) navigation is the result of a looooooong process, not one of the first things to get done.
IA is cost with great delusions of return (the delusions are great, sometimes the claimed return as well). Sure, specific techniques can increase sales, but anyone can apply them – it’s just not clear when and how the costs are worth the return. (Of course, IA practitioners are not the only people making this mistake, as Livia points out.)
I realize that most sites are selling canned corn. They are selling something that has to be branded to be different. They are selling into markets where no market barriers exist.
You can contextualize usability into the pre and post-sales cycles and tie it to money.