All the fuss over findability resulting from Peter’s article and the many insightful comments led me to think about this new concept until I saw this diagram in a dream.
Structural Design Components
Unfortunately my skills fall mostly in two of the three circles, so this draft is pretty rough looking. This one is a bit fancier. I’ll be browsing Information Graphics for inspiration later…
The key concepts should be apparent, though. An IA strives toward the goal of findability, an interaction designer toward the goal of usability and the information designer toward understandability.
Obviously there are overlapping points. I had originally thought to put something in them, but then realized many items could go there. Between IA and InD, browse structures, between IfD and IA you get navigation design, between InD and IfD you get interface (GUI) design and so on. Most websites (and most software) fall neatly in the middle.
This is definitely a draft, so I’d love to get feedback from folks. Cheers!