19 Oct 2006 2259H

Corporate politics impacts information architecture

At least, that is my hypothesis. I suspect it is the number one reason why poor information architectures exist, aside from organic (we might call it more appropriately popcorn or wildfire) site development. Because everyone realizes that the solution and the situation they have is imperfect, yet, no one owns the information architecture. Anecdote. My sister today was informed that I was working on a client whose site she had just visited recently and apparently had not spent even five minutes there but what time she had was memorable enough that, upon discovering I was working for this client, she immediately blurted out, “They need SERIOUS help, man!” Not five minutes and she easily sees the problems. She might not be able to articulate them precisely, but it was a bad impression. Anecdote 2. In the course of interviewing with a travel-related firm, the head of UE there and I had a very fruitful if somewhat mutually commiserating discussion about how since executives ultimately were accountable for various sections of the online channel, they could, and often do, by virtue of their authority, mandate changes be made to the IA or UI layer based on their personal opinion of what or where things should go and what creative direction should be undertaken in order to satisfy their preferences, and not the preferences of clusters of customers, who might be profiled through personas. And it showed in the site’s information architecture: Redundancies in data, difficulties in navigation, confusion in the structure of the site content, so on.

As usual, we use qualitative data to gain insights on what people say, and quantitative data to demonstrate what people actually do. We don’t have to look far to figure out what the root causes of those bad impressions are. In April of this year, a Harris Interactive poll commissioned by the web metrics firm, TeaLeaf, showed that fully 9 out of 10 people had problems with online transactions. Three of the five issues were information architecture related: poorly written error messages. Poorly wrought navigation and labeling systems on sites. Insufficient or confusing information on a site. And yet clients feel they don’t need information architects in their firm. Well, this is a case of not knowing what they don’t know.

What people own is the P&L for various concerns, like, a unit, or a department, and so on. When you have many of these people working together, each ostensibly for their own good and not the good of the customer, the inevitable result will be damage to the information and navigational ecology through a combination of cancerous expansion and systemic neglect.

Permanent link to Corporate politics impacts information architecture

Filed under User Experience, Web

Be the first to respondto "Corporate politics impacts information architecture"

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

No responses yet.

No further responses are being solicited at this time.