05 Aug 2008 0800H

In re: interaction design v. information architecture

At one time, before the dotcom world ended, people would put out these crazy job descriptions where they wanted what used to be called a webmaster: someone who coded, designed, researched, and managed the web services for a company or an organization. They wanted someone who was familiar with major scripting and programming languages, someone who was an ace designer who knew all the Macromedia (now Adobe) and Adobe applications, someone who could turn everything they wanted around quickly and easily, and not require sleep, time off, feeding or vacation, and by the way, a sense of humor would really help as well: in other words, a machine. Those days where one person took on all these tasks no longer exists except in small organizations and jobs, or departments of a much larger organization, and even those people, harried as they are, admit they cannot do everything well. In the new era, we learned our lesson. People who are good at developing software we put onto a dev team. People who are good at visual or written communications, we put onto a creative team. But then emerged the gap about wayfinding mechanisms, and organization of information, and how do people seek information in a website, and so, the information architect was born. 

But there comes a time in every discipline when the complexity of the work we do and the jobs we increasing take on leads necessarily to defining the domain of knowledge and skills that we require of people within our discipline. I would say that almost 90% of the work that I do now and have been doing for the last three years has been less about putting data into informational buckets and labelling them in ways that people understand and can find them as it has been about owning how the user and the application talk to each other in a very high level way. I’m not talking about owning the code or owning the copywriting or the visual messaging: I’m talking about owning the loop of how the user physically acts upon the world of the application and how the application responds in turn to the user, which necessitates understanding the world of the user and the neighborhood of users we want to use this application. Increasingly, the industry is realizing that there is not just the structuring of data and information into user-centered constructs, but equally important, how does the user act upon a world and how does that world act back upon the user: this is interaction design. It is related to information architecture, intimately tied to how information is structured, but it is different from it, because unlike the library and information science origins of IA work, it is more grounded in a critical understanding of human behavior and in engineering. I think this is an important aspect of our work which can’t be emphasized enough. There are those who think that it is easier to teach artists and craftsmen to become engineers than it is the other way around: perhaps so, but, much more important to me, I feel, is the ability to critically inquire into and analyze human behavior in order to properly inform our design. 

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