12 Nov 2008 0918H

Lumping & splitting among information architects, user experience people, and interactionists

Of all the lousy times to be looking for a new gig, there’s a recession and a marriage banquet and an election and all these things with starting a new life. But I really can’t complain because at least the interviews keep coming, so that signals to me that the market is still fairly strong.

So, recently, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing with the information architecture/user experience practices of a number of different firms, and came away with differing and occasionally overlapping views about what each believed IAs should do, and I think this speaks directly to the lumping and splitting problem that is at the center of controversy among, ironically, IAs, UXers, IxDs, and whoever might consider themselves to be part of this group.

As anyone who has worked with taxonomy knows, there is a famous problem called lumping and splitting when it comes to placing things into categories: those who lump tend to elide differences, and seek out commonalities, which results in less complex, but more unwieldy definitions; those who split tend to emphasize difference, but this results in greater complexity, even as one moves toward precision. Well, this is precisely what is happening within the work that we do. I think Jared Spool recently wrote on an IxDA thread about UCD v. ACD, true, it may not matter too much to the patient what procedure might be done so long as they are cured of their disease, but it is important to us, the practitioners, what is included in what we call whatever it is we do and what is not. For example, we would not want someone who is not an oncologist to be working on cancer. But yet, in IA work, we do something like that, because we have not determined where the splits occur and what those splits are.

For instance, is it likely that those of us who work on synonym rings and authority files and metadata schema like Dublin Core will ever be working on interaction design for a complex, customer-facing  transactional application? I can tell you that after 12 years in corporate America that I have never been asked to work on enterprise information architecture on a corporate intranet, which is a hardcore library and info science practice. I certainly would want someone who is a credentialed MLIS or having equivalent experience working on similar projects on that. Taxonomy for a footwear vertical within an online department store? Maybe less so. Layout of a travel application page, or determining the process flow of a balance transfer system for users within a banking application? Maybe not so much. Maybe we want to have someone who has experience as an interaction designer working on some of these things. Maybe we want to have more than one person touching this to make sure all the pieces are there.

The usability body of knowledge within the UPA is a good start. It’s true that the techniques we use to get to the end result are largely the same, but the kinds of specialities that people are working on are not. Maybe we should be pushing people to identify themselves as what kind of IA/UX/IxD that someone is, and maybe we should be pushing HR and staffing managers to also ID the kinds of skills they’re looking for as well so that there’s a good fit for the client and for the practitioner as well. Who knows, maybe in another five, ten years we’ll start lumping again.

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