I’ve been involved in several conversations in the past couple of weeks where I’ve needed to define what an IA is and does. In one instance, to justify my place on a project.
While those of us that do IA know in our heads what we are, it’s kind of tough to articulate sometimes.
My friend, Matthew Hodgson, has been involved in the conversation that’s been taking place on SIGIA-L, and has now come up with one of the best non-technical definitions I’ve seen. It’s one you can pass to business users without overwhelming them – and you should:
IAs are like those cool Scandinavian industrial designers at IKEA. They take the analysis — information requirements, user’s wants and needs, business requirements, processes, strategic goals and organisational drivers — and design how people will interact with information. The result can be as simple as a systems interface or as complex as a business taxonomy for classifying corporate knowledge. Core to their array of skills is expertise in:
- accessibility
- usability
- interaction design
- information design
Most importantly, an IA has an understanding of how these things apply to the unique problems of the users’ environment (e.g. the problems of accessiblity for the web for which the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) was created), and how to transfer the underlying philosophies and principles into workable, usable designs.
So, yes, amongst the other stuff I do, I am an IA (which is like an IKEA industrial designer).
