Information architecture
From eg
The totem spirit of information architecture is the polar bear.
In some organizations, prediction markets are used to limit the reliance on a centralized boss perception. Google shops do this. The duty of any boss is to recognize reactive behaviour and make it more reflective, including their own.
The major decision a user boss makes with respect to a corporate wiki is whether to buy or build its core content and core ontology. In other database applications, notably in banking, it was common to purchase a strong ontology for use in mainframe applications. In the early 1990s one was marketed by an Australian bank to banks worldwide, for a price about US$1.5M per customer.
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[edit] Morville's view
Peter Morville, an information architect, interaction designer and librarian defines Information Architecture 3.0 in his book with Louis Rosenfeld as focused on usability, findability, accessibility, and other qualities of the user experience. He advocates "transmedia models of user interaction, co-creation, tagging, and user participation" and defines IA as:
- "The structural design of shared information environments" - the core ontology that reflects especially privacy-sensitive and scenario-sensitive problem domains.
- "The combined path to organize/label/search/browse" within public web "sites" and intranets.
- "The art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support usability and findability." In particular with rigorous naming discipline.
- "An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape." Note spatial metaphor.
Other IA experts like Christina Wodtke, Adam Greenfield and Peter Merholz prefer broader definitions. Morville and Jesse James Garrett argue that "choosing a narrow definition for the discipline allows us to describe a particular set of problems with precision. And such precision of expression is absolutely required for any discipline to progress." Craig Hubley adds that John McMurty's preference for extremely strict and narrow definitions also applies.
[edit] Hubley's view
Hubley's view, called deep interaction design, is even narrower:
- "a strong core ontology that lets users self-organize: redefine goals, challenge mindsets, transform projects starting with the taxonomy" required to describe a reflexive process
- "a naming scheme that 1. makes all operational distinctions, 2. sticks closely to GFDL corpus namespace standards, 3. limits ontological metaphor, and 4. is adapted to anticipate and solve findability problems" and supports every reflective process within the organization
- "for intranets, a structure based broadly on the twelve levers, that permits a reflective process of continuous improvement, and strictly process-driven categories to support usability within the kaizen" and eventually become a reflexive intranet
- "for web services, integration of REST protocols into the common verbal ontology, and direct support for internal worn devices and external keitai."
- "a general awareness of contract-based, rhythm-based, reflexive means of scheduling reviews and audits, and making decisions based on objective data."
Hubley carefully distinguishes four roles:
- "a carefully defined chief editor role maintaining only process-driven categories, making only those operational distinctions absolutely required by technology and by at most three ontological metaphors to organize/label/search/browse material, avoiding any spatial metaphor."
- "a disciplined team of ethical trolls who challenge and tag every usability, findability, accessibility issue they see, regardless of whether they have any intent or power or skills to fix it, while encouraging other user participation and avoiding systemic bias of participation inequality." For politics, for instance, the open politics in force rules apply.
- "a Lowest Troll focused only on the overall user experience, testing the most privacy-sensitive and scenario-sensitive elements of the system, encouraging other users to engage him or her with their complaints to develop a more rigorous critique of the system - a dissensus - and further the discipline."
- "a credential authority focused specifically on the industry of concern"
From an interaction design perspective, he "holds that aesthetics and function of code is as connected as the aesthetics and function of buildings or a handheld tool. It's similar to Knuth's "literate programming" except that the program is only one level of documents, and the affordances (presented as the command grammar the end users sees) constitute a third distinct layer. All three layers must use the same words. For instance, if it's HTTP, you have to use "get", not "go", as the verb on the button you click to get a new page (and it matters not if HTTP thinks of this as a "post", what matters is what the user thinks of it - for each get there's a put somewhere...). You avoid metaphors that you may need later, like spatial ones (don't say "go", "here", "navigation", etc., since you may need to support GIS someday and then you'll need all those words to mean something entirely different) or social ones (don't say "community" to mean all of the people dumb enough to register, don't pretend that a decision made from authority is made "on behalf of a community", it's surprising how many words suggest that). Stick to operational terms." [1]
[edit] ECG view
The ECG view, as defined in the real web 3.0, takes the reflexive view further: it proposes open configurations, sociosemantic webs and ultimately democratic domains that fluidly reflect changing user bases, and cannot be dominated by any user boss.
[edit] diverse input to the discipline
Morville defines an information architecture community as including "the IA Summit, Euro IA, the Latin American IA Retreat, Oz-IA, and the IA Institute." He notes that "most who participate in the community’s discussions, conferences, and local events do not self-identify as information architects. In fact, some are not very interested in the central concepts of the discipline. Instead, they see the community as a collection of vibrant, open forums for discussing diverse topics with smart, sensible people." He notes also that "senior practitioners of our sister discipline - interaction design attack IA". Morville relates that he "joined IxDA just in time for a celebration of the total absence of information architects from Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge. I opened About Face 2.0 by Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann, only to find them slamming information architecture in the book’s introduction". Cooper and Reimann say that "IA has largely retained its narrow, web-centric view of organizing and navigating content in pages..." and had not incorporated knowledge from application design.
Morville notes that "information architecture is five times more valuable than interaction design in the eyes of Google AdWords." A useful metric.
Morville however also notes that "the vast majority of information architecture work is done by folks who are not information architects" and that "the specialists do play a special role in building the community and advancing the discipline": "search analytics for instance, offers rich opportunities (in practice and research) to better understand user needs and behavior, and inform the efforts of marketing and design." Dating services are far ahead in this.
[edit] supposedly related to physical design
Similar to other advocates of pattern-based methods, Morville seeks to "extend our practice to include a wider variety of shared information spaces, including:
- "Virtual (e.g., software, websites)"
- "Physical (e.g., museums, libraries, hospitals)"
- "Procedural (e.g., flows of information in work processes)"
He claims to be "creating infrastructure, organizing events, and nurturing a culture that’s vibrant, open, inquisitive, and encouraging" among the various specialists required to do this work.
