IROAI

“Content strategy has been around for a long time. Large corporations such as Disney, Wells Fargo, and Mayo Clinic have had functional content strategy teams for years. The mega-agency Razorfish has had dedicated content strategists on staff since 1998. But it’s really only been in the last two years that the larger UX community has started paying closer attention to content strategy. In 2008, not a single UX conference had a session or workshop devoted to content strategy; In 2010, nearly all of them did, including the IA Summit, UX Week, UX London, User Interface Conference, and even SXSW.

Why the gold rush? The answer is pretty simple: it’s inherently impossible to design a great user experience for bad content. If you’re passionate about creating better user experiences, you can’t help but care about delivering useful, usable, engaging content.” (Kristina Halvorson for UX Magazine)

Full article >>

The Johnny Holland reports:

Overview | Day 1 | Day 2

The SVA reports:

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3

“Government environments often have prescribed complex processes for obtaining and implementing technology solutions. In order to encourage and enable information architecture (IA) in government systems, it is essential to embed IA within the current processes and to view IA as part of the overall architectural framework. The definition of IA used here is broad and inclusive spanning applications, the Web and the enterprise. A common focus exists aimed at organizing information for findability, manageability and usefulness, but the definition also includes infrastructure to support organization of information. This case study describes the development of an IA checklist in a large United States government agency. The checklist is part of an architectural review process that is applied 1) during assessment of proposed information systems projects and 2) design of solution recommendations before system implementation.” (Laura Downey, TSA; Sumit Banerjee, IBM – Journal of Information Architecture)

Full article >>

Dan Klyn is Adjunct Faculty at University of Michigan’s School of Information where he is teaching Information Architecture. This is the class sylabus.

“All too often, we hear web developers, search engine optimization (SEO) professionals, usability practitioners, and even search engine reps claim, “It’s good for the user experience.” And we blindly accept that explanation.” (Shari Thurow)

Full article >>

1. Nu doar extinderea grupului LinkedIn, dar si o comunicare relevanta in interiorul acestuia.

2. Deschiderea unui club de carte intr-unul din orasele universitare ale Romaniei.

3. Organizarea unei conferinte de arhitectura informatiei, online sau on-site.

4. Participarea celor interesati de arhitectura informatiei pe blogul IROAI. Daca doriti sa publicati un articol pe blogul nostru, va rugam scieti-ne la iroai[.]org[@]gmail[.]com

1. Am reusit sa trimitem 15 titluri de carte la British Council Iasi cu speranta ca cei interesati de arhitectura informatiei vor gasi acolo un cerc de intilnire. Din pacate nu am primit suficiente donatii ca sa putem face acelasi lucru si la Bucuresti.

2. Am participat la 2 conferinte (IA Summit si EuroIA) unde, din pacate, nu am intilnit pe nimeni din Romania. Ar fi interesat de aflat care sint motivele prezentei romanesti foarte limitate la evenimentele legate de arhitectura informatiei.

3. Am incercat sa aducem in Romania citiva speakeri intr-un format de conferinta sau workshop. Cu toate ca nu am reusit acest lucru, nu ne-am pierdut speranta pentru 2011.

4. Ne-am asteptat ca in decursul lui 2010 numarul membrilor/sustinatorilor IROAI sa fie de cel putin 200. Deocamdata, grupul nostru de pe LinkedIn are doar 53 de membri, din care 6 lucreaza in afara Romaniei.

E mult, e putin? Nu stim. Asteptam opiniile voastre.

“Why does this need to be explained? Why isn’t this more clear? Several reasons:

1. IA as described above is still pretty new, highly interstitial, and very complex; its materials are invisible, and its effects are, almost by definition, back-stage where nobody notices them (until they suck). We’re still learning how to talk about it. (We need more patience with this — if artists, judges, philosophers and even traditional architects can still disagree among one another about the nature of their fields, there’s no shame in IA following suit.)

2. Information architecture is a phrase claimed by several different camps of people, from Wurmanites (who see it as a sort of hybrid information-design-meets-philosophy-of-life) to the polar-bear-book-is-all-I-need folks, to the information-technology systems architects and others … all of whom would do better to start understanding themselves as points on a spectrum rather than mutually exclusive identities.

3. There are too many legacy definitions of IA hanging around that need to be updated past the “web 1.0″ mentality of circa 2000. The official explanations need to catch up with the frontiers the practice has been working in for years now. (I had an opportunity to fix this with IA Institute and dropped the ball; glad to help the new board & others in any way I can, though.)

4. Leaders in the community have the responsibility to push the practice’s understanding of itself forward: in any field, the majority of members will follow such a lead, but will otherwise remain in stasis. We need to be better boosters of IA, and calling it what it is rather than skirting the charge of “defining the damn thing.”

5. Some leaders (and/or loud voices) in the broader design community have, for whatever reason, decided to reject information architecture or, worse, continue stoking some kind of grudge against IA and people who identify as information architects. They need to get over their drama, occasionally give people the benefit of the freakin’ doubt, and move on.” (Andrew Hinton)

Full Article >>