ia/ - Email, discussion group communication

IAI Summary Question 1: To Content Inventory Or Not To Content Inventory

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 22:49:55 -0700

Inaugural Question of the Week for the IA Institute Member Mailing List

Leisa Reichelt of Disambiguity.com posted earlier this month against content inventories, positing that they immerse you in the status quo of the content types and approaches.

http://www.disambiguity.com/2006/05/why-you-shouldnt-start-ia-with-a-content-inventory/

Her position is interesting, but we'd like to hear from you about how you react to this post. How have content inventories affected your process and creativity on projects? Is completing a content inventory as one of your first major IA tasks good or bad?

Information Architecture Institute: Question of the Week

Wed, 24 May 2006 20:30:12 -0700

Hello, Information Architecture fans.

To share the insights gleaned from years of deep dives into Information Architecture and the various User Experience areas of practice, every two weeks we will pose a question to the Information Architecture Institute's member mailing list, collect the responses, then summarize the key discussion points right here on iaslash.org.

Look for the first summary in the next couple days.

Jesse James Garrett in Conversation

Sat, 14 Jun 2003 13:45:58 -0700

For the next couple weeks, our favorite IA named after an outlaw will be a guest on the WELL, discussing the Elements of User Experience and other tasty things.

The conversation is well worth checking out (though it's one long page that takes some investment). You can also participate: send questions by emailing the discussion hosts.

Paper prototyping discussion

Mon, 21 Apr 2003 12:49:29 -0700

In case you missed it, author Carolyn Snyder has weighed in on Keith Instone's earlier paper prototyping post about her book and paper prototyping in general. The discussion is well worth a read. Thanks for stopping in Carolyn! :)

IA Education Mailing List

Wed, 02 Apr 2003 07:48:57 -0800

The IA Education mailing list is an open, unmoderated list for discussing topics related to information architecture education. Educators, students, and other interested individuals are welcome to join.

The SIGIA Highlight Reel

Mon, 17 Mar 2003 00:34:40 -0800

This week saw an increase in volume, but an unfortunate majority of that is part of a tedious, ongoing 'defining the damn thing' discussion. Fortunately, we did see a boost in shop talk, as encouraged by Marc Rettig last week.

My favorite post of the week is from Jeff Lash and John O'Donovan for Best Practices for Recurring Payments Thanks for the great, concrete examples and real world shop talk!
Jeff Isom asked about ways of Labelling a PDF Archive and got a lot of interesting responses. I hope he lets us know how things actually shake out on his project, so we can see how the flurry of opinion helped.
Chiara Fox chimed in with a simple answer to a simple question. The reason it's a gem is because it's actually based on a real project!
For those of you interested in defining the damn thing,
Christina Wodtke added to the list of first principles that was started earlier in the week by yours truly. While there was additional useful resonse, I'll leave it as an exercise for the masochis... err... enthusiastic to follow that thread and sort the signal from the noise ;-)
Finally, to close off with some more pragmatic, concrete contributions: Livia Labate articulates parts of the IA Toolkit, and Eric Scheid shares experiences with free-listing as an alternative/addition to card sorting.

Of course, you might have other posts that really helped you during the week. Post 'em in the comments.

The SIGIA Highlight Reel

Sun, 09 Mar 2003 19:37:43 -0800

This week's hightlights from SIGIA, the central IA discussion list:

Livia Labate had an interesting analogy about the differences between IAs and Flight Attendants that is helpful in explaining the role to others.
Jesse James Garrett had a too brief snippet with this gem: I submit that this field will never make any significant progress if each new participant insists on dragging us back to first principles. Which begs the question - aren't new participants, by definition, starting with first principles? So how to move beyond that, and still support new IA practitioners?
And notably, perhaps in answer to moving beyond first principles, Marc Rettig pipes up and encourages people to share based on their experiences, not just their opinions.

Unfortunately, posts like the shop talk Marc is looking for were rare this week...we'll see next week how things went.

Information Layers Model from Karl Fast

Sat, 01 Mar 2003 14:59:19 -0800

On SIGIA, Karl Fast proposed a rough 5 layered model for information. The layers are content, metadata, semantic, representational, and interaction.

Librarians kick ass on the metadata and semantic layers. They suck on the representational and interaction layers.

Content Management Dissatisfaction

Sat, 01 Mar 2003 15:24:36 -0800

Both the SIG-IA list and a CMS list have surfaced an interesting thread today in regards to an article published at At New York, Study: Content Management Tools Fail. It discusses some high level findings from a Jupiter Research report on the dissatisfaction around the implementation and maintenance of Content Management Systems. I don't have access to the report, but very interesting.

IA around the world.

Thu, 20 Feb 2003 16:09:28 -0800

AIFIA is starting an initiative, managed by Peter Van Dijck, to try and promote, educate and generally talk about IA in an international context. If you would like to get involved with the discussion, point your browser to the Aifia-translation -- international information architecture discussion list.

Rashmi on recommender systems

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 03:38:03 -0800

Andrew pointed me to Rashmi's excellent discussion of findability and recommender systems on sigia-l.

It sure would be nice if the best of sigia-l was culled periodically. Scott Berkun does this from time to time. Maybe the signal to noise has gotten better on the list?

Good gut

Wed, 29 Jan 2003 04:09:30 -0800

Nice discussion on EH:

I'm beginning to theorize that designers and usability researchers can start to quickly evaluate designs with their gut, once they have seen enough usability tests. ... In fact I think the gut is more accurate than a rule. How to Think With Your Gut lends credence to this theory.

Nathan-Adam IA/ID debate still hot on EH

Mon, 30 Dec 2002 14:29:26 -0800

Wow. The discussion on Christina's site over Adam's interview with Nathan is still going on.

New mailing list for faceted classification

Thu, 19 Dec 2002 05:34:24 -0800

Peter Van Dijk (Poor But Happy) and Phil Murray (Knowledge Management Connection) are starting a discussion group on faceted classification.