Boxes and Arrows Podcast

Information architects have always had an essential role in providing access to information and services. Emerging markets have an enormous need for this access – but also a range of constraints that make it hard for designers to deliver effective IA.

Context. It's everywhere. Really, you can't move without bumping into the stuff. Once upon a time, we could easily tell what context we were inhabiting at any given time: we were either "here" or "there."

As technology becomes increasingly portable, mobile, and ubiquitous, new challenges to traditional ethnographic user research arise.

User experience designers often express a desire to play more of a strategic role in guiding business decisions. Yet UX designers don’t always seek to understand the advertising business model so they can maximize revenue. Instead, they often treat advertising as “clutter” — to be ignored at best and actively disliked at worst.

Emotional engagement is an enormously powerful driver in ensuring product success. One group of UX designers, Disney’s Imagineers, know this and understand how to build experiences that people not only engage with, but truly love.

There is a fundamental assumption in information architecture that producers need to organize their content before consumers can access it effectively.

What is the business value of Information Architecture? We keep hearing about several virtues including those of Experience Design, IxD, UX design, storytelling, usability, accessibility, and the list goes on to include some-other-damned-abilities.

Information architects have been singing the praises of metadata, thesauri, and controlled vocabularies for years. But there is a new game in town: the Semantic Web.

Rules provide an underlying structure that governs the experience: what is displayed, when it’s displayed, and how it responds to user actions.

Not only do we work with people across the hall, across town, and across the country, but we also work with people we never meet from countries we know about only through Wikipedia or the Travel Channel.