For this week, one of the things we were required to review was a PowerPoint presentation on IA selling strategies and conundrums by Karin McGrane &Louis Rosenfeld called “Selling IA.” When architects are selling IA, it is important to view it as a display of how vital IA can be for a business model. IA helps to bring the business into a higher level of functionality and gain more customers and funds. The goal of these presentations is to clarify how IA can contribute to business strategy, educate decision makers, answer their questions, and remove any reservations they may have. The thing companies must remember is that if they want to develop their website and gain business, they must be willing to put in the effort and take on the essential labor that is required of IA. This was an excellent presentation and I could not agree with the authors more.
Our textbook readings this week included chapters 20 and 21 of the Morville & Rosenfeld text and the introduction and chapter 1 from the Web Theory text by Robert Burnett and P. David Marshall. In chapter 20, Morville & Rosenfeld (2007) state that, “It’s nearly impossible to develop successful information architecture against a backdrop of explosive content growth, content ROT, and the political twists and turns common in any organization. One of the best approaches we’ve seen so far is the one taken by Microsoft’s intranet portal (MSWeb) team” (p. 429). The entire chapter is devoted to explaining the MSWeb project from Microsoft. One of the reasons this project was developed was due to a problem with employees spending about half of their work time looking for information. This can be caused by several things such as deciding where to begin searching, conflicting systems of navigation and problems with labels.
During the project, three types of taxonomies (an indexing vocabulary, metadata schema, and category labels) were developed to illustrate high-value content. The developers used a modular approach that stressed the importance of service when they overhauled the MSWeb intranet. The main goal of this was to help users and there have been benefits in the forms of easier searching and browsing and there have been improvements in the form of better success rates for tasks and less time expenditure on tasks. All in all, this chapter, while it is highly technical in nature, is an excellent real life example of what embarking on a project of this magnitude would entail.
In chapter 21, the authors introduce an online community called evolt.org. According to the textbook (2007), “evolt.org is a world community for web developers, promoting the mutual free exchange of ideas, skills and experiences” (p. 461). The authors stress the importance of participation from users and how an online-community economy must be created. IA’s role in the formation of the economy provides laws and strategies that make up the economy’s infrastructure as well as being used to fine-tune the amount of transactions (such as discussion board postings, articles or a personal blog) that take place in the economy. One of the things I liked was how the authors mention that web sites should be designed to accommodate a variety of users with varying levels of participation on the site. Evolt.org meets these requirements in that it does provide many levels of access ranging from non-members to site administrators. One of IA’s key aims here is to assist the community in designing and distributing content. Morville & Rosenfeld (2007) state that, “evolt.org’s information architecture has a lot to do with many of the characteristics of a successful online community. It shows how and why one might participate, provides valuable original content, helps promote a sense of ownership among its members, makes sure that contributors are recognized, and taps and repays members’ philanthropy and sense of altruism” (p. 472).
This last chapter was quite informative and interesting to read. On the whole, I have really liked this textbook and learned a lot from it. It was quite helpful and the fact that it also provided so many real life examples was an excellent aid in explaining some of the processes in IA.
Also, this week, we delved into another of this course’s textbooks, Web Theory: An Introduction by Robert Burnett and P. David Marshall. According to the authors (2003), “Web Theory introduces a range of debates and issues pertinent to our move into the network or Web society. We identify key sources, in order to illustrate critical debates about the Internet and to place such debates in relation to broader theoretical discussions” (p. 3). Given the title, I was not surprised at how theoretical the book is, but it is intriguing to get an alternate viewpoint of the web and how it fits into our lifestyle. The introduction and the first chapter were very interesting to read and I loved the variety of opinions. I am really looking forward to exploring this book further.
References
Burnett, Robert and Marshall, P. (2003). “Web Theory: An Introduction.” New York, NY. Routledge.
Morville, Peter & Rosenfeld, Louis. (2007). “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.” Sebastopol, CA. O’Reilly Media, Inc.