To blog is a little dream of mine so I’ve decided to blog. About what I do for a living. I guess that means I feel I’ve got something worthwhile to say about the matter. Whether that’s true or not I’ll leave to you.
I’ve had an urge to blog for a while. I blame, or thank, this urge on my dad who is a writer. He does that for a living. I envy him for his freedom to work from anywhere and I admire him for having followed his dream. What I do for a living is work as a Experience Lead/ Lead Information Architect (IA), or User Experience (UX) Architect as some like to call it. It’s a little like a normal architect planning the layout of a house, only I architect online (mostly) experiences and strategies. A normal architect talks to the people who have given him the job and find out what type of house they want. I talk to our clients and find out what they want from their websites/app/system. A normal architect finds out who will be living in the house and what matters to them so he can draw them a nice house which they will love. I find out who will be using the websites/app/system and what their needs are so they can get a successful experience. A normal architect recommends where to place the different rooms, their doors and windows and how you get from one room to the other. I recommend what pages the websites/app/system should have, what content goes where and how the user will go from one page to the next to find what they are after.
Just as a normal architect doesn’t build the house, choose the material or do the interior design, neither do I build the website or do the design to make it look pretty. I draw the layout and define the documentation from which the developer can build and the designer can design. The normal achitect is of course knowledgeable in the matter of construction, materials and interior design (how else could he architect a nice house) and equally so am I when it comes to technical platforms, programming languages and principles of good design (how else could I define good user experiences and interactions).
Finally, just as the normal architect needs to work with his client, the builders and the interior designers to ensure the house ends up the way it was supposed to, in the same manner do I work with our clients, the planners, the developers and the designers to ensure the experience of the website/app/system becomes what we defined it to be.
The above explains the basics of information architecture and there is a lot more to it than what the metaphor above covers. If you keep reading my posts you’ll learn more about it and what I’m possitively and not so possitively passionate about when it comes to good IA and UX. Hopefully you’ll like my posts too.
