The enterprise environment offers unique challenges for information architects. In this context, we need to develop skills to help us understand and model how organizations deal with information.
Workplace and Career
As information architects, we are not just architecting information; we are using information to architect change. Bob Goodman shows us how we can use business and management techniques to help us be more effective agents of change.
Change Architecture: Bringing IA to the Business Domain
What does the publishing industry have in common with your 10 am design review with the client? More than you might think. Louis Rosenfeld reveals that the process of becoming a publisher is much like a product development process.
Lou Rosenfeld Eats his own Dog Food
Book Publishing as a Design Challenge
In April 2004, Boxes and Arrows sent a set of questions to Steve Krug for an interview to be published in the June edition. What we didn’t know at the time was that Steve is a notoriously slow and methodical writer. Eleven months later, to our great delight, this interview turned up. Thanks Steve!
Interview: Steve Krug
It isn’t often that one has the opportunity to create a course about user experience, let alone an entire sequence of user experience courses. Jason Withrow’s opportunity forced him to examine his perceptions of the user experience industry.
Crafting a User Experience Curriculum
How does a user interface designer know that a given design will work? How does anybody develop enough confidence in a design to move it toward the real world? The methods designers use to evaluate user interfaces require training and experience. But the people who need to hire designers are unlikely to have those skills. How do the people who are paying the bills know they are getting good answers?
The Confidence Game
I recently started a new job. The group I manage is new and all the people on my team have recently been transferred into this group. Additionally, each person has spent a lot of time in the recent past working on individual, solitary projects, and has not regularly been part of a collaborative team.
Mission Statements: Why You Might Want One
As information architects we all know how important it is to keep the user in mind. The same is true in teaching IA: we must keep the learner in mind. Learning objectives are one tool to help keep your classes focused on the student. They will also help you develop the syllabus, lesson plans, and assessment methods.
Focus on the Student: How to Use Learning Objectives to Improve Learning
The efforts to define our field and our role are understandable by-products of our economic times and of forces in our contexts of practice. What are the pressures behind this quest for definition? What are the options (and potential advantages) of refusing to pigeonhole ourselves?
Information Architecture: A Rose by Any Other Name…
Little Boxia has just turned two. Look how proud she stands, barely wobbling at all! See how she toddles around, smearing food on the walls! So independent, so curious and wait… did she just say “no!”? No, no, no! Here they come… the terrible twos.