There are a lot of DIY (Do It Yourself) people out there. My dad is one of them. He doesn’t mind the required 2+ trips to Home Depot per project, the purchase of specialized tools, and the eerie coincidence that one home improvement project seems to invariably lead to another. I do mind. I want to find the expert and work with them to get that single job done as best as possible the first time around. It saves me time and money in the long run, because I don’t have the tools or the years of experience the expert brings by just walking in the door.

Organization
Organizing information seems like it could be one of those DIY kinds of things.  Amazon currently has over two thousand books on “information architecture” and Google returns over three million results for that search term, so there is certainly not a shortage of reference material out there.

But what happens when you read something that directly contradicts something else you just read? And how much time do you want to spend reading about this anyway? Unless you have a passion for the elegance of a streamlined taxonomy, it’s pretty dry stuff. What if you find five different examples of how to accomplish the same outcome (and you will, believe me)? How do you choose what’s best for you and your customers or clients?

Or, if you didn’t want to DIY IA, you could just start coding. Given a few sentences of what a system is supposed to do, any programmer can be set off and running. And the direction they pick may or may not be what the user wants from the system and what the business needs from the system. Wandering is great for a leisurely hike in the woods – it’s a scope and budget nightmare for a project. Yes, you can always correct along the way, but the amount of trial and error can be significantly cut down if time is spent in the discovery and design phases before heading off into the development phase. The quality assurance phase will also thank you. The more documentation someone can provide to the people who are going to create your vision, the closer the end result will be to the initial idea, and the less time (and therefore money) it will take to get there.

IAs are IAs because they enjoy helping others with their information problems; whether it’s figuring out how many steps to have in an ecommerce checkout process, designing the navigation of a website, or finding out what labels will resonate with users. Like my DIY dad, they don’t mind doing what it takes to get the job done. Their knowledge is gained through the way they look at the world, their dedication to learning, and their daily experience. Which makes them experts.

And sometimes it’s worth bringing in the expert. They’ll ask a lot of questions, because while they may know information architecture up one side and down the other, each project has a uniqueness, and the better they understand what that is, the more tailored and efficient the solution can be.  Some things are “standards” or “best practices”, just like in any other industry.  But it also depends what your desired outcome is. A Porsche 911 Turbo does not use all the same “best practices” as a Toyota Prius, even if they both use the “best practice” of having four wheels on the road.

Heidi Berthiaume
MarketNet, Inc.