Information architecture practice: An interview with Lou Rosenfeld Argus Associates, Inc.

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science, Aug/Sep 2000

ASISB: What are the four or five information sources, electronic or print, that have been most useful to you in developing your skills and professional approach and in keeping up with current developments?

LR: As a general "keeping-up" tool, I favor the digest service provided by Tomalak's Realm (http:Htr.pair.com). There's nothing better; they review and digest from the best sources, and distill it all in one daily e-mail.

For general IA-related material, I like Jesse James Garrett's and Info.Design's sites (wwwjjg.net/ia. and www.infodn.com/ iares-ia.shtml, respectively), as well as our own Argus Center for Information Architecture (www.argus-acia.com), although I'll admit that I'm biased.

For passionate knee-jerk musings on IA and other topics, Peter Merholz's weblog (www.peterme.com) is a blast. For usability-related materials, I follow Argonaut Keith Instone's Usable Web site (www.usableweb.com). For knowledge management related material, I occasionally go to Brint (www. brint.com), though its architecture gives me a headache.

"Print"? What's that?

ASIB: Looking back to the ASIS Summit, please give us your own definition of Information Architecture in 30 words or less.

LR: Argus' current party line is "The art and science of structuring and organizing information environments to help people achieve their goals."

This definition represents a couple major shifts in our thinking: we used to see IA as helping people find information, but considering that users may have other goals (e.g., being entertained by a game site) we've broadened our definition. We also have backed away from mentioning specific architectural "systems" (e.g., organization, navigation, labeling and searching systems) because we continually find more to architecture than those systems cover.

Our broader definition seems in line with the sentiment expressed at the ASIS Summit, although I'm personally concerned by this loss of specificity. At some point you need to draw lines.

of Terms from the

Experience Designer: Modeler: Someone who systematically studies what people think, how they behave and why they use products and services in order to understand how the experience ot a website is organized tor its users and to translate that understanding into website architecture.

Partial: "A site for a particular audience, providing a path to all-encompassing content and services through one access point. A portal can be a vortal (vertical portal; narrow area of interest) or a hortal (horizontal portal; brad area of interest)." - Kat Hagedom in The Information Architecture Glossary, Ann Arbor, MI: Argus Center for Information Architecture (Argus Associates), March 2000. p. [41 .

RDF: The Resource Description Framework, sponsored by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is an infrastructure that enables the encoding, exchange and reuse of structured metadata. RDF is an application of XML. For further information see the WX website at http://www.w3.org/RDF/ or "An Introduction to the Resource Description Framework" by Eric Miller in the October/November 1998 issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science at http.,//www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct98/index.html.