Business: UX Professions

“The practice of information architecture is the effort of organizing and relating information in a way that simplifies how people navigate and use information on the Web.”—DSIA Research Initiative

Over the past two decades, the volatile evolution of Web applications and services has resulted in organizational uncertainty that has kept our understanding and framing of the information architect in constant flux. In the meantime, the reality of getting things done has resulted in a professional environment where the information architect is less important than the practitioner of information architecture (IA). Read More

Unfortunately, in the field of user experience, people often confuse terms like information architecture, interaction design, visual design, usability engineering, and UX design. In some cases, people use these terms almost interchangeably. This article provides a lexicon of these terms and more clearly defines the role of the user experience designer.

Information Architecture

Information architecture (IA) focuses on the organization of data—that is, how data is structured from a user’s perspective, as opposed to the system, or technical, perspective.

At the level of an entire Web site, or application, information architecture determines what data is on each page and how pages relate to each other. For example, defining a site map is an IA activity. At the level of an individual page layout, information architecture ensures that data is logically grouped and interrelated. Read More

This is a sample chapter from the 4th Edition of About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design, by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, and Christopher Noessel.

Chapter 6: Creative Teamwork

In the Introduction to this book, we described the Goal-Directed method as consisting of three p’s: principles, patterns, and processes. However, there’s a fourth p worth mentioning—practices. This book mostly concerns itself with the first three, but in this chapter we’d like to share a few thoughts about the practice of Goal-Directed design and how design teams integrate into the larger product team. Read More