[IxDA Discuss] Information Architecture 3.0

[Pabini Gabriel-Petit]

Hi Peter

Great post! Your words echo a discussion I had recently with Lou Rosenfeld as I was working on some new definitions for the UXmatters Glossary—definitions of IA and IxD, coming soon on UXmatters.

Here’s what I said: “I think too many definitions are overly vague and, therefore, unclear, so I want to be specific, even at the cost of possibly engendering controversy. It’s always difficult to find agreement among UX professionals with different specialties about the boundaries that demarcate them. I draw the lines between them myself based purely on good labeling, not people’s roles in their professions. IAs do interaction design and interaction designers do IA.”

I’ve always thought “big IA” means people who call themselves IAs also doing interaction design. ;-)

I heartily concur with you regarding the need to balance the concepts of discipline, role, and community.

I think IA and IxD are both alive and well as professions. In the UXmatters Reader Survey that just concluded, almost twice as many respondents identified their primary UX specialty as IA as for any other specialty. IxD and UI design were tied as the next most frequent responses; followed by UX design and Web design. To the question “What are other UX specialties on which you focus in your work?" the most common answer was IxD, closely followed by IA.

Considering that Boxes and Arrows was created as a Web journal for IAs, with so many IAs reading UXmatters, either IAs are great readers, or there are a lot of them out there. ☺ In either case, we're glad both IAs and IxDs are reading UXmatters.

In the UX community, there's room for everyone.

Pabini Gabriel-Petit