[IxDA Discuss] Information Architecture or Interaction Design

[Muntone, Jim]

I always felt, at least in the early days of the web, it was all the
same thing... Maybe WE knew it wasn't but the people with budgets had
read some Jakob or Krug and were like "We need to get us some of those
IA types..." 

It was common to see sort of a generic "usability, research, taxonomy,
prototyping, duct taping" machine that did all...  Especially in the
agency space... Probably not so much for application development shops
who were more likely to have specialists. 

I think later on, as it become more important to build usable products,
we see more specialization and IA seemed to be more about labeling,
navigation, taxonomy, site maps, content inventory etc. where as
Interaction design was more about how humans (or really smart animals
with web access) interact with an interface.  

These days we have people just working on taxonomy all day (well I guess
there always was, but now it's even more common at smaller shops) and
people just working on "what happens if you push the red button" all
day... 

Just personally, I really liked those jack-of-all-trade days and don't
really mind if someone says "Oh you're an IA" when actually my work is
more centered around ID. Heck, considering the road it's been, I'm just
glad so many of us are working :)

Jim Muntone
User Experience Manager | Product Design
Factiva, a Dow Jones Company
http://www.sadrhino.net