• About Me
  • Blog
  • Services
  • Projects
  • Contact
 
Varun Bihani - Home
Tag Line
KEEP IN TOUCH

Monthly archives for April, 2011

SEO – a necessary evil

Posted On Apr14 2011 Leave a Comment Written by admin

Just wanted to share this very  interesting blog article on the current SEO Industry and why SEO practitioners are being called as “snake-oil peddlers”. It is one of those articles that I so much wanted to write myself but couldn’t amass the right words that can succinctly put my thoughts into words the way Andy has done. Hats off to you, sir!

Posted in SEO - Tagged seo black hat, seo industry, seo white hat

Information Architecture is about listening to your customers

Posted On Apr05 2011 Leave a Comment Written by admin

I so much agree with these lines written by the author of this post .

One of the things they really wanted to know was how to become a great IA. My answers surprised me. I didn’t tell them that they had to master multi-faceted classification or be able to generate thesauri and controlled vocabularies from scratch. I didn’t tell them about stencils and templates for making better wireframes.

I told them how important it was to listen to the customers of the organizations they would be working for and to deeply understand their behaviors and motivations. I told them to be champions for the user. I told them to listen to the pain of their clients, and think about how their designs could ease it. I told them not to go in shouting about CVs and classification and indexing and how their clients were doing it all wrong. Be subtle, I said. Listen for their needs. Present classifications and metadata and all that cool stuff as the way to get your designs implemented, not as an end in and of itself.

When you think about it, it makes a perfect sense. At the end of the day, it’s all about your customers. All the time & efforts you spend in making your website look look beautiful will be futile if your visitors don’t find the information they came looking for in the first place.

This is why Information Architecture(IA) starts with how well you understand your customers needs, what information they need, why they need, how they may use it and how they think about it.

Once you understand your customers expectation, you should then apply this knowledge in providing them with best user experience by using various IA techniques like sitemap, wireframing, prototyping, content inventory,labeling,  navigation etc.  The challenge for user research is not in collecting information from people, but in applying it to an information architecture project. It is easy to collect a large amount of detailed data and then be unsure what to do with it.

This article focuses on how to apply user research to an Information Architecture project.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the same.

Posted in main_menu - Tagged user research

Categories

  • General (2)
  • main_menu (2)
  • SEO (3)
  • Startup (1)
  • User Experience (1)

Archives

  • January 2022
  • August 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011

Recent Posts

  • Infrastructure Architecture & Search Engine Optimization: Search Systems #SEO
  • Boost your Call to action button
  • A start-up where your passion meets your hunches (for cricket lovers)
  • INFOGRAPHICS
  • SEO – a necessary evil
 
Get in touch with me

  • About Me
  • Blog
  • Services
  • Projects
  • Contact

Address:
1 Broadway
14th Floor,Cambridge MA
02142
USA

Phone: 888-666-4316

Email: varun@galaxyweblinks.com

Copyright 2011 VarunBihani.com All Rights Reserved.

EvoLve theme by Blogatize  •  Powered by WordPress Varun Bihani's Blog
Information Architect, Web & Mobile User Experience Expert, SEO Specialist NYC