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.
