And with that said, they are all right. You’ve missed the mark so completely and by so much it’s gone from being funny to being pathetic.

I sincerely hope you know more about marketing then you do about IA. If not you’ve got a long hard and hungry road ahead.

Maybe next time you can write an article on inadequacy?

Is this the best way to win friends and influence people, let alone persuade them?

Trust me, I’m not sure.

Is this a problem? Maybe. but it is also an advantage. What it has led to is the creation of several communities that have been really good at creating practitioners who “find the hole”. But this practice of finding holes and filling them have led to the problem of further clouding our definitions. I.e. many IAs find themselves in the position of doing market strategy, or elements of market strategy. Are they marketing experts, no? But they do that. They also do programming (coding), project management, business analysis, usability testing, visual design, etc. etc. What this process has done is create a community where the people have many more skills than the core discipline that drew them together.

Why go into all this? I think it explains at least my reaction to the article. The visceral reaction of many of us is to defend the community we’ve built around the title of this discipline. I actually, don’t carry the IA title myself, but I do a lot of IA from the position of interaction designer, but i have always understood my co-relationship to the community and to the discipline of IA like I do with industrial design, visual design, and usability.

What are you are trying to do in this article is very political for some reason and I’m not sure why. It feels like to me, and I hope I am wrong, is that you are attempting to demonize one community to begin to establish your own. Many in IA have accused me of doing the same thing (inaccurately of course) in my endeavors around creating the interaction design community.

In this case what is worse is that much of what you are describing as PA is really part and parcel of what IAs are already doing (per Thomas’ point above). If it was something we weren’t doing and you were taking us to task for it, I might be like, OK, makes sense, thanx! But you are putting out misinformation about a very broad global community of practice, and telling the world to stop using IAs, when you can use PAs instead?

What would be more gracious and accommodating is an approach whereby you invite IAs to learn from you, and in turn they exchange for what they can teach you. Many marketing people come to UX events such as the IA Summit, the IxDA conference, UPA, etc. to engage and to learn.

For example another person who speaks about “Persuasion” under the title of Captology, BJ Fogg, was a Keynote at the IA Summit a few years ago. (bjfogg.com).

What I REALLY don’t like about the article is that you are comparing in essence a broad global practice that spans 1000’s of practitioners with so much variety to YOUR practice.

A comparison in my world would be if Alan Cooper (Author of About Face among others) would stand up and say Goal Directed Design (his titled methodology for interaction design) is now “Behavior Design” and everyone practicing interaction design is evil.

What universities is PM taught in? Where is the community of practice beyond your blog and those who “license” (ick!) your methods? Where is the rigor of critique that exists within discourse, peer-review, and other elements that exist within almost any creative or business discipline.

In the end, if anything PA is a type of IA or a marketing driven approach to user experience, but is not a substitute for the broader disciplines and communities of practice surrounding IA or UX.

PA may be great by the way. but I now have such a sour taste in my mouth from this, that well, I’ve been persuaded by you to not engage in any further discussion or education around it. hmmm?

I think if you went back and familiarized yourself with some of the stable IA resources many of us have mentioned, you’d see that the aims and goals have always been there — know the business goal, know the customer goal, organize information accordingly.

To summarize, there HASN’T been a shift in aims and goals. That’s what we’ve been saying — there’s no dramatic shift, it’s always been there.

There was a lot of growing and deep thinking that took place from late 2001 to 2004 or so as the pace of projects and work slowed down. The slow down allowed for a lot of discussion, deconstructing, and working through what works best. The focus on the user and putting information and interactions in their terms is an old concept and one that was quickly seen as the best way forward. This caught on in IA before 1999, but had wide spread adoption in 2001.

With emergent disciplines things do change rapidly, far more rapidly than the programming language of the day. For the most part much of IA has solidified in the past three years or so. For many people IA is a good starting foundation for their much broader work in user experience, interaction design, and social interaction design. Between 2000 and 2006 the IA world was making giant leaps in discovery and understanding, but so were many other related web disciplines. Looking not only at the Information Architecture book from Morville and Rosenfeld, but books like About Face their content (pages) grew dynamically, but so did the breadth and depth of subjects covered. The knowledge of the professions and fields have grown exponentially. The focus of all of this was focussing on the persons using the services and their needs for finding, refinding, using, and reusing the information as they need in their lives. Ease of use and ease of finding is core to the principals of IA and related fields. As best as possible putting the information in the terms of the people using the services and sites has been the best practice for many many years (since 2001 or earlier). Embracing the broad contexts and perceptions is at the core of this understanding as well.

I think there’s a difference between an evolutionary or adaptive change and a fundamental transformation. We’re not talking about a change in technique or technology here, but a change in aims or goals. The WWW may change rapidly, but people generally don’t. So one’s aims in fostering human-computer interaction might reasonably be expected to remain more stable than say, the latest programming language du jour.

According to the IA’s commenting on this piece, there HAS been a shift in aims and goals for the practice of Information Architecture, so about when did this shift take place?

-Jeff

IA, like marketing, is continually evolving and adapting itself to the needs of the industry. And it will continue to do so. The most recent book I’m aware of is the 3rd Edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, which is close to 2 years old. Perhaps there will be a 4th edition in the coming years?

I think your idea of a follow up post is very much warranted. Of course, I hope you’ll understand my desire to put additional background reading and private conversations between this article and the next one.

And that brings up an interesting point. You are right, Russ, there are indeed some heavyweights who have commented on this article, many with published books on IA. So here are my questions:

If a 1999 or even 2002 definition of IA is archaic, then at what point did IA transform itself? And what was the transformation, or transformations, called? How current should a book be for it to reflect reasonably current IA thinking and practice?

-Jeff

Oh yeah, Jeff Sexton is a good friend.

I went to the Information Architecture Institute web site as suggested by Russ U.

At first, I could find no definition of IA that didn’t require me to download a f’ing PDF file. Then, to find out if I am an IA, I must download another PDF file with 17 questions followed by 14 bullet points leading to more resources available on the iainstitute.org site. (BTW…if answering yes to those 17 questions makes me an IA, you should consider raising the bar.)

Guess what’s missing? LINKS! If an IA can’t tell me what IA is without requiring me to download a file, why should I be interested? If an IA can’t at least embed links in the stupid PDF file, why should I care about the wonderful resources in your library? Who needs a mentor to tell them how to botch up a simple search for a definition?

So, I went to the “about us” page. Lots of people put good information on their about us page (when they can’t figure out anything better to do with it).

At the bottom of the page, there’s a link to the IAWiki, a collaborative, open discussion space for the topic of information architecture. CLICK. Address not Found! The IA pros have a broken wiki.

When I go back to see what it was that I clicked on, it was gone, replaced by another partner spotlight.

Yes, on their own “About Us” page, they feature content that is never the same on a subsequent visit. I was confused at first, until I figured out what they were doing. They rotate their people and partners apparently to give equal face time on the page…an internal business/marketing goal. This doesn’t help a visitor reach their objective at all….at least not me.

Finally, on a sub-nav of the about us page, I found “Our Mission”. There was actually some informative information here.

Point is, based on what all you IAs are telling Jeff, you should know how to do this stuff without requiring me to download PDFs, click on broken links and try to figure out why the person who was on the “about us” page a minute ago has been replaced.

Methinks ya’ll doth protest too much.

Have a look at your own sites before ripping into Jeff. At least Future Now has made it perfectly clear what Persuasion Architecture is and isn’t. Their web site is simple. They have been blogging about the concept for a long time. Their books are bestsellers. Even taking a pot-shot at the price is a little childish. At least they tell you the price without trying to do exploratory surgery on your wallet first. If you can’t afford it, buy the book, read the blog, download the whitepapers, attend a class, go to a seminar.

Ummm…did you notice? It’s their blog. Of course you should expect marketing messages about PA.

I could have a go at the other IA sites mentioned here, but I normally charge for this kind of crack analysis.

Nice job Jeff!
Great conversation starter.

I wanted to make a couple of suggestions and I wanted to ask you to considering taking on a task.

First and foremost, the Infomation Architecture Institute offers a really good mentoring program. I’d like to suggest that you consider joining the IAI (www.iainstitute.org) and signing up for the program. Depending upon your goals with IA, the right mentor could be found for you and could really help you grow your knowledge on the topic / in the field.

Also, I noticed that you put this out there in response to Andrew Hinton:

” I definitely should have written the post along the lines you propose, and if I could go back in time to do so, believe me I would! The very fact that I had to clarify things in a follow-up comment makes it pretty clear that I gooned-up the main post itself. So, yeah, mea culpa…”

Instead of going back in time, could you move forward in time and write this post? I realize you want to be provocative, but couldn’t you draw a lot less ire and potentially admiration and respect by doing just that?

I do not believe that any of my colleagues have any desire to take you to task on the topic–they’re all the kind of people who would be very open to applauding and supporting someone who either “gets it” or makes an effort to do so.

One last thing: The people who have offered commentary on this single posting are the same names that any of the rest of us in the industry would be floored to be in the same room with. I think you would be hard-pressed to find that in a lot of other industries, and I think you should realize that they really want you to be accurate in the information you put out there.

Please capitalize on that opportunity.

Wowsa, way to get the IA, ID and quite possibly all of the Muppets fired up. Those furry guys really dig categorization, labeling and sitemaps…especially sitemaps because then they get to retrofit arcane tools like Visio into unintended functionality.

Unlike my brethren, I am not going to argue your premise although I do believe that it is limited in its scope. I would however caution you on your use of Persuasive Architecture. You see, I’m a little ahead of you on this curve having delved into the idea of information architecture as an art of persuading the visitor to using structuring tools to better navigate information spaces. You will find reference to my presentation here [http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/0604/0119.html].

It seems that we were both trumped by Bryan Eisenberg in 2003 with his well received presentation, Persuasive Architecture: Waiting for Your Cat to Bark,” at the 2003 Information Architecture Summit [http://www.asis.org/Conferences/IASummit2003/persuasion.shtml]. Evidently, Mr. Eisenberg has patented all variants of “persuasion” as he kindly informed me in a generous and friendly “cease and desist” email which I did and encourage you to do also.

I checked and found that the term “incentive” was still free and clear and adopted that to describe my thinking. You will find my presentation file on Incentive Architecture here [http://www.daedalusinfosystems.com/documents/Incentive_2004.ppt].

When all is said and done, your post is provocative and extreme. It has galvanized the information architecture community into a cohesive unit and that is no small feat. For that, I thank you and offer a small piece of free advice with the admonition that “free advice is worth exactly what you pay for it.” Change your title and reference to something else or get good lawyers and extend your thinking beyond the idea of the Web as solely a marketing tool. It is really all about search, something that you neglected entirely. Perhaps in your next post?

Thank you for very much for your comment and analysis. I especially appreciate your sentiment to “keep it civil,” which is why I have to agree with your first main point. I definitely should have written the post along the lines you propose, and if I could go back in time to do so, believe me I would! The very fact that I had to clarify things in a follow-up comment makes it pretty clear that I gooned-up the main post itself. So, yeah, mea culpa…

That said, I’ll have to quibble with you about points 2 and 3. On the second point, I was certainly promoting Persuasion Architecture, but I was promoting the idea of PA – as well as the mindset behind PA – more than Future Now’s services. Businesses certainly don’t have to hire Future Now to take a more conversationally oriented approach to their Web design, and in fact Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg have gone out of their way to “give away” a tremendous amount of their content right here on this blog. So while the post and subsequent “discussion” went seriously awry, it’s not like the whole thing was nothing more than a thinly disguised sales piece.

As for your third point, I actually think slamming marketers can be a healthy thing to do. I’d even go so far as to say that The Cluetrain Manifesto could fairly be characterized as one giant slam of marketing, and that Seth Godin has done a world of good by repeatedly slamming marketers. Not that I intended to “slam” IA, but calling attention to some of the nonsense done in any field – especially the nonsense that’s seen as part of the status quo – is usually a positive thing.

At any rate, thanks again for your comment and for extending the olive branch. Really, you have no idea how much I appreciate it.

-Jeff

I’m tempted to say that my colleagues have overreacted here. And maybe they have. But what you may not be aware of is how many terribly misinformed, incompetent, snake-oil peddling “marketing experts” we run across in our work (present company excepted, of course). Many of us have blogs too … and it’s tempting to go on a rant about how Marketing Sucks because of our experiences with these poor representatives of the profession. But somehow we (usually!) manage to refrain from besmirching the whole Marketing field to further our own ends.

So… just saying. From one professional to another: how about let’s keep it civil?

Cheers!

You said, “And if the definition is both outdated AND the official (narrow) textbook definition, isn’t that a problem – not just for you, but for businesses who are likely to misapply IA based on that definition?”

The problem isn’t defining IA, it’s that you’ve used a narrow and inaccurate definition which you’ve still failed to cite. Additionally, you’ve provided no context or reference for this definition or view. It’s clearly not what IA is, which you would know if you had bothered to contact any thought leaders in the field.

You said “[..]I’m a marketer: I’ll take the market’s definition of IA as provided by Google. So go ahead and Google “define Information Architecture.”

That entry begins with stating, “Information architecture (IA) is the art of expressing a model or concept of information used in activities that require explicit details of complex systems.”

Activities. See that? Yes, activities. IA is about organizing things to support a user’s/consumer’s activities, which could be any number of things. Again, if they can’t find it, you can’t persuade them.

You said, “Trust me.”

Didn’t your father ever teach you never to trust anyone who says “Trust me?” There’s a reason for that.

You said, “IA has a marketing problem.”

The problem isn’t IA marketing, it’s that you really don’t know what you’re talking about here and didn’t bother to check your very inaccurate view of IA. I could easily write an article called “How all marketing people lie.” I could fill it full of statements like “Trust me all of my colleagues know that marketing people lie.” Or maybe “Marketing people are the spawn of used car salesmen. And we all know what used car salesmen are like.”

Is that an accurate description of marketing?

You said, “Can we have some content that says how PA is different than IA, that it takes place before IA [...]?”

Well, no, because PA is a subset of IA and IA takes place before PA. Once again, you can’t get PA w/o IA. You can have IA w/o PA.

It’s articles like this that give marketers like yourself such a bad, slimy, misinformed, out of touch reputation.

I believe marketing can be a very vital part picture. Unfortunately, marketing people tend to believe their own BS too often, as in the case here. There’s very little if anything at all that’s accurate about your view of IA.

Next time, try doing some real research, then form an opinion. Don’t fall into the marketing research trap of forming an opinion then only seeking out information which supports, or simply making up information which supports that opinion. Opinions are to be informed by research, not the other way around.

Of course the IA thought leaders understand IA correctly and are aware that my definition was deliberately narrow. The thought leadership within the field has moved well beyond library science. But in fact every day companies are sold BS under the guise of IA. It happens in search, usability, marketing and almost every other interactive discipline. The ideal is not always the practice and clients are frequently misled by this library conception of IA. My post was titled “When IA can fall short.” And it was meant to point out that IA can fall short precisely when logical structuring takes precedent over intuitive persuasion. Many of you know that FutureNow’s Persuasion Architecture has always played well together with IA since they are complimentary. We’ve presented Persuasion Architecture to many IA’s at UIE X and XI and they respected our complimentary approach to IA.

Nevertheless, my (admittedly) quick and dirty analogy of IA to library science hit a sore spot among your community. So I think that’s the best place to start.

Basically, commenter complaints break down into three main camps:

o My definition was total crap and an offensive slur,
o My definition was outdated/archaic,
o My definition was a narrow textbook definition that doesn’t nearly cover the breadth of practices actually used in the field

I feel that the incompatibilities (and commonalities) of these three responses say a lot. Let me start with the top two: either it was a bigoted, made up definition OR it was how the field once defined itself. It can’t be both. And if the definition is both outdated AND the official (narrow) textbook definition, isn’t that a problem – not just for you, but for businesses who are likely to misapply IA based on that definition?

I challenge you to think introspectively for a moment – you may have moved ahead in broadening IA’s definition, but what are the customers perceptions? If IA is so broad that it’s whatever anyone who hangs an “IA For Hire” sign outside their home says it is, then what is it really?

Trust me, my colleagues and I have had plenty of experiences with clients’ internal IA resources/employees whose operating definition was far closer to Library Science than user-centered design. So whose definition are we talking about?

As for me, hey, I’m a marketer: I’ll take the market’s definition of IA as provided by Google. So go ahead and Google “define Information Architecture.” I think you’ll find the results line up far closer to library science than user-centered design. In fact, here are the two “official” definitions from Wikipedia (the number two entry):

“Information architecture is defined by the R.I.P.O.S.E.[1] technique, developed in 1989 [2] as:
o The conceptual structure and logical organisation of the intelligence of a person or group of people (organisations).
Information architecture is defined by the Information Architecture Institute, founded 2002, as:
o The structural design of shared information environments.
o The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support findability and usability.
o An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.”

The bolding/emphasis is mine to draw your attention to the points I’m trying to make, but even without the bolding, it’s pretty self-evident that these definitions center around logical organization and labeling of information/content as a means of supporting findability and usability? As an admittedly quick and dirty analogy, is a library card catalogue that far off?

My point is that there is a strongly logical bias to IA as it is commonly conceived of in the marketplace. Besides IA insiders, most people – even most web people – are affected by this bias towards the hierarchical structuring and labeling of content, and towards intentionality and usability. And this is a bias that pulls designers away from the more emotional, intuitive, and loosely associational flow of most buying conversations.

The bottom line? IA has a marketing problem. And discussions like these – when they are allowed to rise to the level of discussion and dialogue – are a start at fixing this problem.

5 quick links showing the basics of online merchandising and SEO.
……

well done. By going beyond the merely clueless well into the depths of the truly offensive, you have garnered comment from some of the smartest people I know.

I think that they have been too polite. You have turned a butt-ugly salespitch hypothesis into a linkworthy article – thousands of people are going to link to this with “if you ever write anything like this I will never speak to you again”-style messages. One way to attract attention, but probably not sustainable in the long run.

Andrew

Mr. Sexton, let me suggest that a site owner has one set of goals and site visitors have very different, goals. Good information architects make sure that both of these sets of these goals are successfully met. That’s because businesses will never achieve their strategic goals until site visitors can achieve their’s. We master the means that lead to the desired ends.

The way information architects arrange, collect, and display information is a very strategic process indeed. Every play Scrabble, Mr. Sexton? Then you know that creating the words “tin” “iron” and “foam” will not produce as many points as laying down “information” using these very same letters.

Alas, one wouldn’t know from reading the article, but persuasiveness and understanding the users have always been central tenants of information architecture.

The first book on information architecture (1998), by Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville states on page 2 “The best web site producer is an experience consumer. You must become the toughest, most critical consumer of web sites you possibly can.”

The second book on information architecture (2000), which I wrote, has a whole section on how to address the goals of your target audience(s) (persuasive content, simple navigation, etc.). And all of chapter 16 is devoted to helping site visitors achieve the “self-selection” you espouse.

Although the first editions of both these books are now outdated in terms of specific suggestions, the overall observations regarding the ways and means of increasing conversion rates are as relevant today as they were a decade ago. (Note: the exceptionally primative idea of websites as “libraries” and “card catalogs” predate both of these works by a couple of years.)

Happily, newer editions, articles, and presentations are now available, which also address the convergence of online and offline activities. Perhaps the editors of Future Now will give them a quick skim before publishing a sequel to this somewhat misinformed representation of our discipline.