Section 17.5. Other Case-Making Techniques


17.5. Other Case-Making Techniques

Storytelling is just one way to make the case for information architecture. There are other approaches, and which one you select depends on many different factors, including whether or not you're involved in a marketing effort, a sales call, or an interaction with colleagues during a project. (Most of these techniques are discussed at greater length elsewhere in this book.)


User sensitivity "boot camp" sessions

The premise here is simple: get decision makers who aren't too web-savvy in front of a web browser. Ask them to try to accomplish three or four basic and common tasks using their own web site (or, if none is available, a competitor's). Just as you would in a standard task-analysis exercise, have them "think" aloud, and jot down the problems they encounter on a white board. Then review those problems, identifying which are caused by a poor information architecture versus other aspects of design. You'll be surprised at how many of the problems are indeed information architecture problems, and the decision makers will be enlightened by, as information architect Steve Toub says, "eating their own dog food."


Expert site evaluations

Information architecture evaluations of a site can be done quickly and easily. You can probably identify 5 or 10 major information architecture problems within the first 10 minutes of exploring a site. Whether you deliver this evaluation in writing or in the context of a sales call, it can make a huge impression. Not only will you appear knowledgeable about your potential client's site, but you'll probably be exposing problems that they didn't know they had, or that they were aware of but didn't know how to articulate. Evaluations by outsiders, especially experts, are taken very seriously within organizations, because outside opinions often mean much more to internal decision makers than the opinions of their staff. If you're an in-house information architect and have room in your budget, bring in an outside expert when you need to hammer home the value of information architecture to colleagues.


Strategy sessions

These one- to two-day sessions are geared toward bringing together decision makers and opinion leaders, providing them with a brief introduction to information architecture, and then facilitating a discussion on the company's strategy and how issues of information overload, organization, and accessibility can have a strong impact on that strategy. As with site evaluations, strategy sessions are often effective because they educate clients about a problem set that was an unknown, or because they provide language to articulate problems that were already known. Strategy sessions have an added benefit: because they're done in groups, participants often discover that they are not alone in their "information pain."


Competitive analyses

A site's information architecture issues can be riveting when the site is placed alongside its competitors. "Keeping up with the Joneses" is one of the most powerful forms of psychological manipulation, and you should use it here. Always look for opportunities to compare architectural components and features to help prospects and clients see how they stack up. You'll find ample opportunities to slip in information architecture education in the process. Or if you're working in-house, use competitive analyses to expose the differences between business units' subsites within your organization.


Comparative analyses

Not everyone has a competitor, but you can still compare your site to comparable sites. Also consider comparing specific features, such as search interfaces or shopping carts, with the "best in class" from other sites that may not be from the same industry.


Ride the application salesman's wake

Huge amounts of money are being invested by vendors of information architecture-related software applications (e.g., search engines, content management tools, and portals). Whether you partner with such vendors or simply pick names from their client lists, it's often valuable to follow them into a client project. These vendors have already spent heavily on client education, so you can leverage their nickel, but because they focus on the "solution" provided by their own technology, that education is generally incomplete. Clients will inevitably need information architects to configure and add value to the technology, and therefore will be more open to your case-making.


Be aggressive and be early

OK, this isn't so much a technique, but we can't overstate the importance of promoting information architecture as early in the process as you possibly can. For example, if you work at an agency or consulting firm, you should do your best to make sure information architecture is included in the marketing and branding that comprise your firm's public face, not to mention its list of services. Your active participation in the sales process can ensure that information architecture is part of your company's proposals and, more importantly, its project plans. And whether or not you work in-house or for a consulting firm, aggressively educate the other members of your design team; they need to know your value as much as anyone else. After all, it's the intangible stuff, like information architecture, that gets pushed to the side when time and budgets get tight.

Whatever technique you use, consider these three pieces of advice:


Pain is your best friend

More than ROI numbersmore than anything elsework hard to identify the source of a prospect or client's pain. While this may sound obvious, there's more to it than meets the eye. Although many people have heard terms like "information overload," few have actually thought about information as important and strategic stuff. They may not have realized that accessible information is a valuable commodity, and that it takes special efforts and expertise to make it easier to access and manage. And many decision makers don't deal directly with information systems like corporate intranets; employees do it for them. Your best tools here are stories that broaden perspectives, competitive analyses that produce anxiety, and experiences, such as "boot camps," that force people to confront the pain their sites cause.


Articulation is half the battle

Even when people realize what is causing them pain, they often don't have the words to express it. Information problems are new to them, and unless they can articulate what ails them, no amount of consulting will help. That's why information architecture is so important: it provides a set of concepts, terms, and definitions that provide the language to express information pain. If you can educate prospects and clients in the language of information architecture, you can communicate and begin collaborating on addressing their pain. Strategy sessions that begin with a one- or two-hour-long primer on information architecture are a great way to educate clients. Inserting some tutorial material into your initial reports or including a copy of your favorite information architecture book (!) are also useful ways to "spread the word."


Get off your high horse

Let's face it: the term "information architecture" sounds pretty high-falutin'. The jargony nature of the term was the second-biggest challenge in promoting information architecture, according to our May 2002 survey. Be ready for this reaction with a good-natured acknowledgment of this problem (poking fun at oneself and one's profession always seems to go over well). Then defuse the jargon with alternative, "real-language" descriptions of what information architecture really is and what problems it addresses. This is the precise moment that the elevator pitches described in Chapter 1 come in handy, so make sure you stock them along with the case studies and stories in your bag of evangelization tricks.




Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
ISBN: 0596527349
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 194

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