Business: UX Professions

In Part 1 of my series on UX strategy, I defined a mature design approach for the modern world. There are three levels of UX maturity:

• operational—Designers are just implementers. They work on assigned tasks and create design deliverables.
• tactical—Designers are an integral part of a product team. They deeply integrate design into other product development tasks and processes.
• strategic—Designers are visionaries or product strategists—perhaps even product managers. They influence and make strategic decisions on how to evolve a product.

Each level of UX maturity has its own challenges, goals, and limitations. These change as an organization matures. We need strong UX leaders with the clear vision and passion that are necessary to drive change and realize their goals, ensuring that their company’s design culture can grow rather than falling into decline because of real-world limitations. However, UX maturity is impossible without great product designers and a strong UX design team—a great leader alone is not enough. In this article, I’ll describe the role of product designers and how they pursue UX strategy. Read More

If you’re new to the debate about the practice of information architecture, you’ll discover that there are two polarities of thought. As Peter Boersma proposed in his 2004 blog post “Big IA Is Now UX,” there is information architecture that resembles UX architecture and design, then there’s information architecture that looks like, well, information architecture. The Big IA perspective is still evolving, as the creation of digital products and services reveals new gaps and challenges, while the narrow perspective on information architecture remains a highly under-researched, under-developed, and under-communicated subject domain that is as important today as it was when it originally surfaced in the early 1990’s.

People originally called the narrow perspective on information architecture little IA. Today’s more politically correct term is classic IA. I’d really like to call it just information architecture. Why? Simply for the fact that—before there was any need to produce wireframes; improve Web site planning, strategy, or tactics; or discuss platforms and channels—there was a need to address a unique concern within the new context that the Internet had created, for which there was no single source to which one could go for answers. Read More

“The practice of information architecture is the effort of organizing and relating information in a way that simplifies how people navigate and use information on the Web.”—DSIA Research Initiative

Over the past two decades, the volatile evolution of Web applications and services has resulted in organizational uncertainty that has kept our understanding and framing of the information architect in constant flux. In the meantime, the reality of getting things done has resulted in a professional environment where the information architect is less important than the practitioner of information architecture (IA). Read More