Poster

IA One-Sheeters

Leah Buley

To educate people about information architecture and how it can help solve business problems in a large financial services company, in-house architects developed a collection of one-page documents to describe their deliverables. The resulting "IA One-Sheeters" are quick to produce and easy for anyone to understand.

IA One-Sheeters have a number of attractive benefits:

• IA One-Sheeters are a catchy, easy-to-digest introduction to specific IA deliverables. Showing a business person a One-Sheeter is a good starting point for a lengthier conversation about how a particular methodology can address a particular business problem.
• By directly calling out who uses a particular deliverable and how, IA One-Sheeters help business people understand how IA deliverables can be used to improve their own work.
• Multiple One-Sheeters together can help to illustrate the difference between individual deliverables and the unique value that each brings (e.g., how wireframes are different from visual design).
• Because they’re easy to pass around and post in different places (electronically and physically), One-Sheeters take the discussion of IA outside of the context of a particular project. This has the ultimate effect of distinguishing IA from IT (a particular challenge for this in-house team, which falls under the IT umbrella).

This poster shows how to make an IA One-Sheeter, and includes some examples of the IA One-Sheeters developed by the team at Barclays Global Investors.

Follow-up: Leah has created a website for her IA one sheeters.