Main conference presentation

Information architecture meets industrial design: Working collaboratively across disciplines

Michele Tepper

Monday March 26 2007, 10:45 - 11:30AM

As more products come to market with embedded intelligence, the opportunities for information architects to create rich and usable interaction experiences are growing exponentially. But as anyone who has ever struggled with a new cellphone or digital camera knows, these new intelligent tools also introduce usability problems well beyond the traditional web and software purview of IA. In order to have a positive impact on information design and usability in these new realms, IA will have to collaborate with ID: industrial design.

In this presentation, I’ll address the pleasures and difficulties of this collaboration through a case study of the IPC IQ-MAX, a successful frog design project led collaboratively by information architects and industrial designers. The IQ-MAX, a specialized communications device used on financial trading floors known as a “turret,” is designed to fit into a trader’s high-tech, fast-paced and cramped work environment. The IQ-MAX employs color, shapes, and iconography to provide complex status and use signals on its multiple digital screens, so a trader can keep an eye on his communication environment without losing track of his trades. A whole range of cues, behaviours, and control grouping patterns travel across the divide between the digital and the physical realms, making the product easy to learn and use. Where the previous generation turret relied on specialized training, the IQ-MAX has been used successfully by traders within minutes of their being introduced to it.

Our collaboration across the physical and the digital design is a crucial element of the product’s usability. But learning how to work in a cross-disciplinary fashion takes time and effort. This case study shares our experience and process – both the best-practices frog design as an interdisciplinary firm brought to the project and what we learned from doing it - to help information architecture as a discipline come to terms with this new challenge and start to develop best practices around it. I’ll discuss the way in which physical devices go from concept to final product, and where that process and digital design come into conflict. But I’ll also outline the opportunities this collaboration opens up for both teams, and what I’m still learning about industrial design from my colleagues.

The case study will end by drawing out suggested best practices for collaborative IA/ID work. By understanding each other’s methods, work processes, and constraints, we can work more effectively together, and make the case as a professional community for bringing IA into the intelligent device design process from the very beginning.