Main conference presentation

My grandmother the information architect: The IA of everyday life

Hallie Wilfert

Sunday March 25 2007, 9:00 - 9:45AM

The first edition of the Polar Bear book describes an information architect as a person who:

• clarifies the mission and the vision for the site, balancing the needs of its sponsoring organization and the needs of its audiences
• determines what content and functionality the site will contain
• specifies how users will find information in the site by defining its organization, navigation, labeling, and searching systems
• maps out how the site will accommodate change and growth over time.

My grandmother is a person who:

• clarifies the mission and the vision for her home, balancing the needs of my grandfather and the needs of anyone who might visit her home
• determines what stuff in her home stays and what stuff goes out to the trash
• specifies how people will find things in her home by defining its organization, navigation, labeling, and searching systems
• maps out how her home will accommodate change and growth over time, e.g., having guests for the holidays.

Eerie similarities, no?

My presentation examines the information architecture of everyday life, using my grandmother, the quintessential “domestic engineer”, as a case study and example. Through participant observation, I will examine her core IA skills (content inventories, wireframes, and card sorting), illustrate them with photos and artifacts of her work, and compare her work to “traditional IA” best practices.

While seemingly tongue-in-cheek, my presentation will be valuable to anyone who wants to crawl out from the weeds and examine how information architecture is used everyday by regular people. I will talk about how home organization, as a metaphor for web site organization, can be used to describe IA to those who might not understand its value in a larger context.