Poster

Documenting Content: Balancing Content and Design in IA Documentation

Dan Brown

Where information architecture makes the inherent structures of information salient, content strategy serves to highlight the actual information. As such, the line between these two disciplines is blurry at best. IAs and content strategists now struggle with a tough question: where does your work end and mine begin? These issues are exemplified in the difficulties surrounding documentation. Web teams often struggle with the separation of content and design, and find it difficult to accommodate the editorial process in design artifacts, and vice versa.

This poster will unpack this problem, presenting a framework that might help design teams talk about the issues and brainstorm solutions. The framework shows how content impacts other areas of the design process and how those relationships lead to different ways of thinking about content. This framework will then be extended to documentation to show how it predicts problems in the current suite of user experience deliverables, and how those problems might be addressed.