Patrick Kennedy has launched a survey recently on LinkedIn and his blog to help us learn about how agencies view IA and usability.
I liked his approach, it was easily readable and written in a way that agency creatives will understand. I’m glad he put it out there! The questions certainly point to some answers about IA and usability acceptance that I have always intrigued me.
From his LinkedIn Answers post:
“Best practice design of websites, and other digital media, involves a set of skills known broadly as Information Architecture (IA) which generally means making designs user friendly. IA is also known to people doing this work, by such terms as User Experience (UX), User Centred Design (UCD), Interaction Design (IxD) or simply “usability”.
A significant amount of this sort of work is performed by agencies—whether they be advertising agencies, digital agencies or communication agencies. As a practitioner and educator in the field of IA, I am interested in learning how people go about practicing it, in particular how agencies “do IA”. This is to both confirm and challenge my own understanding of the way agencies work and how IA fits into their processes, who it gets done by and how it might be possible to give agencies the skills they need to perform better in this regard.”
Please help by completing the survey on his site here. It will run for the rest of the September 08.