Information Architecture is not a Black Box

September 7, 2004 at 12:18 PM

It looks like Peter Morville has been doing quite a bit of Information Architecture Research. He provides quite a few good points and several links to good studies. I do think one thing that is not fully explored here is the idea of finding out if what we are architecting is actually working. This can be done on a qualitative level through the practice of usability (focus groups, user surveys, usability testing, etc.) and on a quantitative level through web analytics (baseline studies, path analysis, conversion studies, etc.). In short it is important to know and understand that IA doesn't live in it's own black box, that we must rely on a variety of expertise to support our decisions and direction.