Surprise and Delight

Why I’m Still Calling Myself an Information Architect (Sort of. For now. I think.)

At the time that he gave it, much of JJG’s IA Summit keynote really resonated with me. Much of it still does, in fact, and is bouncing around my head every day; he asked some important questions, like the ones about why no distinct schools of thought have emerged in IA, and whether there will ever be a controversial work of IA, and so on. But the bit that really grabbed me at the time, looked me in the eye and said “This is a truth,” is the one I’m now (maybe, sort of) backing away from: the We Are All UX Now part.

I responded to it initially from the perspective of a member of a community; that’s what I feel like at the IA Summit, and that’s how, I think, the point was framed. The notion of a discrete IA community, separate from and perhaps even in some sort of competition with the IxD community, is problematic (and not altogether reflective of reality), and I continue to think that it is in the best interest of the larger UX community to find more common ground and share more efforts, ideas, and initiatives. There is much more to be gained from that kind of collaboration than there is to be lost.

But when I start to think about it on a personal level, I become less comfortable, though it’s hard to pin down why. Oh, I’m perfectly happy to tell friends that I work on user experience…stuff, if they’re tech-savvy enough to know what “user experience” refers to (and they usually are). I always use the phrase “user experience” when trying to explain what I do to relatives; it seems to make marginally more sense to them than “information architect.” My title is not (and has never been) Information Architect, either; it’s currently Senior Experience Architect, and before that, at a different company, it was just Experience Architect. I prefer that title over Information Architect because it’s more descriptive; on almost every project I’ve worked on, I’ve had less to do with organizing and structuring information than I have with creating task flows, deciding on interaction options, and generally figuring out what the user’s experience of the site or the app will be like. I think that nowadays that’s probably true for 99 percent of people who work on Website and application UX. And it’s unquestionably the case that a lot of what I do has to do with interaction design.

For a whole bunch of reasons, though, I’d hesitate to call myself an interaction designer. I am not a visual designer; I don’t have a design background, at least not a formal one. I produce deliverables that are decent-looking (getting better all the time, but unlikely to ever be called pretty), but I don’t create pixel-perfect comps. (It’s likely that I could, given time and practice, but fortunately for all concerned, I’ve so far always worked with people who can do so faster and more effectively than I can, and I expect that to continue.) Nonetheless, I’m a design thinker; what I’m doing the majority of the time, regardless of whether I’m drafting a strategy document or creating a wireframe, is using design to create solutions, to solve problems. That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning.

And despite my MLIS and the orientation that initially drew me to this field, I don’t, these days, build controlled vocabularies and taxonomies and create metadata schemes; I don’t even work a lot on nomenclature for navigation schemes (though I wish I did, because that’s fun stuff for me). I rarely (lately, never) do traditional “first edition of the polar bear book” IA anymore, and I don’t know many people who do, though there must be some. So maybe User Experience Designer is really the ideal title for me, as it is for Chiara Fox, who also comes from the LIS world.

Or maybe, just maybe, the meaning of “information architect” is changing and evolving. Not to the extent that it becomes some sort of weird synonym for “interaction designer,” of course, but so that it encompasses the changes to the digital landscape that have taken place in the years since people first started calling themselves IAs. So that other people in the big UX tent no longer think library science-taxonomy-metadata-little IA when they think of information architects, but they understand that this is where some of us have come from. To me, the “where I’ve come from” part of it is important, and it’s worth preserving in some way. Is a job title the best way to preserve it? I’m not sure, and it’s something I’ll keep thinking about. But for now, I’m still an IA. I’m a UX person too, and maybe I’m even a UX Designer. But I’m an IA.