Jon wrote: "in many practices the IA is now responsible for much more than taxonomies and functional wireframes. We see more cross discipline design work."
Interestingly, when I was initially an IA it was more cross-functional, at least in the web world, and then became more specialized into front end work. Where I practiced it over a decade ago, IA encompassed the data architecture and database support from the back end, through the structure and information flow, into wire frames, etc. Taxonomy went throughout this, first through research, then through front end requirements and back end buckets to meet those. Personally, my experience has been that the UX title heralds a return to the generalist. There were webmasters who did it all, and then things began to become more specialized. But the integrating role of the big picture person was lost. Like a jack of all trades, master of some, the XA or UX specialist pulls together multiple fields of expertise (mine are cognitive psychology, information science, seo, usability, and graphic design). They design information from the inside out, so the data is most usable, findable, attractive, and valuable to the user. The goal is to see the forest for the trees. I don't blog often about my work, but I blogged about this, in case anyone's interested: http://alexfiles.com/blog/?p=100 bests, Alex O'Neal -- The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The next best time is now. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
