Travis has consented to allow me to reprint his insightful email here:

"The meat of your post from Monday -- where you cast about trying to arbitrarily determine whether the term "usability" should be applied to people who measure usability, or to people who create usability -- I'm not even gonna touch that. (except to the extent that I just did.)

and I'm not even going to touch the word "arbitrarily"--c

But I dig your question at the end, about whether to split forces, and I have an answer for you.

Info-centered IA is basically a term I picked up from the SF IA discussion to increase the chance that you and Noel would have a sense of what I meant. Application-centered IA is probably a better moniker. So there's that, there's user-centered IA, and my usual answer for a third type is revenue-centered IA (you know, MBAs do it, deliberately restricting some info while exposing enough to string people along -- very different from user-centric design).

My purpose in app-centered IA is to create structures for info -- data records, actions, processes, whatnot -- that are organized such that applications -- processes -- can use them well and build on them whenever necessary. The structures are never completed products, since you want them

to last, to evolve along with their applications, to be friendly to new apps. I don't know how much this philosophy figures into user IA but it's critical to app IA. A complete website redesign has no equivalent in a good application information structure.

All the primary applications -- serial communication (e.g., encoding into XML), display (presenting in a web page), persistence (storing in a relational database), service (manipulating with program logic), etc. -- define the borders of my environment as an IA. So of course I'm particularly aware of all of them, and there's some translation that has to happen between each, but the idea is either to minimize that or to make it seamless and scalable.

Point is, I think that user IA and app IA are _very_ different, because user-centric design is all about patterns friendly to the human brain, which are exactly the kind of patterns you have to filter out if you want to be objective about app-centric design. Don't want to disappoint you as a would-be uniter, but I bet very few people are good at both. Maybe this is why my discipline is not very well covered in the preferred media of cocktail hours and weblogs; if you really want to get into technical

information semantics you go to W3C and start reading specs. And there's less room for speculation and rambling theorizing, which is definitely the fun and social part.

_Any_ IA is, like Adam says, a creative endeavor. Everyone wants to design _something_. Anyone with a single bit of serotonin in their brain wants to make pleasant order from chaos. Musicians organize sound. Writers organize thoughts. Software architects organize application logic. I'm sitting here

trying to organize variants of information architecture. But the fields are pretty divergent and that's why we usually specialize in just one. To be honest, I think "usability" -- or the constantly evolving acronym known as UI/UE/UX -- is more specific about describing your work than is "information architecture", which is understood by everyone you work with, but it doesn't surprise me that "defining IA" is such a necessary topic when dealing with those outside your circle.

If you want a real bit of fun, ask a traditional architect to define "information architect". An architect I know thought it must refer to the person who kept track of the specs for buildings. In fact, when I explained it, she was a little offended at the use of the term "architect" outside the context of buildings. Yeah, that's a bit extreme, but you get the point."

From: Gleanings
To: Hungery Hungry Clickers
Subject: Gleanings: A Picnic Basket Full of Links

OPENING THANG

Lance Arthur inspires us all-- "Take Five" looks back at five years of a personal website.
http://www.glassdog.com

Meanwhile on the blog I've been puzzling over the roles of Information Architects, and their relationship with usability and the rest of the team
http://eleganthack.com/blog/index.html

Have a nice weekend: I've packed you a nice big gleanings to keep you busy in case it rains.

IA & DESIGN MATTERS

nadav drove down to baychi (and i got to ride along!) and we saw a terrific talk on modeling user experience. I haven't gotten my act together to get my notes up, but he has
http://www.giantant.com/antenna/archive/2001_04_08_index.shtml#3161262
I now worship meta. their schematics belong in MOMA.
http://www.metadesign.com/main.htm

~~~

In other news I was nosing around acia as I am wont to do and looked at this for the third time
Software for Information Architects
http://argus-acia.com/strange_connections/strange011.html
Why is there no decent software for ia's to make their cute little sitemaps and wireframes?

~~~

kottke's collecting transit maps. amazing how many different ways there are to represent what is essentially the same data.
http://www.kottke.org/notes/0104.html#010409

found Information Graphics lying around IQHQ and dragged it home. nifty stuff, almost as lovely as Wurman's Information Architects. Lots of sign systems, graphs, infographics, transit maps and the like.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0500280770/eleganthack

~~~

Ethnographic-perspective paper on the internet as cultural space.
http://skylla.wz-berlin.de/pdf/2000/ii00-101.pdf

~~~

the FAQ on FAQ's
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/faqs/about-faqs/

~~~

Measuring mental workload
"Mental workload has been defined as the "degree of processing capacity that is expended during task performance" "
http://chem.larc.nasa.gov/HumanFactors/mworkload.htm

~~~

how to make a button
http://www.logiko.com/references/button.html

~~~

Noah grey interview on waferbaby
http://www.waferbaby.com/corner/noahgrey/

USABILITY MATTERS

Business 2.0: Intranets Save Time- But for Whom? (tomalak.org)
Jakob Nielsen. "Thinking about the intranet as a productivity tool can prevent
such mishaps. For every service or application you put on the intranet,
estimate the impact on users around the company. If usability is low, then
training time goes up and productivity goes down."
http://www.business2.com/content/magazine/ebusiness/2001/04/09/29409

~~~

Interstitials in the balance
Are improving clickthrough rates and a higher selling price worth the annoyance that pop-up ads cause site visitors?
http://www.publish.com/ic_490520_6414_1-2841_1320_12.html

BUSINESS MATTERS

Boo! And the 100 Other Dumbest Moments in e-Business History
http://www.ecompany.com/edit/0,2088,11274,00.html

NEWS & COMMENTARY

Tech Industry Aims to Render MP3 Obsolete
"The industry doesn't want [MP3] pushed, and Microsoft and RealNetworks don't want it pushed. The consumer is going to eat what he's given,"
http://www.canoe.ca/MoneyWSJ/wsj2-dow.html

~~~

NY Times: Humor Is at Center of Microsoft's New Campaign. (tomalak.org)
Although the campaign is likely to be greeted warmly by many white- collar
office workers who have long grumbled about the paper clip, it has worried at
least one Microsoft researcher who is most closely credited with being the
father of the technology underlying the paper clip.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/11/technology/11ADCO.html

~~~

Amazon, Borders to Join Forces In Online Book-Selling Business
http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB986946353234468786.htm

~~~

Napster's Sad Song Falls on Deaf Ears
By Ronna Abramson
Judge Patel says the music-swapping service may need to be shut down
if the company cannot successfully block unauthorized songs.
http://tm0.com/thestandard/sbct.cgi?s=126041531&i=328309&d=1306497

~~~

Germany plots cyber attacks on neo-Nazi sites
By IDG News Service
The German Interior minister contemplates the use of spam to fight
extremists
http://tm0.com/sbct.cgi?s=126041608&i=328262&d=1305962

APROPOS OF NOTHING

How It Works: Detectors Can Find Just the Right Spot to Drive That Nail (iaslash.org)
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/12/technology/12HOWW.html?0412ci

~~~

figlet server (giantant.com/antenna/)
http://www.surfplaza.com/figlet/

~~~

it's so fun, i don't even care what they do
http://www.filmarts.org/festival/festival00/

~~~

noel and mattjones sent me this, so it's gotta be cool

from: http://www.aint-it-cool-news.com/display.cgi?id=8659
"Apparently, if you look at the second frame of credits on the new A.I. teaser trailer, there is a credit given to Jeanine Salla, Sentient Machine Therapist," Mooncookie explains. "If you enter her name into a Google.com search, you get http://www.familiasalla-es.ro/. Exploring this site will send you on a sprawling search for clues and other sites that are somehow related to the movie. It seems as if there are some 20+ websites that are connected with this guerilla-marketing geek's wet dream, a la the X-Men stunts last summer. After poking around for about five minutes, I was blown away by the man-hours put in to all this -- and the persistence of the geeks uncovering all this stuff -- but it seems everyone likes a good intrigue." As some Plastic wit once remarked, the real amazing thing is how the film industry will pay millions of bucks to lawyers to chase down and exterminate actual fan sites while simultaneously paying millions to developers to build fake fan sites. Only on the web, folks, only on the web!

~~~

why are mondays?
http://www.glassdog.com/the_lab/index.html

~~~

How much silly putty do you need? (rebeccablood.net)
http://www.crayola.com/store/showdetl.cfm?st=0&st2=0&st3=0&Product_ID=236&DS_ID=3