Being a Information Architect practitioner apart from my research agenda, daily engages me in “put in context” issues related to end-user experience and content. Context is a real treat when used in a pragmatic and common sensical way, but I might also be blurred by the mash-up of realities we all are facing. IRL and on-line roles and realities and context have been absolutely blended, and sometimes confused us to ‘who we really are’ in life đŸ˜‰
Everyday practice within IA deals alot with captureing ‘wayfinding’ principles to the domain at hand, with language constructs that communicate to the end-users. Be it tedious taxonomy & ontology updates into a controlled vocabulary, refinement of search experience through logs and stats, endless discussions dealing with redesign of large websites. As humans we like context! we navigate through life with contexual road-signs: but ones in a while we get lost! No doubt about it…..very stressful experience.
This recent post from IA peers at IA Summit 2009, is a very good walkthrough of the evolving work practice and academic wordviews. Enjoy!
Outstanding quest/question: How do we “guide” the users in content provision to ‘put things in context’?
Further down the road of findability ……
Emergent Meccano 