I love T's: the 4T heuristic

Noise Between Stations, Victor Lombardi's weblog, had an entry back in April called Tools: levels of abstraction. I had it marked as "keep new" in Bloglines (my online feed reader) because I liked the entry and was waiting for responses.

Today I finally read it again and saw the one comment by "Dominic". In it he writes:

I think of this as the tool-technique-task hierarchy, and occasionally even add ‘intent’ as the fourth ‘T’.

And I love this hierarchy, this tool to select the right level of abstraction or analysis! It made me wonder if I could map these 4 T's to my (extended) T-model for Information Architecture.

I think it would look like this:

The tools and techniques levels would usually fall under de deep IA category, the task level fits somewhere between the shallow (or Guerilla IA) and UX layers. Intent would also cover part of the UX layer, but I'd consider it to be part of the business layer too.

I love T's!

I support G8Reboot

On 6th - 9th July, 8 world leaders will gather in Scotland at the G8 summit, where they will be presented with a workable plan to double aid, drop the debt and made the trade laws fair. But they'll only do it if enough people tell them to.

Thanks to Adam Greenfield for the idea

Welcome ASIST Bulletin readers!

I've just noticed that Andrew Dillon points to this blog for a review of the IA Summit 2005.

The specific entry is "Result of the Ia Summt: 22 pages of notes, 400 friends" but feel free to browse around the rest of March's archives or indeed the entire blog.

EURO IA: European IA conference announced

The good news is out: We have published the Call for Papers for the upcoming European IA Conference 2005, in October in Brussels.

I'd love to hear if you plan on coming, because we may need to upgrade to a bigger room if too many of you come :-)

And yes, we are working on a proper website for the conference. It's technical issues that are holding us back at the time.

Smart move

I have no idea if you've noticed, but it has been a while since I've posted. I have been busy looking for work, as I'll explain here.

I quit my job (as you may have read before) and have been looking for freelance jobs or a new fulltime job. I looked in many places (here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) but finally settled for:

UserIntelligence

It looks like I will become a partner in the company that is transforming itself from a one-man band into a small-but-significant user experience hotspot based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

UserIntelligence's founder, Tjeerd de Boer (not always as smug as the smile suggests), is a seasoned usability evaluator, an avid follower of the user experience field, and very well-read in general. He has been running and growing the company for the last three years and worked for international and national clients such as Philips, T-Mobile, Reed Elsevier, Manutan and ANWB.

Our services will range from user research, through experience design to usability evaluations, with UX strategy and process advice on one side and UX research and education on the other.

This evening, I have been putting together job descriptions for us and our band of freelancers-turned-employees, and created the sitemap for our not-to-be-released-before-september new website. I am working!

So, people in my network beware! I will soon be coming to haunt you, begging for work , unless you come and bring it to us first...

Best description of Information Architect so far

I've just come accross this description of what an information architect is and I think it is the best I've seen so far!

A quote:

The information architect is responsible for developing or helping to develop the information architecture for an information structure, in this case, for the Web. They have to strike a balance between the demands of authority (i.e., the clients the pages are being developed for), the demands of users, and the limits of information technology. The skill they apply is the knowledge of how to structure information effectively to improve its usability.

And:

The purpose of the information architect on the team is to make sure that the design and content do not override the organizational structure. Information architecture is about the entire site, not the individual pages within the site. To learn to be an information architect is to learn to think in terms of the whole, rather than the elements.

It turns out that it is part of a series of pages describing the craft of website design, by Peter Kantor whom I'd like to introduce as a member of the illustrious Peters in IA...