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!