Archives: September 2004
« August 2004 Home October 2004 »MicroSoft's Philosophy on Information Architecture
September 17, 2004 02:57 PM | Posted in: Information ArchitectureWhile looking around inside the Sharepoint documentation, I found this tasty snippet that explains a great deal about the way Microsoft approaches information architecture, probably design and architecture:
"Creating an effective category structure requires planning and some understanding of how others might organize the content."
Yes, that's right - you only need SOME understanding of how others MIGHT organize the content. No need to get the right people, even - anyone off the street will do, as long as they are clearly a member of the group 'others', so maybe even the neighbor's kid would be fine.
Besides, I'm sure the inconvenience associated with trying to develop a decent information architecture informed by knowledge of users' mental models would probably get in the way of all that planning that's so important to the success of your portal project.
local tags: collaboration, ia, microsoft, philosophy, sharepoint
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