My job involves a lot of different skills now - I'm as much entrepreneur and management consultant as anything else these days - but IA is still my favorite part of the work I do.
Jesse James Garrett
Ajax is an important development for Web applications, and its importance is only going to grow.
Also, if nothing else, writing this book has really changed the way I experience bookstores. I have a whole different appreciation for the amount of work packed into even the slimmest volume on the shelves.
Well, the whole story is in the book, but the short answer is that I was the first information architect in an organization that was traditionally design-oriented, and I felt I needed a tool to help me gain the trust and support of my colleagues.
User-centered design means understanding what your users need, how they think, and how they behave - and incorporating that understanding into every aspect of your process.
Ajax isn't a technology. It's really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways.
Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring.
Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach.
At Adaptive Path, we've been doing our own work with Ajax over the last several months, and we're realizing we've only scratched the surface of the rich interaction and responsiveness that Ajax applications can provide.
But the best teams I've encountered have one important thing in common: their team structure and processes cover a full range of distinct competencies necessary for success.
Content is often the reason users come to your site.
But despite the universality of URLs, we often forget that they're not just a handy way to address network resources. They're also valuable communication tools.
The main benefit of the book for the more experienced practitioners is as an evangelical tool. The book will give you some ways of expressing the value and importance of your work that you may not have had before.
As much as we may want to withdraw into a world of pure problem solving, we have to acknowledge that the most successful architectures are the ones you can actually convince someone to implement.
The more everybody knows about all aspects of the problems we face, the better off all of us will be. Less time spent explaining things means more time for coming up with creative solutions.
I'm not sure that you can say definitively that some roles are better filled by consultants, but I would say that some projects are better handled by consultants.
If you need to take a step back from day-to-day operations and plot out the long-term direction of your user experience strategy, consultants can give you a perspective you can't get on your own.
There are some aspects of the diagram that I wish I had expressed a little more clearly.
Besides, Weebles are too hard to draw - they just end up looking like eggs, not people.
A journalist and an information architect face exactly the same problem - how to give shape to the pile of information in front of you in a way that will make it easy and natural for people to comprehend. I can't imagine any better preparation for the work I do now.
