So at my day job I have been assigned to help work on an Information Architecture document to show the flow of this project. It’s a good concept in theory sure, and the one argument I hear from it is: “If a client goes back on something and says ‘I didn’t want that’ you can say ‘yes you did’ and show they signed off on a IA doc.” However I feel that’s still not acceptable, since you still going to have to make that change if they really want it, and you’re going to get paid for the work you do anyways, if you’re working hourly. Plus checking in with your client will make sure mistakes wont happen as often.

But there is a laundry list of why I don’t like using IA. First being that it takes a long time just to show basic and standard aspects. Such as if you wanted to show a page with a drop down, and when the user selects a page for instance, your JavaScript brings them to that page, however if they don’t have javascript you want to show that button so they can click on it if JavaScript is disabled. If you do something like that, that’s Two mockups that you have to do, the “client can imagine that”. Is the response I often get.

This bring me to my next point. Ideas and concepts often get left out because they are “too difficult” to do on an IA document. Such as if I where to hide many buttons for JavaScript users to make it one less click for them, we have to show that throughout the IA document. So “it’s easier just to leave them all with a button”. So the end user loses on something you where trying to make better and you lose.

I found myself having to waste way too much time on minor details. i.e. Should I show the password on their account page or should I hide it, and they could click to see it? It’s things like that, they waste a lot of time that could be spent just trying it out and see how it works in testing. Sure you might have to change it later, but you might not.

Finally, I feel it doesn’t allow you to be as creative, you have to “figure everything upfront”, not spend your time on something. I feel like creating IA documents is rushed and I can’t get my ideas right. On top of that, your wasting development time, time you could have spent designing and developing ideas and concepts that are useful, not just ideas.

Let me know what you think about this in the comments.