Blog
.
Douglas Brashear
IA Summit ’10 Part Two: Pervasive IA
April 12th, 2010
Information Architecture, User Experience Design
We finished the second day of IA Summit ’10 presentations and in general the sessions I’ve attended so far fall into two major categories:
- Pervasive IA/cross channel marketing
- Prototyping
In this post I’ll cover some of the revelations around pervasive IA. My interest in this topic has grown steadily in the past 5 years as the importance of mobile has grown…and also because, now more than ever, customers can interact with brands and related information in so many different ways, both in the cyber and physical worlds.
On Friday, Andrea Resmini described the challenge now confronting Information Architects and UX Designers: designing information that can be accessed in different ways and using a multitude of different devices. Andrea explained that, using a number of techniques , IAs can create data structures that are adaptable given the capabilities and limitations of different access methods.
On Saturday, Samantha Starmer from REI presented insights on the Holistic Customer Experience. Her talk described how entities need to consider the entire customer experience, from online to on-property, and ensure a consistent customer experience throughout the entire brand interaction. Reminding me of service design principles, Samantha presented examples from her work at REI, augmented with in-store observations, to explain the need for consistent communication with the customer (whether explicit or implicit).
In past years our NavigationArts clients have been primarily focused on corporate Web sites and mission critical Web applications. However, in the cross-channel future, presenting consistent messaging and context-aware features in a channel-optimized manner will be the key to business success. There are many customer touchpoints (see pervasive_ia_diagram) to consider, not all of which apply to all clients.
.
