Chris Thorne

One of the aspects I found most interesting this year was the number of Information Architects who are no longer Information Architects. They started off as one of them, and became a ‘Product Manager’. Christina Wodtke – a ‘big cheese’ in the Information Architecture community, was one of the founders of the Information Architecture Institute. Yet, look at her ‘linked in’ profile today and it says she is ‘Principal Product Manager’ at linked in.

One of the primary reasons seems to be that if you’re just an information architect in an organisation, the usability (one of the things you care about as an IA – don’t you?) of your work can be cut. Too often we see project managers decide that when something has to be cut, the something they choose to cut is the usability.

In an agile project process, it is easy to claim that you’ve answered a user story – ‘The user can add blah to a web page’. At the end of a sprint, the project manager can tick the box. Unfortunately, what isn’t documented is that when the sprint started slipping, the usability of the feature was compromised. You’ve shipped ‘lipstick on a pig’. Yes you can tick a box that say’s you’ve completed a user story, but your target users find the new feature hard to use, frustrating, and in some cases, they refuse to use that new feature that was supposed to have been built for them.

It is one of my frustrations that, in an age where companies like Apple show that prioritizing usability throughout the business can make you significant profits, project managers continue to see it as a ‘nice to have’ a ‘well, if we have time.’

What’s the answer?

Well, I have 2 suggestions:

1. In Agile sprints, user stories should include usability statements. For example ‘A user can add feature blah to the website within 30 seconds of starting the add feature blah process’. Perhaps this should be the second sprint – the first being ‘A user can add feature blah to a website’?

2. User experience professionals could, like Christina Wodtke, become product owners.

If you’re a product owner (or CEO of Apple) you get a lot more influence over what gets implemented.

As I suggest to my IA colleagues next time the usability of their product gets crippled by a project manager/scrum master, climb the greasy management pole…..when you call the shots, you can ensure usability is prioritised.