When I grow up I want to be a calligrapher, tidy and taller. At the moment I measure what I measure (I will not repeat it) and design things (or is what I say to my mother) in Optimyzet. The orderly thing, I still do not contemplate … Anyway, my relationship with the order is complicated.
That is why I have focused on the Information Architecture (instead of ordering the t-shirts of my dresser). In my first year as a UX designer I wanted to go deeper into the subject and I find that, increasingly, large companies innovate and dare to break the rules regarding AI.
These reflections come to read this post: Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture. Reflections on the impending death of Information Architecture. I have changed imminent death by transformation. This article is from 2006, and it has made me reflect on the new structures in the digital world.
Examples like this Ikea campaign come to mind, in which it breaks with the natural nomenclature of the products, and names them as needs. This is more a wonderful SEO experiment, ook, it’s not AI. But after all, it is giving more importance to the ontology (new word in my CPU) than to the taxonomy. The need above categorization (user 1 – order 0).
Another example that fascinates me is Spotify. How lists, in addition to gender, are classified by user moments. Moments that we can clearly identify as ours. How do you categorize moments? Do you put the list “The typical songs that you do not know what they are called and you throw your life looking for it" next to “I was a fucking rocker of the nineties"? Here in this post, Javier gives you advice and encourages you to create your own list to collect followers.
When a user lands on a website she doesn’t know, she sees the search engine as a lifeguard float. In Joshua Porter‘s article, he makes the clear comparison of Yahoo vs Google. Yahoo tries to create a structure in which the user has to choose a drawer to open to search, in addition to having the search engine. I wonder the percentage of clicks of the search in the “drawers" or the search engine … While Google (thanks to its algorithm of Pagerank) surrenders to the need of the user. This makes it look like Yahoo as the light applique box from the hallway on the way to the office, and Google as someone turning off the light with a clap.
In the end we are in a continuous search for the absolute customization and ‘customization’ of the user. And what better way for users to create this categorization based on their real experience. The people have spoken. Instead of establishing relationships, in a way, objective through taxonomies, we establish subjective relationships through our own experience that will be repeated in another user, that is, folksonomy (#newword). What order or what eight quarters, let’s hear the voice of the users. All this makes much more sense (and sanity) in this article on folksonomy and its relationship with labels and taxonomies.
I do not know if dead or not, but the AI in the context of today’s society shows that we must go further. If there are typographies, logos or even music, which endures over time, it is not surprising that the same thing happens with the information architecture. You could say that it is like the backbone of a digital project. This does not mean that we cannot explore other options. Everything is constantly changing (and yes, at a speed that overwhelms), but we must not stop exploring other options that accompany and enrich a good AI in order to improve the user experience.
In short, perhaps it is best not to lose the habit of ordering the shirts of my dresser (and do it more often), but also look for other folksonomies … or catch a wallapop a good “coat rack.”
