MicroSoft’s Philosophy on Information Architecture
While looking around inside the Sharepoint documentation, I found this tasty snippet that explains a great deal about the way Microsoft approaches information architecture, probably design and architecture:
“Creating an effective category structure requires planning and some understanding of how others might organize the content.”
Yes, that’s right – you only need SOME understanding of how others MIGHT organize the content. No need to get the right people, even – anyone off the street will do, as long as they are clearly a member of the group ‘others’, so maybe even the neighbor’s kid would be fine.
Besides, I’m sure the inconvenience associated with trying to develop a decent information architecture informed by knowledge of users’ mental models would probably get in the way of all that planning that’s so important to the success of your portal project.
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