What is the relationship between information architecture and usability?
Great question. I’m not sure there is a good answer, at least not yet. But I’ll blindly wade into these dangerous waters nonetheless. I think of usability as a broad field that is as relevant to testing and improving the performance of automobile dashboards and automated tellers as it is to improving how a Web site performs information retrieval tasks. I know that as an information architect, I’ve learned a lot from usability specialists about users and how to evaluate their experiences in a general sense. However, I don’t know that I could learn much from usability specialists about information itself: how content and its tendency to vary greatly affects retrieval performance. I also find that usability specialists often don’t have a good feel for how greatly a user’s information needs can vary, and how those different needs can have a huge impact upon retrieval performance. So I guess I see usability as an area with extremely broad applicability, but incomplete if not combined with s
