Week 6.2: Intuitive architecture

In this post I’d like to briefly engage with Jesse James Garrett’s ideas about empiricism in his 2002 essay “ia/recon.”

Garrett’s attitude towards IA research, especially in Parts 3, 4, and 6 of his essay, can fairly be characterized as dismissive. Garret emphasizes that information architecture is an art, and that its practice is heavily informed by intuition and “hunches” rather than user research of the kind described by Morville and Rosenfeld. He bemoans the necessity for information architects to justify their decisions to their superiors by means of usability studies, which he believes inhibits the discretion of the architect. Research, he says, should not be used “to tell us what to think.”

At first glance, Garrett’s attitude seemed very much at odds with the user-centric approach to IA advocated by Morville and Rosenfeld, and which I’ve invoked repeatedly in this blog. He also seemed to be waving off empiricism in general, which is a special interest of mine in IA and information science more broadly. On closer examination, however, this reading of Garrett misunderstands the core of his argument. He does not disown empiricism. In fact, he says that research “can be extremely useful in cases where user goals can be clearly identified and measured,” giving e-commerce and information retrieval as two examples. But almost all of the examples of IA we’ve studied in this course fall into these categories! No wonder the thrust of Morville and Rosenfeld’s work, with its special focus on e-business, is so different from that of Garrett, who seems to make the “user experience” – a subjective and difficult-to-measure criterion – central to his work.

Based especially on Garrett’s article in the DMI Review, I’m convinced Garrett is just as user-centric as I am. The difference is that I’m interested in metrics – did the user accomplish what he came to the site for? how long did it take? what menus were useful and useless? – while Garrett plumbs the strange and equally interesting depths of how to create emotional and sensory reactions to a website. Science is no more useful in Garrett’s pursuit than it is to an artist seeking to find a formula for how to paint pathos. His skepticism about empiricism is thus unsurprising and appropriate, and our points of view are compatible.

What’s perhaps most surprising about Garrett’s ideas is the notion that creating an emotional experience is the purview of an information architect, as opposed to a graphic designer or another engineer closer to the end user. I’ll keep an eye out for the aspects of IA that fall outside the proper domain of empiricism as the course continues!