Job Description: Information Architect (At An “Integrated” Agency)
A friend of mine who works in a traditional advertising and PR agency that’s evolving toward “integration” asked me about job descriptions for information architects – he was looking for a way to talk about a position called “IA” or “digital planner” that would make sense to the principals at his firm. I didn’t come up with anything good after Googling for two minutes so I decided to roll my own:
The role of the information architect is to help discover and articulate the “why” of the project, and to work directly with the client and horizontally across vertically-oriented disciplines within the agency to ensure consistency and continuity of meaning in the processes, products and success metrics the team uses, creates and measures its outcomes with.
In the early stages of the project, the information architect assists in the formulation of strategy, and uses simple pictures and complex linguistic structures to assist the team and the client in explaining and understanding the nature of the experiences that consumers will have with the client’s brand, products and collateral.
In the middle stages of the project, the information architect assists the project team in identifying the “how” of the project, and in prioritizing, selecting and arraying specific tactics in ways that protect the continuity, consistency and purposefulness of the resulting user experiences.
During the implementation stage of the project, the information architect listens to and collaborates with the people who build, test and deploy the solution in order to capitalize on the unique insights which emerge during implementation, maximizing opportunities to enhance the solution as it’s being built.
Once a solution is deployed, the information architect assists in the measurement of user experience and in the collection of insights to improve the performance and maintainability of the solution.
How’d I do?