An information architect (”the IA”) who chooses to remain anonymous presented a case study this afternoon at the iRise Fusion conference.  One of the main things that IA’s worry about is how improve the user experience (UX) for customers and this was definitely on the mind of the presenter.

The IA’s challenge is to teach legacy businesses how to build smarter user experiences   as the legacy business is good at what they do, but they are not good at the new business.

His solution is to help the legacy business graduate up the learning curve by discovering how to use the new features and approaches by analogy and familiarity.  Tying new initiatives back to things they know and inherently understand has been the key to making progress with the legacy business.

Ultimately, the goals of information architecture are:

• building smarter
• testing smarter
• planning smarter
• designing smarter
• experimenting smarter

And the overall goal is that “smart user experience yields smart business models.”

The IA closed with how iRise meets his requirements:

• scenario based design
• pattern library in Masters
• simulate while they wait
• data simulation solves big problems early
• frees me up to do other cools things