The Politics of Doing #IA for #HighEd (APS9)
Hill Country C & D
Information architecture is how we organize and label content and navigation for large websites. In an ideal world, planning the information architecture is a lot like designing and building a designer kitchen for a newly-constructed home. But…
Aaron Baker (University of Arkansas at Little Rock)

Polar Bear book FTW!

IA is convergence.
Users – audience, tasks, needs.
Content – docs, data, structure.
Context – institutional goals, funding, politics, culture.

Controlled vocabulary – your university specific language/words. Index vs Directory. Metadata and thesauri.

Add click events to homepage links. So you can track how people got to a page.

Prevention
– Understand political climate
– Have a policy that explicitly explains how IA is determined
– Be transparent about how/who makes changes.

Stop. Look. Listen.
Take a neutral opinion. Don’t let it be about you. Try it both ways and measure the difference.