v-2.org

From time to time, I'm asked to give speeches or presentations explaining exactly what it is that information architects do. And as we all do, in these lapsarian days, I show a PowerPoint sequence to support the words tumbling from my lips, having found that corporate audiences somehow don't feel complete without those friendly bullet-pointed slides up there on the screen.

One of the slides of my standard presentation limns a Venn diagram of two overlapping circles, of the type you first encountered in your junior-high math textbook and never have quite succeeded in seeing the end of. One of the two circles is neatly labeled "business requirements," the other "user needs"; I stroke the shaded area of the overlap with my pointer and croon, "This: this is the realm of information architects." My next slide animates the two circles merging, and I explain that, in some sense, my job is to maximize the overlap between these two sets of prerogatives: those of the user, those of the business.

Heads nod, pens track across notebook pages, and we move on to other material. The bulk of my presentations generally concerns the domain of the second circle, "user needs" - and properly so, since I like to consider myself a practitioner of user-centered design. Left implicit is the entire body of assumptions subsumed by the bland phrase "business requirements."

This is because I've long assumed that we all, somehow, "just knew this stuff" from having grown up in and around late capitalism, whether in its American, German, Korean, Japanese, or Canadian variant, or others. I further had the sense that it would be outright condescending to my audiences to spell out just what is meant by the requirements of business. Lately, though, I'm reconsidering this position; having seen a few discussions around Jeff Lash's recent article on Digital Web, I think it might be worth unpacking a few basic terms from the business domain that directly impact our work as IAs and designers.

I hope you'll forgive me if this recitation is overly schematic - if you've got a solid grounding in the fundamentals of capitalism, you're not the intended target audience, although I do still invite you to read on through and correct any errors or oversimplifications I've committed.

Please also do not read any of the following, necessarily, as an endorsement of capitalist ethics or social norms. These happen to be the current ground rules of the game we play, however - what's the alternative, agrarian Maoism? POUMist redistributionism? - and we might as well at least have a scorecard, if not a cheat sheet.

you are now entering a commercial zone

Unless your practice is solely limited to work for non-profits, NGOs and your cousin Barney, odds are that at some point in your career your services will be engaged by a corporation.

They're so omnipresent in our social and material landscape that we don't even notice this any more, but a corporation is a true oddity, a legal fiction: technically, one has many of the rights of a legal person, without the corresponding responsibilities. They exist to distribute risk, and, at least under American jurisprudence, to partially isolate their directors from personal financial or legal liability for actions taken by the corporation, including debts incurred.

Think of this risk-mitigation effect, though, as an enabling technology, because the first and foremost purpose of corporations is to make profits for their owners (if they are privately held) or shareholders (if they are public).

In fact, the directors of a publicly-held company have a formal responsibility as the shareholder's representatives to maximize their profit; this is known as fiduciary duty. Believe you me, there is a vigilant community of investor-side litigators, and you can and will be sued if your actions (or negligent lack of action) contribute to an avoidable shortfall in corporate revenue.

Thus, after many intervening steps, the concern you'll be familiar with, return on investment ("ROI"). In other words, do more people reach the "buy" button if the navigation is linked text, or a pulldown menu? If we invest $2 million on a topsweet Flash site, and it gets linked to from all the design portals, will the increase in site traffic produce a corresponding spike in revenues? Will the expense of user testing repay itself in increased user satisfaction, fewer calls to our call center, higher conversion rates?

Engaging your services as a designer or an information architect has an associated cost, and ideally anyway, also produces a tangible benefit. If the benefit outweighs the cost, good on you; if not, watch out. Alert readers will want to point out that not engaging your services also has a cost, and this is absolutely correct. Every course of action also incurs an opportunity cost - the unrealized benefit of measures not taken because they were precluded by the action that was taken. When the powers that be are doing their jobs properly, these opportunity costs never overwhelm the benefits produced by the actual strategy chosen. (And if they don't, and it's sufficiently obvious, that can be read as a breach of fiduciary duty, with all the consequences implied above.)

That's some of the context behind that infernal Venn diagram. At its baldest, businesses must make money - revenue - in greater amounts than they spend. If they are successful in doing so, they become profitable, and this profit is distributed to shareholders, as dividends or simply as increases in the value of the institution in which they own equity. Shareholders get pissed off if their investments do not increase in value, and they have been provided (in the United States) by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 with an armamentarium of unpleasant legal tools with which to sanction corporate directors whose misfeasance or malfeasance they hold responsible for this state of affairs.

This eternal drive to maximize revenue affects you-the-IA and you-the-designer in many ways, some obvious and some less so, on at least two levels. In a neat little fractal regression, your shop's work must benefit its clients, and your work must benefit the company you work for.

This certainly accounts for the pressures on you from the client-facing folks ("give them what they want") and the project manager ("...and do it faster"). Absent other countervailing influences, if they can't demonstrate - concretely, objectively, and yesterday - that there is a positive return on the client's investment in your firm's work, the account will be shopped out. Still scarier for them is that they may be out of a job; it's not unheard-of for these folks to have clauses in their contracts holding them personally responsible for the profitability of the projects they run.

Unfortunately, there's a bogus assumption built into these demands, and that is that the client knows best how to produce work for the World Wide Web that will contribute to their bottom line. And despite the fact that we know that this has historically (cough) not always been the case, it's still the default position for all too many of our engagements. This goes directly to our role - if you're lucky enough to work in a consultant role, rather than button-cutting and the like for a production house - of advising the client on appropriate user-experience strategy, rather than meekly implementing the VP/Marketing's latest bright idea.

she's a model and she's looking good

Every company needs to make money: great. So how do companies go about turning a buck, and if the need is so universal, why isn't a one-size-fits-all approach suitable? The answer is summed up by an assumption called a business model: roughly, the situation from which the client business proposes to derive revenue - and therefore, hopefully, profit. And even in the same industry, facing the same market, companies can operate on different models.

This is an abstraction that can be a little challenging to grasp without concrete examples; the distinction between commercial broadcast television and cable TV is a good place to begin showing how differences in business model affect the desired user experience, thus altering the parameters of your work.

The broadcast television networks make their money by aggregating audiences and essentially selling the attention of those audiences to advertisers; the simple fact that the content is distributed freely over the airwaves has historically been sufficient to guarantee an economically large population of viewers. Viewers are compelled to sit through interstitial interruptions of the content they're ostensibly drawn by, and that content must appeal to the largest possible audience in order for advertisers to underwrite it.

Cable TV, by contrast, is a subscription service; the customer pays a monthly fee for a wire that comes into the house, and the service provider makes a small profit each time this happens. This alters the terms of the arrangement significantly: freed from the constraint of having to move mass audiences, cable "networks" can succeed by appealing to niche markets: The Weather Channel. The Cartoon Network. Black Entertainment Television. Queer as Folk.

So we see that differences in business model change the character of products, services, and client companies tremendously. If that doesn't bring it down to earth enough, think of two imaginary cellular-service providers: Company A is in the business of selling a variety of phone handsets to its customers, on the strength of those handsets' features; Company B signs customers up for extended service contracts, during which they automatically get upgraded to the latest phone the company offers. Same market space, two very different models. Which company do you think would have greater customer loyalty? Greater resistance to changes in technology and fashion? The ability to make higher profits on lower revenues?

The differences in the circumstances engendered by these divergent business models illustrates the complexities lurking behind the banal "business requirements" label of my PowerPoint presentation. Differences in business model need not be sledgehammer-obvious, either, to affect your decisions significantly. They can come pretty finely-grained, and yet still alter the tenor of Web design and architecture greatly; Lou Rosenfeld has asked if companies in the same market space necessarily have the same information architecture, and demonstrated (to my satisfaction, anyway) that this is not so. (see also Dan Saffer's piece, along similar lines.)

In IA terms, you had better write different personae for Dell than you would for Apple, because they're not going to want identical features and content. From a designer's perspective, these companies have different goals online, and your creative brief and resultant comps should reflect this.

man with a plan

Distinct from the business model, which can be shared by an arbitrary number of firms competing in the same market segment (or, ack, "space"), is an individual company's business plan.

The components of a business plan differ from firm to firm, but the general thrust is always the same: what business are we in? Do we provide a product or a service? Who are our customers? How to we intend to finance and otherwise support our business operations?

If you're an information architect, odds are that many of these questions sound pretty familiar. They should: they're the same ones you ask when you first set out to scope and define a Web project. If a client contact isn't able to answer these queries to the degree of precision you need to do your work, you might gently remind them that they've already been addressed by their institution, at some level. The answers do exist to be found.

You'll almost certainly never see a client's business plan with your own eyes, but asking the right questions about what it contains can help you reach conclusions about how your client intends to make money in the world, and how the Web site you've been asked to envision for them is supposed to contribute.

business as usual

So there's a thumbnail sketch about how capitalism works, and the ways in which its working influences the situation in which we find ourselves as designers. It's rarely as schematic as I've presented, and the variations are endless - from the cozy inverse socialism of Asian-style crony capitalism to the bare-knuckled free-market absolutism espoused by libertarians - but the elements are the same.

A preponderance of material and energetic flows on the planet are accompanied by informational flow, particularly the flow of that specialized type of information we think of as "money." I hope that this piece has deepened your understanding of this process, in ways that are immediately useful to your work. Please let me know if I've succeeded, or if I've made any errors in fact or emphasis. With any luck, you can use this knowledge to strengthen your hand the next time you get into a difference of opinion with your clients - by pointing out that good design practice happens to be good for their bottom line.