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![]() ACIA Main Page > People > Andrea Gallagher (June 1, 2000) |
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![]() See also: Scient Univ. Michigan School of Information Project Xanadu Who else should we profile? Nominate your favorite information architect. Subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter. ![]() More People The ACIA is sponsored by Argus Associates, a leading information architecture consulting firm. |
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![]() ![]() Andrea Gallagher
Andrea
Gallagher is a Customer Experience Architect at Scient. On top of a BA in Psychology from
Stanford and graduate work in cognitive psychology at the University of
Michigan, Andrea also knows a heck of a lot about information retrieval.
Which makes her one of my heroes. Lou: How long have you been working as an information architect?
And how did you find your way into the field? Andrea: The first "information architecture" I did was in June
of 1994, on a Web-based catalog for hot sauce called Hot Hot Hot!. But I
did a lot of different work on the Web since then. I've been calling
myself an information architect since
early 1997. You could really say I went to school to do this sort of thing. I got
my undergraduate degree in psychology, with a focus on cognitive
psychology and human-computer interaction. I then did some work designing
and evaluating an interface for an online library catalog and became
fascinated with the problem of information access and retrieval. In 1992,
I began work on a doctorate in cognitive psychology, also taking classes
in the then-named School of Library and
Information Studies. I wanted to do my thesis research on browsing
and searching interfaces for large search engines. In late 1993 Mosaic started making the rounds. As people immediately
started building the most random and interesting web sites, it was obvious
that the search engine had just turned into a mass-market product. That
summer I consulted for Presence Information Design, the company that
built that hot sauce catalog, interned for Apple for a few months, and
never went back to school. Lou: How has your academic background (human computer interaction and information retrieval) helped you in your work? Andrea: A lot of web design is similar to basic UI design. I get
a lot of insight from understanding how human perception works, the limits
of human memory, and how people deal with categories and problem solving.
The HCI field also provides design methodologies and techniques for
evaluating systems that I use every day, though the Web constantly tests
these by presenting new tasks for people to do and new issues of
scale. The knowledge of information retrieval, both of how humans try to do it
and how the technology works, helps me tackle those new issues. When we
add scale, information access issues are woven into every task. Users
have to combine search and feature comparison, browsing and project
management, information foraging and problem solving. Lou: What's your greatest insecurity as an information architect? Andrea: I don't have a strong background in information design,
and it is often critically important to be able to represent a complex
conceptual model for a web site to a client, design teams, or partners. I
always feel as if I'm half an information architect when I need to
explain complex concepts that involve information design. Lou: What's your strangest experience as an information
architect? Andrea: Probably my first experience as an information
architect: listening to Ted Nelson describe hypertext and his Project Xanadu in 1991. It was strange
and wonderful. It was an epiphany, and I walked out of there an
information architect without even knowing it. Lou: What advice to you have for people entering the field? Are
there areas they really need to study? Attitudes they need to bring (or
jettison)? What do you wish you'd already known before getting
started? Andrea: Spend as much time as you can observing real people in
their tasks, watching how they categorize their world, listening to their
questions, and watching them use your systems and other people's systems.
Users are the best teachers. Lou: Finally, what site are you visiting lately that other
information architects should check out? Why? Andrea: Google. I love it,
because it fulfills the promise of search engines so consistently. I always end up using the very first hit that comes up in their results. Most of the time, I'm curious about what the other hits will be, so I look at the whole results list. But one of these days I'll just start using their "feeling lucky" button. One of the promises of hypertext from the start was that there was
information in the links - which sites think which other sites are
interesting enough to link to. This is basic citation indexing, but
applied to a huge and heterogeneous document set. Google finally puts that structural information to use well. |
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![]() The ACIA is Sponsored by Argus Associates, Inc. Copyright 2000 All Rights Reserved ![]() |
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