Darwin does design: measuring & optimizing the user experience
Mar 26th, 2009 by Aaron Louie
Information Architecture Summit 2009 presentation by Aaron Louie and Rachel Elkington: “Darwin Does Design: Measuring & Optimizing the User Experience”
At the Information Architecture Summit this last week, I attended “Evolve or Die“, a panel discussion about the future of Information Architecture. The panelists ranged in tone from prophecies of doom to obituaries for sitemaps and wireframes (my take: IA is not doomed, nor are sitemaps or wireframes even close to extinction).
To the panelists, evolution was a thing to fear, as if we are as powerless as dinosaurs in the face of an approaching asteroid. I found myself wondering how we might embrace evolution as a tool for advancing the discipline or, more ambitious, develop an evolution-inspired approach to advancing the process of how IA is done. How would we re-conceive of the process of IA as the guided evolution of information spaces? Might we guide the evolution of the discipline itself, utilizing evolutionary principles to improve what how IA is done and ensure the survival of IA as a discipline?
That evening, I realized that the book I’m co-writing (more on this later) on the blending of analytics, optimization, and user experience already described this evolutionary approach. Early the next morning, I signed up for a session slot to co-present the idea with fellow ZAAZ user experience architect (and optimization test designer) Rachel Elkington. Our session title: “Darwin Does Design: Measuring & Optimizing the User Experience.”
You can view the slides of our presentation on SlideShare. Audio coming soon!