Human-centred decisions
I lead teams and organisations to make human-centred decisions. I am a lead content designer and information architect at the Scottish Government.
Email — contact@duncanstephen.net
Information architecture normally focuses on the objects that need to be represented in a system. Some human-centred practitioners focus instead on the tasks users need to do. These approaches are sometimes framed in opposition. But combining these techniques can make services and systems easier to use as well as more efficient to manage.
Amid technology-focused hype cycles, the job of human-centred practitioners is to remind everyone: the main reason people use technology is to enhance our connections with other humans in the real world.
I have long felt uneasy about modern occupations associating themselves with high-status traditional professions. This has been brought into sharp focus for me since I started a role last year focusing heavily on information architecture, to the annoyance of my wife Alex, who is an actual architect.
There are several benefits of building a content model in an object-oriented way. This post walks through those benefits, and demonstrates a real-life example of how this approach works on a well-known website.
Decades-old approaches are being brought up to date with new techniques to create a robust way of structuring content to enable reuse and make content management more efficient.
In my job at the Scottish Government, we are understanding the opportunities that can be provided by following an object-oriented approach to structuring our information.
Information has become the forgotten half in “information technology”. Tech companies are struggling because they aren’t focusing on the human problems they need to solve.
I was sad to learn earlier that Vicky Teinaki has died. Vicky had been a designer for a few different government departments and public sector organisations.
I didn’t know her well. But I have read her blog posts for years, and I was delighted to encounter her in meetings about structured information since I joined the civil service a few months ago. I was struck by how she demonstrated both fresh thinking and wisdom.
Just a few days after I started in my information architecture role at the Scottish Government, she published this excellent article about the discipline.
It serves multiple purposes expertly. It is a comprehensive but concise history of information architecture, tracking its major milestones over the past 20 years.
Vicky argued that information architecture had become diminished when it got absorbed into user experience, and then got forgotten entirely when it suddenly became easy to churn out high-fidelity visual prototypes without tackling underlying structural decisions.
The post is also an incredible bibliography of key information architecture resources. I have turned to this blog post numerous times over the past six months, and I know I will continue to do so.
A perspective on the similarities and differences between information, data, content and knowledge.
I found some very vintage but surprisingly pristine litter in Morningside a few weeks ago.
My eye was drawn by the Savacentre branding (not a thing any more).
I was surprised to discover that this partial leaflet dates from spring 1990.
Unfortunately the coupons are no longer valid.
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As with my other social media accounts, its main purpose will be to let my followers know when I have posted something on my blog. But if you’re on Bluesky, feel free to follow me there.
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I have long been an advocate of agile ways of working. One of the things that originally drew me to user experience was the opportunity to have evidence-based ways of understanding the changes you need to make. So I was surprised whenever I encountered people who believed that user experience methods ran counter to the principles of agile.
