One of the realizations that's significantly influenced how I approach a design project is that there are, for the most part, two distinct kinds of sites or presentations out there: tools and experiences.

The two kinds of site are usually differentiated at the outset by defining the measure of success. A store, a news site, a search engine. These are epitomes of tool sites. The interface exists to fascilitate a collaboratively directed transfer of information, either from or to the visitor.

An experiential site typically has a very different measure of success. Unfortunately, that measure is often hidden because it is superceded by a more quantifiable measure. For example, a site about brand-building (www.levi.com for example), may have 600,000 hits per month as a measure of success. This is unfortunate because the real measure of success should be the impact the site has on the individual.

Some people try to incorporate subjective measurements by looking at other objective measurements, such as pageviews per visit, time spent on a page or a session, 'stickiness', and the like. This ends up doing the site and viewer a disservice because when the designer (architect, graphic designer, whoever) designs with the goal of increasing these numbers, they often do so to the exclusion of the subjective goals.

Of course, sometimes this is blatant and intentional. If you've ever been to a porn site (stumbled across it while looking for something else, of course), then you're familiar with the dozens of unrequested popups that scream, 'Don't go! There's more porn over here!' This is one example of inflating a number while deflating the subjective user impression.

Getting back to the point of this entry, the numbers are important goals for tool sites. Numbers indicating daily sales, purchase-path abandonment rates, coupon redemption rates, clickthroughs, repeat business and affiliate programs are vital to tool sites. The insights they yield can help create smoother purchases, more directed shopping, better search results, and the like. In short, they make better tools.

The opposite is true for the experiential site. 'Measures of success' are really measures of effectiveness, but when only objective, numeric qualia go in, the only effectiveness that's measured is that people see, that people read, that people think, but not what they see, what they read, and most importantly, what they think.

As indicated earlier, while the distinction between tool and experience is important when assessing the success of a site, it's much more important when designing the site in the first place.

In the time I spent working at the big firms, each had its own 'best practices' philosophy that sought, among other things, to define the process by which a site is made. Roles and responsibilities were at the center of these processes. In some companies, design begins with the graphic design (the 'creative' side, as it's called). In others, strategy and technical hammer out the site requirements. Typically the initiating side takes on their part of the pie as well as the interface design and, whether they realize it or not, the groundwork of the information architecture.

The problem is that the initiating side isn't often decided by the type of site, but by the culture of the design firm and, in some cases, the culture of the client, regardless of the type of site being created.

So, taking the long and winding road to get back to the point of what an "Information Architect" is, the information architect should be the bridge between the creative and technical arms. He or she creates a framework that a technical team constructs and a creative team furnishes. Still, the architect usually has a greater affinity to the technical side, which is suitable when creating a tool site, but not when creating an experiential site.

However, chopping the IA out of the equation on experiential projects would be severing the tie to innovative technical solutions that can augment the experience. What's needed is a different sort of information architect, an "Information Artisan" if you will.

The information artisan's responsibility would be to work with the design team, ensuring that the final architecture provides them with the framework they need to achieve the aesthetic goals of the site. They would be analogous to the information architect on a tools site, only instead of specifying a structural framework to support a site, they would design a piece where the artistic aspects extend deeper than the creative arm usually reaches, calling upon the tech side to enhance the art instead of using design to enhance a tool. Kvetch and The Fray are good examples of this.

That's all for now. Maybe I'll touch this up when I'm not in such a rambling state of mind.