Information Architecture Series: Part 1 – Ask the questions

Congratulations, you have been given the task of laying out some sort of information in SharePoint and your objective is to try to make it repeatable, usable, and easy to administer. You may feel like you are looking to the rabbit hole but it is really not as rough as it seems. You main objective is to think about the basics:

·         What do they want and/or need?

·         Who is your target audience?

·         Who are you trying to keep out?

·         Where else will this information be needed?

·         Where is the information coming from?

·         How will you find the information?

·         How will the information be presented?

·         Who will maintain the information?

·         Do others need to approve this information prior to it being published?

·         Does this information need to be published to other locations?

When it comes to the questions, I find often that people (your customer) either don’t know the answers, think they know the answers for someone else, or know the answers but are wrong. For the latter scenario, the only way to avoid that is just through experience. I have been in organizations that built million dollar solutions and when it was all said and done, nobody used it because it was hard to use, or it was just not what they needed even though it was exactly what was requested. 

One of the biggest challenges with information architecture comes from the person collecting the information not knowing enough about how SharePoint out-of-the-box works. For this reason, I highly encourage you to take a SharePoint power user course from a reputable training company or through an online resource. This will give you the basics to include (and this is especially important) nomenclature. When someone mentions a list or library, you need to know the difference. When someone mentions a site column or managed metadata, you need to know the difference. This is especially true for the person laying out the information in the SharePoint site.

Before we get too far down this rabbit hole, I want to start with explaining the platinum rule. Nearly everyone knows the golden rule of “treat others as you wish to be treated”. But unfortunately, not everyone wants to be treated the same way you do. For example, if I go to a restaurant and order a bacon macaroni and cheeseburger (yes, it is a real thing), I would not order the same thing for my coworkers. The reason for this is because one is a vegetarian, and the other is gluten-free. I would order them something else. I would implement the platinum rule of “treat others as they wish to be treated”.

Finally, as you peer down the long dark hole of information architecture, it takes time. One if the biggest mistakes regarding SharePoint is not realizing that you should spend 75% of the total delivery time planning the solution, and 25% actually delivering it. Many of you may think this seems way out of whack, but from the questions above, it is very true. Time will be spent collecting requirements by asking questions. This means you actually need to talk to the people and not make assumptions. You will see at the end of this series that everything is tied together and you may need to adjust your approach on the fly.