Abby Covert
As the digital practices have grown and evolved over the past few decades, the job title "information architect" has become less common. That doesn't necessarily mean that the work isn't being done, but IA is now often in the province of a designer, content strategist, or other practitioner.
Abby Covert sees this situation as both a sign of progress and as an opportunity to more deliberately democratize the craft of information architecture.
We talked about:
her current work on democratizing information architecture
her take on the relationship between information architecture and content strategy
how the apparent current dearth of IA attention may actually be a sign of success
how IA work is getting done, regardless of whether practitioners label their work as IA
the importance of incentives and incentive structures
the origins of her democratization work
her shift from teaching corporations about information architecture to focusing on teaching individuals
the hazards of bringing your IA ego into an organization
when to step back from democratized practice and engage a true IA expert
the crucial role of education in democratization
opportunities as an IA to influence the incentives in an organization
her stealth approach to teaching metadata
Abby's bio
Abby Covert is an information architect, writer and community organizer with two decades of experience helping people make sense of messes. Abby has written two popular books, How to Make Sense of Any Mess and Stuck? Diagrams Help. She currently spends her time making things that help you to make the unclear, clear, many of which she makes available for free on her website www.abbycovert.com or at accessible price points in her popular Etsy shop AbbytheIA. In 2022 she started The Sensemakers Club where she brings together sensemakers from different walks of life to learn from one another. Abby currently lives and writes from Melbourne, Florida where her most important job title is ‘Mama’.
Connect with Abby online
AbbyCovert.com
The Practitioner's Guide to How to Make Sense of Any Mess
The Teacher's Guide to How to Make Sense of Any Mess
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMNfdoRw950
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 157. The field of information architecture has seen a lot of change over the past 25 years. One aspect of this evolution has been a reduced prevalence of the role of "information architect." IA work is still being done, but often by folks who don't have the term in their job description. Abby Covert sees this situation as both a sign of progress and as an opportunity to more deliberately democratize the craft of information architecture.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 157 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am super delighted today to have with us Abby Covert. Abby is a well-known information architect, who focuses these days on writing and teaching. Welcome Abby. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.
Abby:
Hi, Larry. Thanks for having me. Let's see. These days, I'm really focusing on democratizing information architecture. I really want to bring the information architecture lessons I've learned over the last 20 years to as many people in as many industries as possible. So I've been focusing for the last few years on projects that really work on that.
Abby:
The first was I expanded my authorship into my second book, which is about diagramming. It's called Stuck? Diagrams Help. And then around the same time, I also launched something called The Sensemakers Club, which is a place for people to learn how to make more sense. So I'm working on expanding that into a series of community events. We have some monthly things, some quarterly things. And then of course our annual celebration Makesensemess, which comes up every November. So yeah, I'm keeping myself busy in the indie content world over here, Larry.
Larry:
Nice. Yeah, no idle hands there, I can tell. Yeah, and I got to say we're a thousand percent aligned on the democratization thing. Anybody who's listened to this podcast knows that I've used that word in the intro to every episode, so I'm super excited to talk about that. But one thing I want to do first, because this is entitled Content Strategy Insights, is talk a little bit about your take on the relationship between information architecture and content strategy.
Abby:
I love that question. It's also one of the most common questions I get. I would say my favorite quote about this is actually from Karen McGrane, who I know you've had on the pod. Karen years ago, and I have no idea the provenance, said something to the effect of, "Information architecture builds the car and content strategy makes sure you don't run out of gas."
Abby:
And I think that when I look at the projects that I've been on, whoever is doing the information architecture and the content strategy can change. They can have different roles than those two specialties, but ultimately you do need both of those parts. You need somebody who is figuring out how the pieces arrange themselves as a whole to make sense. And then you also need someone to figure out how that whole is going to evolve and be filled with content that makes sense over time.
Abby:
And the degree to which you need content strategy really comes down to cadence. Are you designing something that's super evergreen and locked down, or are you designing something that changes all the time? If it's the former, you can kind of take care of the content strategy part upfront. If it's the latter, it requires an ongoing maintenance that you don't see as much of a need for in terms of the information architecture part.
Larry:
Yeah, interesting. I love that take on that. Now, I had not heard that quote from Karen before. She's kind of a quote machine, so I'm not surprised she said something that brilliant. Well, hey, I want to turn to quickly to democratization because that's a topic near and dear to my heart. And we talked a month or two ago to prepare for this. And you said a few things in there.
Larry:
One of the things you said when we talked was that the current dearth of IA talent out there in the world, or of current apparent dearth of IA talent, might be a positive sign. It might be a sign of some kind of success. Tell me more about what you meant by that.
Abby:
I think that it really comes down to labels, which is funny for an information architect to say it comes down to labels, but I think that that's really true. I think there's a lot of people that end up in my inbox that tell me that they've been practicing information architecture for 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 years, that did not know the word for it.
Abby:
Now, does that make them any less good at information architecture? I would argue no. But, it does limit their ability to connect with community to get better at it, and it does limit their ability to have the right words to break into that next level of it.
Abby:
So I see a lot of folks that get into the labeling part and they're like, "Whoa, I have a label for this." And then they want a job doing that by that label. And often I have to then burst the bubble that that's actually probably not going to happen, that you're going to do information architecture, but you're going to do it in service of another role.
Abby:
So my most recent bout of that was moving into a role in product management. I had an IA job at Etsy that was going really well for a few years. But ultimately, because I was a person who was the only person with that title, it wasn't something that was sustainable in a corporate environment. It just was always going to be a specialist contractor like thing floating through the orb. But taking on a role of product manager, I could do a lot of the things that as an information architect, I could talk about all day, but I couldn't get them done.
Abby:
So I think there's something that I really learned in that process of letting go of the label as a title and thinking about it as a practice. Which I think in the 15 years that I've been teaching information architecture, that's been my focus of, "It doesn't matter what your title is, everybody needs to make more sense." And information architecture is something that existed far before we had words for it. So we all do it all day.
Larry:
The way you set that out is super interesting, because it almost sounds like it's been elevated to this, you bring in the outside pro, the proper IA consultant. But at the same time, everybody's expected to have some basic skills around it. Is that what it is? Because I hear a lot of consternation in the IA world, and a lot in the UX world, which I run in more, about the disappearance of the role. But it sounds like you're saying that the activities are still there, they're sort of hidden away. Or not hidden away, but just not articulated.
Abby:
I think that the activities are absolutely getting done. I mean, people are labeling things and they're picking structures to put content into. That is absolutely happening all day, every day, in the majority of knowledge worker jobs, if not in the majority of tech and design jobs. So everyone is doing it all day.
Abby:
Now, when do you need a specialist, I think is the more interesting question. What is the point at which you need it? And to be honest with you, I think the point is fear. I think that there is a fear point. There is a risk assessment point where the fear is great enough that an organization feels the need to bring in an expert. Either that expert is in the scale of the problem, or that expert is in the tool of the problem or the medium of the problem. But whatever it is, there is a moment where the mess is too big.
