Benefits and Outcomes of the Research

E5 Benefits and Outcomes of the Research

In the context of increased User Centered Design (UCD) in the digital world of web based internet or mobile internet it is necessary to understand that IA is not only revolutionary but also unique in determining the specific issues surrounding usability engineering. It is beneficial to note that user research helps IA in many ways. IAs learn about content (product) people use and need, how they think about groups of content, how they describe concepts and what functionality they need. In turn IA aims to understand the users’ needs and design with those needs in mind, balancing business objectives with user needs with respect to the given content. Also IA aims to validate design decisions with the users’ involvement. Further user research data is relatively easy to collect, from interviews and surveys. Their analysis will help IAs to design the site (product) structure, arrange navigation and labeling scheme (look and feel of the product). Therefore, the study of IA in relation to user behavior (usability or UX) will offer an insight as to how IAs can be useful for businesses.

Experts like Kelly (TED talks, 2007) state that the online wired world of web took more than a decade to mature, however, the world of wireless or mobile internet grew exponentially. There is no doubt in saying that it is growing very fast in the era of post-modern virtual reality. However, much of this growth is witnessed mainly because the technological developments were first tried and tested in the wired world of web and then the successful principles were applied to the wireless world of mobile internet. The study of W3C guidelines of IA in mobile world in terms of user accessibility indicates IA is adapted into the mobile world from the web. Potentially this will impact organizations such as Digital Fairfax, Telstra, ABC (Australia), MIG, VentureOne and BBC, who are involved in mobile industry and provide rich media (AV) content and user generated content (UGC) for mobile internet browsers, who are not able to browse the internet at home or office and are generally in transit and need the information fast. In this respect the proposed research will be expected to be of value to professionals, academics across the disciplines of IA studies, developers and consumer research such as The Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index.

IA is getting remodeled and reengineered in the mobile world owing to the diversity in design and technology of mobile phones and advanced features integrated with them. And in the context of mobile environment the design principles of IA are shifting from being web centric. The present generation smart phones, black berries, Apple I-phones, Google phones and Palm Pre are multimedia (AV enabled) Internet-enabled mobile phone. In addition they have added features like text messaging, camera on phone and visual voicemail. All this makes them highly attractive. But features alone don't make a gadget successful. However, usability and how it can be improved by studying IA remains the main factor determining the success of such gadgets in the mobile world. Ergo, it is important to study the aspects of Information Architecture (IA) applied in generating rich user experience (UX) in such world.