Semantic Confusion

As a (part-time but still active) philosopher, I sometimes get tweaked by less than earth-shaking errors. One of my more common peeves is the misuse of terms - darn it, somebody went to a lot of work to figure out what X meant, so when you go using it for Y (for which we ALREADY HAVE a perfectly workable term - namely, Y) you’re being disrespectful AS WELL AS increasing the amount of confusion in the world.

So it is with a bit of irritation that I read articles like Sitepoint’s Good Information Architecture Increases Online Sales. Sure, the topic is great and the tips are full of goodness (or they might be; I haven’t finished it yet, having zipped over here to rant while in the midst of reading), but it suffers from an all-too-common misconception: usability and information architecture ARE NOT THE SAME THING!

And if you need an explanation of that claim, maybe you should take a look at Jakob Nielsen’s site, Lou Rosenfeld’s site, and the like.

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