IA Jargon Watch

November 07, 2003

Friday is typically List Serve catch up day. A day when I go through all the UXP list serves and sites I subscribe to and read up on the happenings in the user experience world. While going through the news, I ran accross a good IA jargon list from Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path that I found entertaining.

My personal favorites:

SUAC v. Acronym for "Shut Up and Color". How Marketing and Engineering departments often think (or wish) design should be done.

Boil the Ocean v. Try to solve too many problems with an overambitious project, typically resulting in a complete failure. Many Content Management projects end up this way when attempting to port an entire organization's content, process, and workflow into one new, massive tool. "Look, just help the HR teams get their forms online. We don't need to boil the ocean with this."

Deep Diving v. Giving users the ability to bookmark a page deep within the site. "We've enabled deep diving in the employee directory by changing the URL structure."

"Boil the Ocean" tends to really ring true in my experience. We go through far too many of those type of projects only to narrow scope well after it is obvious we Boiled the Ocean dry.

Read the full list >> (pop-up)