Thread by @visakanv

I’ve been ruminating on a hypothetical holy grail of information architecture for years and years now and every 3-6 months or so I have some new epiphany that feels like it’ll change everything, and it kinda does but not as much as I originally hoped

I’ve talked about a few critical things before

- bricks/spreadsheets as the densest way to display information

- the importance of desire paths

- “magic phrases” – passwords, really, but that word has come to become associated with a very specific login, so need a diff word

For some period of time I was painfully fixated on trying to represent my entire twitter corpus, I even unintentionally sent a couple of earnest devs down that hellhole, none have returned lol sorry friends

I realize now that’s a mistakenly needy frame. You can’t eat the sun

Writing a book was tremendously clarifying for me re: thinking about information architecture in general

we are trying to build mind cities

we cannot represent everything perfectly everywhere and we shouldn’t force it

rather the thing is to be artful in graceful degradation

also a big part of trying to make this work is that you have to solve not just for the nail but also for the hand

we have to account for human limitations of working memory, perception, etc

digital tools are generally bad at this. Twitter 280char limit is a remarkable exception

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1079695290418876417

phrases like “user centric” and “human centric” etc now sound like meaningless buzzwords, which is annoying, because when I think about the 5-10% of my corpus that’s most effective, most powerful, most used, valuable, etc, it’s stuff that interfaces with people in a natural way

also while i'm currently sifting thru notes I feel like an annoying thing about digital notes is that they don't really have an intuitive "weight", like a google doc or a blogpost with 2 strings of text outwardly looks the same as one with 100 pages. IRL this is much clearer