A List Apart has published findings from their April 2007 Web design survey. It’s a rather comprehensive study (over 30,000 respondents–I was one of them) and the first of its kind. One of the things that impresses me most, however, isn’t that it’s so comprehensive, but that the folks at A List Apart were honest enough to admit that in hindsight some of the questions were a bit ambiguous and left holes in the data. So often, this is only something you’ll find after the analysis has been done. It’s great to see researchers being honest.
One of my biggest complaints with surveys in the past is that they are designed poorly. Poorly designed surveys lead to misleading data–bad data in, bad data out. In the report, the researchers actually highlight questions that left holes in the data or the felt left some of the findings a bit ambiguous, or possibly questionable. As a researcher, this increased my confidence in the data.
Congrats to the folks over at A List Apart for running the survey and being honest and ethical enough to show where the data had holes and how they can improve it in the future. I’ll definitely participate in their next study, which they promise will be refined based on their findings this time around.
Read the article, or just grab the survey results. It’s a good read and packed with plenty of good information. Thanks again for pulling this together.
Woah, Information Architects have the highest proportion of salaries over $100K, even more than creative directors and usability specialists (which get skewed because they often have advanced degrees)?!?!?? I’m not surprised, due to the complete dearth of talent available for open positions…
I stopped going by the title Information Architect, but now I’m wondering if maybe I should go revive that title
I’m obviously biased in this statement, but I think the reason IA’s make more than others in the web design field (on average) is because the work of the (senior IA) is just so phantasmagorically complex. While a sitebuilder or a visual designer or a developer or dba can focus on a relatively discreet layer of the system, the IA has to think about all those layers. That’s not so say that the work of any of those roles are simple. But I think they’re just more focused on a single discipline (as in more creative, more logical, whatever) – the successful 100k+ earning IA has to be left and right brain, creative and logical, totally cross-disciplinary – i.e. possess a little bit of each of the skills of all other members of the team. Frankly though, I think that the more agile and iterative a team is, the more collaborative they are, the lesser the need there is for a jack-of-all-trades IA. In other words, if only all those companies with the open IA positions, looking for that ace-in-the-hole IA to save their website, would consider shifting their model to one in which the IA thinking is more evenly distributed across the team, they might find that they’d be better off hiring developers and web designers *with IA skills* which (apparently) would cost them less than hiring an IA. Ok, Todd, I’ll stop my rambling – sorry for clogging up your blog with my banter