Jesse James Garrett

When I’m busy evangelizing user experience at an organization, I always pull upon Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience as a resource to educate stakeholders and business people on where user experience design, particularly interaction design and information architecture, sits in relation to visual design.

For our profession of user experience design, Garrett is something of a provocateur. I draw upon the 2009 “Memphis Plenary” as an example. Within this plenary speech, Garret denies information architecture as a profession and that it is more of an area of interest or inquiry. Granted, this seems a provocation - attempting, in prolix, to move us from a field of information architects (and interaction designers) to that of user experience designers. In fact, he states that we design for users; users “use” our designed experiences. He charges user experience designers to move well beyond the medium of digital spaces and think more broadly when it comes to designing for cross-channel/medium experience. As for information architecture, Garrett says that it is but one area of focus in the user experience design discipline - we can architect information in such a way to design for how people think or feel. |

More recently, Garrett maintains that he still believes in information architecture and its power to “to drive out ambiguity, prejudice, and bias, and replace it with clarity, understanding, and connection.” He believes in its ability “to capture the weird, eccentric, inescapably human beauty of our different perceptions” and “to map the common truths written deep inside each of us.” So it is not dispelled for good, but it is subsumed in the greater user experience design.

Garrett co-founded Adaptive Path, a user experience strategy and design firm in 2001, and co-founded the Information Architecture Institute.

Garrett is well known for his writings:

The Elements of User Experience (2002, 2010).