Rosenfeld challenges Nielsen's Approach to Guidelines

Lou Rosenfeld, a director of the new Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture and co-author of IA bible "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web", used his visit with the Nielsen Norman Group to London to air differences he has with Jakob Nielsen's approach to user-centred design.

Speaking to the London AIGA experience design meeting, he said that no talk seems complete without mention of Jakob Nielsen nowadays. He told the meeting that there were both good and bad points to Nielsen's approach, before stressing that in IA 'there are no gurus, no rules; just guidelines and two words: "It depends"'. 'That is the IA mantra,' he said. He went on to suggest that the three elements on which every design decision should depend are content, users, and context, making any fixed set of approaches inappropriate.

Read his views on how to promote IA within an organisation in UN story Rosenfeld explains Enterprise Information Architecture.

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