The HFI Salary Survey, which I mentioned here a while ago, has released its results. The quick info for US respondents:

Commercial: $82,600 (179 respondents)

Government & Nonprofit: $59,700 (23 respondents)

With the US respondents working in the commercial sector of the economy, three factors appear to influence compensation:

1. experience in the field
2. advanced degrees
3. primary activity

View the full results. Also, I started Salary Surveys page at iawiki to keep track of all of these. If you know of one that's missing, add it!

Hot on the heels of the AIfIA Salary Survey comes the HFI Usability Salary Survey. It's geared more towards usability, for sure, but one of the job titles they identify is "Information Architect," so it's worth participating.

Why should this be important to you?

1. Most HR departments don't know what information architecture / usability is, much less how much it's worth.
2. There isn't a whole lot of data on IA / usability salaries, and the data that is available, with a few exceptions, is several years old.

So, help out our cause and take the survey.

From Beth Mazur

The International Institute for Information Design,
informationdesign.org and a variety of interested
stakeholders in the ID community are coming together
to increase the relevance and awareness of
Information Design through a variety of
yet-to-be-finalized tactics.

This survey is intended for people interested in
volunteering their time or resources to the
Information Design community, or who want to
suggest other people or organizations that
might participate.

Now while I might disagree with some of the overarching themes coming from some ID folks, I think that overall the intentions of these folks are completely in line with the general user experience community, and wish the Institute all the best.

AIfIA has released the results of the 2003 IA Salary Survey.

There's plenty of criticism of content management systems (CMS). Discovering what bothers us most can help us start to address these problems constructively. We conducted a survey to identify the biggest obstacles to effective content management systems. View the results.

Please help identify important trends and possible futures for information architecture by responding to this AIfIA survey. The results will be shared on the aifia.org site and analyzed in the upcoming IA Leadership Seminar at the ASIS&T IA Summit. update: This survey is now closed. Thanks to all who participated! - jess

In speaking with a few project managers recently while consulting the topic of what to do when there are disputes over UI designs arose. This seems to be a recurring theme with more and more people I speak with these days. It's the old too many chiefs not enough indians problem.

Surely extensive user tests and hard evidence can silence a lot of this talk, but what if you only have time to do "quick and dirty" UI tests? How have others handled this in the past? What if you don't have access to actual users of the product? What if the sample size for users is very low (1-2 people)

I'm interested to hear other people's experiences in this subject...

Results from a survey of IAs taken by the Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture in January 2003.

The decisions we make today are influenced by our implicit assumptions about tomorrow. During these turbulent times, all of us can benefit by asking the difficult questions and sharing insights. This survey is part of an effort to identify important trends and possible futures for information architecture. Results will be analyzed during the upcoming Leadership Seminar.