You're struggling to resolve conflicts in Information Architecture. Can emotional intelligence help?

2 Why is EI important for IA?

IA is not only a technical or rational process, but also a social and emotional one. It requires working with people with varied backgrounds, values, and motivations and dealing with ambiguity, complexity, and change. These can lead to emotional reactions such as stress, frustration, anxiety, or anger. EI can help you manage these challenges and create better IA solutions. For instance, perceiving emotions can help you empathize with users and stakeholders and monitor your own emotions. Using emotions can help you engage users and enhance creativity. Understanding emotions can help you anticipate the emotional impact of decisions and appreciate the diversity of emotions. Managing emotions can help you resolve conflicts and regulate your own emotions. All these benefits of EI can help your IA practice be successful.

3 How can you develop your EI for IA?

EI is not a trait that is fixed or innate, but rather a skill that can be learned and improved. To develop your EI for IA, practice and apply strategies such as paying attention to emotional cues in yourself and others, and checking assumptions and biases. Ask open-ended questions to understand the emotional context and perspective of users and stakeholders. Utilize tools such as personas, scenarios, user interviews, surveys, and usability testing to gather and analyze emotional data and feedback. Additionally, use positive emotions to communicate with users and stakeholders to build rapport and trust. Express emotions through tools like mood boards, storyboards, sketches, and prototypes in your IA design. Understand the causes, consequences, and meanings of emotions across different situations and cultures through emotion maps, emotion wheels, and emotion schemas. Visualize the emotional journey of users through user journeys, empathy maps, experience maps, etc. Finally, use constructive ways to address conflicts and disagreements with users as well as seek feedback. Utilize tools such as conflict resolution models, feedback models, negotiation techniques etc., to facilitate dialogue and collaboration. Self-awareness, self-regulation, relaxation, and mindfulness can help manage your own emotions in stressful situations.

4 What are some EI best practices for IA?

To apply EI effectively to your IA practice, it is best to be curious and open-minded, flexible and adaptable, collaborative and inclusive, and empathetic and compassionate. Explore the diversity of emotions without judgment, adjust your IA design to the emotional context of users and stakeholders, involve them in your process, and show empathy to them. Additionally, experiment with different solutions and test their emotional impact. Acknowledge user feedback and address their concerns, while also recognizing your own emotions and taking care of your emotional health.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?