..as in Me “Tarzan” You “Jane”. Being an “independent” I have to keep my ear pretty close to the ground of the digital Internet. I may be mistaken but I think I’m sensing a trend in the “Help Wanted” from “Actionscript Developer” to “IA/UX designer”. Being a “developer” I naturally shy away from anything “designer” 
and I’m sure designers feel the same way about developers. Its just the nature of the business that these diverse poles, although in desperate need of each other, still follow “ne’er the twain shall meet”. But they do meet. Somewhere along the line, in anything you see on the Internet that can be considered “professional”, is the blending of the two. Even in cutting edge agencies, this is usually attributed to some kind of magic that bridges the gulf between the creative and the functional. 
Everything you see on the Internet (and most technologies since the radio) are electronic impulses doing their thing and our uncanny ability to turn that into actual communication; sights and sounds that have meaning to human ears, eyes and brains. This is truly remarkable since there is a mighty big leap between a random electron and bringing a smile to someone’s face. Without that magic, we might as well be reading text in black and white, one page at a time. Where does that magic come from?
I’m not sure anybody knows exactly where it comes from, but I do know there’s an awful lot of people out there willing to pay for it! I’ve been seeing the letters “IA/UX” popping up fairly frequently but I had to confess I wasn’t exactly sure what it meant. So I went to Wikipedia
to find out exactly. Lo and behold, there was no entry. So I added one. Of course to do it, I had to give it some serious thought. I believe there are so many buzzwords and acronyms in this business because if people act as if they know what they mean, nobody will ask you to explain them, ESPECIALLY “technical” terms. Even in this day and age, technology still implies “mystical meets emotionally suppressed”. I’ve worked at a lot agencies, particularly “digital” agencies. No institution works harder to avoid the image of a group of nerds and weenies, than a digital agency chock full of nerds an weenies. 
For some reason there is still the “great divide” between “technology” (hard-core nerds and weenies) and “creatives” (soft-core nerds and weenies). But that great divide becomes a just bit more narrow every time a “creative” learns how to build an actionscript class or a techie adjusts a css property just ever so to get the right “effect”.
By now you should be able to guess where I’m going with this. Yes, the ultimate “nerd/weenie/creative/techie/designer/developer” will be the wielder of the magic of IA/UX. There will no longer be any divide. The “hard-core” and the “soft-core” will smoothly blend into one. I’ve been in this business awhile, as far back as when “Information Architecture”
and “User Experience”
were completely separate terms, seldom if ever used together, much less in the same breathe. But times are “a-changing” along with the vernacular and apparently the job specs.
So what exactly is IA/UX? Let’s start with the fact that you are reading this blog. That’s good. I want you to read my blog, that’s why I write it. But why should you? What do you get out of it? How can I grab you, hold your attention and even make you want more? That’s my job as a IA/UX designer in a nutshell. The “IA” part is the “brain” part; I use wordpress to enter articles. I use wordpress because I can frame those articles in a programmable template so that I can control the “look and feel”. The “UX” part? That “look and feel” is the emotional part. I don’t just want you to read articles. I want to “feel” them, to feel my enthusiasm for writing them. I want to make you see things through my eyes. I don’t want you to just “read” the article I want you to “show” it to you. For this I use images, carefully selected and carefully placed to the give, not only the greatest sense of I what I am trying to explain, but why I think its a “fun”, and not just useful, thing to know. My little bit of “awesomeness”. So I leave it to you the reader…how am I doing?