Lately, I’ve been asked a lot about information architecture and how it fits within the field of user experience. So, I thought that I’d go into a little bit of detail about the discipline, see if I can shed some light on it, and create a resource to refer to.
What Is Information Architecture?
Information architecture, also referred to as IA, is a discipline that focuses on the organization, structure, hierarchy, and labeling of content in a scalable way. It exists as a means to help users understand their location within and ultimately complete tasks that will lead to them achieving their objective. Like user experience, IA is typically referred to in a digital context, but it applies to the physical world as well.
History
Most agree that information architecture was a field that was born because of the effort of Richard Saul Wurman. Trained as an architect and designer, he’s branched out into many areas becoming a distinguished author, publisher, teacher and a founder of the TED Conference. It draws on many different fields. Based primarily on traditional architecture, it also draws elements from library sciences and various fields of psychology.
Tasks & Deliverables
User Research & Dissemination of Information
Information architecture, and by extension information architects, often play a key role in shaping the direction of a product or service. Not always having access to a research team, they may have to conduct their own user research. This means they perform a lot of requirements gathering. They meet with cross-functional teams and stakeholders to gather information about business goals, marketing objectives, the industry, competition, and more. They are good at listening and great at asking questions. They are excellent collaborators. They perform research activities such as surveying, contextual inquiry, tree testing, card sorting in an effort to answer important questions about their users. Who are the users? What are their mental models? How do they behave? Can they find what they are looking for? Does this make sense to them? Information architects often create personas or journey maps to help share the information with different cross-functional teams across their organizations. Because of this skill set, they may even perform the dual role of business analyst and user experience designer in agile or lean settings.
Taxonomy Creation
Taxonomies can be incredibly complicated (see the animal kingdom). In retail environments, having a good taxonomy can be one of the most important things to get right. In practice, taxonomy creation of involves activities such as organizing and tagging products. As an example, you might tag a gold ring with it’s attributes – metal type [gold], ring, ring type, color [gold], stone type, brand, and potentially several more – all for a simple ring. These are all ways based around different mental models to search for, filter, and make this product findable.
Navigation
The creation of navigation systems is probably the most well known duty an IA performs. In the eyes of a user, the main navigation of a website or application is the “face” that everything is categorized by. Secondary and tertiary levels of navigation also inform design choices – are you using navigational pages? Do you need a mega menu? It represents the highest-stakes application of the correct mental models and is crucial for good findability. Having a good navigation system makes for better usability and ultimately a better user experience. An example, for clothing retailers – this means determining the appropriate choice of system. Do you sort your products on a high-level by men and women? Or, do you sort by product type – shoes, accessories, shirts, and pants? Or, is there some finer level of detail that should be surfaced at an earlier point in the user’s journey?
Labeling
Correct labels also depend on good user research and information gathering. For example, if a user has a mental model that suggests they are looking for investment information, what exactly should you use as a label? Are they talking about investments in general? Financial institutions? A specific type of investment such as an IRA? Or, are they speaking of investing in principle as a part of a larger conversation? Learning what they actually mean, and what language they use will help an IA choose a correct label. Labels are essentially the titles of each category in an information structure.
Diagramming
Diagrams make up a lot of the deliverables that an information architect typically produces. Site maps, user flows, task flows, screen flows and even spreadsheets may all be a part of an IA’s daily tasks. These types of diagrams are the linchpins that foster the communication necessary to shepherd many projects to completion. They provide a common ground for cross-functional teams to collaborate on. One of the most important things that information architects do is help organizations understand the difference between designing screens and designing tasks and that you create screens as a response to the tasks a user needs to complete.
Wireframing
Wireframes are another responsibility that can be completed by people with all sorts of job titles. At their most basic, wireframes are a placeholder for a conversation. But at their most advanced, wireframes become complex technical documents that directly inform design, prototyping, and development. For an information architect, wireframes often put a visual to the organization of information that has already taken place. It may not directly inform the final design, but it’s important to communicate the necessary hierarchy of information in a way that cross-functional teams and can understand and provide feedback on.
Content Strategy
Usually done with the help of a content strategist, information architects often work on specific parts of content strategy. They seek to determine how much content they need to account for and need to gather that information to help determine how they should organize and structure the content. This often has an effect on the final navigation of a product.
Usability Testing
While this is a less common activity for IA’s to perform, if a UX Designer is responsible for organizing information, usability testing will help information architects determine if their research, modeling, and hierarchies are correct, or if they need to pivot and make any adjustments. Usability testing lends itself extremely well to iteration and is a core component of a good user experience process.
Why Is It Important?
Information architecture is the backbone of a good content strategy. It informs the design of a product or service, both informationally and graphically. It’s crucial to organize content in a manner which is consistent with the mental models of users. You can have a ton of great content, but if it is not findable, a user cannot complete the required tasks to ensure success. As the amount of information available on the internet explodes, good IA has become increasingly important. Retailers have thousands of products that need to be organized into appropriate categories for their users. Companies need to make sure their customers can find the information they seek on their websites. Digital applications rely on providing a good experience, often as a primary part of their business model. None of this can be accomplished without information architecture. Even when a user is searching and not browsing, the hierarchy and organization of search results is important. One of the reasons Google is so successful is because they have great information architecture – they have an incredible structure in which they deliver the information in their results.
For Designers and Managers – Here’s Why The Line Can Get Blurry
In the workplace, depending on the needs of a business, being an information architect may not be a job description that even exists. Performing it may be the responsibility of a researcher, a UX designer, or collectively amongst a team or teams.
In my experience, it’s very rare to encounter an information architect at a small company or startup, as those types of businesses typically look for generalists who are very flexible and often have an analyst, designer or researcher perform IA activities. Often, they may even not know of IA and assume those responsibilities are a part of an interaction designer or UX designer’s job description.
The Bottom Line
For the designers out there, if you want want to be an expert in user experience, you don’t just need to be aware of information architecture – you need to be great at it.
For the companies out there – you need to pay attention to information architecture. You may not need an information architect, but you need people who can perform the role to make sure your users get the best experience you can possibly deliver. The standards across the internet have changed. It’s no longer a competitive edge to organize your information better than your competition. It’s a basic expectation of your users and those standards will only continue to rise proportionally with the amount of information available not just on the internet – but as products in the physical world begin to connect to the internet-of-things.
