Blueprint of the Information Architect

When someone tells you they are an Information Architect it probably doesn’t easily conjure up what this person’s day-to-day might look like. Like an architect, information architects build structures. Specifically they build structures for the massive amounts of data that are found online as well as the real world.

This is the definition provided by the Information Architecture Institute: “We define information architecture as the art and science of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support usability.”

Why do we need Information Architects?

This great quote from Peter Morville, who wrote the popular and widely adopted Information Architecture for the World Wide Web helps us define what the problem is.

“Users couldn’t find things. Sites couldn’t accommodate new content. It wasn’t a technology problem. It wasn’t a graphic design problem. It was an information architecture problem.” — Peter Morville, A Brief History of Information Architecture

So, information architecture is about helping the user situate themselves on a website and find what they’re looking for online and in the real world.

A brief history

Information Architecture’s in it’s modern usage begins in the mid-1970s with Richard Saul Wurman’s talk at the American Institute of Architecture Conference of 1976, where he coins the term Information Architecture.

Humans use categories to navigate the world — it’s how we make sense of the “tsunami of data that reaches our shores” and the main task of IA is to organize content to help make the data findable and useful. These are the critical components of IA:

Ontology: Do you know what you mean when you say what you say?

Taxonomy: Have you provided logical structures that bring meaning to what you present?

Choreography: How is meaning affected across various channels, over time and through usage?

Why is it important?

Information is fickle. It can make sense to us but not make sense to the person we want to give the information too. By critiquing information using the above IA components, we can lessen the gap between our meaning and the meaning of our user.

As data scholars, Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel explained, if you wrote out the information contained in one megabyte by hand, the resulting line of 1s and 0s would be more than five times as tall as Mount Everest. If you wrote out one gigabyte by hand, it would circumnavigate the globe at the equator.

This monumental volume of data that exists today creates a call for clarity, a common language and structure in a global information network.

Sources:

Abby the IA (www.abbytheia.com)
Complete Beginner’s Guide to Information Architecture
The Pain with no Name