History & Origins of Information Architecture
I remember one of my friends was learning information architect for school and he would tell me all the time how boring it is. I could always tell by his facial expression. But as I’m diving deeper into the UX process I’ve come to realize how critical information architect is for UX design. When this subject came up, I wanted to learn more about it but I kept hearing my friends voice replaying in my head like “It’s so boring!” But what exactly is a person who does information architecture? Are they designers? Developers? Managers? All of the above? Well, I think to fully understand you have to find out what it is, the history of it and how it’s used today for UX design. Well here’s a quote from uxbooth about information architecture.
“ Information architecture is about helping people understand their surroundings and find what they’re looking for in the real world as well as online.”
So basically it’s the creation of a well-organized information that allows a user to understand where he is, where he wants to go, and how to get there. Here are some questions we ask when doing information architecture:
What is the flow of users through our site?
How does the application help the user catalog their information?
How is that information presented back to the user?
Is that information helping the customer, and driving decisions?
When answering these questions, the information architect must always think about the target audience, technologies related to the website and the data for that website. Once you have all the data, how does someone organize it? Well, you can use a sitemap to structure your data. We use sitemaps to have a good idea of how the information will flow through the site. Here’s an simple sitemap of structure data.
This is just an example, and it can get quite complicated when you have more data.
How did this all started?
Well, information architect as we see it today began around the 1970s before the web and mobile apps. It has been used in numerous fields like library science, cognitive psychology, etc.
In the mid-1970’s by Richard Saul Wurman, an architect, himself who was at a conference called “American Institute of Architecture”, where he addressed how information was sorted, understood, and presented and led him to call it information architecture. In 1970 Xerox was one the first corporations to begin to address the concept of information structure and how it can be an easier, practical and more inspirational model.
In the later years around 1998, Rosenfeld and Morville described the 4 definitions of IA in their book called “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” The definitions were:
1. The structural design of shared information environments.
2. The combination of organization, labeling, search, and navigation systems within websites and intranets.
3. The art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support usability and findability.
4. An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.
Once the internet started to rise information architecture took suit as well as a design staple and the foundation to every website.
Conclusion
As more and more information is being put into the world. It’s our job to organize and make it as simple as possible. The role of an architect is so important for a design process because, without it, your website or mobile app will have no structure and your information will be all over the place.
