I’ve seen a number of projects fail to go live, fail to get stakeholder sign off, or just fail to make any sense to users because the design team have sprinted off straight into Screen Design Mode, without any thought to the overall architecture of their product or experience.
This is not to say that you have to spend months on IA before you start making things, but having a basic idea of how the thing will work, how the content will hang together, and where everything fits is essential. Even if it’s just a sitemap on a piece of paper.
Define IA for me?
Information architecture is everything you do to research, understand and document:
- How the content of your product hangs together
- How the user will navigate around it
Do we need an actual Information Architect on our project?
Have you ever worked with an Information Architect on a project? If so, lucky you — they are awesome. You tend to encounter them on large-scale websites and especially government projects, where there is a problem big enough to need a number of specialists.
