Past & Present: Information Architecture

Kimberley Wang
Jul 30, 2017 · 3 min read

Information architecture (IA) is the design of information to facilitate understanding. It brings order to complex information while simplifying it to be easily-accessible to those who are searching for it. At a high level, IA is mainly concerned with the interaction between:

  • Ontology, or the labeling of information (i.e. roses, tulips, and peonies can be grouped together under the label “flowers”)
  • Taxonomy, or the organization of elements (i.e. grouping like elements together, ranking by recency/popularity/alphabetical order, etc.), and
  • Choreography, or navigation and search (i.e. the “breadcrumbs” on a website, search bar, menu options, etc.).

While typically used when describing digital products, IA can be found in the “real” world as well: maps, department store signage, and libraries, to name a few. Take the example of a map:

Information architecture found in a map

Here’s how this map employs IA:

  • Ontology (a.k.a. labeling): regions, highways, and landmarks are clearly marked and color-coded.
  • Taxonomy (a.k.a. organization): the key to the right of the map area describes how to interpret it, grouping different types of information together. Bigger freeways are emphasized with a thicker line to give them more visual weight.
  • Choreography (a.k.a. navigation): helps the user orient themselves in relation to the surrounding area, see which areas and landmarks are around, and figure out which route to take to get there from their current location.

Brief History of Information Architecture

In 1970, a team of information science specialists at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center began building technology that could support IA. They eventually developed “the very first personal computer with laser printing, a user friendly interface, and the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor.

In the mid-1970’s, Richard Saul Wurman coined the term “information architecture” to describe this idea of using structure to give meaning and clarity to information. Then in 1998, Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville published “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web,” bringing the concept of IA to the wider public.

The Future of Information Architecture

As technology continues to advance and our interactions with it change, some think IA as we know it may eventually become irrelevant. The worry here is that IA’s authoritative “one-size-fits-all” approach to cataloging is not truly representative of how users want to find for information. It is impossible to design a perfect IA that will suit all users ideally — and if that’s the case, skeptics suspect that developing the architecture based on user behaviors (e.g. folksonomies) will prove to be a more appropriate approach.

One of the most visible examples of behavior-centered architecture is Google Search. Results are ranked in part using Google’s own PageRank algorithm, which counts “the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.” The Yahoo Directory, on the other hand, was a hand-curated list of categorized links to resources. Google Search’s obliteration of Yahoo Directory proved that automated search results based on analysis of existing behavior are not only more efficient, but also more relevant — at least in the world of search engines.

In the end, whether IA remains the same or begins to change forms, its core value of bringing order to and simplifying complex information will always be a need.

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