What would the Granddaddy of Information Architecture Say?

As product designers we often work with lots of data. How can we organize information to maximize the impact of our design?

You’ve no doubt encountered dashboards brimming with information that doesn’t seem relevant. When designing information heavy projects you run into a million things you could analyze or chart. How should product designers approach problems like this? And who is this grandaddy?

We don’t often start projects with a truly blank canvas but rather with a set of preconceived notions. To get the best solution for a design project it’s helpful to start with a fresh set of constraints.

UX principles suggest we follow three steps:

1. Set business goals: pick a metric you want to drive.
2. Understand user needs: work to empathetically understand the user’s perspective and the problem space.
3. Iterate on solutions: come up with multiple possible solutions.

When you’re ready to iterate on designs for how information is organized turn to grandpapa, Richard Saul Wurman.

Wurman is credited with coining the term Information Architecture and suggests there are five ways of organizing information. The term the Five Hat Racks or the acronym LATCH is used to describe these five concepts: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, and Hierarchy.

Questions to ask about information organization

Imagine going up to Wurman with your business goal and a deep understanding of your users. One might imagine Wurman walking you through a series of questions based on LATCH:

How can information be organized spatially?
“Location” focuses on organizing information spatially. Useful when showing relative positions in a system or a model. The defacto example for a dashboard would be showing referral traffic on a world map. Showing traffic through a model, such as a conversion funnel, would be another example.

Where would ordering information from A to Z make sense?
“Alphabet” lists information A to Z. Helpful when users are relying on recognition such as scanning a list instead of relying on recall; where the user could type exactly what they want in a search box. In our example, this might be appropriate as a sorting option when drilling down into the full list of referrals.

What if we put information in a sequence?
“Time” can be thought of as any sequence. This is helpful to show change over time, be it a timeline or step by step guide. In our dashboards example we could look at how much traffic came from social channels today vs yesterday or last week.

What if we group or tagged information?
“Category” is most easily related to the concept of tagging. This tactic is advantageous when similar information can be grouped together or when users are looking to browse through a group of related items. We could organize referral traffic into categories in our example. This could show us how many visitors came from the various social channels.

How can information be ranked?
“Hierarchy” or “Continuum” refers to the ranking of information. Used to sort information based on a criteria, this concept is helpful in displaying what’s more important or relevant in an order. This could have many applications in a dashboard such as showing the referral sources in order of importance, be that amount of traffic or goal conversion.

Asking these questions will help you come up with ideas for organizing information. Give it a try or tell me about your own process via Twitter @nikDOTca. For Product Design inspiration directly in your inbox signup for my mailing list.