Information Architecture Still Matters: How to Organize Digital Spaces
Information gets architected, whether you decide to do so or not.
A few years back, my wife and I wanted to clean our utterly disarrayed basement. Years of accumulated stuff had randomly accreted into piles and boxes and areas that, perhaps, one day we’d tackle. After buying my third set of pruning shears, we realized we needed some organization.
Fortunately, we discovered that our neighbor was a professional organizer devoted to organizing people’s houses. She helped us sort through 30 years of detritus and rearrange it neatly so that we could both see and access our belongings more efficiently. The principles she showed us proved deceptively simple:
- Put like with like.
- Decide what to keep versus what to trash or donate.
- Label and store items based on how you live.
Her succinct process of physical organization reminded me what information architecture, or IA, truly is: a method of organizing and classifying digital stuff so people can find and use it. It provides the basis for wayfinding (“Where am I?”) and findability. It delineates the blueprints for information display, retrieval, and use (“Where does this stuff go?”). And it maps information to help users understand place, relationships, and possibilities.
IA Makes Sense of Space
Similar to my basement, digital places can confuse people, especially as they move between areas no longer clearly divided as “digital” or “physical.” For example, a physically printed QR code on a smart plug enables a person to make that plug work…and also then to find instructions on setting that plug up in their mobile phone. As Paola Antonelli writes, “We live today not in the digital, not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two.” Using an IA approach helps people make sense of the spaces they maneuver through.
While IA has existed as a field for well over 20 years, lately it’s taken a back seat to other aspects of user experience (UX) — such as user interface (UI), content strategy, and interaction design (IxD). However, we miss a critical meaning-making moment in product design when we forget how important IA continues to be. Too often teams focus on what something looks like or how something functions without intentionally deciding how it’s organized.
Building a Foundation for Good IA
Like other aspects of UX, IA starts with understanding the user and their context: What are their behaviors, what are their goals, and how does a sense of information help them achieve those goals.
Conducting User Research
To understand how people use information, we observe their behavior, both in seeking information as well as using and storing it. Research from Marcia Bates and others showed us that people engage with information similar to how humans have engaged with their environment for eons.
“Information berrypicking” illustrates how a person goes from one information repository to another in search of information that helps them form a sense of meaning or place. Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card extended Bates’ metaphor into “information foraging,” indicating that people look for those areas of information that pose potential value.
Humans are informavores who look for an “information scent.” It indicates how likely their information pathway might reveal nuggets of valuable items.
People wander digital aisles as well, looking for meaning in the informational hallways they walk. Just as physical aisles can fail to meet needs (“why is breakfast cereal in the Home and Garden aisle?”), digital aisles can block our cognitive connections of task to goal. Knowing user’s goals becomes critical in determining how to design the pathways.
Assessing Your Information
We continue our research by evaluating an information environment. To organize information, you first have to know what information you want to organize. Is it existing information that needs better arrangement? Is there information that needs creating? Is there duplicate information that needs reconciling? To help us put like with like while we determine what needs to be retained, bundled together, and discarded, we use:
- Content inventory — identifying every piece of content in the information space. Think of this as a thing you finish and deliver, that is, a noun.
- Content audit — analyzing the content by type, purpose, redundancy, and viability to the user. Think of this as something you do, that is, a verb.
To understand how people name the stuff they use, we have a bunch of tools we can use. At Coforma, often we conduct:
- Search log file analysis — taking a look at the actual words that users entered when searching for things, followed by analyzing the terms that successfully matched targeted destinations…and the ones that didn’t.
- Card sorting — engaging with people to see how they organize terms (which can be things or actions) into sensible categories.
- Tree testing — asking people where they go to find or do something, by presenting them with a simplified hierarchy and giving them sample tasks.
Designing Information Spaces
Once we observe people interacting with existing and imagined terminology, we end up with a good sense of the terminology they need. Next we label information spaces, finding ways to store them for users to access and use. We see this labeling effort in the creation of navigation menus, headings for information repositories, and taxonomies.
Once we label these spaces, we then design digital guideposts and markers to help users wander through information spaces to find what they’re looking for.
We semantically structure the ways we craft our navigation tools as well as our search results pages and other artifacts, helping that wayfinding work for users. In addition, the blueprints we develop as wireframes also help define the space in which users live their digital lives.
Jorge Arango captured IA so well when he talked about IA’s concern “with the structural integrity of meaning across contexts.” IA helps people engage with that meaning across all experience touchpoints. As we look at their context through research, we need to understand that quest for meaning as well.
When we look at the output of what IA activities produce, we see site maps, taxonomies, and search results pages, for example. However, we also need to consider other artifacts so that we ensure our architectures expand with technology. Sometimes our traditional deliverables don’t provide enough framework for emerging interactions. Voice, virtual, and augmented experiences all need structure and classification, just as visual ones do.
For example, voice interfaces require IA. Providing information clues reduces the memory people must retain. How many times have you gotten lost in a voice response system, ending up shouting “Manager! Manager! Agent!” in some hope of bypassing an obtuse kudzu tangle of aural choices? Instead, a clear aural framework helps people know where they are when asking for an album to play, a forecast to be delivered, or a recipe to cook.
Our main human concern in IA remains not just the structure, but what people do within it. As Frank Lloyd Wright quotes Lao Tze at Taliesin West, “The reality of the building does not consist in the roof and the walls but in the space within to be lived in.”
In the same way, IA consists of the space where people live their information lives. It provides the structure, the bones, and the frame in which other activities operate.
When we design this space as an intentionally organized digital structure, people have markers to help achieve a better understanding of where they are and where they can go. They also experience a predictable sense of meaning — all of which enhances the experience of those information lives.
A version of this article originally appeared in the anthology, 97 Things Every UX Practitioner Should Know.
About Coforma
Coforma works with the government and private sector to craft creative digital solutions and build technology products that improve people’s lives. We’ve honed a modern, agile, user-centered approach that elevates human needs through thoughtfully-designed systems and products. We’re dedicated to reshaping the way communities access and utilize technology products. Together.
Visit us at coforma.io.
