Information Architecture, making sense of information since 1976
Information architecture (IA) is the underlying structural organization of a content system. Good. Now let’s apply one of IA’s most important principles and say it in a clearer way — the way the Information Architecture Institute says it :
“Information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable.”
Better ? IA is found everywhere there is information to be organized, which happens to be more and more the world wide web. If it has been well designed, the information architecture of a website allows users to navigate easily, the same way physical indicators would allow them to orient themselves in the real world. The most efficient codes that are used to indicate worldly places are also the most efficient for websites : words and pictograms. And pictograms.
Brief History
Our human kind has been generating and organizing information since the prehistoric times. In fact, information is so critical to humanity that it’s the invention of the most effective way of saving and sharing it, writing, that marked the dawn of the time period we call History.
Now that you have seen this nice graph, you must think that my post title doesn’t make sense (haha). Year 1976 is actually when Richard Saul Wurman — creator of the TED conference — used the term ‘information’ together with the term ‘architecture’ during a conference of the American Institute of Architecture. Richard Saul Wurman was a graphic designer as well as an architect. In an interview in 2004, he said :
“The common term then was ‘information design.’ What got confusing was information design and interior design and industrial design, at that moment and still today in many and most people’s minds, are about making something look good. Interior designers make your place look better, industrial designers were engineers doing something that usually went to an engineer to put a package around it. Information design was epitomized by which map looked the best — not which took care of a lot of parallel systemic parts. That is what I thought ‘architecture’ did and was a clearer word that had to do with systems that worked and performed.”
Having to say “architecture” instead of “design” to convey the idea of functionality is kind of sad for designers. But we must admit that the word “architecture” does a pretty good job getting its point across: we hear “architecture”, and we think “foundations”, “what is done before building” and “spatial organization”. Despite the reference to architecture, the main places where we used to organize information databases before the explosion of the internet, were libraries. And indeed, IA is deeply rooted in Librarian information science.
Ontology, Taxonomy and Choreography
The most evident principle of IA consists of organizing content, which is done in three steps :
- Ontology : Listing and naming pieces of information is critical.
- Taxonomy : Literally, the method of arrangement. The first interpretation of the word refers to the field of biology that classifies all living organisms.
- Choreography : At this stage, we decide on the place of groups according to their importance. We also think about possible transversal paths between groups, shortcuts, as well as information redundancy.
Information Architecture and User Experience Design
As the Information Architecture Institution puts it :
“UX designers practice IA everyday; the two are closely connected. Put simply, IA is an important skill within UX and other disciplines, such as content strategy, technical writing, library science and interaction design.”
UX Design is not about the behavior of computers but rather about the behaviors of humans. Understanding people’s behaviors as well as mental models is necessary to build an IA that feels intuitive. The thing is, we all have different mental models and as a UX Designer, I must always remind myself that no matter how well I know the subject, I don’t design for myself. Only the user is the expert, and even though I might be an avid user, the product needs to also satisfy those who have not spent hours looking at the problem like I did. Information architects must always strive to understand what it is like to not understand. The curse of knowledge is every designer’s — and teacher’s — enemy.
IA Heuristics
A good Information Architecture must be :
- Findable : Users can easily locate what they are looking for. i.e there is more than one way to access things.
- Accessible : The platform can be used via all channels and by visually/hearing impaired people.
- Perceptible : The information is clear and the language considers the target demographic’s reading level.
- Communicative : Labeling is consistent across the platform and allows the user to orient himself
- Useful : Users can accomplish the task
- Credible : To be trustworthy, information must be up to date. An easy access to customer service (real people) reinforces credibility.
- Controllable : Users can tailor the information to his needs, exit, go back, avoid errors, recover from errors
- Valuable : The information provided is desirable, creates value, improves user satisfaction
- Learnable : The information and its architecture can be grasped quickly
- Delightful : It exceeds the user expectations, beats the competitors
