Information Architecture Notes

IA is concerned with…

Organizing (and labeling) information so people can find it and use it.

or phrased a little differently…

Organising functionality and content into a structure that people are able to navigate intuitively

“The individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear; a person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge…”

- Richard Saul Wurman

IA isn’t limited to web sites and applications

• Other devices: TiVo, DVD Menus, Mobile Phones, PDAs

And also…

• ‘Experiece design’ of Carnegie Library (pdf)
• Menus, City Planning, and Catalogs (ppt)
• Business Strategy at Vanguard (ppt)
• Tracking shopping patterns in grocery stores
• Bills/Mail –- How do you file things?
• Collections—like organizing a massive record collection in the movie High Fidelity ;-)
• Any ‘data’ we try to understand by forcing an order or deducing a pattern (everything!)

Technological advances over the past century have dramatically multiplied the quantity and nature of information engaged in by human beings. In addition, the tools for displaying, manipulating, distributing and interacting with this information have become dramatically more sophisticated.

Every juncture of information creation, storage, retrieval, distribution and use entails design. If we think about this, it is clear that there should be no profession in higher demand than that of the designer…

-Clement Mok (from Time for Change )

IA and Experience Design
Where does IA into the broader field/practice of Experience Design? What is distinct about IA?

Perhaps ‘Findability’ and ‘Understandability’ are the distinct focus of IAs (a UX/XD person would also be concered with other factors contributing to the overall experience, such as desirability/aesthetics—the book ‘Watches Tell More than Time’ comes to mind here…)

Also, Peter Boersma has some thoughts about this, as well as a poster...

What role do all those wonderful tools/methods play…?

To Understand the Problem…

• Goals/Objectives
• Mission/Vision
• Concept Models

To Understand your Users the Person…

• Contextual Inquiry
• Task Analysis
• Interviews/Questionnaires
• Field Research
• Reviewing server logs
• Search log analysis
• Role Playing
• …and much, much more!

To Understand the Content

• Content Inventory – A complete list of all the content that that information space holds and will hold
• Card Sorting – activity

To Create a Navigational Framework

• Site Map
• Wireframes (and the variants)

A good navigational structure answers 3 questions:

• Where am I?
• Where have I been?
• Where can I go?

Ways to organize content:

• By Hierarchy (most common!) – Global Navigation – Local Navigation
• By Tasks (frontmedia.com)
• Contextually (related content)
• Alphabetically (yellow pages, good / dcc, bad)
• Chronologically (timeline, archived content)
• Based on Popularity (amazon.com)
• By Facets (gettyimages.com, wine.com)
• By Searchable Keywords (any)

Create a Navigational Framework, and Labeling!

• “pop” vs “soda” vs “coke” vs “soft drink” etc.
• Student Resources: “Provider” or “Doctor”?
• controlled vocabulary / folksonomy ?

  insert more examples here…

How IA is Changing

• Moving ‘Beyond the Page’ (from page state metaphor to smaller content/functional units)

• (related to above) Current IA tools (wireframes/sitempas) do a poor job at communicating application behaviors. How do you architect AJAX style actions?

• Rise of non-hierarchical organizational methods (keyword searching, faceted navigation, tagging, folksonomy, etc.)

• Growing emphasis on the function of language (and cognitive linguistics)

• Personas are expanding to offer richer, more experience focused pictures (influence of ethnographic approaches)

• Wireframes, and the problems therein (PPD, interactive, etc.)

• Peter Merholz / work on Document Genres…?

• IA is not just for computer anymore (vanguard strategy, library redesign) – crossing over into Experience Design Strategy

• Usability is loosening up – mark hurst listening labs, peterme (oct 17th post)

• Rise of aesthetics and their importance—as a differentiator, and looking at how emotions affect usability

• In a world of ‘Getting Real’, do IA skills belong to other (more quantifiable) positions? While IA skills are important, are IAs?

(Dan Brown article Information Architecture 2.0 )

• A good primer on information architecture
• IAWiki
• Boxes and Arrows
• IA Institute
• IA Slash

• Louis Rosenfeld
• Dan Brown
• Donna M
• Peter Morville (check out his blogroll for a good list!)
• Christina Wodtke
• Gene Smith

• Peter Morholz
• Luke Wroblewski

more coming…

My Delicious bookmarks for IA