A colleague asked me to please speak at her company on the subject of information architecture and as long as I was digging into the topic for the presentation, I decided that I’d write about it this month as well.
I consider myself an information architect, even though my titles and responsibilities have changed over the years. I’m the product of a doctoral program in Information Science (what used to be called Library Science—a field that has evolved and expanded into the information age). As such, I think about the structure of the content of whatever it is I am working on: will the users be able to find what they are looking for? Is there something that we can do to make it easier? And I often unconsciously evaluate digital information spaces for my ability to find what I seek.
Information Architecture (IA) is not necessarily a role, a job, or title; it’s more a way of viewing the world of information. Information architects (IAs) look at the world of chaos and see possible structures that can help make sense of that world. We see web sites and try to figure out if the navigation and labels make sense to the users. We also look at physical spaces and evaluate whether or not the signage and arrangement make sense to the visitors. As you have probably experienced, you can’t always find what you seek in any of these places!
In many ways, information architects look at the world in ways similar to building architects. We design the foundation and basic structure of an information space, figure out where to put the plumbing and the electrical access, where to put the closets and laundry room.
I took my first job in the ‘internet economy’ in 1995 as a Webmaster for an information company. I worked with a small team at the company along with a third-party consulting company to design the site. It wasn’t large by today’s standards, but we did want to provide information about the company and the suite of products. Over the next two years, the site grew ‘organically’ and we added pages and section navigation when we had more information to add.
One of my other responsibilities was to read the mail that came into the Webmaster. Over time, we received more and more messages asking about things that were on the web site (which they apparently couldn’t find) and we couldn’t figure out why. So we ran a usability test and what we found out was that our organic growth had broken our information architecture and our users could no longer find what they were looking for. The other thing we found out was that they wanted web delivery of our online products, but the company was not ready for that.
The importance of that site structure and how the content was arranged became clear to me as a result of that exercise. We found out that the people coming to our web site (mostly librarians) had a mental model of how they saw our content and what had grown over two years no longer fit that model. That was the beginning of our first site redesign.
Information architects have a number of tools that can help us better understand how our users see an information space. We can do a card sort—where we provide a list of content elements and we ask the users to put that content into buckets. By analyzing the results of the card sort, we see how the users organize the content along with some terms of what they would call the buckets. Once we go deeper into planning the site or the software, we can check the lower levels of the hierarchy through a tree test, which asks users where they would go to look for several different content elements. They can select a place in the hierarchy where they think they would find the content, which helps the IA build out the site map. The same processes work for software navigation menus.
Information Architects are also concerned with taxonomy or naming conventions. We know that we need to be consistent in our naming and labeling. We are also concerned with signposts and other indicators to help users find their way.
At its most basic, IA is the practice of solving the problems of accessing and using the vast amounts of information available. With the blurring of software and web sites and the introduction to the Internet of Things (IoT) the need for IA continues to expand.
What is your experience? How easily can you find what you are looking for? How efficiently can you complete your tasks? Could the problems be associated with information architecture?
Previous UX Matters Posts:
UX Matters #4: Getting to the know the team
UX Matters #3: What do we mean when we say UX?
UX Matters #2: Where did all of this user experience stuff come from?
UX Matters #1: Introducing WHY user experience matters at CA
Elisa Kaplan Miller is a Principal, UX Design and UX advocate at CA Technologies on the Central UX team. She is an enterprise UX thought-leader with focus on agile integration and other issues in the enterprise arena. A long time user advocate, she is passionate user-experience architect / user research specialist with broad experience in user experience research, content strategy, information architecture, and technical training. Her professional toolbox contains many techniques for conducting quantitative and qualitative research for better understanding users. For last 20 years, she has provided the strategic link between business, marketing and technology.