Design: Information Architecture

The title of this column could have been “Getting Your Information Architecture Right.” But, to be honest, my guess is that the majority of people still don’t understand information architecture and the value that it brings to Web sites and other information-technology experiences. Uttering the term information architecture when speaking to a sophisticated business person or even an intelligent lay person typically leads to raised eyebrows and a tilted head—that is, an expression of perplexity—or perhaps curiosity.

While information architecture, as a term, sounds impressive, it consists of two concepts that can be difficult to grasp—even for IA practitioners and academics.

Even though the average person deals with many forms of information every day, people’s popular view of information is as an abstract idea that applies to just about anything. Anything can be information. As for the term architecture, it’s equally troublesome. Read More

In 2004, UX design professional Peter Boersma suggested that information architecture was one of the many disciplines that come together to shape the multidisciplinary practice of user experience design for the Web. He titled the diagram he used to express this concept The T-model, shown in Figure 1. Before Boersma’s articulation of this viewpoint, many information architects had considered the practice of information architecture as the overarching umbrella, referring to this as Big IA.

Since Boersma created his diagram, many respected practitioners of information architecture have adopted a similar position. In his 2008 IA Summit plenary, Andrew Hinton described the practice of information architecture as one of a tribe of many disciplines that contribute to the broader practice of user experience design. And in their latest book, Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel Experiences, [1] Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati have concurred with Boersma—referring to the practice of information architecture as a necessary part of the user experience design elephant. Read More

Donna Spencer is one of Australia’s best-known information architects, organizer of the UX Australia conference, and a frequent presenter at UX conferences in Australia, the US, and Europe. I caught up with Donna between her appearances at the IA Summit and RedUX DC to talk about card sorting and her new book, Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, which Rosenfeld Media recently published.

SB: Can you tell us a little bit about your background? How did you get started?

DS: I was working for a big government department in the very late 90s. (Actually, I worked there for all of the 90s, but not on the Web.) I moved to the Web team right when they were expanding the Web site from 20,000 to 200,000 pages. At the same time, there was lots of discussion on the Internet about information architecture (IA), and that’s when I found my thing.

But that’s about how I found information architecture. You are probably also interested in how I found card sorting. There’s a story for that, too. Read More