A brief introduction to (the main concepts of) Information Architecture
When talking to people about the things I learn during my master studies of content strategy at FH Joanneum in Graz, puzzled expressions are not an unregular reaction. Content Strategy is a rare bird still in Austria. Mentioning Information Architecture, the reaction doesn’t differ much. Huge questionmarks invisibly crowd the conversation.
So, like my esteemed colleague Meike Koch has made an effort to break down the rather complex field of content strategy into palpable bits and pieces, I will do my best to accomplish this task with another one of the big puzzlers: Information Architecture (from here on mostly abbreviated as IA)
What is this?
IA is the discipline of organizing and structuring information in a logical, user-friendly way to provide people with the content they are looking for.
Information architecture helps people to understand their surroundings and find what they’re looking for — in the real world as well as online.
The Information Architecture Institute
Not unlike what architecture does for buildings, information architecture is concerned with the planning of the structure, form and functionality of how information is presented. Be it on a website, in an app, on a touchscreen, it is present in any kind of interface where information is displayed. It is everywhere and mostly goes unnoticed when it is done right. It’s negligence or poor application becomes evident whenever you feel lost or unsure where to go (and how you got there) when navigating a page or a device.
Information has always needed to be organized and categorized, put into a system to make it searchable and findable. Library systems are an example of ancient, real world information architecture, as are the structuring and the index of a non-fiction book, the legend and labeling of a map, or the way the products in a supermarket are categorized and organized in space.
By listing these real-world examples, most of the pillars of IA were already mentioned. Information architecture is put to work by putting to thought and working out carefully the following things:
Groups and categories: organization
There are as many different ways to organize and structure information as there are characteristics you can group your content pieces into. Content can be organized by location (e.g. maps, interior catalogues), category (very commonly used on websites), alphabetically (e.g. dictionaries), and chronologically (e.g. blogs).
Knowing the existing content — in case of a work-over of an existing medium — and/or having planned your future content very well is mandatory to determine the IA. Head over to my esteemed colleague Freya Essler’s article about the benefits of audits to get the hang of the topic.
To be able to group your content, categorizing is your method of choice to find a working organizational system to distribute your content and develop a structure for it.
Labeling
Closely tied to the navigation (and also placemaking and wayfinding), obviously, the labeling provides the nomenclature for your content’s organization. It should be done in a clear and inclusive way to be intelligible to all of your potential visitors. To provide consistency, it is helpful to create not just labels, but labeling systems that define the syntax and speech. Labeling also gives the opportunity to set the tone of your content’s representation, hence can help to strengthen your brand.
Placemaking, wayfinding and navigation
Whether you explore a place in real life or browse for certain content in the digital world, knowing where you are, where you came from and where you can go is a basic state to ensure feeling comfortable and “safe”. Defining a place that a user comprehends in its layout and establishing a clear view on the paths that take you to the desired content is, one of the most basic set-ups to accomplish. This is critical to provide at any place within your site: users that land on a page via a search-engine have to understand where they are in the newly entered place: every page is page one.
Search
Besides a well-designed navigation that gives your users a clear sense of place and possible pathways through the content, it is necessary to provide them with the opportunity to search your content. Especially when you are dealing with a large scale of content, they need a functioning search feature to wormhole to that bit of information that they suddenly need to find at any time, without having to navigate to it. There are people who like to browse and there are people who like to search and you should cater to them both.
These are the very very basic concepts to have in mind when approaching Information Architecture. All of these are intertwined and influence each other, and the order in which they are tackled is defined by the information that is needed to be made accessible and comprehensible.
There is no simple recipe to cook up, step-by-step guide to follow or fixed set of rules to oblige to for building an Information Architecture. The different tasks explained above have all to be taken into account and — as they all influence each other – may have to be done multiple times until the best working result is achieved. As it is formulated in one of the definitive books on the topic “Information Architecture for the web and beyond”:
IA is “the synthesis of organization, labeling, search, and navigation systems within digital, physical, and cross-channel ecosystems.
Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond
Happy synthesizing!
