What is Information Architecture?

For example; a word processor application interface might resemble a piece of paper,so when printed the user can see how the output will appear. UX Booth is trusted by over 100,000 user experience professionals. Published in 2005, Peter Morville’s defining information architecture book about information overload and finding content in the world of Google is as valid now as it was then. He digs into the question “why does it matter how information is structured, if Google can magically find the answers to your questions?

They also create logical comparisons with new data as you take it in. Recalling patterns helps you guess what might happen next, assuming that it will align with what you’ve seen happen before. It’s also useful to remember that outside events and situations can also impact your users’ cognitive load.

The Power of Good Information Architecture

Content inventory shows IA practitioners what content they have and where it lives . Effective IA takes the users, as well as their problems, behaviors, and needs, into account. Download our free ebook The Basics of User Experience Designto learn about core concepts of UX design.

August 11, 2014 Why Online Visibility is Important What happens when you search your organization’s name in a search engine? If you didn’t establish that you were going to have a glossary but just created those definition pages ad-hoc they could be scattered across your website. Some could live on your blog, others could be resource pages and some could be FAQs. Cognitive psychology is the study of internal mental processes such as memory, language, perception, and creativity.

Christina currently advises startups and writes at her blog, Eleganthack. After conducting this research, an IA will begin to analyze the data. Depending on the https://globalcloudteam.com/ stage of your development, whether you have existing content to work with, or you’re starting from scratch, your information architecture needs will change.

Information Architecture Institute

The Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) is an association not only for web architects, but also librarians, researchers, developers, and professors and students. Their goal is to close the gap between theory and practice of information science. They run Strategic Planning Town Hall sessions, a journal publication, and events and webinars for their members. Nick is a 12-year veteran of the web and considered a web craftsman by trade. His skills traverse web design, web development, user research, web analysis, information architecture, and web publishing. He is the author of numerous web design-related articles for various publications.

These are some of the major responsibilities of an Information Architect. Keep in mind that all these responsibilities are only fulfilled with teamwork. Labeling as clear from the name allows a classifier to label the data. This labeled data is used in UX writing, and UX writers discover information through labels.

They also create a flow that lets users navigate between screens without much effort. Information architecture results in the creation of site maps, hierarchies, categorizations, navigation, and metadata. When a content strategist begins separating content and dividing it into categories, she is practicing information architecture.

What is the difference between Information Architecture and UX?

Results might show chronologically by date, alphabetically by title or author, or based on popularity. So, labels offer context that helps your users understand where to find more information. Labels need to be easy to understand and feel familiar to your audience. An information architect may also create simple, low-fidelity prototypes to demonstrate the hierarchy of information and navigation.

A hint or slight overview of a page should be written so that the user knows what content they can find inside if they dig in. Prototypes and examples should be used in the description of website content and categories to elaborate their meaning. Information architecture is not built with vague guesses and baseless plans. It requires several principles and methodologies to be followed. Following these principles leads an architect to obtain a working prototype.

Information Architecture Diagram

Seeing how prospective users categorize information into groups helps the IA practitioner understand users’ mental models. Cognitive load is the amount of brainpower that a user has to invest in interacting with a product. In the context of information architecture design, cognitive load is the amount of information that a user can process at any given moment. Our short-term memory cannot retain much information, so it’s easy to overwhelm users when the system provides too much information or too many options at a given moment.

Iain Barker is an alumni of Step Two Designs, and a specialist in usability and information architecture techniques with over ten years experience in the industry. Storyboards enable other members of the project team to understand the proposed information architecture before the system is built. Personas are a technique for defining archetypical users of the system. Personas are a cheap technique for evaluating the information architecture without conducting user research.

Writing, Copy, and Content: How Words Make or Break the User Experience

Both fields focus on user satisfaction and utilize wireframing and sitemaps to plan an optimized product. However, looking at what UX designers actually do, it’s easy to see that UX takes on a much broader scope than IA. For existing products, IA design can be beneficial during product redesign because team members can address the areas in a product that cause major friction.

This section gives advice about mobile and desktop design patterns that support orientation and wayfinding. The content audit can be documented in whatever tool you’re comfortable in, whether it’s a spreadsheet like the example above. If you’re planning to do more advanced analysis and tracking, loading your content into a more dynamic tool like Airtable can help you to create links between content, source and author. Website navigation that feels natural grows out of the research and planning you’ve done up to this point. So, your next step is to develop navigation that makes your categories and taxonomies easy to find. Now that you’ve set up your top-level categories and labels, it’s time to look at the content within each of those categories.

Our UX team are experts in digital product design, interface design and making your interactive things not just usable, but a joy to use. If done correctly, your information architecture and user journey maps will share commonalities. They both inform each other in different ways, with the intended user journey helping to shape how you structure and organize the information in your website. Microsoft Visio is a premium tool that offers dozens of premade templates, diagrams, and stencils to help you start diagramming your IA.

• User Interface Design is the discipline of designing software interfaces for devices, ideally with a focus on maximising efficiency, responsiveness and aesthetics to foster a good user experience.
• They then utilize this to illustrate information architecture diagrams and flowcharts.
• The eight principles of IA were first proposed by information architect and UX designer Dan Brown in a 2010 issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
• Within each category, the resources are shown in recommended reading order.
• It is the research study of how to arrange, organize, categorize, and list information resources.
• Not only does it help designers keep their products user-centered but it can also help drive conversions and user engagement over time.

UX writers and UX designers work side by side to achieve this flow consistency and easy navigation through the digital product. Full Content Inventory – Start listing down every piece of content on the site. You’ll need a team of people to do this if it’s a fairly large website.

Cognitive Psychology

Although these two terms are related to each other and are kind of synchronized with each other, both these are different terms. Such kind of analysis requires teamwork, and different opinions to obtain the working prototype. This is how the complete hierarchy of the rest of the app or website is constructed. With the help of this inventory, information architects work to group the data by identifying any patterns, repetitiveness, or relation between information. The results generated from this user research allow an IA to synchronize the work with the data obtained from the analysis. This working approach demands organization and sequence of information so that it is arranged in a user-accessible way.

Nick has spent the last 10 years working in the software industry with a specialized focus on research and development. He counts advertising, psychology, and cinema among his myriad interests. While IA has roots in various fields, cognitive psychology is one of the most important, because this discipline defines the way we structure information.

Besides compatibility with Adobe Creative Suite and Sketch, all assets in this kit are vector-based and fully scalable. You can use this kit to show the basic features and flow of an app before you start wireframing. Do more user testing with your initial user group to test your final website labels and categories. But the most important thing a prototype does is to show how the digital product will function. Once your website architecture is complete you’ll build wireframes, prototypes, and data models to communicate the new structure to the team.

Information architecture works along with a team of UX writers, content strategists, and UX designers. The more content in a product, the more important is the role of information architecture. The amount of information a user can process at a specific time is referred to as cognitive load.