Think of an apartment building and a mall. They both are architectural structures but they are quite different from one another. One is built for residential purposes while the other is built for commercial activities. Each building has its own users, such as residents, shop-owners, and shoppers. Each type of user has different needs and expectations from the building. And each building is designed to cater to those needs and expectations.
Websites are just like a building. Each has its own users. And they have certain needs and expectations, which the website should fulfill. How you lay things out and where you put them matters equally whether you are building a house or a website. It determines how usable and functional your structure is. That’s where information architecture comes in the picture.
Definition
However, information architecture is not website designing. It goes way deeper than that. Information architecture focuses on building intuitive, useful, and functional website structures.
As information architects Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville define in their book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Information Architecture is:
1. The structural design of shared information environments.
2. The combination of organization, labeling, search, and navigation systems within
websites and intranets.
3. The art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support
usability and findability.
4. An emerging discipline and community of practice focused on bringing principles of
design and architecture to the digital landscape.
The goal of information architecture is to help users find what they are looking for, quickly and effortlessly. It means arranging, organizing, and labelling information in a way that makes it easy to retrieve.
Important concepts
The following are some important concepts you will hear frequently in information architecture:
- Information ecology: consists of three interdependent elements – users, content, and context. The understanding of why the content exists (context) and what purpose it serves for the users.
- Content: documents, applications, metadata, text, or anything that users need to find on the website.
- Context: the purpose, mission, goal, strategy of the website as well as the organization that owns it.
- Users: people who use the website.
- Information-seeking behavior: understanding why users search information and how they search it. For example, through browsing the menu or searching Google.
Components of information architecture
The components of information architecture are categorized into four systems:
- Organization systems: how information is organized. For example, by topic or by timeline.
- Labelling systems: how information is represented, what terminology is used. For example, labels and tags.
- Navigation systems: how users browse through the information. For example, the top-level menu and sidebar menu.
- Search systems: how users search information. For example, the search box.
These components can also be categorized based on their purpose:
- Browsing aids: helping users find their way through menus and links. For example, table of contents and site breadcrumbs.
- Search aids: helping users find information using a query. For example, the search box.
- Content and tasks: the ultimate goal of user’s interaction with the website.
- Invisible components: crucial parts of information architecture that exist in the background and are invisible to users. For example, vocabulary and algorithms used improve search performance, or metadata added to each topic for better organization.
Resources
To learn more about information architecture, check out these resources:
Nikita Apraj 