Wow what is with all these articles on information architecture? It is almost like there is an upcoming World Information Architecture Day event (20th Feb) ;-). There is one event in Australia for Melbourne fans of IA.
The pain with no name
It doesn’t matter who comes up with the label or who decides how something is arranged. What matters is that someone thinks about it and decides a way forward that upholds clarity and intention.
The need for clarity will never go out of style, and neither will the importance of language and structure. We will always need to have semantic and structural arguments to get good work done.
Source:The pain with no name | A List Apart | Abby Covert, Feb. 2016 - Incidentally I have Abby Covert’s IA book called ‘How to make sense of any mess’ which is a good read on IA.
Getting agreement on who wears the pants on information architecture is like getting agreement on who 'owns' the homepage fraught with difficulty. I reckon developing a shared undertstanding of user goals and having a nice design artefact to illustrate will get you off to a good start.
Three views of information architecture
The three views of (Information) Architecture| UX Booth | Dan Klyn, Feb. 2016
Dan basically introduces to the three design artefacts used by architects to make their intentions in design understood. He then links them to their IA equivalent. Smooth with a capital 'smoo'.
Plans
In the plan view, the features of the space that change the least are emphasised the most.
- Synonymous with site maps
Sections
Sections are most helpful toward understanding the relationships between levels.
Sections are useful in understanding the relationships between and across levels, much like user flows in UX design.
- Synonymous with user flows
Elevations
An elevation drawing offers a view of the building as seen from one side, and from one fixed perspective.
Wireframes might be considered the elevation drawing of the IA world. Wireframes help us understand intricacies of the user’s contextual experience. And high-fidelity wireframes allow us to see everything that the user would see from a particular place in the architecture.
- Synonymous with wireframes
Been a fan of building metaphors for a long time. I think they provide a great insight into systems thinking and multi-discplinary team processes. Atul Gawande's checklist manifesto had a great chapter on the processes to make a skyscraper which is well worth a look.I thought this article was great. Digital information structures and approaches remain largely unknown to many.
I find it interesting how much focus developers and database admins put on data integrity when we know humans are inherently lossy. By that I mean we struggle to remember things accurately and recall exact data. I like the ideas expressed by Alan Cooper et. al. on this in About Face (4th ed.). Instead of building a system with zero tolerance for invalid data... a fortress of perfection only allowing humans who bend to serve the data model. They favour data immunity. This is about designing a data system that can handle a bit of fudgeability and imperfect data. This would seem to be a better way to go for the real world of messy humans with their lossy, incomplete data.
Other good resources on IA are:
Donna Spencer's seminal work A practical guide to information architecture (2nd ed.) and the ‘intertwingly’ Peter Morville. If you want to broaden your horizons into more general information theory try David Weinberger (Everything is miscellaneous) or James Gleick (The Information)