An Introduction to Information Architecture

by Mark Kennedy

Sep 2004

Quick question: You've decided to build your dream home. Who is the first person that you turn to, the architect or the interior designer?

The choice is obvious: You turn to an architect at the beginning of the project, while you won't need the interior designer until much later on. After all, you have to design the house before you build it, and you have to build it before you can decorate the den.

Next question: You've decided to redesign your web site. Who's the first person you need on your team?

This is a question that a lot of web publishers still don't know the answer to - or don't even think to ask. In many organizations, a web design or redesign project is kicked off by contracting a graphic designer to develop a "look and feel" for the site. They may create mockups of the web site in Photoshop, or if they're web savvy they may develop them as actual HTML files that can be viewed in a browser. Often, the immediate focus tends to shift to the visual side of things: what colors should be used on the site? What fonts should be used where? What graphic elements should be included on a page? Is the site "too busy" or does it have too much white space? Should the boxes on the site have a border, and if so, how thick should it be? Does it look like a "modern" web site, or is the design a bit dated? If the discussion moves towards issues of navigation or site organization, it tends to be driven by ideas that people have seen on other web sites, or framed around a question of what content or department should have a higher profile than the others.

All of these are valid issues that probably need to be addressed at some point during the redesign, but most of them should be tackled towards the end of the process, not at the beginning. So the question remains: Who do you sign on first to the redesign team?

For more and more organizations, the answer is: The information architect.

What is information architecture?

What is information architecture (IA)? One definition offered by Louis Rosenfeld, a leading figure in the IA community, is "the combination of organization, labeling, and navigation schemes within an information system." (1) This isn't the only definition of IA that you'll find, and there are many additional areas of interest to people who call themselves information architects, but this definition is useful because it focuses on some of the most important foundations of a successful web site redesign: organization, labeling, and navigation. These are the core areas where the design process should begin.

When a web design project is first getting started, it's important to know who is going to focus on these topics. The IA team might consist of one person or a group of people. You might decide to hire a specialist from outside, or you might build the IA team internally. No matter how you do it, you should make sure that someone spends some time thinking about these issues early in the process.

Why? Without sensible organization, labeling, and navigation, a web site can have the most informative content in the world but in all likelihood your customers will have a very hard time finding and using it. Since its inception, the World Wide Web has been compared to the largest library in the world where all of the books have been pulled off of the shelves and thrown into a pile in the middle of the floor. The information is there, but it's the user's job to find it. Without well-designed information architecture, your site is just one pile among many. With good information architecture, your content is back on the shelf, properly labeled, and searchable using the online card catalog, for which your users will thank you.

Need a better reason to care about IA? Well, it is entirely likely that a site design that starts with well-designed information architecture will be easier to produce and maintain and will be less likely to need a significant overhaul in the near future, leading to cost savings in the long run.

Inventorying and organizing content

When designing the information architecture for a web site, one of the first steps should be performing an inventory of the content that needs to be delivered. It's important to know the universe of the types of content that you need to deal with as opposed to knowing how much content you have in total. For example, a typical corporate web site may need to present product information, press releases, feature stories, customer service information, investor relations information, quarterly reports, management biographies, staff contact information, or any number of other types of content. The key in the beginning is to know what kinds as opposed to how much.

Once the content has been inventoried, the IA team can start considering how the content can be organized. Depending on what kind of content was identified by the inventory, the difficultly of this process could range from very easy to very hard. If your content is very homogenous, it will probably be fairly easy to organize, but given a large set of diverse types of information, it can be hard to think about how best to organize it. One way to start is by considering five major modes that can be used to organize information: location, alphabet, time, category, and hierarchyn (2). Those who like mnemonics might remember these modes of organization by the acronym LATCH. An explanation of each of the five modes may help you understand how they may relate to your particular content.

Location is a useful way of describing information that come from or is related to different sources or places. For example, in a corporate intranet you could use a location-oriented scheme to organize content based on the department that produced it, or the department that it applies to. A directory of manufacturers might be organized by state, country, or other geographic region.

Organizing information alphabetically is useful for organizing large amounts of information. The directory of manufacturers could be organized alphabetically by name, for example.

Time can be used to organize content that is published on a regular schedule such as annual reports or the archives of a publication. It works well with calendars, schedules, or other event-driven content.

Organizing by category can be very useful, provided the categories are well-understood and consistent in their organization and their application to content. Categories tend to organize content by type, purpose, topic, issue, and so on. Categorical organization is especially important to publishers, whose audiences often come to their sites for highly topical content. Detailed categorization schemes are often referred to as "taxonomies" or "ontologies" (look for a future article on this topic).

Hierarchy refers to organizing things by importance, rank, magnitude, or some other similar measure. Products might be organized by price, lowest to highest, for example, or they could be organized by shipping weight, lightest to heaviest.

Since you'll likely have different types of content to manage, you may need to utilize several different organizational models throughout the site. Also, it might make sense to organize some content in more than one way, such as the product shipping weight vs. price example above. These decisions affect the complexity of the design of the web site significantly, so it's better to consider them as early in the process as possible so you don't have to re-engineer the site to accommodate the unanticipated needs of your customers that you discover post-launch.

Which brings up an important point: You may not know the how best to organize your content to serve your customers, so it might pay to ask them. Organizations sometimes have a myopic view of their content. They may only think about their web site within the framework of the organization that produces it. For example, many companies naturally organize their web sites based on departments or divisions. The odds are pretty good, however, that your customer doesn't care about your org chart, so while it may seem "natural" to the publisher to organize the site that way, it may be completely inscrutable to their customers. One of an information architect's job is to learn how your customers would like to interact with your content by conducting surveys and other studies to gain a better understanding of how customers might view and use your content.

Labels and navigation

Attending to the information architecture of your web site also entails paying attention to how content is labeled and described. Some of the labels that are worthy of careful consideration on any web site include headings, titles, navigation elements, and index terms. These labels are important because they are the tools your users will rely on to build a mental map of how your site is organized, where they currently are located, and how to find the next piece of information they want.

Headings and titles are important pieces of information for understanding the content that comes after them. In general, they are the sign posts that guide a user through a document. Proper use of titles and headings can break large amounts of information into much more digestible parts.

Navigation labels are a key component of any site's information architecture since they are often the primary reflection of the overall organization of the site. If the labels for your navigation are clear, users will have a much easier time finding their way around than if the labels are ambiguous or vague. The problem is, what is perfectly clear to one person may be completely inscrutable to another, so long before the navigational labels of a site are cast in stone (or Photoshop mockups), it is best to have vetted the labels through user testing or other empirical methods to be sure they make sense to your target audience.

Finally, index terms are the labels that are used to describe individual pieces of content on a site. Most people are familiar with index terms as the keywords used by some search engines use to determine the relevance of a particular piece of content to a particular topic. In some situations, the IA team may be responsible for defining a controlled vocabulary of index terms that are used to describe content on the site. They may also be responsible for maintaining a thesaurus of related terms.

Once again, it is important to take into consideration the target audience when assigning index terms to a piece of content. Often, the terms used to describe something will vary depending on who you ask. For example, the marketing team will describe a given product in terms that are much different than the engineering team responsible for its development.

Conclusion

This article gave a brief introduction to information architecture issues for a web site, but we hope it conveyed the importance that should be given to the topic during your next web redesign. As the web matures and the scale of the information systems we encounter grows, the need for robust information architectures will only increase.

If you're interested in further reading on this topic, I suggest the following sources:

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites, 2nd Edition, by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. This is the book to read to gain an understanding of how information architecture fits in to the design and development of a web site.
Information Anxiety 2, by Richard Saul Wurman. This book, while not strictly about information architecture, is full of great ideas about how to effectively turn the large amounts of data that surrounds us into information that can be used and understood effectively.
The IA Wiki. This Wiki is a great place to read more about information architecture and even add your own thoughts and opinions about the subject.

Footnotes

1. Rosenfeld , Louis and Morville, Peter. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites 2nd Edition, Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 2002.

2. Wurman, Richard Saul, Information Anxiety 2, Indianapolis, IN: Que, 2001.