Designing Information Architecture

What Is Information Architecture?

This chapter introduces and provides an overview of the professional practice of information architecture (IA)—one of the design specialties that make up the broader practice of user experience (UX) design. In this chapter, I’ll present some foundational knowledge that you’ll find useful whether you’re learning about information architecture because you plan to pursue a career as an information architect, you need to take on IA activities because there is no information architect on your design or project team, or you want a better understanding of the role of any information architects on your team.

This chapter conveys basic knowledge regarding the purview of information architecture as a professional practice and considers the following key topics:

Defining information architecture
Goals of information architecture
Information ecosystems
The value of information architecture
Who is responsible for information architecture?
Core IA skills
Overview of the IA process
Key components of information architecture

In reading this book, you’ll build on this foundation to gain a deeper understanding of the many facets of the discipline of information architecture.

Defining information architecture

Let’s first consider the meanings of the individual words information and architecture. Information is a broad term that encompasses everything from the sorts of raw factual and numeric data that organizations store in relational and object-oriented databases to the more meaningful—sometimes even insightful—content on Web pages, on pages in mobile apps, in documents of various types, and in images and other media.

In relation to a professional practice, the term architecture originally referred to the planning and design of physical spaces—particularly buildings. But since the advent of computers and software, architecture has also referred to the design and organization of the components of computing and software systems.

Who coined the term information architecture? The prolific author and information designer Richard Saul Wurman wrote the following in his 2001 book Information Anxiety 2:

“When I came up with the concept and the name information architecture in 1975, I thought everybody would join in and call themselves information architects. But nobody did—until now. Suddenly, it’s become a ubiquitous term. … Effective information architects make the complex clear; they make the information understandable to other human beings. If they succeed in doing that, they’re good information architects.” [1]

In 2004, Dirk Knemeyer—a design entrepreneur who has cofounded companies such as GoInvo and Genius Games and currently leads SciStories—interviewed Wurman, asking how he had chosen the term information architecture. Wurman responded with the following:

“The common term then was information design … Information design was epitomized by which map looked the best—not which took care of a lot of parallel systemic parts. That is what I thought architecture did and was a clearer word that had to do with systems that worked and performed. Thought architecture was a better way of describing what I thought was the direction that more people should look into for information, and I thought the explosion of data needed an architecture, needed a series of systems, needed systemic design, a series of performance criteria to measure it.” [2]

Nevertheless, it was Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville who, in 1998, defined information architecture as a practice in their seminal work Information Architecture for the World Wide Web—which the IA community affectionately refers to as the polar bear book because of the bear on its cover. [3] Both Lou and Peter have backgrounds in library and information science (LIS), which forms the foundation of their thinking. Their view of information architecture—with its focus on organization, clear labeling, navigation, and search—differs fundamentally from that of Wurman, and it established the foundation for the profession upon which all information architects have since built.

What exactly is information architecture? Here is a brief definition of the term as I’ll use it in this book:

Information architecture is a design practice that focuses on defining the structure of digital information spaces—for example, Web sites, intranets, social-networking communities on the Web, and information-rich digital products such as Web and mobile applications—by organizing information and supporting findability and usability through well-designed labeling, navigation, and search systems.

While some information architects have expanded their view of information architecture to comprehend physical spaces, the focus of this book is on information architecture for digital information spaces, in service of providing a practical book for people working on digital products and services.

Around the time I launched UXmatters in 2005—when I was giving a lot of thought to the distinctions between information architecture, interaction design, and UX design—I wrote a detailed definition of information architecture for the site’s glossary. That definition previews the scope of the information I’ll cover in this book:

“A UX design discipline that defines the structure of digital information spaces—including Web sites, intranets, online publications, applications, and other digital products—with the goal of supporting findability and usability. Information architecture encompasses the creation of taxonomies of the hierarchical and associative relationships that exist between content objects; controlled vocabularies that effectively communicate the nature of and relationships between content objects; labeling for navigation systems that makes information browsable; metadata, retrieval algorithms, and query syntaxes that produce useful search results; and the content and format of both individual search results and sets of results. Good information architectures make digital information easier to navigate, search, and manage; balance breadth and depth appropriately; and enable users to readily find the information they need. Information-architecture deliverables include content inventories,* wireframes, site maps, and flow diagrams.” [4]

Note—With today’s increased levels of specialization, a content analyst, content manager, or content strategist might now be responsible for creating content inventories.

I wrote that detailed definition of information architecture for UX professionals, who are knowledgeable about its practices. Let’s begin building your understanding to the same level by exploring the basic and advanced concepts that the definition merely highlights. By reading this book, you’ll quickly learn everything you need to know to create an effective information architecture.

Goals of information architecture

The goals of information architecture include the following:

Making information easy to find
Providing information scent
Supporting browsing
Supporting search
Creating a sense of place
Making content easy to consume
Combatting information overload

Making information easy to find

Findability is the efficiency and effectiveness with which users can find specific content within a digital information space and is essential to usability. How do practitioners of information architecture assist people in finding the information they need? By structuring, grouping or categorizing, and labeling information, they help people make sense of information spaces. Organizing information objects into discrete groups or categories that are meaningful to people and assigning clear labels to them are paramount. The design of usable labeling, navigation, and search systems enables people to easily find the information they need.

Providing information scent

In the late 1990s, Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) published their “information foraging theory,” which frames human information-gathering activities in terms of the ways “adaptive pressures work on users of information that are analogous to ecological pressures on animal food foraging….” In their report, they wrote: “The problems and constraints of [information-foraging] environments can be thought of as forming abstract landscapes of information value and costs, such as the costs of accessing, rendering, and interpreting information-bearing documents.” [5]

A key concept of information foraging is information scent, which enables people to instinctually follow environmental cues in gathering the valuable information they need, while ignoring irrelevant information. These cues include visual and textual signposts that convey semantic meaning to people as they browse for information—proximal cues that let information seekers know whether they’re getting hotter or colder in relation to the information they want, as in a game of Hot and Cold. Obviously, people pursue the paths that promise to be most fruitful.

The information-foraging environments that information architects create can facilitate the effectiveness and efficiency with which users can gather information. Providing the right environmental cues, or signposts, aids users in successfully accomplishing their information-seeking goals. This is especially important for complex information spaces. At the same time, providing information scent enables organizations to capture the most valuable of resources: users’ attention.

Supporting browsing

Information architecture supports browsability by doing the following:

Creating logical structures for information spaces that match users’ mental models and, thus, encourage exploration
Chunking content onto pages at an optimal level of granularity to prevent what Jared Spool calls pogo-sticking—that is, forcing users to navigate back and forth between pages unnecessarily by decomposing content into chunks at too fine-grained a level [6]
Designing usable global, primary navigation systems, comprising links with clear labels, to enable users to gain access to the information they need and show users where they are now and where they can go next
Providing global or local supplementary navigation systems such as site maps and alphabetical indexes to provide alternative means of gaining access to information
Presenting contextual links in a consistent location on pages to support navigation within a page
Providing useful links to related information as supplementary means of navigation, either by embedding them within content or by grouping them in a consistent location on pages
Displaying clear page titles to ensure that users know where they are—titles that use language that is similar to that of the links that display the pages

Supporting search

A search system is necessary for any digital information space that is sufficiently extensive that a navigation system alone would not adequately support findability. Information architecture plays an important role in ensuring the usefulness and usability of a search system. To better support search, practitioners of information architecture can do the following:

Define descriptive metadata—Using metadata to describe content of any type gives semantic meaning to that content and provides greater precision in searching, enabling search systems to deliver more useful search results in response to users’ queries.
Implement a controlled vocabulary and thesaurus—Supporting a domain-specific vocabulary, including variants of terms, and synonyms of search terms increases the likelihood that searching would deliver useful content to users.
Provide a usable search user interface—Users should be able to easily type or revise a search query. For a large digital information space such as an ecommerce site, it should be possible to limit the scope of a search to a specific facet of the information within that space.
Suggest search strings—Automatically suggesting search strings that would deliver useful results, in response to whatever the user types, helps users to search more efficiently.
Display meaningful search results—Effectively displaying the most salient information on search-results pages helps users to accurately identify the content they need.

Creating a sense of place

Increasingly, users are experiencing digital information environments as places—and designers are consciously creating contexts that are conducive to that perception. As Jorge Arango—an architect of physical spaces by training, but an information architect in practice—says in Living in Information, “With the growing pervasiveness of information systems in our daily lives, placemaking has started to emerge as a primary concern in the design of information systems.” [7]

Designing navigable digital information spaces that emulate certain characteristics of real-world places and, thus, create a sense of place, lets you take advantage of users’ knowledge of familiar places to make digital spaces easier to use, convey what users can do there, set the right user expectations, and elicit desired user behaviors.

Making content easy to consume

Information architecture is about making it easier for people to consume content. In addition to supporting navigation and search, doing the following facilitates information consumption:

Applying a consistent organizational structure that reflects the user’s mental model of the content within a digital information space
Orienting users to ensure that they know where they are and prevent their becoming lost in hyperspace
Creating clear labels for navigation links and page titles that make it clear users have arrived at their intended destination
Appropriately decomposing content into chunks so there is neither too little nor too much content on a page
Personalizing content, prioritizing content that meets users’ needs, and thus, reducing the amount of information users must peruse to find what they need
Providing convenient links to related information

Combatting information overload

Bertram Gross, in his 1964 book The Managing of Organizations, was the first to use the term information overload, which Alvin Toffler popularized in his 1970 book Future Shock. This term describes a state of mind that arises when people receive more information within a short period of time than they are capable of rationalizing for use in their decision-making. [8]

Data on the Web is accruing at an astounding rate. According to a Bernard Marr article on Forbes, “How Much Data Do We Create Every Day? The Mind-Blowing Stats Everyone Should Read,” people generated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day in 2019. In just two years, we generated 90 percent of the data that currently exists in the world, and the pace of data creation is only accelerating with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). [9] This is more information than any human being could possibly keep up with and, as Daniel Tunkelang writes in his book Faceted Search, creates a “scarcity of the most valuable resource of all—the user’s attention.” [10]

Because of this burgeoning volume of information, digital information spaces have become increasingly complex, and the danger exists that they could become unusable. However, by effectively structuring and categorizing information and, thus, improving findability, the practice of information architecture provides a bulwark against information overload. Users can find the information they actually need without having to wade through a morass of irrelevant information. This reduces the information anxiety—another term coined by Richard Saul Wurman [11]—and frustration that users would otherwise experience as a result of trying to process too much information, which has become exacerbated as people use more and more devices, information sources, and services.

According to a Pew Research Center report from 2016, information overload is less of a factor for most people than it was a decade earlier. Just 20% felt overloaded, down from 27% in 2006. “The large majority of Americans do not feel that information overload is a problem for them. … 77% say they like having so much information at their fingertips. Two-thirds (67%) say that having more information at their [disposal] actually helps to simplify their lives.” [12]

Information ecosystems

British ecologist Arthur Tansley introduced the concept of an ecosystem in his writings in 1935, using the term to describe “the whole system, ... including not only the organism-complex but also the whole complex of physical factors forming what we call the environment.” [13] While the term ecosystem originated in the life sciences, some have adapted it for use in information science. Others, including Morville and Rosenfeld in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, have adopted the term information ecology. [14]

People thrive in information-rich environments. We exist within overlapping information ecosystems at various levels of granularity—ranging from the personal to the Web, a massive, worldwide information ecosystem. Depending on users’ current context, their larger information ecosystem could comprise different, more granular ecosystems. For example, a business information ecosystem might comprise departmental, corporate, organizational, marketplace, and governmental ecosystems.

Despite an information ecosystem potentially having a much greater scope than a typical Web site or mobile app, many of the same approaches to organizing information and designing information architectures still apply. Some ecosystems have emerged organically, while others have been consciously designed—but as they evolve, either the messiness of organic growth or the order of design may predominate at any given moment in time, unless an ecosystem is maintained systematically, with great discipline.

A holistically designed information ecosystem typically comprises users of various types, a business or other organization that serves their needs, and content that the business or the users themselves create to meet those needs. Of course, all information-architecture solutions must serve the unique needs of both their users and the business or organization sponsoring the creation of a digital information space—that is, the needs of a specific information ecosystem. Plus, every designed information ecosystem exists within the broader context of a marketplace or community. Figure 1.1 depicts the elements of a business’s information ecosystem and the information architecture that connects users with that ecosystem, whose elements we'll look at in greater depth next.

Figure 1.1—The elements of an information ecosystem and information architecture

Users

Practitioners of information architecture follow a user-centered design (UCD) process to ensure that the IA solutions they create meet the needs of the users who engage with them. They do user research to understand those users’ information needs, tasks, and information-seeking behaviors, then create personas that represent key user groups, or target audiences. Depending on users’ wants and needs, they might simply consume the content within a digital information space or contribute to it—either by creating user-generated content (UGC) or tagging, voting on, sharing, or linking to content.

Each unique audience has a particular mental model of an information space, based on their existing knowledge and prior experience, and uses a specific vocabulary that should factor into the design of an information architecture.

Content

Digital information spaces are dynamic and their content may evolve constantly. There are complex interrelationships and dependencies between the content elements in a designed information space. The information architect must understand its existing structure and both the scope and types of the existing and planned content to create a sustainable information architecture. These might include Web or mobile pages; documents in various formats; different types of digital media such as images, audio, or video; other digital assets; or databases—even the metadata that enables people to find the content within a digital information space. That metadata could consist of information such as the content’s title, document format, owner, creator, vendor, or groups or categories to which the content belongs.

The business

Commercial Web sites, intranets, and extranets are designed information spaces that exist within the context of a business or organization. A business or organization that sponsors the design and development of such digital information spaces does so to meet its strategic business goals. According to David A. Aaker, business strategy comprises the following:

A product/market investment decision
Marketplace in which a business competes
Level of investment
Allocation of resources across business units
Functional strategies, including product strategy, pricing, and market segmentation
A foundation for sustainable competitive advantage
Strategic assets and competencies
Synergy across business units [15]

An information architect who designs a digital information space needs to understand the strategy of the business sponsoring it—particularly its vision for that information space, the available design and development resources, and any technical constraints that exist—and must work toward the business’s strategic goals. To do this effectively, the information architect must also understand the culture of the business and build strong relationships with stakeholders and all members of the multidisciplinary team responsible for design and development.

An information architecture is a tangible manifestation of a business’s or an organization’s strategy, which conveys meaning to its target audience and differentiates the business or organization in the marketplace.

Context

The context in which a designed, digital information space exists includes its intersections with other digital information spaces. For a business, these might include one or more Web sites, intranets, extranets, ecommerce sites, and mobile apps. Together, these information spaces form the business’s information ecosystem, which itself exists within the context of a broader information ecosystem comprising the business’s marketplace, competitors, sales channels, customers, users, social media, the press, and more.

Creating holistic, cross-channel information ecosystems

As information sources and the devices on which people consume information proliferate, information architects must create holistic, cross-channel information ecosystems that interoperate across devices. For example, if users look for information on their mobile phone, then go to their computer, they should easily be able to resume their information-seeking task there. Working across devices should be a seamless experience.

Any information that is available on one device should be available on all of a user’s devices. However, the ways in which specific platforms display or communicate that information might differ, depending on the size of a device’s screen or its lack of a screen. Nevertheless, the language and organization of the information should be consistent across channels and the information useful regardless of the user’s current context.

The value of information architecture

Information architecture provides value to both the people who use a digital information space and the business sponsoring its design and development. Let’s consider the value proposition that information architecture offers to users and the business.

The value of information architecture to users

Designed information architectures provide many benefits to the people using digital information spaces. An effective information architecture provides value to users in the following ways:

Improves the user experience (UX)
Helps people make sense of information spaces
Makes information easier to find
Reduces the frustration of users’ being unable to find information
Improves the quality of the information people find
Minimizes the likelihood that people would find the wrong information or no information
Improves decision-making
Facilitates browsing
Facilitates search
Saves users’ time
Makes it easier to identify content
Makes content easier to consume
Makes information easier to manage
Prevents users from experiencing information overload
Reduces the need for documentation, training, and support

The value of information architecture to the business

Designed information architectures can deliver great benefits to the businesses and organizations that sponsor their creation. An effective information architecture provides value to the business in the following ways:

Improves ease of use
Increases employee productivity
Enhances customer service
Increases customer satisfaction
Increases customer adoption
Improves the business’s understanding of customers
Increases sales on ecommerce sites by ensuring customers can find the products they want and by upselling related products to them
Reduces the overall costs of information seeking to the business
Minimizes negative business impacts resulting from workers’ lacking accurate, useful information
Improves decision-making
Reduces duplication of effort
Communicates and facilitates alignment on business strategy
Creates competitive differentiation
Engenders trust
Builds brand loyalty
Minimizes employees’ needs for documentation, training, and support
Reduces customers’ needs for documentation and support
Reduces the overall costs of documentation, training, and support
Prevents unnecessary reimplementation costs
Makes information spaces easier to manage and maintain
Reduces maintenance costs [16]

Core information-architecture skills

“Effective information architects make the complex clear; they make the information understandable to other human beings.”—Richard Saul Wurman [17]

Practitioners of information architecture must develop a deep understanding of both the target audience for a digital information space—including the language they use and their mental models for organizing the information of its domain—and the goals of the business sponsoring its development. They must also comprehend the full scope of the content that information space comprises and be capable of doing very detailed work in organizing that information. Finally, they must have the ability to synthesize all of this information into a holistic IA solution that meets users’ needs.

Accomplishing these goals requires a broad skillset. Now, let’s consider some essential attributes, knowledge, and skills that an information architect must have to take on the responsibility of creating the information architecture for a digital information space.

Systems thinking

What exactly is systems thinking? According to The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, by Peter M. Senge and his coauthors, it is “a way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems.” In describing strategies for systems thinking, they say: “Although systems thinking is seen by many as a powerful problem-solving tool, … it is more powerful as a language, augmenting and changing the ordinary ways we think and talk about complex issues.” [18]

Systems thinkers are able to think abstractly, address complex problems, appreciate the interrelationships between the various elements of a system, and approach problem-solving holistically. Being a systems thinker is especially important for an information architect who is designing complex or cross-channel information ecosystems.

UX research and user-centered design

Of course, all UX professionals should possess UX research and user-centered design (UCD) skills. The practice of information architecture benefits particularly from the following UX research and UCD activities:

Content analysis
Stakeholder research
User research
Developing personas
Building mental models
Card sorting
Tree testing

Empathy for users

Empathy is an essential quality for information architects—and all UX professionals. Empathy for users enables an information architect to understand their motivations and accurately perceive their needs and emotions, then use that understanding to create better solutions for them. Being empathetic lets an information architect look at things from different people’s perspectives and internalize what they learn about the target users of a digital information space. [19]

Information organization

Effective practitioners of information architecture can perceive, understand, and communicate the relationships between the information elements within a digital information space, organize information in ways that make sense to users, and devise holistic IA solutions.

IA design skills

Designing an information architecture requires the following knowledge and skills:

A deep understanding of design principles that are pertinent to the design of an information architecture
Labeling design
Designing and mapping information architectures
Navigation design
Search design

Strong language skills

Designing an information architecture requires excellent language skills—in the language of the target audience for a digital information space. Both the hidden underpinnings of an information architecture and the visible elements that users experience rely on the use of language. An information architect must organize content into groups or categories, define metadata for content, choose optimal labels for navigation links, and design search systems. All of these design activities require working with language.

Overview of the information-architecture process

The design of an information architecture occurs within the broader context of the UX design process, which I explored in depth in my UXmatters column On Good Behavior “Design Is a Process, Not a Methodology.” [21] In this section, I’ll highlight the aspects of the design process that play the largest role in ensuring the creation of an optimal information architecture.

Stakeholder and user research

Stakeholder research involves interviewing the business leaders who have sponsored and are defining the strategy for an IA project, project team members who are leading the implementation of that strategy, and others who have a stake in the project’s outcome, including customers. This research ensures that those responsible for designing an information architecture understand the business needs driving the project, as well as the desired outcomes.

User research consists of a variety of generative-research techniques—including user interviews, contextual inquiries, user observations, field studies, various open card-sorting methods, tree testing, and surveys—and enables practitioners of information architecture to understand the needs, vocabulary, mental models, and information-seeking behaviors of existing or prospective users. [20] On the basis of the findings from user research, the UX team can define personas that represent the various types of users who make up the target audience for a digital information space.

Stakeholder and user research occur during a project’s Discovery phase. In Chapter 5, UX Research Methods for Information Architecture, you’ll learn about some specific UX research methods that are useful in designing information architectures.

Information-architecture strategy

A project’s information-architecture strategy derives from an organization’s business strategy and the stakeholder and user research that the UX team has conducted. Thus, the IA strategy is an output of the project’s Discovery phase.

Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango, the authors of Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond, define information-architecture strategy as follows:

“An information architecture strategy is a high-level conceptual framework for structuring and organizing an information environment. It provides the firm sense of direction and scope necessary to proceed with confidence into the design and implementation phases. It also facilitates discussion and helps get people on the same page before moving into the more expensive design phase.” [22]

An information-architecture strategy provides preliminary design guidance on which a team can align—regarding the definition of a taxonomy and metadata; the optimal structure for a scalable information space that can accommodate the addition of new content over time; the organization of content; the design of labeling, navigation, and search systems; and the eventual implementation and administration of an information architecture. Chapter 8, Defining an Information-Architecture Strategy, explores IA strategy in depth.

Design and usability testing

The goal of the Design phase is to realize the IA strategy; iteratively design, test, and deliver an IA solution that provides value to both users and the business. Designing an information architecture comprehends creating the structure of a digital information space and determining the organization of its content, which you’ll learn about in Chapter 6, Understanding and Structuring Content; the definition of a taxonomy and metadata, in Chapter 7, Classifying Information; designing labeling systems, in Chapter 9, Labeling Information; designing and mapping information architectures, in Chapter 10, Designing and Mapping an Information Architecture; designing navigation systems, in Chapter 11, Foundations of Navigation Design, and Chapter 12, Designing Navigation; and designing search systems, in Chapter 13, Designing Search.

Usability testing enables a team to evaluate the quality of a designed information architecture, identify areas for improvement through iterative design, and ultimately, validate a design solution.

Implementation and administration

The users of an information architecture include the content-management (CM) team, which is responsible for the analysis, collection, management, and publishing of content. In a small organization, there might be a CM team of one; in a large enterprise, different people, or multiple people, might be responsible for each of the roles that Table 1.1 outlines. According to Bob Boiko, the primary goal of content management “is to break information away from its presentation and instead focus on its structure….” [23] Information architects have a similar goal. Achieving this goal requires a well-defined process and clear policies.

Role	Implementation Responsibilities	Maintenance Responsibilities
Content manager	Content management, including the planning and implementation of CM initiatives and technology acquisitions	Content management, including governance
Business analysts	Creating a business strategy or aligning CM initiatives with business strategy, building upon existing efforts, fostering support for CM initiatives, setting goals, and devising a CM strategy	Establishing a governing body and ensuring the CM team remains aligned with the business strategy
Information architects	Content analysis, which includes gathering content requirements; designing a logical, holistic structure, or content model, for digital content; creating a metatorial framework, or categorization scheme, for organizing content; defining metadata, and applying metadata to content	Governing the application of a metatorial framework to the content in a digital information space; ensuring content conversions have correctly identified, chunked, and tagged content components; applying metadata to content; maintaining a metatorial guide, and training others on the guide’s use
Software developers	Template, content-management system (CMS), and application development	Template and CMS development
Content creators	Writing, graphic design, media production, and editing	Managing acquisitions, writing, graphic design, media production, and editing

Table 1.1—Key roles on a content-management team*

Note—The information in Table 1.1 derives from Chapter 11 of Bob Boiko’s Content Management Bible. [24]

Key components of information architecture

Let’s briefly consider the following key components of the practice of information architecture:

Taxonomies
Metadata
Labeling systems
Organizational structure
Navigation systems
Search systems

Refer to Figure 1.1, earlier in this chapter, for a diagram depicting these key components.

Taxonomies

A taxonomy provides a systematic classification of the content within a digital information space and supports its organization into a hierarchy of predefined, but evolving, categories, or classes, of information. You’ll learn how to define an information-classification system in Chapter 7, Classifying Information.

Metadata

Metadata is a type of data that describes other data—such as specific Web or mobile pages, documents, content elements, or digital assets. Descriptive metadata facilitates identifying and finding particular instances of information. Chapter 7, Classifying Information, also covers how to define metadata.

Labeling systems

Effective labels enable users to seek and identify the information they need. Choosing what domain-specific language to use consistently throughout a digital information space and designing an optimal labeling system are the subjects of Chapter 9, Labeling Information.

Organizational structure

The organization of information is at the core of information architecture. Chapter 4, Structural Patterns and Organization Schemes, describes some common structural patterns and organization schemes that you can employ in structuring information within a digital information space. Chapter 6, Understanding and Structuring Content, explains how to discover what content already exists, what content the team needs to create, and how to structure that content. In Chapter 10, Designing and Mapping an Information Architecture, you’ll learn how to design and map an information architecture.

Navigation systems

A digital information space’s information architecture becomes manifest in its navigation system. The design of a navigation system leverages all the foundational work that goes into creating an information architecture that optimally supports browsing. Chapter 11, Foundations of Navigation Design, and Chapter 12, Designing Navigation, cover the design of navigation systems in depth.

Search systems

Designing search systems also relies heavily on the foundational work of creating an information architecture—especially the definition of an information-classification system, metadata for specific instances of information, the vocabulary to use within an information space, and its labeling system. In Chapter 13, Designing Search, you’ll learn about the complexities of designing a search system.

Designing Information Architecture: A practical guide to structuring digital content for findability and easy navigability

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Supporting search

Creating a sense of place

Making content easy to consume

Combatting information overload

Users

Content

The business

Context

Creating holistic, cross-channel information ecosystems

The value of information architecture to users

The value of information architecture to the business

Systems thinking

UX research and user-centered design

Empathy for users

Information organization

IA design skills

Strong language skills

Stakeholder and user research

Information-architecture strategy

Design and usability testing

Implementation and administration

Taxonomies

Metadata

Labeling systems

Organizational structure

Navigation systems

Search systems

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