Digital Media Buzz > Staying Alive: Lost Art of Information Architecture

Staying Alive: Lost Art of Information Architecture

By Niki Hammond

Back in my day, the web wasn’t participatory. We would visit a site, read a few articles, maybe even buy a book or a t-shirt even though (*gasp*) we couldn’t try it on first. If something really caught our attention we might bookmark it or email the URL to a friend. We didn’t have any tagging or tweeting or mashing or mobiles. It was a simpler web, and it was very, very boring.

It was also a lot easier to architect.

In the context of the web, information architecture is the practice of structuring and organizing web-based information. The metaphor can be a useful tool here. Is your site selling something? Model it after a department store, where the main navigation consists of whatever categories your products fall under, and the main features include customer service and check-out. Is it a news-based web site with an ad-based revenue model? Design your global navigation to follow a typical table of contents and reserve space for sponsored content throughout. When users were passive observers and most sites fell into a handful of basic archetypes, the job of the information architect was relatively straight-forward. In fact, it was so straight forward that while the number of professional web sites grows exponentially each year, the demand for information architects remains relatively steady. One might conclude that many developers either started doing it themselves or perhaps just skipped a formal IA process entirely.

You can see, though, that demand for “interactive designers” continues to increase dramatically. Not at all surprising when you consider that in the web 2.0 world, so much online content is user-generated and interactivity can get (ideally) as complex as that of real life experiences. The simple old analogies don’t quite cut it anymore, and many site owners are hiring for skills that contribute to richness of interactivity rather than organization of information.

So what’s to become of the art of information architecture? Are rumors of its death exaggerated? Is IA to become extinct? Not exactly. Traditional IA is more of a Neanderthal than a dinosaur. While the old analogies are no longer sufficient, the basic tenets of good information design are more important than ever. Information architecture must continue to expand to include a focus on relationships in addition to data. Ten years ago the most exciting aspect of the web was the breadth and depth of data readily available. Today it’s the socialization and user-participation inspired by that data. The term “interactive designer,” therefore, is en vogue, as are social architecture, social classification, and participation economy. In fact, O’Reilly’s most recent edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web now has entire sections dedicated to those areas.

The fact is, the discipline of information architecture is not just about the web. It is the art and science of modeling any complex data systems, from libraries to enterprise software to online communities. To say that web 2.0 is killing IA would be akin to saying the assembly line killed manufacturing. As a result of web 2.0 trends and technologies, the scope of information architecture is expanded and its importance is as great as it ever was.

Niki Hammond, PMP, is a project manager and business analyst with more than 13 years of web application development experience. She can be reached at nhammond@perspectivepm.com.