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Today I am banging on about IA because I believe it is crucial to the success of any product design project, is wildly interesting and challenging, and separates the wireframers from the big boys and girls.
It’s also shockingly overlooked both in terms of project delivery and skill set.
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Information Architecture is the backbone of the UX design process. It orders and influences everything we design and build.
In reality it is one of the oldest areas of human understanding and effort. It goes back before UX, before HCI and before HIP. Just like architecture. There’s a reason that word is in there. It’s library and information science meets engineering. It’s All of the Things.
As long as humans have been able to think, they’ve been trying to organise thoughts. As long as there has been information, data, words and things, there has been a need or desire to understand, categorise and organise — from the Dewey Decimal System to the use of heuristics and stereotypes in understanding basic human societal interactions in everyday life.
If you like science, and you like design, and you’re interested in humans, then this, is your jam.
Why should you care
1. It is everything
Information Architecture reaches into every area of a product design project from strategy to design. It encompasses what the thing is, how the user uses it, how the business understands it, how it operates and is maintained and yes how it is designed.
2. It is the hardest part of any project
It is the problem you need to solve. If you don’t solve this problem, you haven’t solved the project.
3. It is fundamentally human
IA, and all its component tasks, activities and documentation, is about how we think, perceive and process information as human beings. From a pure UX and psychology geek perspective, you should want to get elbow deep in this stuff.
