Information Architecture

The Web is an organic growth whose tendrils stretch across corporate networks and into our homes. Page by page, link by link, we have grown a vast digital jungle. Taming this wild landscape, guiding people to answers amid the chaos, is the design challenge of the information architect.

-- Rich Julius, President and Founder, Specific Impulse Inc.

Justifying Information Architecture

Imagine a building without a design; a collection of rooms, floors, and corridors assembled with no master blueprint and little or no ongoing planning. Would you be able to find your way around? Would you even know what's there? Would you feel comfortable doing business in such a building?

Richard Saul Wurman defines Information Architecture as "the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge." Many organizations suffer with unplanned, organically grown web sites whose continual reconstruction leaves visitors confused and frustrated. Just as a building architect designs structures that are both aesthetically pleasing and functional, an information architect ensures that your information structures are well-planned, functional, and usable.

Web sites need to serve two constituents: the information providers and the information consumers. Architected sites are easier to build and maintain, and are designed to accomplish clearly-defined and measurable goals: increase business, reduce support costs, improve communication, educate visitors, and so forth.

Well-architected sites follow a logical and intuitive structure, presenting information in a way that the information consumer will understand and respond to favorably. Market and audience analysis, user-centered design and testing, and ongoing evaluation achieve "walk-up" interfaces that delight visitors and ensure that you meet your business objectives.

Information architecture is critical for web-based applications, hosted services, document libraries, and globalization. Building Web-based systems and managing multilingual content represents a major investment in time, cost, and human resources. Information architecture goes a long way to reduce risk and ensure a successful outcome. But it also reduces overall cost by improving planning and communication and by eliminating the chaos associated with complex projects.

Beyond Hierarchies

Simply organizing information in a hierarchy is not enough. Information is often multi-dimensional, and all too often companies organize their sites according to where information comes from. This means that visitors must determine how your company is organized before they can use your site. For example, a visitor looking for help may have trouble determining whether the answer to their question is in the training, support, sales, or documentation sections.

Have you organized your product line by your own departments or divisions? A visitor looking for a particular solution may not know which group provides the products or services that would satisfy their requirements, or even what the right names, topics, or labels are. Sometimes the best organizational structure has nothing to do with your company's org chart but everything to do with your market demographic: geography, age, income level, or interests.

Text search systems will never replace good information architecture. Will all users know what you call things? Will they become frustrated with too many or too few "hits"? And even if they eventually find the product, service, or information they want, text search circumvents browsing and learning. So our search systems include category classifications along multiple dimensions that expose related items. This is essential in any knowledge discovery application, such as a commerce site where the process of discovery introduces customers to the other products and services that you offer, increasing the likelihood of related sales and impulse buying.

Along with information architecture consulting and web user interface design services, Specific Impulse provides a toolkit specially designed for web developers, designers, and information architects. The StageOne system enables information architects to model a company's information, content, documents, business taxonomies, navigation, and workflow processes in a web-based eBusiness control panel. The transparent collaboration features enable staff, contractors, subcontractors, and consultants to work together as a team.

The control panel is made up of modules that store information, and the information can be tagged according to any data classifications. Modules can be related using shared classification trees, and end-user access and publishing permission is controlled at the module or data level.

StageOne makes it easy to model a company's information architecture, and it enables end-users to begin managing and storing their information almost immediately. The control panel serves as a powerful vehicle for driving web templates, and data-driven template design is simplified through the use of a simple tag library using the popular Macromedia® ColdFusion® markup language.

Read more about StageOne.

Read more about Rich Julius, Chief Information Architect.

 
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