What is IA?

Have you ever visited a site and didn’t know where to find something on it? The reason for you not being able to find something may have something to do with the information architecture (IA) of the site. But, what exactly is information architecture? Information architecture is the art of organizing information in a way that makes the relevant stuff easy to find. In it, we essentially group and organize information in a way that makes sense.

Parts of IA

Three key parts need to be considered when creating the information architecture:

1. Ontology — what the piece of information represents or means (“@Twitter” on Twitter.com represents a particular Twitter account name)
2. Taxonomy — which bucket that piece of information falls under (“@Twitter” should be shown on any tweets made by the account)
3. Choreography — how those pieces of information and buckets interact with one another (tweets from the “@Twitter” account are all shown together on the relevant profile page)

Succesful IA

When it all comes together well you should be able to answer the following questions when on any page:

• Where am I?
• What can I do here?
• What else is there that can be done?

Now to some people this may seem like a fairly straightforward thing to do. I mean, come on. I’m just labeling and organizing information, right? How hard could it be?

Well, it might be more straightforward if you’re architecting something small, but doing it with something complex is an art. Just think of how easy it is to build a dog house as compared to an 8-story apartment complex.

History of IA

Now that we know what information architecture is and what are the requirements for doing it well, let’s look back to the history of IA.

Pre-computer Times

As the knowledge base of humanity grew, so did the need for sensibly organizing the information. As early as 330 BCE, there was a library in ancient Egypt where they kept a scroll with all the contents of the library in it.

Advent of computers

With the advent of computers, the term architecture was first used by IBM in the computing world. But this was to refer to the hardware. Then in the mid-1970s, Richard Wurman coined the term information architecture. Although his definition of IA was more in-line with what we consider to be Information Design (using visual representations to make information clear).

Then in the late 1970s, a group of information scientists at Xerox Palo Alto developed the first PC with a graphical user interface. This was because it was their company’s mission to develop an “elegant and inspiring phraseology, the architecture of information.” This furthered our definition of IA closer to what we know it to be today.