Imagine you were dropped in a strange location without a proper map. The next step might not be obvious because, chances are, there isn’t a clear path. If this happened today, you would most likely pull out your phone to get directions from a mapping app. In our modern world, we are, more often than not, reliant on technology to do the heavy lifting of problem-solving.
Ever since Google made finding an answer only a few clicks away, it’s been easy to forget that in order for information to be accessible to us, it must first be organized in a way that makes sense. When information is sorted, organized, and labeled, it becomes a map. By definition, maps are diagrammatic representations of relationships between things. Whether physical or digital, good maps allow people to navigate efficiently and with clarity through any environment.
Information architecture (IA) is exactly what it sounds like: how information is structured, from the foundation to the footnotes. Richard Saul Wurman, the founder of modern IA, believed that how information was presented was oftentimes more important than the information itself. While the process of defining information structures isn’t confined to the digital spaces we inhabit, the fluid nature of the internet requires us to think deeper about how different “knowledge nodes” connect. Let’s break down why that is.
In the digital world, information can be structured (and stored) in many different ways, like spreadsheets, sitemaps, content schedules, and databases. In the context of user experience (UX) design, the deliverables designers use to communicate information is dependent on the context of use. Designers often use IA to illuminate what content or information is mission-critical, where it lives in the system, and how it’s connected.
For a simple company website, a designer might first build a site map to communicate (to the internal team and potentially to the client) and confirm what static pages are necessary, what the information hierarchy is for content, and what information lives in the different global elements (e.g., the top navigation versus the footer).