Application of Information Architecture in Design

Design is used to inform an audience with graphics, to show function with its hierarchy, or to interact with interfaces. But just because one has made a design doesn’t mean that it is a good or useful design. Today, we will discuss an important part of designing and what it can do to help us make our designs good and functional: Information Architecture.

Starting Information Architecture

So, what is Information Architecture? It sounds complicated. Well, it kind of is, but for good reason.

First, let’s use our imaginations. Imagine a house that is under construction and the builders thought, “Let’s start making the externals of it first.” So they did, and they were able to make the house, but they forgot one crucial part: the foundation. After that, the building, even though it was pretty, beautiful, and looked strong on the outside, easily broke down.

You see, you can’t properly start something without a foundation. The same goes for designs. If you don’t start with a foundation, your designs can potentially be messy and unfunctional to a user.

This is what Information Architecture is for. Similar to buildings, you need a backbone or a foundation before you start creating your designs. This is where information architecture comes as it is about the organization of information in designs and products. It is to make a foundation to start with consideration for its user on structuring, organizing, and categorizing its content.

But that is rather the simple definition of Information Architecture. As I said earlier, it is kind of a complicated topic, but it is because we are considering our users and their needs in order to have our designs useful, functional, and understandable to them.

Considering the Audience

In information architecture, when creating a design for our audience or our users, we want them to easily understand what we want them to see, read, or interact with, and just putting stuff together without a proper start is not going to cut it. Users have needs that we need to consider in order to make a good design that can be catered to them.

When thinking about the user’s needs, there are a few things we should consider with information architecture: cognitive psychology, principles, and systems.

Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Load

Cognitive psychology is the study of how our mind works, and what mental processes take place there. And in order to use information architecture effectively, we should do research about how we can help lessen our user’s working memory and not cause cognitive overload which can overwhelm them and cause them to be unable to comprehend our designs effectively.

All people are different, and that goes with our working memory. Not everyone has the same capacity for working memory and we, as the ones creating the designs for them, should acknowledge that.

With this in consideration, we can then understand that we need to remove any unnecessary elements in our designs and be more straightforward with adding the information and details so as to not overstimulate our audience.

Principles of Information Architecture

Besides the Gestalt Principle, which I could assume that we already have the basics upon, there are eight (8) principles when it comes to Information Architecture that we can follow and use as a guide for our designs. These are the following:

• The principle of objects treats content as a living, breathing thing, with a lifecycle, behaviors, and attributes.
• The principle of choices creates pages that offer meaningful choices to users, keeping the range of choices available focused on a particular task.
• The principle of disclosure shows only enough information to help people understand what kinds of information they’ll find as they dig deeper.
• The principle of exemplars describes the contents of categories by showing examples of the contents.
• The principle of front doors assumes at least half of the website’s visitors will come through some page other than the home page.
• The principle of multiple classifications offers users several different classification schemes to browse the site’s content.
• The principle of focused navigation means designing navigation and establishing a strategy for finding content on the website.
• The principle of growth assumes the content you have today is a small fraction of the content you will have tomorrow.

Even having a basic knowledge of these principles can give us a better understanding of how to create a good and powerful information architecture for our designs. Although it may look overwhelming to research, it is worth it as it can help us to improve our designs, to widen our skills/knowledge of information architecture, as well as to understand the relationship of our users or audience to our designs.

Information Architecture Systems

In their book, “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web,” pioneers of the IA (information architecture) field, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville have distinguished four main components or systems when it comes to creating designs. These systems can help you identify what you’re creating in your design, whether it is for graphic designs or for UI designs, and helps us know what our goals are once we have identified what it is.

Organization Systems are the groups or the categories in how the information is divided in designing where an effective organization system can enable our audience/users to operate efficiently, achieve their goals, and locate their needed information.

Labeling systems aim at uniting your data or content effectively to represent them in a simplified manner. Using this in combination with understanding hierarchy can help you achieve an effective and friendly way for your audience to comprehend your designs in just a few words.

Navigation Systems has sets of actions that allow users to navigate the content in designs to find what they need in the design. Having a good navigation system presents a good information architecture on the design and indicates to the user how to navigate through, especially in complex and abstract designs.

Searching Systems are used mostly in digital products. This helps users look up the data they want on a website or an app. Searching systems are effective only for products that have tons of data that can risk our users getting overwhelmed or lost.

Using Information Architecture

Of course, I can’t put everything about Information Architecture into one blog, but that is why one of the keywords of it is “research.” It is an essential part of creating a good information architecture for your designs and building it for your audience. As we discussed earlier, it is an important foundation and backbone for designs.

Being able to use Information Architecture allows us to be more clear and have a greater understanding of how and what the design is for. It helps us to define our goals for us to make a better system that can deliver for you and your audience since you need to determine what both of you need. It allows us to organize and reorganize the content that we have in order to categorize, reveal, and strengthen our designs. And finally, it makes us designers adapt to what our audience actually needs as we often forget the user and their needs for aesthetics and form. Information Architecture allows us to refocus on them and what they need.

Conclusion

Information Architecture is honestly overlooked more commonly than we think. When we try to make designs, we tend to forget that we are creating for our audience and not for ourselves, unless it is. But now as we have a better understanding, Information Architecture will help us make our designs better, friendlier, and more functional for our audience.

“Information architecture is the way that we arrange the parts of something to make it understandable.” — Abby Covert, How to Make Sense of Any Mess