Information architecture (IA) is a science of organizing and structuring content of the websites, web and mobile applications, and social media software. An American architect and graphic designer, Richard Saul Wurman, is considered to be a founder of the IA field.
Today, there are many specialists working on IA development who have established the Information Architecture Institute. According to the IAI experts, information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable.
Information architecture aims at organizing content so that users would easily adjust to the functionality of the product and could find everything they need without big effort.
Nowadays, when the user-centered approach in design is a top trend, many designers learn the principles of information architecture science which they believe is a foundation of efficient design. IA forms a skeleton of any design project. Visual elements, functionality, interaction, and navigation are built according to the information architecture principles. The thing is that even compelling content elements and powerful UI design can fail without appropriate IA.
IA is a blueprint of the design structure which can be generated into wireframes and sitemaps of the project. UX designers use them as the basic materials so that they could plan navigation system.
UX design means much more than content structuring. In the first place, UX designers aim at making pleasant interaction model, so that users feel comfortable using the product. They encompass various aspects influencing users’ behavior and actions such as emotion and psychology when the IA experts stay focused on the user’s goals.
If you want to build strong information architecture for the product, you need to understand what it consists of. Pioneers of the IA field, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville in their book “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” have distinguished four main components: organization systems, labeling systems, navigation systems and searching systems.
Content is the reason why people visit websites. We all know how important it is to produce content that users will find valuable, but what’s equally important is to make sure that the content is easy to find.
Time is the most precious resource people have. We live in a world where people expect to find a solution to their problems with the least amount of effort. When finding information becomes too complicated or too slow, there’s a risk that people will simply abandon it. And when people abandon an app or a website, it’s more difficult to bring them back. This is where information architecture design plays a key role.
While IA has roots in various fields, cognitive psychology is one of the most important, because this discipline defines the way we structure information.
Gestalt principles explore users’ visual perception of objects in relation to each other, including similarity, continuity, proximity, symmetry, and closure. All of these can influence how designers should organize graphical information on the screen. A UX architect uses the principles to decide how to present and organize the information on a page.