Information Architecture (IA)

What is it?
Information Architecture is an emerging field that has become a necessity in the information age in which we live. There is so much content on the web. How are we going to find what we are looking for? According to the Information Architecture Institute, an information architect designs the structure of shared information systems. He also designs the labeling and organization of online web sites to make it easier for people to use the site and find the information that they are looking for.

When do they work?
According to the folks at IBM an IA needs to be brought in on the project as early as possible. They are an architect first and foremost and so they develop the framework that the site is built around. You would not start building a house without an architectural plan so there is no reason to build a complex website with out a detailed plan of how to organize the content.

How do they work?
The start by gathering information. Then they do a bottom up approach. After they have an initial taxonomy completed they start a top down approach to clean up every thing with a higher level overview.


http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/us-inarch.html

Findability: beyond just google-binging it

According to Peter Morville at findability.org, "findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable. At the item level, we can evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or locate. At the system level, we can analyze how well a physical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval."

This sounds like a fairly vague definition and a very hard concept to measure. Do you quantify this by how much money it takes to find an item or maybe how much time it takes? It is probably easier for a mechanic to find a wrench in a workshop than a stay at home mom who never had shop class. Does that mean the wrench is easy or hard to find? These are a few questions that I do not have answers for right now.

I do know that SEO, usability, information architecture, and accessibility are all related to findability. The goal of a website is to deliver information. The concepts of findability make it easier for search engines to crawl a website and return relevant search results. Also if a user directly accesses a site and wants to find some piece of information they want the site to be laid out thoughtfully and for it to be very usable. The information architecture needs to be clearly defined so that they can find something quickly. This is where web standards come into place. If a website is designed using web standards there should be a straight forward way to navigate the site and find information or in other words the site should be accessible with different browsers and also different technologies such as screen readers for the blind.