Perspectives, methods, case studies, and interviews about information architecture and structured content design for the modern web.
I helped UW Medicine create a content strategy and information architecture approach for integrating health and wellness content into their main website in a systematic, goal-oriented way. Now, UW Medicine’s UX and content teams can use their vast library of health and wellness content to help site visitors find the resources they seek—and engage with the healthcare professionals and services they need.
I helped the World Health Organization assess and develop an improvement roadmap for the Knowledge Action Portal (KAP), a community-driven communication and collaboration web application focused on the prevention of non-communicable diseases. Now, the KAP team has a clear path forward for making high-impact usability, accessibility, and performance improvements.
In this episode of "Content Strategy Insights," Larry Swanson and I discuss the huge gaps between the human needs of digital content consumers and the constraints and requirements of the digital systems that manage it. We also, of course, explore how information architects use data, stories, and meaning to bridge these gaps and bring content to life for the human beings who need it.
One of the greatest challenges in digital design is identifying and maintaining focus on the right problem. For information architecture, one of our most common deliverables, the visual sitemap, can actually make focusing on the right problems harder, if not impossible. In this article we’ll examine why this happens, explore what practitioners and teams can do to avoid this trap of misplaced focus, and learn how to rehabilitate our wayward sitemaps and reinstate them as the effective design artifacts they can be.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a website in possession of a shiny new design, must be in want of good content. Unfortunately, the process of auditing, revising, migrating, and creating quality content can be daunting. Style guides can help! Here's a brief intro to web writing style guides—and a quick way to get started with creating your own.
Customer feedback is a cornerstone of user-centered design, but the insight it holds is often locked up in thousands of rows of unstructured text. Learn how free, open source Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools can help you understand and draw meaning from these datasets—even if you're new to (or terrified of!) working in code.
The way that we consume information on the web is changing. Voice and IA technology are driving this change in a way that affects anyone publishing online. And yet: we continue to hold on to the metaphor of the content we publish as “pages,” destined to be found and read as delivered by patient, attentive online readers. I recently had the opportunity to talk with the Seattle Content Strategy MeetUp group about this alarming state of affairs—and about what we can do to fix it.
Finding and hiring an information architect can be challenging, especially when your IA needs are project based. Fortunately, there are ways to use the periodic nature of some IA work to your advantage.
Information architects work collaboratively to build information environments that support defined user and business goals. An IA will work to clarify the systems and structures that support those goals—or are actively undermining them.
Not every project needs a dedicated information architect, but things can go woefully sideways if you need one and don't have one. Here are a few clues that you should include an information architect, or at least a practitioner with strong IA skills, on your design team.