“Complex issues … written about patiently, clearly, and accurately.”
Like many “so easy anyone can do it processes,” there is a pitfall in setting up and running an effective card sorting exercise: selecting the right topics for cards. With a little bit of preparation, teamwork, and in-person (or virtual) facilitation, it’s possible to fine tune your card sorting exercise set-up process to substantially improve both the quality of your results, and the depth of insight those results reveal.
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.
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.
Information Architecture is the process and the product of designing shared information environments. In the same way that building architects collaborate in the creation of physical environments for shared human use, information architects collaborate in the creation of information environments for shared human use. The architect may not know in detail how each wall or widget gets built, but they know enough about how all the pieces fit together as a whole to ensure that the final result effectively meets the human needs.
If you’ve ever done any contextual inquiry or usability testing, you’ve probably observed first hand the difference between what people say they will do and what they actually end up doing. Overlooked calls to action, bizarre navigation paths, mind-bogglingly irrational decisions — even the most sensible seeming users occasionally (or often) do things that “rationally” make little sense. Which is to say that we all, on occasion (or often) do things that seem to make little rational sense.
In order to effectively communicate across contexts in digital information spaces, we need to understand the way we make meaning as thinking animals. We also need to dig in to the details of the language and models we use to make them intelligible, both so that we can use them more effectively and so that we can leave them behind when they are hindering communication. In the same way that we construct our built environments in response to the physical mechanics of our bodies, we can construct our information environments in response to the conceptual mechanics of our minds.
With the growing need of responsive web solutions and adaptive, flexible content, there are new reasons for designers to roll up their sleeves and get into “code.” Since HTML is, at its core, a layer of description wrapped around content, working at this level helps designers think more critically about their content and about the architectural implications of that content. While considering markup won’t replace our content audit, user research, or taxonomy work any time soon, it can increasingly function as an important part of the design process.
Much virtual ink has been spilled in the last year or two over the importance of thinking about information design in terms of systems as opposed to thinking of it as a set of carefully laid out maps. As an initial stab at defining an approach to systems informed by the way we think, I submit that information architecture is in a unique position to act as a shim between systems and sentience. IA is where we create information from data and structure that information with narrative. We use IA to wend a deliberate path through the wilds of content at large.
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