Purpose
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- Information architecture is about helping people
- Information architecture at the Government of Canada
Information architecture is about helping people
Information architecture (IA) helps answers the following questions for those using a space, whether real or digital:
- Where am I?
- How did I end up here?
- Where can I go now?
- What is x and how does it relate to y?
Photo by John T on Unsplash
Have you ever been in a building where you couldn't find the bathroom? Or visited a company's website and have to hunt for their phone number? Those kinds of problems, and more, are what information architecture has emerged over three decades to solve.
Information architecture is about helping people understand their surroundings and find what they're looking for—in the real world as well as online.
Information architecture (IA) focuses on organizing, structuring, and labeling content in an effective and sustainable way. The goal is to help users find information and complete tasks.
It can be difficult to describe what IA is, which makes it hard to showcase the value of IA to colleagues, clients or managers. In simple terms, you can say:
As information architects, we organize information so that people can find the right answers to their questions. We strive to support casual browsing and directed searching. Our aim is to apply organization and labeling systems that make sense to users.
Information architecture at the Government of Canada
In the government's digital context, information architecture (IA):
- refers to the way you structure and group information based on its context and use, current and future
- involves organization and planning of entire websites as well as individual content pages for both internal (intranet) and external consumption
- is a process of negotiating between business needs, user needs, and information organization principle
- can be subject to budgetary, time, cultural, and organizational constraints, which can impact the quality of the IA and affect the user's ability to complete tasks
You will often hear references to IA in relation to the Content and Information Architecture Specification. It's important to note that IA goes well beyond those templates.
IA is also about the structure and relationships you create within content from sentences to paragraphs to pages to topics and themes. This is where content providers have a lot of influence and should be very thoughtful about the decisions they make.
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