An edited excerpt. Originally published on UXmatters and under the title “The Information Architecture Value Chain” – May 5, 2014

Information architecture is widely associated with navigation and content organization. However, information architecture’s value extends well into other critical aspects of digital environments, products, and services. 

Consider Your Audience

When attempting to position the value of information architecture (IA), you may be lucky enough to have to explain this to only a single individual. If you’re not so lucky, your audience might span a team of business stakeholders, product managers, user experience (UX) strategists and designers, a technology group, or a disparate UX team of interaction designers, visual designers, and developers.

As a result, never go into a meeting armed with only a definition of information architecture and expect everyone to drink your “Kool-Aid”. With multiple perspectives in the room, defining something like information architecture is always a matter of debate. Instead, approach your audience with more concrete, actionable concepts by explaining the value of information architecture to the final interface design and how it compliments the members on your team. This will bring focus on the gaps that the practice of information architecture fills.

Finally, to prepare your value proposition for the appropriate audience, make sure that you know who will be present. Of course, since you never really know who may actually show up to a meeting, it’s always best to plan for a full house, with all viewpoints represented.

For any Web design project, you can group the interests of the entire team into the following four segments:

• strategy value
• design value
• user value
• technology value

Information architecture must address each of these segments with a solid value proposition. I’ll summarize the IA value propositions and list of what I describe as key areas of interest that you can use to support each claim. I will not review each area in this post. I would encourage you to explore them on your own.

The Value of IA to Strategy

Proposition: Information architecture contributes systems thinking that improves synthesis, strategic alignment, and solutions framing.

A successful IA strategy fosters alignment across many business-related concerns, which helps establish solid intention.

Business owners, product managers, and design strategists think in terms of the big picture. Business owners obsess over the budget, objectives, and key performance indicators. Strategists wax poetic over North-Star visions that provide guidance to the design and development teams. Similarly, sound information architecture activities establish coherent objectives and bring clarity to goals that naturally contribute to the overall product or project strategy.

Key areas of interest:

• planning
• performance
• context mapping
• visioning
• synthesis
• understanding

The Value of IA to Design

Proposition: Information architecture improves the relevance of and expectations for information by probing issues about content, context, and users.

We can achieve greater design value when meaning and relevance are apparent to users. Users may experience a user-interface design not only through a device but also through an interplay between physical and digital spaces.

A Web user-interface design is the most tangible artifact to which every design, communications, and development discipline on a team must contribute. This design includes content strategy and authoring for all types of media, information architecture, visual interface design, interaction design, and front-end development. Each discipline or specialized function contributes to the experience of the user interface.

Information architecture contributes by probing to learn about and justifying why, what, how much, and when to deliver information to a Web user interface, with targeted meaning and relevance that resonates with users. Whether the Web user interface is static, responsive to various presentation modes, or traverses the boundaries of physical and digital space, information architecture is invaluable in understanding the nature of the appropriate information interactions.

Key areas of interest:

• content modeling
• information interactions
• sense making
• placemaking
• information environments
• experiences

The Value of IA to Users

Proposition: Information architecture simplifies how people navigate and use information that connects to the Web.

We realize value for users when wayfinding techniques and logical information connections improve a user interface’s usability.

Everyone involved in the design lifecycle for a Web user interface must contribute to user value, because user value is product value, and product value is business value. Assuming that user and business value are aligned, there should be nothing in the design lifecycle that doesn’t contribute to user value.

The value of information architecture to the user has been clear for nearly two decades. By simplifying how people navigate and use information in complex Web environments, information architecture gives users the chance to achieve their tasks and goals with greater precision. Businesses typically associate information retrieval, or search; labeling; and the formal organization of content with the interests of information architecture. However, the methods for enabling their flexible use and maintaining a coherent, manageable Web structure represent additional value that also rests within the domain of information architecture.

Key areas of interest:

• navigation
• organization
• metadata
• Web structure
• segmentation
• information

The Value of IA to Data Modeling

Proposition: Information architecture improves the resilience of database structures through sound conceptual modeling.

By endowing data with intrinsic value, information architecture assists in the planning of data architectures that are becoming larger and more complex.

Nothing on the Web happens without the magic of information technology. Period. Everything that we do in information architecture and UX design resides within the realm of abstraction, so our value is realized only when developers and other computer-science experts implement technology solutions in software, systems, and physical devices. The expression “garbage in, garbage out” typically refers to the quality of data. However, it has another meaning in the area of database modeling. A bad data model will produce an ineffective physical database structure.

Thus, because Web user interfaces rely on database-driven content management systems, the underlying database models that they leverage require the sound conceptual and ontological modeling that strategic IA documentation delivers. This is a more advanced information architecture activity that provides crucial input for database designers who must design logical and physical data models and engineer sustainable data architectures. As the information domains that we design increase in complexity, these will be the kinds of conversations that IA practitioners must be prepared to have.

Key areas of interest:

• concept modeling
• ontology
• semantics
• communication
• information modeling
• information theory

Finally

Information architecture’s value extends into many areas. Whether you perform information architecture tasks as a UX designer or an IA professional, try to consistently communicate the value of information architecture. This is all of our responsibility to the field of information architecture.

Further, senior-level proficiency in many of the areas of interest I’ve listed in this post can take several years to acquire. So, don’t be intimidated by the breadth of topics. Just keep learning. The most practical path to growing your IA skills is to start at the top of each list of areas of interest and work your way down. If you gravitate more toward strategy and theory, start at the bottom of each list and work your way upward.