This article was modified on 8/22/2020 from its original post.

Information architects are known to provide architectural guidance and the structural [1][2] “blueprint” for shaping application user interfaces and experience strategy.

Architectural Guidance

According to the first book written on the practice of information architecture [3], the information architect is one who:

• “Clarifies the mission and vision for the site, balancing the needs of its sponsoring organization and the needs of its audiences.”
• “Determines what content and functionality the site will contain.”
• “Specifies how users will find information in the site by defining its organization, navigation, labeling, and searching systems.”
• “Maps out how the site will accommodate change and growth over time.”

Information architects are known to provide architectural guidance and the “blueprint” for shaping application user interfaces and experience strategy.

Application user interfaces and the information environments that digital teams create are becoming increasingly complex for users and organizations that must manage them. However, despite the growing complexity of today’s application user interfaces, IA practitioners remain a useful but highly underutilized resource for bringing clarity to digital strategy, informing UI design behavior, and giving proper scope for content use and maintenance.

Structural Blueprint

Information architects attempt to bring coherence to complex application user interfaces and digital products and are adept at modeling contextual assumptions, human behavior, and content (artifacts) of an environment as a way to articulate strategy and define sustainable UI structures.

The resulting artifacts of IA modeling provide the official “blueprint” for design requirements and functionality.  Common models include, but are not limited to sitemaps, and models for concepts, content, user experience, and flows. These and many other models are used to provide alignment with “owners” and clear instructions for design and development teams.

“information architects must define the underlying conceptual and content structure surrounding the targeted application interface/s.”

In smaller Web-based environments that appear to be less complex, the information architecture strategy (often referred to as “the IA”) can be rationalized with less formality. In such cases, documentation may be minimal and the IA solution will likely be defined by someone who is not an IA specialist. However, complex information environments will typically require collaboration with many “stakeholders” such as business, product, marketing professionals, and a diverse team of HCI (human-computer interaction) practitioners. In this case, the acting information architect must work to integrate the concept- and content-dependent artifacts of each discipline to establish a sustainable and flexible site structure that correlates to the architectural intent and a set of anticipated usage patterns.

When a digital application user interface is not the end objective, information architecture analysis can be used to assess the underlying patterns of any target domain in order to rationalize a structure for strategy and/or implementation.

[1] Davis, Nathaniel. “Getting Your Web Site’s Structure Right.” UXmatters, 22 Apr. 2013, https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2013/04/getting-your-web-sites-structure-right.php.

[2] Davis, Nathaniel. “Transforming Our Conversation of Information Architecture with Structure.” Association for Information Science & Technology, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 21 June 2013, https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bult.2013.1720390510.

[3] Morville, Peter. Rosenfeld, Lou. (1998) Information Architecture for the World Wide Web. First Edition. O’Reilly & Associates Inc.