No really, what is it? That wasn’t a rhetorical question. I recently attended the World IA day event in Des Moines and had a ton of fun. Despite being The Pain With No Name, Information Architecture seems to be both a flourishing profession and an increasingly popular hobby, as evidenced by the impressive turnout and roster of speakers at the event this year. The event featured 11 sessions across two tracks. The attendees seemed to come from a variety of backgrounds and were also split nearly evenly between men and women, which is much better than you usually see at conferences of this type.
All of that being said, my primary takeaway was this: no one really knows for sure what Information Architecture is. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart famously described the process for identifying pornography as “I know it when I see it.” Information Architecture in the real world seems to work in the opposite way. I know it when I don’t see it. Or more specifically, it’s only apparent when it has gone horribly wrong. Good information architecture should be invisible. It should feel effortless. Bad information architecture reveals itself through the frustration you feel when using a poor interface or searching for information that seems to be deliberately hidden (if you want to see this in action I’d recommend trying to browse the PayPal API documentation).
At Webspec we do information architecture nearly every day. Like design, it’s inescapable in our industry. We might not call what we do information architecture, but that’s what it is. And it’s not relegated to any particular member of the team or phase of the project. When we look at a client’s existing site and say “ok, what are we going to do with this?” – that conversation is part of Information Architecture. Creating a sitemap, writing copy, modeling content, designing databases, and creating page layouts all involve information architecture, whether we consciously acknowledge it or not.
So we practice the discipline, but we don’t talk about it enough. Specific decisions on each project are discussed of course, sometimes ad nauseam, but we don’t call those information architecture, and there’s no sense of overarching purpose or structure. Which doesn’t make us especially unique. Outside of agencies that specialize in IA, I’d wager that most people don’t have those discussions. That takes time, and there are always project budgets to worry about.
Why do I bring that up? Because I don’t want 2016 to be another year where I practice Information Architecture but don’t write or talk about it. It’s a little late in the year for New Year’s Resolutions, but I’m making one anyway. I may still not know for sure what Information Architecture is at the end of the year, but my goal is to get incrementally closer. And possibly take what I’ve learned to World IA Day 2017 in the hopes that I can help make The Pain With No Name just a little less painful.
