Week 1: Definitions, and notes on taxonomy

This week’s reading: Morville & Rosenfeld, foreword through Chapter 2

I’m coming to the study of information architecture without formal experience in computer science – but I do have the important qualification that I’m a child of the Information Age. At various times in my life I’ve been a hobbyist computer programmer, an avid websurfer, a small-scale webmaster, an online forum administrator, and a student of library science. Each role has exposed me to what I now understand to be IA from a different perspective, and now that I’ve read a couple chapters on the topic, the meaning of the phrase “information architecture” has begun to fall into place.

While attaining my bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago, I had the good fortune to become acquainted with a software engineer with a special interest in interface design. Through his website and blog, as well as my conversations with him, I learned some of the basic issues and philosophies surrounding software usability; most importantly, I became firmly convinced that most end-user frustrations should be blamed on poor design and not on user incompetence. As a result, I understand information architecture primarily as a branch of interaction design. A good design is by definition a design that is usable and humane – respectful of the needs, frailties, and limited patience of our users. Though outside constraints such as budget and institutional culture may sometimes trouble our pursuit of such a design, good information architecture should place the user first as often as possible. If a design is not usable, it is nothing.

Our book would interject here to point out that interaction design is far from the only discipline related to IA. Pages 10 and 11 usefully summarize the points of tangency between IA and a number of other fields of study. At this phase of my nascent understanding of IA, however, I can’t help but think of these as allied fields to IA, while interaction design is its parent field.

Consider, for example, a now-commonplace but once-striking implementation of information architecture: Gmail’s conversation-based system for organizing and displaying email. In the days of yore, way back in 2003, email services invariably displayed emails one message at a time. Messages were prefixed by a potential infinity of iterations of RE: and FWD:, and the contents of a protracted email exchange might be spread across several pages of a user’s inbox. Gmail changed that by sorting all emails with the same subject line into one conversation, the whole of which can be viewed at a click. This design choice is clearly an act of information architecture, since it changes the nature of Gmail’s information environment through tweaking the organization and navigation of email.

Clearly, conversation-based email grouping would have been impossible without the software developers who coded it, the graphic designers who concretized it, and the usability engineers who optimized it – but it wasn’t for any of their sakes that such grouping was invented. Conversation-based grouping was invented for the sake of interaction design. Gmail’s information architects implemented the new system because it improved user interactions with email software. Users could find, digest, and act on information more easily under the new system than under the old one. This is the exact goal of information architecture. Viewed this way, IA’s status as a subfield of interaction design could not be more apparent.

Going forward, I’ll continue to focus on how good information architecture addresses user needs. At the same time, I’ll stay alert to other issues raised by the readings, such as the question of how architecture shapes the people who dwell within it. Morville and Rosenfeld raise this question through Winston Churchill at the beginning of Chapter 1, and it’s not an unfamiliar one. Educators wonder whether the instant availability of certain information via Google and Wikipedia has changed how we learn; business owners struggle to understand and accommodate the expectations of a generation brought up with social media; and legal professionals are in the midst of a seismic organizational realignment brought about by the Internet’s liberation of legal materials from the monopoly of West Publishing. We will find the evolution of information architecture at the origin of all of these changes, and it is IA – rooted in the needs of its residents – that we will use to shape the future!