Erica Joy Decker

Define: “Information Architecture”

Information architecture is defined by the Information Architecture Institute as:
1. The structural design of shared information environments.
2. The art and science of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities and software to support findability and usability.
3. An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

Any website that does not pay attention to the way that their content, information, and navigation are structured risks the possibility of a great site that no one can use. If the public cannot find the information they seek quickly and effectively, most will leave the site. Skilled information architects know that the most effective websites play into human cognitive processes while they structure information.

According to the article “Cognitive Psychology & IA: From Theory to Practice” by Jason Withrow, humans naturally form mental categories in order to group similar items and concepts in everyday life. When visiting a website, the same cognitive processes occur, making the proper break-up of information essential to the usability of the website.

However, a common conundrum for information architects is that every person’s method of categorizing items and ideas is different. For instance, one person may mentally group items by visual similarities (ex: this icon looks like a computer), while another groups items by their intended purposes (ex: this article serves to educate the reader on information architecture), and yet another groups items by a certain set of rules for inclusion or exclusion (ex: this site doesn’t include any pictures of kids, so it cannot be a site for a children’s museum). A lot of people in the field of information architecture recommend to accommodate as many variations of categorization as possible, or at the very least, to accommodate a common categorization process.

Since visual cues often serve as a basis for mental associations, a web interface that exploits the cognitive processes of visual perception will be a more usable site. Proximity and similarity are among the most important parts of mental perception. Items that are layed out closely together will be perceived as belonging in a group, and will therefore be categorized as such (ex: these links are close together, so they must be related). Items that share similar characteristics will also be mentally grouped together (ex: these links are of different colors and font sizes, so they must not be related).

This is not to say that just because items are related in some way, that they should all be thrown onto one page of a website. Since encoding, storage, and retrieval of information makes up much of cognitive processes, functions of memory also play a significant role in web design and information architecture. Many studies have shown that the average human can remember between four and nine “chunks” of information in short-term memory at a given time (see “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information“). For this reason, it is important for usability’s sake to split up information effectively into readable and memorable chunks.

Key points to take away from this article? Information architecture is important for usability. Pay attention to the way people group items, use visual cues to help people group items, and split up your information into bite-size chunks.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 2:58 am
Categories: Design Psychology, Information Architecture, Usability.