Architecture, Latches, and Taxes

Information architecture is the confluence of context, content, and users. What does that mean? It means you design your website around your content, while keeping in mind usability, the perspective from which your audience is coming, and any relevant "stuff" (for lack of a better term) from your business.

Richard Saul Wurman first coined the term information architect in the mid-1970s. He explains his choice of words as the following:

Unfortunately, design, which used to be a perfectly good word, means to make something look better for most people....The designer is called in to make a magazine article look better, or an illustrator is asked to make a picture look arresting, or a photographer is asked to take an interesting view of an author or a subject. Nowhere are any of these designers used in the fundamental sense of creating meaning or understanding.

That's why I've chosen to call myself an Information Architect....I mean architect as in the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles to make something work--the thoughtful making of either artifact, or idea, or policy that informs because it is clear. I use the word information in its truest sense. Most of the word information contains the word inform, so I call things information only if they inform me, not if they are just collections of data, of stuff (qtd. in Wyllys, 2000).

So an information architect's job is pretty much all-encompassing: figure out what you're displaying, and present it in the best manner possible. Organizing the information is a big part of that. Wurman lays out the five LATCH methods of organizing:

• Location
• Alphabet
• Time
• Category
• Hierarchy
  

An example of information arranged by category and hierarchy is Jess Bachman's Death and Taxes poster, which divides the federal budget by department and uses a proportionally-sized icon to indicate the relative size of that department's chunk of the budget. (As a side note, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the Office of Governmental Ethics' icon is visible only with a microscope.)

Web designers should be concerned with information architecture. Website content is divided into multiple pages, of course. How do you organize them? This is where the context comes in. Is this a large e-commerce site? Organize by product type. Is this a site dedicated to the history of Elbonian widgets? Organize by year. What are your users going to be looking for? Figure out how to get them to what they need, as effortlessly as possible. You are an architect. Construct your virtual building.