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Information Architecture is Here to Stay
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Over the holidays, the UXD team came across a blog post from Thomas Memmel’s blog on usability and user experience. While he touches on the industry’s “war of terms,” we were most interested in his statement that Information Architecture is going to begin disappearing from the scene in 2010:
“I believe that information architecture (IA) will disappear from the scene, because the web becomes increasingly interactive. IA was especially associated with an expertise in building content and navigation structures that rather had a static form. Today, technologies like Silverlight, AJAX and Flash turn the web into a highly interactive media. Because the design of interactive systems is headlined with the term interaction design (IxD), it will absporb IA as a discipline. Naturally, this comes with an increasing need for IAs to enhance their knowledge and design capabilities beyond static forms of content representation.”
We can agree that IA is changing, but we don’t think it is going away any time soon. IA’s rarely deal with static content and structure. There will always be information that needs to be organized – whether the technology delivers it in a static form or not.
Engaging with the interactive web isn’t like floating in a sea of nothingness. There is still information there, and that information may just be dynamic or interactive. Just because it is dynamic doesn’t mean it is structure-less. We will sometimes explain IA to others with an analogy of a skeleton in the human body. Without it, the other components cannot form a meaningful structure.
For us, IA is the middle layer. The technology layer (system architecture) is below and the visualization layer (user interface) is above. The IA is the immutable, abstract understanding of the information at hand. It defines the scope and relationships of this information and it is enduring over time. The underlying technology may change or the physical manifestation may change, but the IA remains constant. This constancy and relationship to the user’s wants and needs is what creates a more ideal user experience with a product.
So, what are our predictions for IA in 2010? We have to look beyond the technology. IA isn’t going anywhere so long as there is information to be had. Information is constantly growing, and technology is constantly evolving. Someday they will run in parallel, and the experiences will be out of this world!