Information Arhitecture

What You Need to Know

To be successful, you need a diverse understanding of industry standards for creating, storing, accessing and presenting information. Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville in their book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, note that the main components of IA:

• Organization Schemes and Structures: How you categorize and structure information
• Labeling Systems: How you represent information
• Navigation Systems: How users browse or move through information
• Search Systems: How users look for information

In order to create these systems of information, you need to understand the interdependent nature of users, content, and context.  Rosenfeld and Morville referred to this as the “information ecology” and visualized it as a venn diagram.  Each circle refers to:

• Context: business goals, funding, politics, culture, technology, resources, constraints
• Content: content objectives, document and data types, volume, existing structure, governance and ownership
• Users: audience, tasks, needs, information-seeking behavior, experience

IA Sub-Specialties

Since the field of IA is complex and when dealing with large information systems the task becomes more massive, sometimes experts choose a specialized niche within the discipline.  Some examples of IA sub-specialties include focusing on search schemas, metadata, taxonomy, etc.

References

• The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and Beyond (2nd Edition) by Jesse James Garrett
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld
• Information Architecture , Web Style Guide 3rd Edition.
• Information Architecture Concepts 
• Components Used in Information Architecture 
• Information Architecture 3.0 
• Understanding Information Architecture 

Read more on https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/information-architecture.html