Expert Insights | Earley Information Science

[Video] What Is Information Architecture?

Written by Earley Information Science Team | Mar 23, 2022 8:45:20 PM

 

TRANSCRIPT

Information Architecture is a way of designing an information structure for any system or any process. And the analogy that I like to use is, if you were going to build a house, you would not just start digging holes and pouring foundations, right, you would hire an architect. And so as we build any of our systems, the architect is going to design your home or your house or your your building or your commercial property, whatever it is, based on your needs. And based on how you're going to use that property, that would be analogous to use cases.

But there's also going to be multiple designs. So there would be a foundation plan, there would be a framing plan, there would be a heating, ventilating, and air conditioning, HVAC plan or be an electrical plan. There's all sorts of different motors, there would be a rendering. And each of those types of plans are analogous to what we build an information architecture. So we build the core structure, the domain model, we build the the metadata, facets and structures, we build the wireframes, we build the user interface. And all of those are there multiple ways of which we build out sets of use cases. So all of those different design components are part of the information architecture, just as if a an architect was going to design a house or home or structure of some sort. So it's really important that we are intentional about our information design, and especially thinking about the consistency of organizing principles such as taxonomies, and metadata, and content models, and product data models, and even customer data models.

So anytime we're building or integrating or re platforming or migrating any type of a system, we need to have a plan and the plan includes everything up to the moving in plan, believe it or not, if you were going to move into a new home after it was all built, you would take the stuff in your old home, you'd label it, you put it in boxes, and you'd label it and you'd say, well, what room is it going to go to? And you bring it into the new home. And sometimes people will do things like take their attic, all the junk in their attic. And do you just move your junk in your attic to use new attic while sometimes, but many times it's an opportunity to clean out the attic right and to get rid of the stuff that you don't need. So it's there's a lot of great analogies to the physical world when we think about information architecture, and all of the related processes.

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