What two things do a mother repairer, a brilliandeer-lopper, and an information architect have in common?
- When people ask what they do for a living, they’re all likely answer the question by describing the type of company they work for.
- If any of them throw caution to the wind and answer with the name of their job, the most common response is, “Huh?”
Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld, who literally wrote the book on information architecture, explain the awkward social interaction this way:
“Their eyes glaze over. They nod politely. Then comes the desperate attempt to change the subject. ‘Hey, speaking of information architecture, did you hear tomorrow’s weather report?’”
What is information architecture?
Most of us don’t know how to build a house by ourselves, and we wouldn’t even try. Even so, we still provide requirements that affect the end result. We can communicate these needs in terms of the physical structures (e.g., the number of bedrooms and bathrooms) or in terms of our physical and psychological needs (e.g., how much space we need to accommodate a growing family.).
This needs-defining exercise can help the builder decide not only what physical structures to build, but also their relationships. A builder might say, for instance, that the kitchen should always be adjacent to the dining area, or that bedrooms, to ensure the safety of the family, should always be downstairs, or that steel beams should be used instead of wood.
This is sort of how information architecture works. Web designers practicing this discipline must determine, based on the needs of the project, what the constructs (content) are, where they will come from, how they’re created, and the relationships that should exist between them.
How has it evolved?
Unlike in designing a house, however, on the Web it’s possible to jump from one area to a completely different area immediately. It’s even desirable when doing so will help someone solve the problem that brought him to your website in the first place.
Website design is about more than organizing chunks of information logically (which is still an important part of the overall process), but about planning holistic experiences through which people can solve their problems or find something they want or need.
Even though in the early days of the Web, jacks-of-all trades, art directors, or programmers handled these jobs, as websites become more complex, the industry has increasingly looked to specialists to fill this function.
They call them “experience designers,” “experience planners,” and, if they don’t deliver the results the customer wants, some other things that we won’t reprint here.
Much like the architect’s responsibility in building a home, the experience planner on a web project must take multiple problems and communicate the means by which those problems can be solved to various members of the team, and to the stakeholders themselves, not only be describing the structures, but also by defining how they work and the path through which people should and are likely to encounter them.
When you don’t need a specialist
Whether you plan for it or not, experiences get designed. It is either going to be a good experience or a bad one. A good experience reinforces the brand, and a bad experience can harm it. So the short answer is it doesn’t matter if it’s a specialist who designs the experience or someone who wears multiple hats. It only matters that the experience solves the problem in question – a problem that was correctly identified in the first place.
When the problem, solution, and/or risks are relatively small and already clearly defined, there’s usually no need to call in a specialist. Just ask a few average people what they think, and you can pretty much figure out what works and what doesn’t.
Blogs are good examples of websites where calling in a specialist might not be the best use of your resources. They’re pretty straightforward (though if your design team has a tendency to get too clever by half, getting some feedback from a specialist as a gut check couldn’t hurt).
When you need a specialist
On the other hand, specialists are particularly useful for complex projects, because it gives design teams the ability to work out the details of how a site should function before getting into the nitty-gritty details of how it should look.
This way, teams can decide if the way it functions can actually solve the problem before they must decide if it they’re using the right colors or if it’s pretty enough.
Blog platforms are good examples of websites that would be impossible to create but for the work of someone who was an expert at architecting information, it’s flow, and designing experiences.
The ugly truth
Any time you must deal with influencing human behavior, planning any experience around ergonomic, technological, psychological, social, and business requirements with any degree of certainty in a vacuum is tricky (if not impossible).
Therefore, it’s important to do a good job identifying the problems beforehand and to institute continuous testing methodologies to make sure you’re solving the right problems.
Also, a lot of people can have some very good answers – even if they’re not specialists. For even though the industry is recognizing information architects and experience planners as specialists, the truth is that they got there by first being generalists who, at some point in their careers, took an express interest in mastering the art and science of turning abstract concepts into concrete, intuitive, and persuasive solutions.
So the next time you’re on a website – especially a big website – and you’re able to find what you’re looking for, be sure to drop a note to the site’s owner to thank the information architect on your behalf. If you also happened to enjoy the entire experience – you found it intuitive, easy to understand, and even pleasurable – thank the experience planner, too.
And then grin with the knowledge that the people who monitor that kind of communication probably don’t even know what the heck you’re talking about.
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