Information architecture for everybody

Our world is full of messed up stuff that causes a lot of questions as to what we do as designers, marketing, etc.

A large part of this mess is information.

• Thinking of information as material is hard
• Information also exists from the lack of materiality

We can make all sorts of judgements from these cookies

There is no true information

8 of 10 Doctors do not recommend

Vs.

Doctor recomended

There is spin, and we find and construct information inside an architecture that already exists.

To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe. — Carl Sagan

Change at one level has implications at other levels.

Everyone has an opinion

frustration comes from people who have difference mental models.

Objects can help us compare our mental models.

Sometimes we think of ways to make sense of the mess

• tutorials
• incentives for the user to deal with the mess
• etc.

Don’t “Pretty up the mess” — @Abby_the_IA #uxlx pic.twitter.com/YNpE9gyzbc

— Adrian Howard (@adrianh) June 4, 2015

IA

IA is the tools and concepts that help people make sense of messes made of information.

It is also the way we choose to arrange the parts of something to make it understandable as a whole.

Critical components of IA

Ontology

The capiberra is considered a fish by the catholic church, so that it could be eaten on friday.

Meaning :

– is subjective

– is demographic

– is socio political

– gets lost in translation

– is complex

Ontology is the act of choosing the language to be used or not used within a specfic context.

Controlled vocabularies: list of approved term and definitions for a particular context and/or setting.

Example of controlled vocabulary: https://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/words-we-dont-say/?_r=0

We should start with language and not interface. Language is not just words, it can be icons, smells, light …

Taxonomy

Where does Michael Jackson go into? M or J ?

Organising is not hard, the hard part is agreeing on the organisation

You can arrange information by location, alphabetically, time, category, hierarchy. And that’s it. Basically. @Abby_the_IA #uxlx

— Mads-Peter Jakobsen (@madspeter) June 4, 2015

Choreography

These are the liberties and constraints that you put on users to try to simplify the process.

How you coreograph the product says something about you.

If you make anything, you are probably already architecting information.