Is the process of organizing and presenting data to a person in a meaningful, clear and intuitive manner. IA is the foundation of all great customer interactions with information spaces. All other design aspects – form, function, metaphor, navigation, interface, interaction, visual, and information systems – build upon the groundwork of information architecture. Initiating the IA process is the first thing you should do after a thorough process of user research.

Typically, we begin with the business needs and organizational goals. After listing and discussing these aspects, we address the needs, expectations, and goals from the customers perspective. This is referred to as the “Top-down” information architecture — beginning with the abstract, and slowly narrowing down to clear objectives to drive the implementation.

The next step involves an exhaustive content inventory: cataloging of all your existing content as well as all the content which needs to be created garnered from the Top-down IA process. Correlating the underlying relationships in the content with people’s expectations and behavior, we develop a new overall information structure. This is typically referred to as “Bottom-up” Information Architecture.

We then extensively document the new site structure using a rigorous diagramming methodology, carefully selected labels, and a controlled vocabulary of key terms. Using these assets, we create a navigation design that allows people to move easily and quickly around the information, helping them find and use what they’re looking for. We can do this because we understand the cognitive science behind information seeking as well as the art of findability design.

During a typical information architecture process we will:

• Collect and organize product requirements. We focus on more than the list of desired functions; investigating the stated and implicit factors that the company considers to be most important in the product’s success.
• Collect and organize user needs and expectations. Either using existing research or by performing an exhaustive user research and persona creation process, we identify what the products’ users want from it and how they expect to use it. We put this knowledge together into a mental model of the user, an understanding of the user’s wants, needs and expectations.
• Perform a content audit. The depth of the audit depends on the final outcome-high-level navigation redesign requires only auditing a sample of content, whereas a CMS migration necessitates a rigorous page-by-page inventory. The audit is the analyzed to define primary content types, which are then laid out in a Content Map.
• Create a new information architecture by coupling the content audit analysis with our understanding of users’ mental models and the product’s business goals.This architecture will define the overarching user experience of the site and will be documented in a diagram specifying every step of the user experience within the section under review.
• Provide detailed navigation specifications indicating the navigation elements required for every page, in order to guide the implementation of the new architecture.
• These specifications will be supplemented by wireframe schematics indicating the placement of all navigation elements. We can also provide a style guide that will outline naming conventions for key content areas, URL conventions, and conventions for site-wide way-finding cues.

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Information Architecture Resources

• An introduction to information architecture
  Information architecture (or IA) is the science–some would insist art–of defining the structure, organization, navigation, labeling and indexing of a website. It is the role of the information architect to decide how a site should be structured, what kind of content it should host, and how to accommodate future growth. In short, information architecture defines the backbone of a website.

• Information architecture
  Part of a series of readings for students of information science, this article discusses ideas associated with the phrase “information architecture” and relates them to aspects of the library and information science professions.

• Information architecture for the rest of us
  Using a lost-in-the-woods analogy, John S. Rhodes explains information architecture in a very simple and clear manner.

• Ambient Findability
  Intelligence is moving to the edges, flowing through networked computers, wireless devices, empowered users and distributed teams. Ideas spread like wildfire. Innovations emerge from uncharted borderlands. Information is in the air, literally. We’re exploring a new world called cyberspace, and we’re navigating without a map. (Peter Morville)

• Designing complex, adaptive systems
  Reductionism is popular, but it makes for incohesive sites. Forget top-down, use bottom-up information architecture design to make your Web site whole. (Peter Morville)