Information architecture Summary

							Information architecture
       Summary


       Natalia Shatokhina
             CS575
          Spring 2010
                 Understanding IA
 Information architecture (IA) is a boundary, multidisciplinary field
which borrows from architecture, library and information science,
industrial design, and the social and cognitive sciences to design
information spaces


 IA has been defined in different ways, often in relation to Web
design as the art and science of organizing and labeling web sites,
intranets, online communities and software to support usability and
findability.




 More recently the field started encompassing environmental
design. Pervasive IA concept gains popularity.
  “Information ecology” concept
 “Information ecology”                      Business goals,
concept illustrates complex                 funding,
dependencies that exists                    politics,
between users, content and                  culture,
context                                     technology,
                              Context       resources



                                                  Audience,
Document/data                   IA                tasks,
types, content
                                                  needs,info-
objects,              Content           Users     seeking
volume,
                                                  behavior,
existing
                                                  experience
structure
 Information architecture as a
          discipline
Main components of IA for WWW:
   Organization systems (how we categorize information)
   Navigation systems (how we browse or move through information)
   Searching systems (executing a search query against an index)
   Labeling systems (how we represent the information)
   Metadata, controlled vocabulary, classification schemas

IA process:
 Research
 Strategy
 Design
 Implementation
 Administration
      Designing for pervasive
     information environments
 Pervasive architecture - a new view on the architecture of
  information and human-information interaction.
       - it is the information architecture for a pervasive
  environment, where user interacts with cross-media.
 Cross-media

   – Concept: parts of a single good or service are distributed
     among different devices, media, or environments, and require
     the user to move across two or more complementary, non-
     alternative, domains.
 Example: Design of an environment in a public library
   Paper:
Example: Carnegie library in Pittsburgh
The environment comprised physical spaces (buildings, rooms,
  materials), organizers (classification schemes, online catalog) and
  human beings (customers , librarians and staff)

 Research
   – Talked to stakeholders, interviewed librarians and customers,
     observed customers interactions with the library systems
 Analysis
   – Defined basic components of IA, created personas walking through
     scenarios, created diagrams mapping difficulties customers
     encounter when moving between organizers, communicated the
     understanding of the system to stakeholders
 Design (work in progress)
   – developed directions: improve customers’ wayfinding experience,
     help them transition gracefully from one organizer to another
 Refinement & Implementation (work in progress)
   – refined IA for physical space (redesigned signage and wayfinding
     mechanisms) and categorization schemes, proposed a surface for
     displaying of information of general interest in several areas as
     pervasive architecture element