Information Architecture, In Short
In my new role as a Design Consultant, I’m involved in the design of user experiences (UX) – what a user experiences when they are, say, visiting a website.
When people ask me what I do, one of the things I usually mention is Information Architecture (IA), which is a part of user experience (UX) design.
Blank look. During that brief moment, I can tell that most people are thinking if they should ask me to explain further or not.
Then I’d go ahead with an explanation similar to this:
When you have a large website, it’s common for the information to be badly organized, such that it’s hard to find the information you’re looking for, right?
I’d pause and wait for some glimmer of understanding to appear in their eyes, before continuing:
What the Information Architect does is to use various methods, such as user studies, surveys, et cetera, to find out what is the optimum way to organize the information on the website, so that the website becomes a lot more user-friendly.
That’s when they usually get it.
It’s been a week into this new job, and I’ve been learning a tremendous amount, and there’s still loads to learn.
Things are getting interesting.
μεταcole 
is it like a kind of usability testing thing that you’re doing?
Usability testing is a part of what we might do in IA, but we go deeper than what usability testing alone can do, especially in terms of how information is structured.
i see..
Cool! kabababrubarta
This is great stuff, thanks for having the blog and putting details like this on it. Those of us with no writing skills really appreciate it. Believe me.