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Information
Architecture
R.
E. Wyllys
Introduction
This lesson discusses
ideas associated with the phrase "information architecture"
(IA) and relates them to aspects of the library- and information-science
(LIS) professions.
Origin of the Phrase,
"Information Architecture"
The phrase "information
architecture" appears to have been coined, or at least brought
to wide attention, by Richard
Saul Wurman, a man trained as an architect but who has become
also a skilled graphic designer and the author, editor, and/or
publisher of numerous books that employ fine graphics in the
presentation of information in a variety of fields. In the 1960s,
early in his career as an architect, he became interested in
matters concerning the ways in which buildings, transport, utilities,
and people worked and interacted with each other in urban environments.
This led him to develop further interests in the ways in which
information about urban environments could be gathered, organized,
and presented in meaningful ways to architects, to urban planners,
to utility and transport engineers, and especially to people
living in or visiting cities. The similarity of these interests
to the concerns of the LIS professions is patent.
Wurman views architecture
as the science and art of creating an "instruction for organized
space." (See Endnote 1.) He sees the problems of gathering,
organizing, and presenting information as closely analogous
to the problems an architect faces in designing a building that
will serve the needs of its occupants. The architect must
- ascertain those
needs (i.e., must gather information about the needs),
- organize the
needs into a coherent pattern that clarifies their nature
and interactions, and
- design a building
that will—by means of its rooms, fixtures, machines,
and layout, i.e., flow of people and materials—meet
the occupants' needs.
In short, Wurman
sees the gathering, organizing, and presenting information to
serve a purpose, or set of purposes, as an architectural task.
In 1976 Wurman served
as the chair of the national conference of the American Institute
of Architects (AIA) and chose as "The Architecture of Information"
as the conference theme. It is a curious historical coincidence
that the AIA held a conference with this theme just 100 years
after the first meeting of the American Library Association.
He developed the following definition:
"information
architect. 1) the individual who organizes the patterns inherent
in data, making the complex clear. 2) a person who creates the
structure or map of information which allows others to find
their personal paths to knowledge. 3) the emerging 21st century
professional occupation addressing the needs of the age focused
upon clarity, human understanding, and the science of the organization
of information." (See Endnote 2.)
Information Architecture
Emphasizing Graphic Design
Although much of
Wurman's definition is directly applicable to what we people
in the LIS professions see ourselves as doing, it is clear that
Wurman emphasizes the presenting of information as the essence
of what an information architect does. It is also clear that
his vision of information architecture is colored by his own
powers as an artist and graphic designer. He sees an information
architect especially as one who can abstract the essentials
from a complex situation or body of information and present
those essentials in a clear and esthetically pleasing manner
to a user. An illustration of this view is Wurman's abstracted
representation of the Toyko rail transportation system (Endnote
3):
In this abstract
map, Wurman shows:
-
the stations (the bold white type inside the circle) on the
outer rail lines of the Tokyo transportation system, largely
ignoring the actual geography of the system while emphasizing
the most important matter to a person riding the subway:
viz., what the sequence of stations is
-
a selection of principal buildings or tourist sights (in
regular type outside the circle) near each station
-
the stations on the crosstown subway line
-
the junctions between the crosstown subway and the outer
rail lines
-
as an aid to orientation, the Imperial Palace Grounds.
Note the elegant
incorporation into the whole map of the yin-yang design, important
in oriental philosophy.
As another example of similar abstraction, on the right is a
map of the Orange Dillo Route (Endnote 4) in Austin, Texas,
operated by the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Again you can see that the designer of the map has concentrated
on presenting the essential information about the route. Geography
is partially represented, but the scale varies in different
parts of the map, and only the names of principal streets are
shown. The actual stops along the Dillo Route are indicated
by white numerals inside black circles. A few major possible
destinations are shown as aids to orientation.
This Capital Metro
map serves its purposes well, though no one would claim that
it displays the artistic elegance of Wurman's map of the Tokyo
rail transportation system. While few of us possess Wurman's
artistic ability, we can all strive toward his goal of "making
the complex clear."
Information Explosion
or Information Tsunami?
Wurman is gifted
not only graphically but also verbally. I cannot resist quoting
some of his "Introduction" to Information Architects.
He writes:
There is a tsunami
of data that is crashing onto the beaches of the civilized
world. This is a tidal wave of unrelated, growing data formed
in bits and bytes, coming in an unorganized, uncontrolled,
incoherent cacophony of foam. It's filled with flotsam and
jetsam. It's filled with the sticks and bones and shells
of inanimate and animate life. None of it is easily related,
none of it comes with any organizational methodology.
As it washes up
on our beaches, we see people in suits and ties skipping
along the shoreline, men and women in fine shirts and blouses
dressed for business. We see graphic designers and government
officials, all getting their shoes wet and slowly submerging
in the dense trough of stuff. Their trousers and slacks soaked,
they walk stupidly into the water, smiling-a false smile
of confidence and control. The tsunami is a wall of data—data
produced at greater and greater speed, greater and greater
amounts to store in memory, amounts that double, it seems,
with each sunset. On tape, on disks, on paper, sent by streams
of light. Faster, more and more and more.
Some of these
people go back to their desks where, folded back and forth
like accordions, are gobs of paper printouts of this stuff.
They nod their heads and say "Yes, this is important, this
is good stuff. The person sitting next to me, sitting in
the next office down the aisle, they understand it, so I
will smile, making believe I understand it too.". . . .
Unfortunately,
design, which used to be a perfectly good word, means to
make something look better for most people. A company invents
or develops some new piece of electronic hardware. When it
is finished it calls in a designer to wrap it up in a nice
package. Then the company gets an engineer who understands
how it works to write the instruction booklet. He suffers
from the disease of familiarity, and so few customers really
learn how to use the product. The designer picks the typefaces
in that booklet and (maybe) puts a cover on it. The designer
is not involved in the use, organization, or understanding
of the instructions, except tangentially to make it easy
to read. The designer is called in to make a magazine article
look better, or an illustrator is asked to make a picture
look arresting, or a photographer is asked to take an interesting
view of an author or a subject. Nowhere are any of these
designers used in the fundamental sense of creating meaning
or understanding.
That's why I've
chosen to call myself an Information Architect. I don't mean
a bricks and mortar architect. I mean architect as used in
the words architect of foreign policy. I mean architect
as in the creating of systemic, structural, and orderly principles
to make something work—the thoughtful making of either
artifact, or idea, or policy that informs because it is clear.
I use the word information in its truest sense. Most of the
word information contains the word inform, so I call
things information only if they inform me, not if they are
just collections of data, of stuff.
If I throw 140,000
words on the floor and connect those words with a sentence
or two, we wouldn't call that a dictionary. A dictionary,
or an encyclopedia, or many of the collections of data in
our world, are based on being able to find something. The
ability to find something goes hand-in-hand with how well
it's organized. We choose to organize the dictionary alphabetically,
and for most of us, most of the time, that's a useful organizing
principle. . . .
As I looked into
the organization of information, I realized that there were
only five ways to do it. They can be remembered by the acronym
LATCH: L) by location, A) by alphabet, T) organized by time
(many museum shows are organized by timeline; the famous
Charlie Eames Franklin and Jefferson timeline of those
two great men was probably one of the best ever devised),
C) by category (. . . it's the way department stores are
organized), and H) by hierarchy, from the largest to the
smallest of something, from the reddest to the lightest red,
from the densest to the least dense, and so on. The primary
choice of which way you organize something is made by deciding
how you want it to be found.
These are all
examples of information architecture: the building of information
structures that allow others to understand. But, the structures
of information go well beyond basic organization. Many principles
of clarity can be employed. For example, you only understand
something new relative to something you already understand,
whether visually, verbally, or numerically. Something will
have an understandable size if it is related to the size
of something you know. This is easy to see when viewing a
photograph of a building that seems to have no human scale.
Or visiting a painting and being surprised by its size, because
all the reproductions of it are not relative to a human being.
Scale always relates to us.
Wurman has much more
to say about what he believes should be the guiding principles
for information architects in his book, Information Architects
(Endnote 1), as do his numerous fellow contributors to the book.
Together, they make it a masterpiece of examples of information
design, primarily in the sense of excellent graphics.
Another of Wurman's
many books is Information Anxiety (Endnote 5), a work
in which he discusses other aspects of the information explosion
in a useful way. Delightfully idiosyncratic in its organization,
the book is, inter alia, a vehicle for Wurman to display
some of his nontraditional ideas about exposition. He begins
the book by saying: "Books are a major source of information
anxiety, and I'd like to ensure that you won't feel anxious
about reading this one. So, I've departed from the conventional
book format in ways that I think will reduce your book-induced
anxieties." (A new edition of this book, Information
Anxiety 2, was published at the end of 2000.)
Information-Rich
Graphics and the Work of Edward Tufte
Another aspect of
information architecture worth examining is exemplified superbly
by the work of Edward
Tufte on what he likes to call "high-information-content
graphics" (HICG). Tufte has written about HICG in three
masterful books: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
(1983), Envisioning Information (1990), and Visual
Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
(1997). All three books share the theme that pictures can convey
large quantities of information in a compact fashion, when constructed
through thoughtful design that concentrates on efficient and
effective ways of presenting information.
As an example of what
can be accomplished, Tufte discusses, early in his first book, The
Visual Display of Quantitative Information, an extremely information-rich
picture, Minard's Map of
Napoleon's March (because of its rich detail, this picture is
large and may be difficult for you to print; however, you should
take a look at it on your computer screen, scrolling around it enough
so that you can appreciate the richness of its information content).
Minard's Map is a stylized map of the part of Russia that Napoleon
invaded in the War of 1812. The map displays a wealth of information
about Napoleon's invasion, from the time his army crossed the Polish-Russian
border into Russia on June 24, 1812, till he and the pitiful remnants
of his army left Russia behind them once again on November 29, 1812.
For the French, those five months constituted one of the great disasters
of military history, made all the more dramatic by the campaign's
tragic contrast with Napoleon's earlier conquests, which had earned
him the reputation of being one of the great military geniuses of
history.
As Tufte describes
it, the picture is a classic diagram by
"Charles
Joseph Minard (1781-1870), the French engineer, which shows
the terrible fate of Napoleon's army in Russia. Described
by E. J. Marey as seeming to defy the pen of the historian
by its brutal eloquence, this combination of data map and
time-series, drawn in 1861, portrays the devastating losses
suffered in Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning
at the left on the Polish-Russian border near the Niemen
River, the thick band shows the size of the army (422,000
men) as it invaded Russia in June 1812. The width of
the band indicates the size of the army at each place on
the map. In September, the army reached Moscow, which was
by then sacked and deserted, with 100,000 men. The path of
Napoleon's retreat from Moscow is depicted by the darker,
lower band, which is linked to a temperature scale and dates
at the bottom of the chart. It was a bitterly cold winter,
and many froze on the march out of Russia. As the graphic
shows, the crossing of the Berezina River was a disaster,
and the army finally struggled back into Poland with only
10,000 men remaining. Also shown are the movements of auxiliary
troops, as they sought to protect the rear and the flank
of the advancing army. Minard's graphic tells a rich coherent
storv with its multivariate data, far more enlightening than
just a single number bouncing along over time. Six variables
are plotted: the size of the army, its location on a two-dimensional
surface, direction of the army's movement, and temperature
on various dates during the retreat from Moscow.
"It may well
be the best statistical graphic ever drawn." (Endnote
6)
What Tufte refrains
from saying, leaving it for the reader to recognize, is that
not only are the six variables plotted, but their presence and
arrangement in Minard's picture enables the viewer to use the
marvelous pattern-recognition capabilities of the human mind
to see not merely the variables but also connections among them.
The richness of information that Minard succeeded in incorporating
into this diagram sets a high standard for graphic design, one
that everyone concerned with information should strive to emulate.
Minard's diagram is a spectacularly good example of high-information-content
graphics.
What Do Wurman and
Tufte Teach Us?
Together, Wurman
and Tufte show us how greatly can excellence of graphic design
contribute to the organization and presentation of information.
Though few of us possess graphic skills comparable to those
that they, and their examples, demonstrate, we can all learn
from their emphasis on the importance of good graphic design.
In particular, Tufte's three books offer their readers a rich
elucidation of information-architecture design principles, both
for communicating information directly via pictures and for
using pictures to support the communication of information in
words.
Information Architecture
in LIS
From the viewpoint
of the LIS professions, the ideas of IA add a fillip of graphic
design and fresh thinking to a base of practice with which the
professions have long been concerned. Since the beginning of
writing, librarians have understood the importance of selectively
acquiring information and organizing it in ways that will facilitate
later access to the information by users. Librarians have understood
far better than most people that by no means can anyone anticipate
today all the possible future needs for the information being
acquired and organized today and, hence, that tools must be
provided to facilitate a variety of future uses.
In short, librarians
have long understood and practiced the principles that Wurman
has labeled as "information architecture." Nevertheless,
his fresh, innovative, and artistic exposition of the ideas
of information architecture is welcome and should be studied
by LIS professionals.
Does Information
Architecture Apply Only to the World-Wide Web?
Recently, IA has
taken on something of a connotation of applying especially to
the organization of information on the World-Wide Web. This
may be due in part to the opportunities that arose during the
1990s to rethink the presentation of library-catalog information
as this information has been moved into online public-access
catalogs (OPACs), and in part to the proliferation of information
on the Web itself.
An excellent presentation
of information architecture as referring primarily to information
organization on the Web is a book, Information Architecture
for the World Wide Web (see Endnote 7), written by two librarians,
Louis Rosenfeld
and Peter
Morville. These librarians built a business, Argus Associates,
that specialized in the design of Websites and has evolved into
the Argus Center for Information
Architecture. In their book, they emphasize that they "talk
about web sites. Not web pages, not home pages. Web sites."
They do so because they are concerned with the presentation
of information in the whole of a Website, with how the pages
within the site relate to each other, and with how the viewer
is permitted and/or directed to navigate his or her way around
the site.
A broader view of information
architecture is espoused by many thinkers, including Andrew
Dillon, who emphasizes the importance of the user experience
as a guide to information organization and who has written (Endnote
8) that
It should be clear
now to anyone who studies IA that attempts to narrow the
field's scope to organization of information on the Web have
failed to garner much support in the broader community. There
are at least two reasons for this. First, information organization
itself is a much contested area with pragmatic views from
the LIS tradition sometimes drawing on and often clashing
with more theoretical approaches from cognitive science,
anthropology and linguistics. Regardless of how IA tackles
this topic, many people will believe this is a legitimate
and central concern of other fields too. Second, many of
the folk at the earliest meetings on IA actively resisted
the notion of IA as primarily concerned with information
organization. Instead, these folks (among whom I include
myself) have continually argued that, complex as it may be,
website organization is far too limiting (and, dare I say
it, uninteresting) an issue on which to base a field. For
such folks, IA is concerned with more than categorizing,
searching and labeling, and, at the very least, must include
the range of experiences that a user may have with an information
space, be it in the pursuit of commerce, education or entertainment.
In so extending IA, this field was always going to be dealing
with many of the issues more traditionally tackled by HCI
[studies of human-computer interaction] where usability and
customer experience have always been of paramount concern.
Part of the difficulty
separating such fields as IA and HCI results from the fact
that information system design is a complex activity which
requires multiple skills that are beyond any one person and
one field. Hence we need teams of people, each with slightly
different backgrounds to work collectively on the problems,
applying methods appropriate to the needs of the project.
Furthermore, the issues of interest in information design
are so numerous that they attract diverse disciplines with
differing views of the situation and how it can be studied.
Couple this with the amount of design that is going on at
any one time in the world and it is clear that no one discipline
can claim to cover it all and no one set of issues drives
all design processes. End result – a mix of professionals
working together, bringing different skills, training and
methods as needed and available to bear on the problem. To
attempt to carve one part of this out for IA alone, and to
expect to gain agreement from other stakeholders on this
carve-up, is a fruitless task in my view and one on which
we should not expend too much energy.
Despite
their concentration on the Web, much of Rosenfeld's and Morville's
advice applies not just to Websites but to all collections of
information. For example, they say that the first consideration
in designing a Website should be to prepare a definition of
"what the site will actually be, and how it will work"
(their italics). Continuing, they declare that formulating such
a definition is
the main job of
the information architect, who:
- Clarifies the mission and vision for the
site, balancing the needs of its sponsoring organization
and the needs of its audiences.
- Determines what content and functionality
the site will contain.
- Specifies how users will find information in the site
by defining its organization, navigation, labeling,
and searching systems.
- Maps out how the site will accommodate change
and growth over time.
Although
these sound obvious, information architecture is really about
what's not obvious. Users don't notice the information
architecture of a site unless it isn't working. When they do
notice good architectural features within a site, they instead
attribute these successes to something else, like high-quality
graphic design or a well-configured search engine. Why? When
you read or hear about web site design, the language commonly
used pertains to pages, graphic elements, technical features,
and writing style. However, no terms adequately describe the
relationships among the intangible elements that constitute
a web site's architecture. The elements of information architecture-navigation
systems, labeling systems, organization systems, indexing, searching
methods, metaphors are the glue that holds together a web site
and allows it to evolve smoothly.
You should try rewriting
the preceding paragraph substituting the words "library"
or "information center" for their word "site,"
and substituting words like "catalog," "directory,"
and "call number" for their words "pages, graphic
elements, technical features, and writing style." When
you make such substitutions, you will see that Rosenfeld and
Morville could equally well have been talking about how to organize
the information-access tools and the information-bearing entities
(InBEs) in a library or information center.
Guidelines for Information
Organization
Rosenfeld and Morville
continue by saying:
Well-planned information
architectures greatly benefit both consumers and producers.
Accessing a site for the first time, consumers can quickly
understand it effortlessly. They can quickly find the information
they need, thereby reducing the time (and costs) wasted on
both finding information and not finding information.
Producers of web sites and intranets benefit because they
know where and how to place new content without disrupting
the existing content and site structure. Perhaps most importantly,
producers can use an information architecture to greatly
minimize the politics that come to the fore during the development
of a web site.
Consumers, or
users as we more commonly refer to them, want to find information
quickly and easily. Contrary to what you might conclude from
observing the architectures of many large, corporate web
sites, users do not like to get lost in chaotic hypertextual
webs. Poor information architectures make busy users confused,
frustrated, and angry.
Because different
users have varying needs, it's important to support multiple
modes of finding information. Some users know exactly what
they're looking for. They know what it's called (or labeled),
and they know it exists. They just want to find it and leave,
as quickly and painlessly as possible. This is called known-item
searching.
Other users do
not know what they're looking for. They come to the site
with a vague idea of the information they need. They may
not know the right labels to describe what they want or even
whether it exists. As they casually explore your site, they
may learn about products or services that they'd never even
considered. Iteratively, through serendipity and associative
learning, they may leave your site with knowledge (or products)
that they hadn't known they needed.
These modes of
finding information are not mutually exclusive. In a well
designed system, many users will switch between known-item
searching and casual browsing as they explore the site. If
you care about the consumer, make sure your architecture
supports both modes. While attractive graphics and reliable
wish list technologies are essential to user satisfaction,
they are not enough.
Organizational Schemes
and Organizational Structures
Like Wurman, Rosenfeld
and Morville discuss principles by which information can be
organized. They begin by distinguishing between the schemes
and the structures of systems for organizing information:
Organization
systems are composed of organization schemes and organization
structures. An organization scheme defines the shared characteristics
of content items and influences the logical grouping of those
items. An organization structure defines the types of relationships
between content items and groups.
Schemes
Rosenfeld and Morville
classify organizational schemes as either exact or ambiguous.
"Exact organization schemes divide information into well
defined and mutually exclusive sections." Among exact schemes
are alphabetical, chronological, and geographical groupings
of InBEs.
Ambiguous schemes
include topical (subject), task-oriented, audience-specific,
and metaphor-driven groupings of InBEs. "Task-oriented
schemes organize content and applications into a collection
of processes." Audience-specific schemes are suited to
situations where there are "two or more clearly definable
audiences" for the information: e.g., customers vs. employees,
first-time visitors vs. repeat visitors, or registered software
owners vs. potential buyers of the software. Metaphor-driven
groupings of information "are commonly used to help users
understand the new by relating it to the familiar. You need
not look further than your desktop computer with its
folders, files, and trash can or recycle bin
for an example."
Rosenfeld and Morville
note that it is also possible to have hybrid schemes that blend
"elements of multiple schemes." However, they counsel
that "confusion is almost guaranteed" with hybrid
schemes because users cannot apply a single mental model to
understand the scheme and, instead, must "skim through
each menu item to find" the desired information. They note
that unfortunately "hybrid schemes are common on the Web."
Structures
Organization structures
include hierarchies, networks, and database-oriented models.
Hierarchies are exemplified by such classification structures
as the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) and Library of Congress
Classification (LC) systems. Of these, the DDC may be considered
the "purer" hierarchy, in that it has an explicit
goal of classifying the entire universe of knowledge by means
of categories, sub-categories, sub-sub-categories, and so on,
whereas the LC classification has been developed empirically
in response to the need to handle actual library collections,
first at the LC itself and, nowadays, at research libraries
in general.
Networks are characterized
by having nodes and links between nodes, links that are not
restricted to paths within a hierarchy. Networks are exemplified
by the Web itself, with Websites and Webpages as nodes, and
with hyperlinks as the paths between Websites and Webpages.
Database-oriented
structures consist of pieces of information. These pieces are
stored in fields, which are grouped into records, which in turn
are grouped into files within a relational database structure
(see Endnote 9). It is usually convenient to think of the essential
InBEs in a relational database as the records themselves. All
relational databases also include metadata elements (see Endnote
10) that identify and associate the fields and records.
Summary
This lesson has provided
information about various ideas associated with the term "information
architecture" and has endeavored to show you how information
architecture is closely related to, and embodies most of, the
long-standing principles of library and information science.
Endnotes
1. Wurman, Richard
Saul; Bradford, Peter; eds. Information Architects. Zurich,
Switzerland: Graphis Press; 1996. ISBN:3-85709-458-3. [The quoted
phrase is from the jacket's definition of "architect".]
2. Wurman, op.
cit. [The quoted phrase is from the jacket.]
3. The Tokyo map
is from: Wurman, Richard Saul. Tokyo Access. Los Angeles, CA:
Access Press; 1984. ISBN:0-91546-105-6.
4. The Capital Metro
map was found at URL: http://www.capmetro.austin.tx.us/routes/orange.jpg.
Download date: 2000 October 2.
5. Wurman, Richard
Saul. Information Anxiety: What to Do when Information Doesn't
Tell You What You Need to Know. New York, NY: Bantam; 1990.
ISBN:0-553-34856-6.
Wurman, Richard Saul; Leifer, Loring; Sume, David. Information
Anxiety 2. Indianapolis, IN: Que; 2000. ISBN: 0-7897-2410-3.
6. Tufte, Edward
R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire,
CT: Graphics Press; 1983. ISBN:0-9613921-0-X. [Minard's diagram
appears on page 41 of this book. Etienne-Jules Minard (1830-1904)
was a distinguished French physiologist; he invented the sphygmograph,
a device still in use which records graphically a patient's
pulse and blood pressure changes; and he also did important
work in developing motion pictures, including making the first
movies of objects seen through microscopes.]
Tufte, Edward R. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics
Press; 1990. ISBN:0-9613921-1-8.
Tufte, Edward R. Visual Explanations: images and Quantities,
Evidence and Narrative. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press; 1997.
ISBN:0-9613921-2-6.
7. Dillon, Andrew.
IAs in search of an identity? Bulletin of the American Society
for Information Science and Technology. 2001 June/July 27(5).
Downloaded 2001 July 10 from http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-01/dillon.html.
8. Rosenfeld, Louis;
Morville, Peter. Information Architecture for the World Wide
Web. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly; 1998. ISBN:1-56592-282-4.
9.
For a brief overview of relational databases, see the LIS 386K.11
presentation entitled "Database-Management
Principles and Applications: Introduction."
10.
The LIS 386.1 reading entitled "Overview
of Metadata" provides information about the concept
of metadata.
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