A note about information architecture #

There is never only one solution #

There is not a prescriptive path through an information architecture project. There is no one, perfect answer that will last forevermore.

Personally, I don’t think I’ve taken the exact same path twice.

Consider navigation projects. They look the same from the outside: developing a hierarchy. But the priorities change. The known issues follow a different tenor, the backbone of the content was developed with more or less fluidity, the mental models of the people in charge of content are more or less flexible. The subject matter can be more or less complex, and the designers and developers more or less experienced with the material. All of these impact the time, attention, and reactions of the sources. Break them, and they’ll never maintain the architecture devised and the user experience will devolve back to chaos faster. 

The existing infrastructure is a product of a mix of short and long term solutions. Sometimes there will even be solutions that were intended to be short term that have become such a cornerstone in the data or process that it can’t be moved without incredible chaos, which the business may or may not have a stomach for. Some information structures were built to try to solve the world as a first step. More often, bits and pieces are built up over time, grafting solution over solution over solution until it’s hard to find the core.

This happens in websites. This happens in software development. It can happen in any business endeavor that has cyclical data that gets built up, expanded, and contracted over time — so any living, used process.

This happens in our education. It happens in our cultures and social structures.  It definitely, absolutely, beyond any shadow of a question has happened in our laws and tax structures.

It happens in our language.

It happens in our brains.

Anywhere that data exists outside of a chaos void has an information architecture. If a data point has meaning, it exists in an architecture — the data is somehow, in some way, connected with other data. 

Pull all of these potential uses of information architecture together and think about what this means in terms of the information architectures we use daily. We have 8.2 billion people, with each of us forming our own information architectures that are rubbing up against other information architectures, mostly on an ad hoc basis. It actually, overall, works amazingly well. A baby gets fed. An idea is spread. A digital, information-hardware-software-formed button is pushed resulting in the intended connection between business and individual. 

But not all information architectures work well. They get drudged over time. They have too much complexity for the at-hand problem or not enough meaning. They lose a cornerstone and suddenly what used to work smoothly, doesn’t. Or it simply is required to scale and was not built to be scalable, or built on a legacy system and used daily, or built to be scalable with assumptions that didn’t hold true.  There are as many reasons for an information architecture to go awry as there are people on earth, times the decisions they are making, across the lifetime they lived, and the decisions made by people no longer living that are still impacting as a ‘just the way it works’. 

So, yeah, there is not a prescriptive path through an information architecture project. There is no single solution, but a series of bets to be made. Even if the first attempt at a solution is great, it will all be revisited eventually as more brains process and rub together to find new balances and insights.

That said, good information architecture, built with the intent of real people using it to help answer their real questions, with a flexibility conditioned on humility that what is known is not everything, and avoiding the hubris of inflexible, static, brittle structures based on what we are certain of and what we want others to do.