Has Information Architecture outlived it’s Usefulness?

I’ve been giving a little (but not much) thought about Information Architecture and how it collides with the social media ‘bottom up’ folksononmy that’s being created by the users. Don’t know what IA is? It’s the understanding, orgininization of information and users for websites. It evolved from library sciences.

At one point in my career, I gave a lot of focus into this practice, but have since felt that folksonomies (structures created from users, like tags, voting, rating) could also yield similiar if not better results. Of course, the answer is not ‘or’ but ‘and’ you’ll need both someone in your web team to provide a structure, and encourage multiple features from your user base to provide input how the structure can be sorted, arranged, and presented.

Read Thoughts on the Impending Death of Information Architecture

“Yes, indeed. IA as it has lived will soon die. Not because it wasn’t valuable, not because IA’s didn’t do great work, but because the Web is moving on.

The problem is that IA models information, not relationships. Many of the artifacts that IAs create: site maps, navigation systems, taxonomies, are information models built on the assumption that a single way to organize things can suit all users…one IA to rule them all, so to speak.”

The key issue Josh lays out is that IA is about information structure, not about people. Yes and no, Josh. I believe IAs do spend a great deal of time trying to understand their users from ethnography, interviews, monitoring, and other measurement tools. It would be interesting to take a look at how masses structure information from digg, wikis, and personal blogs. You may be able to find more patterns that way.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 6:55 am and is filed under User Experience, Web Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.