Expert Voices: Peter Morville on Why Information Architecture Matters - ' Next page' (
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: The Meaning of Information">
The Meaning of Information
CIO Insight: How do you define information architecture?
Morville: Information architecture deals with the structure and organization of a Web site. It's about the design of the navigation and searching systems, the design of taxonomies, and making sure that they work both for browsing and searching, with an emphasis on making sure people can find what they're looking for. And it isn't necessarily limited to the Web. You can think about these organizational issues across any kind of media or channel, though the Web is where these issues are most concentrated.
How has information architecture changed as the Web has grown and Web-site visitors have become more sophisticated?
It's funny. Early on, "IA" was a new term—nobody actually had the job of information architect. Now there are a lot of people who have "Information Architect" on their business cards. And within the community, we've advanced quite a bit in our knowledge of how to do this work well, and how to integrate things like usability testing into the process so that we're not relying solely on our expertise and experience.
At the same time, there's a huge separation between companies that have embraced information architecture and are doing a good job on their Web sites, and those that are still back in the mid-1990s, building terribly organized sites that are tremendously frustrating to use.
A company's Web site is now very often the most visible expression of its identity. It's the channel through which most user interactions happen. So the trick is to align the information architecture for the Web site with that company's brand and identity, in recognition that the Web site is a very important instantiation of the brand.
Do you think that, as a rule, people have gotten better at Web-site design?
If you look at the Web today versus the Web in 1995, the improvements in information architecture have kept pace with the improvements in visual design. We all remember some of the horrors of the mid-1990s: all those image-intensive sites that took forever to load.
At the same time, it's easy to assume there's been more progress than there really has been. The technology keeps changing and improving very rapidly, but information architecture is more about words and language and organization, and to some degree psychology. Since we as humans aren't getting a lot smarter, the field doesn't advance as quickly as the technology does.
What gets in the way of good Web-site design?
Sometimes bad Web sites are bad because there's a lack of understanding about usability, findability, and the user in general.
Other times you have really smart, knowledgeable people, but politics prevent a good solution. I've seen lots of cases where if you gave any single person in a corporate Web-design group the ability to design the site, they would do a great job, but working all together they end up doing a terrible job.
Another typical problem: I had a client who had recognized they had a terrible Web site and wanted to make improvements. So they decided that developing some portal software in a content-management solution would help. But they actually made things worse: By putting all their content into a dynamic database system, they ended up focusing more on the technology at the back end than on the user experience at the front end. The result was a horribly slow site where pages, even on a high-speed connection, were taking up to a minute to load. It was a case where they had good intentions, but they actually managed to go backwards.
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