Information Architecture helps you understand the foundations of the field: organizing, labeling, navigating, and searching information. The book also places information architecture within the broader context of Web-site development, from research to conceptual design to production; and it provides practical advice to help get you through that process.

Scott Hill interviewed Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, pioneers in the field, about their book and their work.

The Field of Information Architecture

Hill:

For those not familiar with the field, how would you define information architecture?

Rosenfeld:

Information architecture involves the design of organization, labeling, navigation, and searching systems to help people find and manage information more successfully.

Organization systems are the ways content can be grouped. Labeling systems are essentially what you call those content groups. Navigation systems, like navigation bars and site maps, help you move around and browse through the content. Searching systems help you formulate queries that can be matched with relevant documents.

For each of these systems, there is much more than meets the eye. If this wasn't the case, it would be a lot easier for users to find what they're looking for in web sites (and it'd be easier to maintain those sites, to boot).

Hill:

What are the major problems Web-site users encounter that information architecture addresses?

Morville:

On most large web sites and intranets today, users have tremendous problems finding the information they need to make decisions and answer questions. This is a huge source of frustration for users.

It is also a very expensive problem for web site producers. In a recent study of major e-commerce web sites, Creative Good, a Web consulting and research company, found that 39% of shopping attempts failed due to poor navigation. This suggests an estimated $6 billion loss in online retail sales during the 1999 holiday season.

Hill:

Why is it so hard to find information on the Web, and why aren't search engines more helpful?

Rosenfeld:

It's a simple case of the Web taking something that was already really hard and making it a lot harder. Information scientists were studying information system performance long before the Web was a sparkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye. [Editor's note: Tim Berners-Lee invented the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP.] They've known for years that users had a terrible time finding the information they need in CD-ROM databases, library catalogs, and other online systems.

One reason for this confusion is that it's really hard to express our information needs in words, much less translate those words into a query language understood by a dumb piece of software (i.e., a search engine). Another reason is that it's really hard to index the ideas and concepts that are stored in text (i.e., the stuff we're looking for) in a way that this dumb software can understand (and therefore find). So when we do a search, we're asking something much dumber than we are to do something we find hard to do ourselves.

But at least these older online information systems were fairly narrow in scope, smaller in size, more homogeneous in content and format, and targeted more focused audiences. The Web, on the other hand, has a zillion times more content, covers every known subject under the sun, uses many more formats, and is used by every imaginable audience. This heterogeneity makes it much harder to index and harder to search. Because fewer assumptions can be made about Web users and the kind of content they need, a search engine has an even trickier time on the Web. So what's hard gets harder.

Hill:

Your professional backgrounds are in the field of information and library studies. How did you get started working with Web sites?

Morville:

In 1994, before the Web took the world by storm, we were teaching some of the first academic and commercial courses about the Internet. We both believed the Internet would become an important medium and that librarians had a great deal to offer this brave new world of networked information environments.

We helped early adopters understand and use state-of-the-art tools such as FTP, Gopher, Archie, Veronica, and WAIS. We also designed a number of early Gopher sites. In retrospect, the limitations of Gophers (purely hierarchical text-only solutions) were a blessing as well as a curse. They forced us (and everyone else) to focus on issues of grouping and labeling. Then Mosaic exploded onto the scene and everyone became distracted by graphic design and technology issues.

After some experimentation in the full-solution web-site design business, we realized we wanted to return to our roots and leverage our core competencies as librarians. However, we didn't have a name for this specialization and didn't know whether there was a market for these specialized services.

Hill:

Did the concept of information architecture originate in the field of information studies?

Morville:

It's hard to say where the concept of information architecture originated, since people have been doing information architecture in one form or another for centuries. The structure and organization of books, maps, libraries, museums, and cities are all artifacts, in one sense or another, of an information-architecture design process.

Rosenfeld:

People have been developing information architectures ever since a stylus was first applied to a clay tablet. All information systems have an architecture, planned or otherwise. Books, for example, have sequential, numbered pagination, move top-to-bottom and left-to-right, use title pages, tables of contents, and back-of-the-book indices. These are all architectural conventions that we take for granted. But their acceptance took decades after Gutenberg's revolution.

Web sites, on the other hand, generally have unplanned, accidental information architectures. The conventions aren't really there yet, which isn't surprising given how new the medium is. With all of these information systems, someone has been functioning as the information architect, consciously or otherwise. So information architecture is nothing new in practice.

Morville:

The recent explosion in the number and size of networked, digital information environments has created a need and opportunity for people who specialize in this field.

Hill:

Did the term information architecture exist when you started?

Rosenfeld:

It did. Richard Saul Wurman coined the term about thirty years ago, and others since then (including us) have come up with varying definitions of the term, some quite similar, some not.

Morville:

We first began using the metaphor of building architecture as a way to explain our focus back in 1994. In 1995, we began writing the "Web Architect" column for Web Review magazine. Then, in 1996, Richard Saul Wurman's book Information Architects caught our eye. At first, we were excited by the notion that information architecture was becoming mainstream. But when we read the book, we realized that his definition of information architecture didn't match ours. He focused on the presentation and layout of information on a two-dimensional page. We focused on the structure and organization of sites.

We brashly decided that in our world view, Wurman was really talking about the digital equivalent of interior design or information design, not true information architecture. Of course, not everyone would agree. A healthy and sometimes heated debate over the definition of information architecture continues to this day. These debates are a good illustration of the ambiguity of language and of the political and emotional implications of information architecture design.

 

Hill:

How has the field developed since your book was published in 1998?

Rosenfeld:

If postings for "Information Architect" on Monsterboard are any indication, the field is booming. This isn't surprising: Thanks to cheap and easy-to-use information technologies like the Web, people can create information much faster than they can ever hope to organize it. It's probably safe to say that there will always be a greater demand for information architects than anyone can supply.

As far as what constitutes information architecture itself, we've learned quite a bit since we did the bulk of our writing back in late 1996 and early 1997. What we did back in those days, and what our book covers, is what we now call "top-down" information architecture. Top-down architecture is about creating basic top-level structure and navigation for organizing large bodies of content, such as entire sites.

The other area of information architecture, as you might imagine, is "bottom-up" information architecture. Bottom-up information architecture covers how you can organize content at a much finer level of granularity: not whole sites, but at the level of individual documents, or, going further, at the level of content "chunks" that mark-up languages like XML deal with.

Another way to look at this distinction is that top-down architecture is about determining the right questions to ask (e.g., What are the major categories that should drive a taxonomy?), while bottom-up architecture deals with how to organize the answers (e.g., how you structure and classify actual pieces of content). Of course, all information architectures combine both top-down and bottom-up approaches to some degree.

How you chunk, link, and classify "atoms" of information from the bottom-up perspective is something we've not seen many people write about in great detail. This is surprising, because so much of our consulting these days fits squarely into this area. What's also surprising is how few information architects in the field seem prepared to discuss this aspect of information architecture. Many of them seem stuck in a top-down perspective. This is why we've started putting together a new edition of our book, which will cover bottom-up information architecture extensively.

Onto the rest of the interview

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