Three Foundational IA Concepts | Jorge Arango

Information architecture is about designing semantic places that allow people (and other agents) to find and understand stuff.

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The words on the navbar suggest that context to your mind. As with physical contexts, you have expectations about what you can find and do here.

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When designing a navigation system, you want to tap these expectations; you can make a website or app easier to learn if you leverage what users already know.

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There are three concepts you must understand to create an IA: distinctions, relationships, and patterns.

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Distinctions are meaningful conceptual differences between related items.

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Each option stands on its own as a unit of meaning, but its meaning might shift when shown next to other options. Consider the word “checking”: on its own, it might mean one of several things. But when displayed next to the word “savings,” we immediately consider how “checking” and “savings” might relate.

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In larger sets of distinct yet related items, our minds spot patterns: recurrent arrangements that suggest subsets of items within a larger whole. In an information architecture, they might consist of groups of terms that hint at conceptual similarities.

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In designing an IA, you want to create intentional relationships between intentionally distinct terms. People who encounter such structures will perceive patterns, either between adjacent concepts or with other concepts they already understand. These patterns establish contexts that allow people to know where they are and what they can do and find there.

Distinctions, relationships, and patterns enable us to draw mental bounds around conceptual domains. They’re how we understand semantic places. As such, they’re foundational IA concepts.

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Posted on May 26, 2022