Why some IA is better than none
3 ways to encourage tactical information architecture
In February of this year, I spoke at World IA Day Toronto. I warmed up the crowd by pointing out that IA has seen better days:
- “We still collectively suck at IA.” (Feb 2016)
- “IA is the most important part of design you’re overlooking.” (April 2017)
- “My work has moved from IA into content strategy.” (Oct 2018)
- “IA is a skill that I often find missing in Product and UX.” (April 2019)
- “The job title ‘Information Architect’ is dead.” (Oct 2019)
I’m not the only doomsayer. In April, Abby Covert used her IA Conference keynote to argue that information architecture has been pushed to the sidelines by mobile design, walled gardens, and broken fast things.
I wasn’t booed off the stage back in February — but only because I argued that everyday users are starting to notice that poor IA is degrading their digital experiences. Amazon is a mess:
iTunes, meanwhile, let us drown in content for over a decade. In a January 2020 Atlantic article, Robinson Meyer argued that “The explosion of cloud storage and the invention of smartphones subverted the idea that we should organize our computer.” Unfortunately, the result is that “We’re all now wanderers in a sea of content.” And many who wander are in fact lost.
These navigational mistakes and organizational neglect represent a significant opportunity to make IA great again. But how? Through something I call tactical IA.
From practical to tactical IA
In 2010, Donna Spencer wrote A Practical Guide to Information Architecture. I skimmed the second edition last year and I can confirm it’s exceedingly practical.
When you’re in a position of strength there’s nothing wrong with being practical. But when IA is missing or overlooked because information architects are dead, suck, or now called content strategists, a talk entitled “A sensible framework for IA projects” might not be enough to flip the script.
Enter tactical IA.
Tactical IA isn’t as comprehensive as waterfall-era IA, but it’s learned from experience that some IA is better than none. Tactical IA doesn’t ignore the philosophical and theoretical roots of IA, but cherry picks relevant aspects on a project-by-project basis. Tactical IA is designed for SaaS, apps, mobile experiences, and other stuff that didn’t exist when classic IA was invented. Tactical IA doesn’t belong to a single UX discipline. And by improving its visibility through utility, tactical IA creates the conditions for an even larger impact in the future.
Tactical IA is Lisa Maria Martin’s Everyday Information Architecture: “If your team has the budget to hire a dedicated information architect that’s great. If not, I want to make sure that you can make informed, responsible, effective structural decisions.”
Tactical IA is Abby Covert’s How to Make Sense of Any Mess: “We need to see information as a workable material and learn to architect it in a way that gets us to our goals.”
So how can we use everyday tactical IA to make sense of any mess? Let’s start with 3 things: IA lenses, lightweight frameworks, and sales techniques.
Take a peek through IA lenses
I have a deck of wireframing cards. And BrandSort cards. Plus UXPin’s paper prototyping kit and the Design Fiction work kit. I want to say that I use these zany analog design thinking tools all the time … but I don’t.
The exception is my pack of Information Architecture Lenses, created by Dan Brown. They’re 51 IA lenses that divide the discipline into categories like presentation, structure, inclusivity, flexibility, and classification. You can watch Brown explain them in a video, or read an article about them (or both, it’s up to you).
In March of 2019 I bought a deck and used them a few months later in an IA workshop. With the help of co-worker Rya Gershcovich, I cut up the key elements of Shopify’s product page and asked our UX team to rearrange it based on a few IA lenses.
None of the designers, researchers, front-end developers, or UX leads in the room would describe themselves as IA experts. But they were all able to dive right in and use the lenses to improve visual hierarchy and content modelling.
After the workshop I tweeted about using the lenses, which led to a call with Dan Brown. He was surprised to learn I used the lenses to teach people about IA, since he created the cards as a nudge for senior information architects. But when you think about it, his lenses are perfect for IA newcomers. In essence, Dan Brown ran the 500+ pages of Information Architecture For The Web and Beyond through a centrifuge, extracted the best bits, and put them into a condensed format that’s easy to browse and digest. It’s almost as if he applied information architecture principles to the principles of information architecture.
We need more of this, please.
Keep frameworks light, relevant, and visible
Attending the 2018 Information Architecture Summit in Chicago reminded me that there’s an impressive breadth and depth to IA. But for the most part, your co-workers don’t care about robust metadata schemas or intricate taxonomies. All they want is a nice, lightweight framework to help them understand why they won’t get fired for agreeing to your IA recommendations. Last year I gave a presentation where I boiled IA down to 6 words:
Simplify complexity. Support scalability. Create consistency. Who doesn’t want that? (Answer: no one).
Full disclosure: I borrowed that framework from a co-worker. It was buried in a Google slide deck that was hidden in a dusty folder. The good news is that framework, along with a bunch of other great IA thinking, was recently published in Shopify’s design system Polaris.
That’s another key aspect of tactical IA — finding ways to tell as many people about it as possible. Make it visible. Make it relevant. Make it easy to find.
Selling IA by the pound
IA is not the only UX discipline with a PR problem. UX research has a long, proud history of justifying its existence. But unlike IA, UX research survived agile and lean by being plucky and crafty. Whether it’s Caitria O’Neill’s cat on a dinosaur or Laura Martini tricking stakeholders into saying yes to UX research with buzzwords like “scalable feedback loop,” there’s a willingness to shift with the times.
As a content designer (see also: product content strategist, UX writer, pixel-stained wretch) I’ve spent the last four years getting really darn good at justifying my existence, leveraging teachable moments, and learning how to accumulate trust through a series of small- and medium-sized victories. I’ve taught dozens of UXers that short beats good but also that clarity beats brevity. But it’s not all smiles und sunshine. I’ve also employed “touch the stove,” disagree and commit, and hard truths disguised as memes:
Along the way I’ve learned that no one, regardless of discipline, gets to do things exactly the way they want. There are always a bucketful of constraints. Time. Budget. Technical. Stakeholders.
Even if you’re at an organization where UX has a strong voice, nothing is a given. There’s no such thing as a textbook approach for content design. I will always have to provide rationale for my activities and prioritize ruthlessly — all while being split across projects. Given this, IA shouldn’t feel picked upon.
And yet. At IA Summit 2018 I heard a few speakers say, in essence, “We used to be really important — and we still are — but no one seems to realize it.” That’s a lament, not an argument. My experience as a content designer has taught me that tactical callouses are part of the job.
The path to galactical IA
In a May 2019 tweet, Lívia Labate noted that, “It is difficult to talk to people about the difference between the conceptual structure of something and how that structure is represented in pixels.” In other words, it’s hard for many people to understand or discuss how information architecture impacts visual design and vice-versa.
There’s a whole new generation of UXers who can’t fall in love with IA until they gain some experience with it. Once you give people the ability to separate structure from visual design, a whole new world of UX appears. If you want people to understand why IA is important, show them, don’t tell them.
That said, flash cards and clever slides only take us so far. Foment from below needs to be coupled with buy-in from above. As Abby Covert argues in her IA Conference keynote, there’s no shortage of “full stack, persistent, structural deficiencies.” But there’s also no shortage of people who want to do hard, necessary, essential work on intergalactic-sized IA problems. Incentive structures, not laziness, might be the root cause. As Covert notes, the best way to get promoted is to take on “something that is clear and time bound” not some “lofty, messy, under-the-surface project.” For the reverse to be true, we’ll need an incremental series of IA wins to gain momentum and change minds.
In other words, it’s a perfect time for some tactical information architecture.
