Information Architecture

Gwen Leapaldt Resume

About What I Do

What is Information Architecture?

Information architecture is a combination of organizing a site's content into categories, or identifying a task sequence or process, and then creating an interface to support those categories, sequence, or process. It stems from traditional architecture, which is made up of architectural programming and architectural planning.

In Web design, a person who drives the information design of websites and applications is an Information Architect (IA). The Information Architect maps the entire structure of the site and organizes the positioning of pages and screens within sections, developing a functional and intuitive plan to get the user from point A to point B on the path of least resistance. An IA will also identify tasks and the sequence of events and determines the page sequencing when designing online business applications.

Architecture can and should be an extremely collaborative and iterative process, which evolves somewhat organically in as much structure that can be defined up-front as possible. Anything an IA can do to ask as many questions and get as many answers up-front will ultimately help the process. IAs also focus on who use the site, strategic and business goals, key usability principals, technical constraints, and future needs.

How Does An Information Architect Fit Into a Web Team?

An Information Architect (IA) meets with the client to help define a project's scope, as well as plot the path to meet the objective and work with user interface designers and technologists to develop engaging and intuitive visual interfaces.

Information Architects also work closely with visual designers, helping to maintain the balance between form and function. Design effects architecture as much as architecture effects design. IAs also bridge architecture and look and feel with development by troubleshooting problems with technologists, database engineers, and HTML coders to resolve issues that arise affecting the architecture or the look and feel of the project.

On most projects the Information Architect essentially becomes the nucleolus of the design and development team as they have, through their numerous roles throughout the project, acquired the global understanding of how all components of the project fit together to meet the project's goals and objectives.

User Interface Design

If you build it, they will come. Well, that depends on how you've built it. If you've built it badly, they almost certainly won't come back.

Interface design that produces a positive user experience is not a matter of chance or intuition. It happens because of a systematic process that includes data gathering, high-level structure, detailed design, task-flow parameters, and testing. Everything has to be in place.

When the interface is well designed, it is comprehensible, predictable, and controllable - users feel competent, satisfied, and responsible for their actions. In web design, the person who is responsible to design an interface that is intuitive, easy to use, and allows the users to maximize their efficiency and effectiveness is called a user interface (UI) designer.

A UI designer will work closely with an Information Architect and technologists to ensure that the interface supports the architecture. In a usage-centered design approach the UI designer will focus more on what the user likes, and what they will expect from the site. It is the UI designer that will dig in up to the elbows to understand the users and the tasks they perform in order to design interfaces that will produce the best user interaction and experience.

The UI designer will also be concerned with download times, horizontal scrolling, page lengths, and browser differences. Other considerations include industry standards, human factors engineering, intuitiveness, consistency, and selecting the appropriate types of user interactions (pull down menus, pop up windows, check boxes, radio buttons, icons, scrolling lists, etc).

Web Positioning

Achieving a top web position is no accident. In fact, you would probably have a better chance of being struck by lightning than having your website "accidentally" end up in the top position on the major search engines.

Web positioning, or search engine positioning, is one of the most preferred marketing strategies for websites. Studies show that 95% of all people using search engines use one of the major 10 engines, and furthermore, that people only look about 30 deep in the results. Having a great web site that doesn't get pulled up in the top 30 positions is like having a wonderful billboard out in the middle of the woods. No one is going to see it.

If web positioning is done carefully, your site will attract very targeted visitors who are more likely to be customers or recipients of the services that your business is offering. Good web positioning starts with good design techniques, and it must be considered as early as the conceptual design stage of a website. In web design, the person responsible to ensure good web positioning is called a web positioner.

During the design process, a web positioner will work closely with the UI designer to make sure critical components such as appropriate use of keywords and keyword phrases, the inclusion of meta tags, domain name selections, the density of keywords, link exchanges, and the positioning of content and graphics on each page. Web positioners make it a point to understand how search engines work and keep up with the never-ending changes search engines implement so to ensure the a top position in the search engine results.