The individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear;
A person who creates the structure or map of information which allows others to find their personal paths to knowledge.

The Role of the Information Architect
This may sound obvious, but for most web sites, it's true: design and production storm ahead without any unifying principle to guide the site's development. To avoid overkill, the site will need a definition.

That's the main job of the information architect, who:
Clarifies the mission and vision for the site, balancing the needs of its sponsoring organization and the needs of its audiences.
Determines what content and functionality the site will contain.
Specifies how users will find information in the site by defining its organization, navigation, labeling, and searching systems.
Maps out how the site will accommodate change and growth over time.
Although these sound obvious, information architecture is really about what's not obvious. Users don't notice the information architecture of a site unless it isn't working. When they do notice good architectural features within a site, they instead attribute these successes to something else, like high-quality graphic design or a well-configured search engine. Why? When you read or hear about web site design, the language commonly used pertains to pages, graphic elements, technical features, and writing style.

However, no terms adequately describe the relationships among the intangible elements that constitute a web site's architecture. The elements of information architecture--navigation systems, labeling systems, organization systems, indexing, searching methods, metaphors--are the glue that holds together a web site and allows it to evolve smoothly.

Well-planned information architectures greatly benefit both consumers and producers. Accessing a site for the first time, consumers can quickly understand it effortlessly. They can quickly find the information they need, thereby reducing the time wasted on both finding information and not finding information. Producers of web sites and Intranets benefit because they know where and how to place new content without disrupting the existing content and site structure.

The Consumer's Perspective

Consumers, or users, want to find information quickly and easily. Contrary to what you might conclude from observing the architectures of many large, corporate web sites, users do not like to get lost in chaotic hypertextual webs. Poor information architectures make busy users confused, frustrated, and angry.

Because different users have varying needs, it's important to support multiple modes of finding information. Some users know exactly what they're looking for. They know what it's called (or labeled), and they know it exists. They just want to find it and leave, as quickly and painlessly as possible. This is called known-item searching.

Other users do not know what they're looking for. They come to the site with a vague idea of the information they need. They may not know the right labels to describe what they want or even whether it exists. As they casually explore your site, they may learn about products or services that they'd never even considered. Iteratively, through serendipity and associative learning, they may leave your site with knowledge (or products) that they hadn't known they needed.

These modes of finding information are not mutually exclusive. In a well-designed system, many users will switch between known-item searching and casual browsing as they explore the site. If you care about the consumer, make sure your architecture supports both modes. While attractive graphics and reliable technologies are essential to user satisfaction, they are not enough.

The Producer's Perspective

Consideration of value to the producer takes us back to the consumer. If you're producing an external web site, this involves actual and prospective customers, investors, employees, and business partners, not to mention the media and senior executives within your organization. Do you really want to frustrate any of these people? What is the value of quickly and easily helping them find the information they need?

If you're producing an Intranet, the employees of your organization are the consumers. What is the cost of their time spent to find the information they need? What is the cost when employees don't find the information they need?

Who Should Be the Information Architect?

The information architect of a large, complex web site should be two things: someone who can think as an outsider and be sensitive to the needs of the site's users, and at the same time is enough of an insider to understand the site's sponsoring organization, its mission, goals, content, audiences, and inner workings. In terms of disciplinary background, the information architect should combine the generalist's ability to understand the perspectives of other disciplines with specialized skills in visualizing, organizing, and labeling information.

Thinking Like an Outsider

Because information architecture is largely about the big picture view of the organization, its goals, and its politics, a logical choice for the architect role is a senior person who knows the organization as a whole and who isn't involved exclusively within the activities of one department. A senior person can often think like an outsider even though being on the inside, and has enough clout to enlist other departments' resources when necessary. One drawback to choosing a senior level manager is that he or she may have so many other responsibilities that the work gets delegated out to staff, thereby negating the original goal of using a single, organizationally savvy person.

Another approach is bringing in a true outsider: a new hire or a consultant. The great thing about outsiders is that they can get away with asking naive questions considered suicidal by insiders, such as "Why does your organization have two completely separate order fulfillment departments? The web site will confuse users if they can order products in two different, unresolved ways.

Thinking Like an Insider

As many organizations can't afford to outsource information architecture services or move a head honcho into the role, the responsibility often goes to an insider who is not a senior level manager. Sometimes this is ideal; it's the people in the trenches who often know the most about an organization's processes, and how to get things done within that organization. The problem with a lower-level person is that his or her knowledge may be too specific. Additionally, such a person often lacks the political base required to mobilize cooperation from others in the organization. A possible solution is to make information architecture this person's only job responsibility. This could allow him or her to step away from original duties and focus on the broader needs of the organization and the users of its site.

Disciplinary Background

Remember that no single discipline is the obvious source for information architects; each presents its own strengths and weaknesses.

Graphic design
Most people who have written about and practice information architecture are graphic designers by training. This is not surprising; as mentioned, graphic design is much more than creating pretty pictures. It is geared more toward creating relationships between visual elements and determining their effective integration as a whole. On a page, printed or HTML, these elements include white space and typography as well as images. So graphic designers traditionally have been focused on the architectures of individual pages of information.

Information and library science
We've found that our backgrounds in information science and librarianship have proven very useful in dealing with the relationships between pages and other elements that make up a whole site. By definition, librarians deal with organization of and access to information within information systems and are trained to work with searching, browsing, and indexing technologies. Just remember that librarians are also prone to get lost in details, a weakness that can distract from determining the big picture of a web site.

Journalism
Journalists, like librarians, are trained at organizing information, but in a different setting. If your web site delivers highly dynamic information, like a news wire or a push technology-based service, someone with a journalism background might have a great sense of how to best organize and deliver this information. Because of their writing experience, journalists are also good candidates for architecting sites that will have high levels of edited content. by their experience in organizing information for print and other traditional media.

Usability engineering
Usability engineers are experts at testing and evaluating how systems work. For information systems, they measure such criteria as how long it takes users to learn how to use a system, how long it takes them to find information in a system, and how many errors they make along the way. Of all the disciplines we list, usability engineering is probably the most scientific in its view of users and the quality of their experiences with information systems. Keep in mind that usability engineers concentrate on measuring a system's performance, not in designing or redesigning a system.

Marketing
Marketing specialists are expert at understanding audiences and communicating a message effectively to different audiences. Marketing expertise can ensure that the message is presented in a user-oriented manner and not buried in organizational jargon. If your site is geared especially toward selling products and building brand-awareness, someone from your organization's marketing department might do the trick. The drawback to marketing-based approaches is the danger that they are more geared toward selling rather than helping users.

Computer science
Programmers and computer specialists bring an important skill to information architecture, especially to architecting information from the bottom up. For example, often a site requires a database to serve the content; this minimizes maintenance and data integrity problems. Computer scientists have the best skills for modeling content for inclusion in a database. However, unlike librarians or usability engineers, computer scientists aren't necessarily trained in user-centered approaches to designing information systems.

So, an information architect might come from one of many different disciplines. He or she will certainly need to know at least a little about every type of expertise involved in the entire web site design and development process, because his or her work will affect every part of the process.

Perhaps the most important quality in an information architect is the ability to think outside the lines, to come up with new approaches to designing information systems. The Web provides many opportunities to do things in ways that haven't been done before. Many sites are pushing the envelope of design, architecture, and technology. It's the responsibility of the architect more than anyone else to prevent site failure and ensure that the user encounters a site designed to take best advantage of the medium.

Balance Your Perspective

No matter your perspective, the information architect ideally should be solely responsible for the site's architecture, and not for its other aspects. It can be distracting to be responsible for other, more tangible aspects of the site, such as its graphic identity. In this case, the site's architecture can easily, if unintentionally, get relegated to secondary status because the architect is concentrating, naturally, on the tangible stuff.

However, with smaller organizations, limited resources mean that all or most aspects of the site's development--design, editorial, technical, architecture, and production--are likely to be the responsibility of one person. Our best advice for someone in this position is obvious but worth mentioning: 1) find a group of friends and colleagues who are willing to be a sounding board for your ideas, and 2) practice a sort of controlled schizophrenia in which you make a point to look at your site from different perspectives; first from the architect's, then from the designer's, and so on.

Collaboration and Communication

The information architect has to identify both the goals of the site and the content that it will be built on. This means getting the people who drive the business, whether bosses or clients, to articulate their vision of the site and who its users are. Once you've collected the data and developed a plan, you need to present your ideas for an information architecture and move the group toward consensus.