The Benefit of Information Technology
Information Architect is extremely vital to the UX design process. Although for a beginner it can be extremely tricky to understand. It’s like baking a cake.
The Information Architecture portion of the UX design process feels like when you are sorting the ingredients out on your counter before you start putting them in to mix. If you sort them out correctly, your cake making process will run smoother and you’ll probably have a better tasting and more delicious cake in the end.
For Lambda School’s unit on Information Architecture, we had to create and sort labels for our second project, mine was a party planner web app, and form those labels into a sitemap and site blueprint. Without this process, I wouldn’t be able to properly format my app in a way that would be beneficial and usable for the app’s user.
When it came to figuring out what labels would be the most important, I referenced a lot of my user research, mainly from my user interview. I took into account what my potential users told me was the biggest frustration of partying planning and what gave them the most enjoyment.
Without this information, it would have been incredibly difficult to figure out an initial placement for the content, or what pages I should label the navigation in the app. Information Architecture is probably the most important part of my app as I have to essentially create a glorified to-do app with extra features like creating a theme or adding images to a mood board. If the app is to have better usability, the placement of the app labels/features, and pages are crucial.
Without empathizing the importance of it, I may have found myself probably going down the road into an app that resembles Wunderlist with mismatched features, or rather features in places that make no sense.
For all that my app is offering, like planning entertainment, keeping track of a guest list, adding images to a mood board, users might not find those features if they are in the wrong spot on the app. Or the other side of that is they may be looking for it and get frustrated because it isn’t in a spot that makes sense.
Either way, I believe that Information Architecture is extremely important to any part of UX design. While it is primarily used in the definition phase, you can take the same principle of sorting and the empathetic placement of content to the UI phase or even when drafting copy for an app/website.
