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Information Architecture (IA) is the practice of designing the infrastructure of a Web site, specifically the navigational model and interaction design. The title ‘Information Architect’ has quickly come out of obscurity and become a necessity in the art of web development. While many factors work together to create a quality site, careful planning is what makes or breaks it. IA creates the structures or maps of information which acknowledges how people will eventually use these structures to create knowledge. Thus, it’s a user-centered process as opposed to a data-centered process.

The modern practice of information architecture was first popularized by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, co-authors of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web [(AKA “the Polar Bear Book”).

Information architecture often has an emphasis on usability studies and testing for website compliance to community standards.

“IA is the art and science of expressing a model or concept for information. Information architecture is used in library systems, web development, user interactions, database development, programming, technical writing, enterprise architecture, critical system software design and other activities that require expressions of complex systems. Information architecture has somewhat different meanings in these different branches of what might be called IS and/or IT architecture. Most definitions have common qualities: a structural design of shared environments, methods of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, and online communities, and ways of bringing the principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.” (from Wikipedia.org)

Information architecture is defined by the Information Architecture Institute as:

1. The structural design of shared information environments.
2. The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support findability and usability.
3. An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

The term information architecture describes a specialized skill set which relates to the interpretation of information and expression of distinctions between signs and systems of signs. It has some degree of origin in the library sciences. Many library schools teach information architecture.

In the context of information system design, information architecture refers to the analysis and design of the data stored by information systems, concentrating on entities, their attributes and their interrelationships. It refers to the modeling of data for an individual database and to the corporate data models an enterprise uses to coordinate the definition of data in several (perhaps scores or hundreds) of distinct databases. Recently, the “canonical data model” is applied to integration technologies as a definition for specific data passed between the systems of an enterprise. At a higher level of abstraction, it may also refer to the definition of data stores.

RNA labs latest projects in Information Architecture

RNA labs has been working with several large clients who have large data-driven websites and software that needs easy to use information architecture and at the same time that is easy to understand and navigate. We have also run usability testing to get the most out of IA and designing websites and software applications that speak to the user.