Information Architecture in a deportalized web

People sometimes ask me what an Information Architect actually does… My answer is usually that we are somewhat like ordinary architects, but instead of building physical houses we build virtual information houses where the doors are links and the rooms are information.

For many years Information Architects have been building houses in the shape of websites. An information architect would typically start with the front page (the front door) of the website and then work his or her way down through the many layers (rooms) of information in the website.

Just like ordinary Architects we would build one information house at a time, and then move on to the next house.

The problem today is that the structure of the Internet is changing, and sometimes it seems like the Information Architecture discipline hasn’t caught up with this change.

Working on a diverse range of projects, I increasingly find myself considering issues that explode the limit of the simple website. I no longer feel that I am building a single house, I feel that I am building whole cities of houses, condos, flats, rooms and storage rooms at the same time.

The age of the website is basically gone, and we are now moving into the era of the deportalized web, where information is not structured in discrete websites, but across many different websites, portals, widgets, search engines, communities etc. In this new era of the deportalized web, the role of the Information Architect is also changing. In stead of building website information structures, we today need to focus on how information can be linked together and structured across a wide range of different places in the digital landscape.

I am presently working on a project for a customer, where we are building the information architecture for a website, which will present visualized data from the entire world. We are of course building a traditional website for this purpose, but we are also realising that relatively few people from our target groups will bother to actually visit the website. We are therefore deportalizing the content of the website, meaning that we build widgets which can be “stolen” and reused by bloggers, associations, Facebook groups – basically anyone with an interest in the subject of the website. As an Information Architect I therefore need to be familiar with the entire information space existing around the subject of the website on the Internet, and I need to know how my widgets will fit into and be relevant on a wide range of different websites.

And this project is not a unique case. When we work with digital concept development for our customers at Hello Group, I more often than not find myself entangled in discussions about traffic generation, link strategies, affiliate deals and widgetization, which are all questions that transcend the borders of the website and deal with the structuration of information across websites.

It is about time that Information Architects start to understand that they can no longer stay within the save walls of the website. They need to break down the house and consider how users are actually using the Internet.

On a very tangible level this has two important consequences for the Information Architect discipline:

1. When we are building the information structure of a website, we must understand that users no longer look at our website as a well structured house with a main door (the front page) as the obvious starting point. Users jump between websites and follow deep-links that will lead them to the belly of your website without ever visiting your front page. We need to build websites that reflect this navigational pattern – websites that are logic and well structured while still being decentralized enough for the users who only visit a tiny part of our website.

2. On a much more disruptive level, Information Architects need to move into the areas of media planning, digital traffic strategy and search engine optimization. We need to understand not only the website we are building, but also the information environment which our users exist in. Information Architecture has always been about guiding users from their starting point to the desired outcome. Today this guiding does not start at the front page of the website, but at a much earlier stage, which may be when the user enters a search query in Google, reads her friend update in Facebook or checks her news in an Iphone app. Information Architects must understand how users in few seconds can move from listening to a song in a Facebook embedded Last.fm widget over to downloading the same song on Itunes and then storing it on their iPhone. Users simply don’t care whether they are on Facebook, Last.fm or Itunes, they simply follow links (as they have always done) that lead them to their desired outcome.

This is a new world for many traditional information architects, but it is definitely also a much more challenging and fun world, where we will need to look at ourselves less like architects and more like urban planners.