Why Is Information Architecture Important?
If you want clean and focused design, you have to start with clean and focused Information Architecture. This approach forces us to do the thinking, so our users don’t have to. When we think about the Information Architecture of an app, we're forced to view it - not as a collection of pages and pixels - but rather as a collection of abstract thoughts: nouns and verbs. Nothing more.
We quickly see that an app or website is just information. The way we piece that information together determines how well it will be received.
It's just like constructing a thought, or sentence, or idea. The arrangement of the nouns and verbs in the sentence will determine how well the message is received.
An app is the same thing. An app is just a collection of nouns and verbs: “stuff” and “actions I can take on the stuff”. The nouns are the really important things. They make up the world of your app. The nouns in your app can be things like:
- Songs
- Folders
- Users
- Photos
- Restaurants
- Money
- Friends
This is the stuff that makes up your app.
The verbs are the actions the user can take on those nouns. Here are some examples:
- Play a song
- Create a folder
- Create a user
- Share a photo
- Find a restaurant
- Send money
- Add friends
So typically, in an app we can follow a certain pattern. A majority of the screen (roughly 80%) is devoted to displaying the "nouns", and a smaller portion is devoted to displaying the "verbs" - the available actions that the user can take on those nouns.
Good information architecture is universal (AND TIMELESS)
Over time we see that good information architecture is universal. Certain principles and patterns seem to always prevail. Perhaps most obviously, the items in the top-most navigation of your app should be the most important things. For Spotify, those things are “Home”, “Browse”, “Search”, “Radio”, and “Your Library”. What are the most important things in your app? Try to limit it to 3-5 items.
Where things get interesting is when we realize that information wants to take on similar structures, regardless of the exact nature of the information. For example, a common pattern we see is that as we navigate deeper into the Information Architecture of an app, we tend to move from broad collections of items, toward specific items. This is often referred to as “drilling down”.