Are information architects UX designers?

What is it I do? Lately I’ve taken to calling myself an information architect.

I help people create news websites that encourage exploration, tease out the deeper context behind every news story and have the rich structure and metadata needed for easy repurposing across platforms.

That’s my first stab at an elevator pitch, by the way.

I considered information designer, but nobody knows what the heck that means.

I described myself as a journalist/coder for a while, but it’s been a long time since I did any reporting myself. Plus, I’m not the guy who creates infographics or multimedia packages that tell an individual story differently. Instead, I do infrastructure work to better present each and every story. I want to make sure all the content on a news website works together to provide readers with clear pictures of broader issues. So journalist/coder doesn’t quite fit.

I’m a pretty accomplished coder and I have some experience with larger software projects, but then again, I’m not really a software architect pur sang either.

So information architect it is. For now.

But then again, maybe I’m not an information architect in the same way a lot of other people are information architects.

Most publications (though not in the Polar Bear book!) relate information architecture closely to user experience design, maybe even suggesting IA as a subfield of UX design. User experience design for information-heavy websites. But I don’t do any UxD myself, though it fascinates me.

I work on taxonomies and all kinds of navigation. Enhancing findability and encouraging exploration is very big for me. That’s classic IA if anything is.

But what keeps me up at night? Thinking about how content on a news website can relate to other content, and to people, places, events and so on. Or, technically speaking: creating domain-specific ontologies that bring out the structure and interrelations in content.  And domain modeling is traditionally a task either assigned to a software architect or, in very specific circumstances, to a library or information scientist.

And the fact that many information architects take the structure of information as a given upsets me to no end. Because it essentially conflates information architecture and user experience design.

If information is a given in our line of work, all that’s left for us to do is a little dressing up. Sprinkle information with some faceted metadata. Tweak the search engine a bit. Think up a few different ways of navigating around that information. Important, sure, but it’s work on the fringes.

Crap in means crap out. An information architect who doesn’t have a say in how information is carved up and how it relates to other information — as well as its entry, codification, storage and retrieval — ends up being a glorified UX designer with an expertise in information-heavy websites.

That’s not me.

Usability and user experience professionals with an expertise in large-scale information-heavy websites are exactly the sort of people a lot of companies could use. But an UxD isn’t going to change the way you think about

• how information flows through different systems
• how information can be put to use in different contexts and for different end products
• how information can be reliably archived
• how to avoid jumbling presentational markup with structural markup
• how applying structure to information can fuel database applications
• which workflows should be in place to ensure accurate metadata
• whether there are any sensible international standards or nascent conventions (like microformats) that should be adhered to

and so on.

The core of a digital strategy.

Companies should make sure they hire people — either information architects or software architects — who can solve these problems and can spot opportunities hidden within data or information. That’s what makes an information architect different from a user experience designer. A UX designer isn’t supposed to think out an archiving strategy or a publishing workflow. They’re better at other things. Things I do awfully. And vice versa.