Emptying the Dishwasher: Making Information Architecture Real for End-Users

By Joe Shepley (@joeshepley) Oct 5, 2010

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Information Architecture (IA) can be confusing and difficult to understand for end-users, but understand it they must. One way to make things less "technical" and more relevant to their daily work experience is to provide an analogy to something everyone knows well, the kitchen.

IA can be a very academic domain. Its practitioners come from backgrounds like Library Science, Enterprise Architecture, Business Intelligence, Database Administration, and so on, and use words like ontology, thesaurus, controlled vocabulary, semantics, metadata, and facets—language that makes perfect sense to these practitioners but is extremely difficult for the average business person to grasp.

Given the highly specialist nature of the IA community, I think the biggest challenge in running an effective IA engagement that delivers real value is keeping the IA work tangible and relevant to the business goals the team is trying to solve.

But this is not an insurmountable challenge (or at least it shouldn’t be), because IA concepts are actually quite straightforward once you understand them. And the act of organizing things and information is a fundamental human activity, practiced in every culture and by every person in those cultures all day, every day — it’s one of the core ways that we as humans make sense of our world.

So why does a group of stakeholders glaze over instantly when someone starts talking about IA (if you can even get them to the meeting in the first place)? It’s because IA hasn’t been made relevant to their everyday experience, so they remain non-specialist outsiders looking in, and what’s going on inside seems to have no connection to anything they have any experience with.

One of the best ways I’ve found to make IA real for end-users, particularly the concepts of usability and taxonomy, is to put aside all the specialist, technical terminology and illustrations we typically use and focus instead on one of the most basic, ubiquitous human experiences: working in the kitchen.

Taxonomy and Usability

After all, the kitchen in the typical Western household is the perfect expression of the intersection between taxonomy and usability. First, there’s the silverware. In most households, you have a silverware drawer that holds knives, forks and spoons; but you usually also have a miscellaneous drawer that holds things like ladles, lemon zest graters, ice cream scoops, tongs, rubber spatulas and the like.

But as any of you who live with other people know, what precisely goes in each of these drawers isn’t quite that simple. Some folks would include the ice cream scoop and the pizza cutter in the silverware drawer; others might include the measuring spoons or chopsticks instead. Depending on whether my wife or I empty the dishwasher, what the makeup of these two drawers in our house will be very, very different!

And as I try to reminder her, this is not primarily a domestic dispute, but an IA one. We each have different problems to solve in the kitchen, and so what utensils need to be ready to hand in the silverware drawer rather than jumbled up in the miscellaneous drawer is different for each of us: I make coffee and scoop ice cream, she opens cans and likes to drink from a straw.

This negotiation is exactly what goes on in a business context when stakeholders on a web content management (WCM) project struggle to optimize a website. What visitors want to accomplish on the site will impact what how the site and content need to be structured: is the site selling something, providing information or collecting information (or some combination of the these)? Are the anticipated users going to be frequent or occasional visitors (or will there be a mix of both)? Are visitors familiar or unfamiliar with the concepts on the site (or perhaps both)?