From the course: Understanding Information Architecture
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What terminology do information architects use?
From the course: Understanding Information Architecture
What terminology do information architects use?
- Like any specialist discipline, information architecture comes with its own range of weird words and has special uses for common words. Let's look at some of the stuff you'll hear information architects saying and what it means. We'll start with the basic tools of the trade. To get an understanding of how users group content on a site, information architects will perform a card sort. Originally, this would have been done using three-inch by five-inch index cards, hence the name. Now, instead of writing each piece of content to be sorted on a card, we use software that makes it easy to manipulate the terms and then does much of the analysis for us. Along the same lines, we also have a reverse sort, also called a tree test. That, again, would have originally used index cards with content or terminology written on them, but this time participants would be asked to place each card where they expect it to sit in the hierarchy that the information architect has just designed so that we…
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