Information Architecture: In The 21st Century
All digital products can make use of good IA, in organizing content and guiding users through a clear customer journey via clearly labeled categories and intuitive navigation. But as users’ needs and technology evolves, so too must IA.
In order to sustain in the market of e-commerce websites, personalization is quickly becoming a necessity to incentivize repeat visits from customers. Machine learning is enabling businesses to recommend specific products for customers by tracking their search history and previously purchased products. The role of IA will be in determining what kinds of relevant data will be served at which point in the purchasing journey. User account hubs, for example, such as Amazon, are becoming increasingly complex to serve every individual’s needs. This can range from wishlists, to order tracking, to rewards and gift cards, and support tickets. This customization extends to marketing efforts, where e-mail and direct mail are also headed by a customer’s name and display previously viewed items. Users are now even able to control what they want to see. On Vanguard’s mobile app, customers can add and remove widgets based on personal preferences on their main dashboard, such as transaction history, market news, and account performance. With all these unique customer experiences, we will have to consider how to organize this information so it adds value to UX instead of clutter.
For many key tech players who have their own home assistants, the voice-command interfaces are going to become increasingly important in IA. The problem is, without a physical interface, it can be quite difficult to determine how to find the information or help users need. Moreover, depending on the external device these home assistants are connected with, commands may differ ever so slightly. For example, telling Google
Home to play “Dawson’s Creek” might prompt it to play a Spotify playlist by the same name, instead of a video clip on a TV with Chromecast installed. If Google Home is playing a song, and the user decides to cast a video clip on TV, simply telling Google “Stop” does not clearly determine whether it stops playing the music or the video clip you are casting.
With no physical manual of commands or interfaces to tell a user which devices their home assistant is connected to, many experiences are led by trial and error. To turn off smart lights at home, the obvious command would be, “Hey Google, turn off the lights.” In actuality, this action can also be performed by saying, “Hey Google, good night.” With the second command, Google would also tell you the weather for tomorrow. At the moment, learnability is not quite there yet with vocal interfaces. A better understanding of semantics and recognizing speech patterns will become crucial in the future.
Prolonging a user’s duration on their websites is a common activity for many social media websites currently. Previously, pagination allows users to skip to certain pages further back in their search. Now, infinite scrolling means a user cannot know where it ends and may easily lose track of how much time they’ve logged in the process. Instagram’s core features include feeds, exploring other accounts, viewing stories, and searching for accounts/tags. All of these actions simply lead to many more hours of viewing content. Advertisers, wanting users to be exposed to as many ads as possible, would introduce slideshows that separate each slide into its separate page to be loaded. This brings to question, what are the business ethics of IA? Just because we can make exiting a website difficult, should we? Knowingly moving clickbait up the hierarchy and relevant articles lower, IA becomes more business-serving and less concerned with a positive user experience.
Because IA can subconsciously affect so much user behavior, it likely would not be going away any time soon. However, there is a fine balance between structuring IA to assist the user and using it to trap users in an endless loop. It must also find solutions around ambiguity
where it is easier for a user to manually turn off all the lights at home than telling Google to do so with a voice command, thereby rendering their home assistant rather obsolete. In any case, information architects have a duty to ensure a delightful customer experience and must adapt and evolve with new expectations and technological advancements.
