There’s a fairly new thread over on SIGIA-L at the moment with respect to differentiating complex taxonomies from navigation on a website. Alongside that, how the information architecture of a site doesn’t necessarily conform immediately to either the taxonomy or the navigation.
It’s an interesting thought, and one that I find clients particularly and junior IAs often have difficulty in differentiating. Me too frankly, as very often each of taxonomy, information architecture and navigation bear significant superficial similarity to each other. As an IA, I think it’s very important when doing client work for sites that the difference be very clearly identified.
While what I’m about to say is by no means definitive, and probably open to significant argument, here’s my take on a useful, client-friendly differentiation between the three:
- Taxonomy – the information about the information on your site or the metadata. With a good taxonomy, your content providers and subject matter experts will be able to quickly and accurately classify each piece of content available on your site and that will assist visitors in tasks such as searching.
- Navigation – the components of your site that helps visitors move around. Navigation is informed by your information architecture and taxonomy, but is not either of them. Navigation should be simple to use, intuitive for casual visitors and should direct visitors to the material they want without having to search.
- Information architecture – (now this gets harder for the client to understand and even harder for you to explain without babbling) the structural design components of your site that help to build the navigation and look and feel. Informed in part by your taxonomy (which may be an input to or output of your IA work) but also heavily influenced by factors such as types of site user, nature of site (sales, company info, intranet, product data, etc.), good design rules, organisational structure and user-centered design.
Now, by no means are these definitions necessarily scientifically accurate. I’d go so far to say that they aren’t at all. But they are useful when dealing with clients, and that’s the point here.
What do you think?
