Communication Design Quarterly Jan 2019 Open Access

Information architects: what they do and how to become one

Amber Swope Institute for Global Environmental Strategies

Abstract

Every organization relies on information to communicate with prospects and customers - blog posts, articles, whitepapers, user manuals, web portals, videos, tweets, social media posts, moderated forums, and more. This means that many people are creating content and are delivering it in multiple ways. To meet our users' needs, we need information architecture (IA) to provide the framework for developing and delivering this information. Although most content creators do not think of themselves as information architects, many of them perform tasks that are information architecture responsibilities. If you decide what information gets created and delivered, identify keywords to support findability, or organize the hierarchy for a table of contents, you are performing IA tasks. To learn who was performing these tasks and how they ended up with this role, I conducted a survey. This article presents my analysis of the results based upon my experience and relevant industry sources.

Journal
Communication Design Quarterly
Published
2019-01-22
DOI
10.1145/3309578.3309582
CompPile
Open Access
OA PDF Gold
Topics
digital rhetoric social media
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References (17)

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