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Information Architecture: What’re the Fundamentals?
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Are your users lost?
Complex digital products can be confusing. Users must parse lots of information. Often, they face unfamiliar terminology and navigation options. The result: frustrating customer experiences.
What if your website or app could speak to people in their own terms? It can — with a bit of forethought.
Information architecture (IA) is the practice of organizing, structuring, and labeling information to make it easier to find and understand. A thoughtful IA serves as a blueprint for more understandable and usable products and services.
This course is for you.
If you’re a UX designer, product manager, or stakeholder, your structural choices determine if your users can understand your product. You need to know about information architecture.
Is your content going unread?
Many organizations invest in content only to have it go unread because users can’t find it. Learn how to offer relevant content and build paths for users to find it.
Are product capabilities underutilized?
Products with lots of features can be hard to use. Learn to connect user needs with product capabilities using language that is clear, relevant, and meaningful.
Is your product portfolio a hot mess?
Successful product families grow organically or through acquisition. Either path can lead to misalignment. Learn to create models that drive cohesion.
In this four-week course taught by a renowned information architect, you’ll learn to design blueprints for more usable products and services. The result: improved customer satisfaction, reduced support and development costs, and higher conversion rates.
What others are saying:
Simply put, this course will supercharge your practice. Jorge’s lectures are the perfect balance of theory, practicality and good magic — they will inspire you to do your best work. By the end of the course, you’ll be able to construct a complex system with confidence and clarity.
Tara Kimura
If you're drawn to humans and systems, and how humans make sense of complexity, Jorge Arango's 4-week course IA: WTF? will be a boon. This is the chance to watch an experienced information architect at work, deftly weaving theory and practice.
Rosa Vieira de Almeida
Contents
Information Architecture Fundamentals
How terminology impacts user interfaces.
How to humans find and understand things — and how to help them do so.
A process for designing successful information architectures.
Understanding and Modeling the Domain
How to understand user mental models.
How to understand your product’s content and context.
How to define a conceptual model for your product.
Information Architecture Components
How to design effective navigation and search systems.
The role of labels in user interfaces and how to design effective labeling systems.
How metadata can make your information easier to find.
Information Architecture in Practice
How to validate design directions via prototyping.
How artificial intelligence can help produce IA faster.
Why you need to focus on governance and ethics.
Plus more!
The Plus tier gives you everything in the standard version of the course plus:
Office hours with Jorge
Smaller, more intimate meetings where you can discuss specific issues and concerns. One hour per week during the course. (Four total.)
Info management books
Ebook copies of Jorge's books about information management: Living in Information and Duly Noted — a $56 value!
Logistics
How will it work?
We'll meet on four consecutive Tuesdays from 8 - 10 AM U.S. Pacific Time (11 AM - 1 PM ET / 16-18 GMT / 17-19 CET.) Sessions can be recorded (with the agreement of the cohort,) but you’ll get most value if you participate in real time.
Weekly Zoom call
A two-hour live session that includes lectures, discussions, and hands-on exercises.
Discord cohort room
A private online space for the cohort to raise questions and discuss IA-related topics.
Mural board
We’ll use a shared digital whiteboard for hands-on exercises during the course.
Meet Your Instructor
Jorge Arango
I’m an information architect, author, and educator. For the past three decades, I’ve used architectural thinking to bring clarity to digital projects for clients ranging from non-profits to Fortune 500 companies.
I’m co-author of Information Architecture: for the Web and Beyond, author of Living in Information and Duly Noted, and host of The Informed Life podcast. Besides consulting, writing, and podcasting, I also teach at the California College of the Arts.
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IA:WTF? plus Office Hours
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- 4 Lessons
Don’t need the office hours?
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IA: WTF? Live
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