Organizing concepts early in the design process using IA

Interaction Designers are very different from graphic designers as they focus their intentions for the design on user experiences interacting with the product or software. This means that a big part of an Interaction Designer’s job surrounds the planning, development, and organization of their concepts with many revisions and iterations before even beginning the prototyping process. Information Architecture is integrated into this process through the organization of concepts; often towards the beginning of formulating ideas. Information Architecture is created through various different tangible and most often visual layouts. The most commonly used by Interaction Designers includes site maps, concept maps, and task flows. Each of these takes information and organizes and groups them based on hierarchy or commonality.

I have personally utilized all three of these methods of organizing information, and found them very useful for displaying information in a way that allows someone new to the project to quickly understand how my concept will function and be laid out. 

This site map was created for a proposed interactive museum kiosk that featured the artist Lance Letscher. When creating this site map, I broke down each potential screen of the kiosk and displayed them in a nest format to depict what screens were parenting the others. 

This task flow is another example of when I used IA to organize information based on the relationships, type, and time distinctions. Without the arrow and outlines, the information would seem randomly placed and not understandable to others.

I created this concept map to break down the different intentions and effects surrounding the existence of a pier in my city of San Diego. I created the inner layer for the image to show what the focus of all the information is on. The 2nd layer includes various links labeled with the relationship the next layer of text has to the main topic. The final layer is the in-depth text that goes into more detail exploring ideas based on the relationship noted on the connected link label.

Overall, IA can be extremely helpful to an Interaction Designer, especially at the beginning stages of the design process. The ideas, concepts, and screens in the development phase, can be broken down into their relationships with each other or other organization techniques, and displayed in a way that makes it clear to everyone what is being explored and potentially designed in the next phases of a project.