We live in seemingly chaotic spaces, yet we can navigate through this chaos in an organized manner in order to achieve our goals and objectives. This strongly indicates that we have found ways to detect patterns and develop heuristics to manage the chaos – whether it’s understanding a signboard, finding a book in a library, making way through a crowded market, or picking a favorite from a myriad choices on a menu. 

Just as we expect to navigate intuitively through physical spaces, so do we expect to deal with the digital world – after all, what we want is information that will help us achieve our goals. A methodical approach, and not chance, is what defines how these patterns help organize the unorganized. Designing these digital intuitive organized spaces and wayfinding experiences falls under the discipline of Information Architecture.

To understand how Information Architects integrate with a technical writing team, its processes, and its practices, we need to step back and understand content development, content delivery, and the evolution of instructional material.

In addition to distilling relevant information into a digital deliverable, there was the need to organize and manage the lifecycle of the content aligned to the user journey. Content now had to adhere to a structure, be reusable, be scalable, context-oriented, and adapt to multi-channel publishing. For example, the same content might be accessed on the web, as a PDF, and on mobile devices. Other dimensions of change were tools and processes. Agile development and shorter release cycles meant faster product updates. Various content management tools also evolved making the content management ecosystem a lot more complex.

These changes needed an additional layer to connect the dots across traditional and modern deliverables. This layer was pivotal in creating meaningful user interaction and managing large repositories of content. The Information Architectural practices added this valuable layer, expanding the scope of technical writing. These practices needed expertise, and so emerged the need for a dedicated role; Information Architect.

Having an Information Architect as a lead role in your team gives you an advantage of taking a proactive, design-first approach to developing content. Aligning with the user centered design principles, this helps in keeping your content user-focused and iterate through early feedback cycles. Extrapolating from the IA process and methodologies and applying to the technical writing phases, following is an illustration of the Information Architecture process.

While the above illustration is a macro perspective of the process, the real value of having an Information Architect on your team is the ability for the role to see the big picture, work with multiple business stakeholders, and to empathize and see the user’s point of view at every stage in the process of development. Apart from defining the content strategy and governance, an Information Architect’s expertise is the pursuit of transforming data into knowledge. They are customer advocates who steer the technical writing team towards producing documentation that is intuitive, well organized, and easy to use.