It’s been fifty years since information architecture’s coming out party in Philadelphia. Alas, the discipline is still widely misunderstood. The main obstacle? The very thing that brought it to many people’s attention: the World Wide Web.

I’d venture most people who’ve heard the phrase ‘information architecture’ have done so in the context of designing website navigation systems. That’s understandable: The web is a huge deal and IA was exactly what it needed early in its development.

But IA has more to offer than its contributions to UX design. To understand why, consider its ultimate purpose. This is how I describe it: The purpose of information architecture is increasing agency by making systems more legible.

Let’s unpack this statement.

The word agency is loaded now. We talk of agentic systems to mean those powered by AI agents. But here, I mean ‘agency’ in its original sense: giving an actor (human or otherwise) scope to decide and act independently.

Systems are the scope we’re acting on. What is a system? A collection of parts that relate to one another in particular ways so that the whole can serve a purpose. A website is a system. So is a business.

Systems can have subsystems. Many websites are subsystems in service of broader business systems, which are in service of broader social systems. Architects are always aware of the broader context; we operate holistically. As Eliel Saarinen put it,

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

IA makes systems more legible. That is, the actor who’ll use the system will be better able understand what to do with it to accomplish their goals.

Think back to a time when you had to use a complex, unfamiliar product. You scanned its user interface for recognizable labels and symbols, looking for the smooth handle. If you’re like me, the system’s illegibility led you to YouTube, the web, or an LLM for an explanation. IA fixes that — or at least aims to make the process less onerous.

To recap, the ultimate purpose of IA is increasing agency — enabling actors to make good choices — by making systems more legible. Let’s stress-test this claim against some real-world applications:

  • A website’s navigation structure should give users recognizable labels that allow them to find their way to the part of the website that has the information they need. The user is the agent; the labels give them clear choices that allow them to make the right decisions about where to click.

  • A spreadsheet gives an executive the information they need to understand how their part of the business is functioning. The executive doesn’t need all the data; that might drown the signal in noise. But the right data shown at the right time and place will allow them to make good business decisions.

  • Your car’s speedometer tells you how fast you’re going, allowing you to remain compliant with traffic laws. Again, a car generates lots of data. Modern dashboards are carefully designed to put the most important front and center: speed, fuel/energy levels, etc. — ‘most important’ being the ones you need to make critical decisions.

  • A map makes physical environments more understandable by collapsing their scale and details into a set of abstractions you can hold in your hand. Reading the map lets you make better decisions about which roads to take to get to your destination.

  • A carefully structured prompt allows a large language model to work properly. You could point the LLM to a broad corpus, but that wouldn’t improve its performance. The point of ‘context engineering’ (which is awfully close to IA) is giving the LLM the right information at the right time with the right instructions so it produces useful outcomes.

One of the most common questions I’ve gotten post-LLMs is, “Why do we need information architecture now that we have chatbots?” This is old-school thinking. “For the world wide web” was a phase of information architecture’s development — just a phase. It’s never been more important to re-embrace the discipline’s broader origins and aspirations.