Information Architecture

The art and science of arranging information so that it's intuitive to find, easy to navigate, presents a cohesive design, meets accessibility guidelines, looks attractive on any device or screen size and ultimately drives behaviour change.

More terms you might want to know

Saturation

The intensity of a color relative to its own brightness. Colours are said to be saturated when they have a strong hue and high intensity.

Heatmap

A graphical representation of the density and distribution of data points. Denser regions in the image are interpreted as the data points' frequency, while lower densities are interpreted as fewer data points in that area.

Heatmaps show you where people worldwide are clicking on content to help you understand how people interact with your website designs and content.

Hick's Law

A well-known cognitive psychologist's principle that says that the time it takes to make a decision varies logarithmically according to the number of choices. As more options are presented, more decision time is required due to the mental work of comparing and contrasting each potential option.

Shade

The relative lightness or darkness of a hue.

JPEG Image

JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Expert Group, an international standards body that sets standards for creating and handling compressed digital images. The JPEG file format was designed to balance good visual quality and small file size, typically through lossy compression. The JPEG file format is widely used as a means of compressing digital images, particularly those produced by digital cameras.

Monospace

A style of typeface that uses a width-to-height ratio of 1:1.

Scale

The distance between two points of extrusion or an object. It can also be defined as the measurement of size.

ID

A selector that can be applied to any HTML element. ID should be used when designing for a single instance, such as using the id="main" attribute on an <h1> tag.

Brand Mark

A logo, symbol, design, or pattern used to promote and distinguish one's brand or company from others.

Lowercase

The designation of a set of character encoding styles for glyphs that are not capital letters.

Problem?

Got a suggestion or found an issue with the glossary?
Let me know!