A Decade of Information Architecture in HCI: A Systematic Literature Review

Information Architecture (IA) is a blueprint for the information system in websites or other information-rich environments. It corresponds to how we organize, label and structure information. The importance of Information Architecture and its influence on a system's usability is vastly discussed in literature. Because of the inherent connection between Information Architecture concepts and the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) field, we decided to investigate how previous research has used Information Architecture in the context of Human Computer Interaction (IAinHCI). In order to do that, we followed a two phase process. First, we conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). We queried both the ACM and IEEE databases. We filtered and assessed 311 papers that spanned a decade of research on Information Architecture. We found 25 papers that utilized Information Architecture in the context of Human Computer Interaction. Then, we followed a Background Reference Search process using the SLR resulting papers as a starting set. We assessed the eligibility of the reference list of all 25 papers and found eight additional papers that were relevant to our research question. Results of our review show that, IAinHCI papers fall under seven main categories, from IoT to the semantic web and ubiquitous technology. The website category, however, was both the most consistent over the years and the most prevalent category accounting for 67% of the papers. Our findings suggest that IA has not yet uncovered its full potential and there is still room for research to leverage and expend the IA knowledge base promising a prosperous future for Information Architecture.