Abby Covert

The web needs information architects. Abby Covert reveals how to become one, what makes it challenging, and why it can ruin your life

- Jim McCauley

Websites used to be reasonably straight-forward things, but as the web marched forward from niche interest to omnipresence, things got more complicated. Not merely in terms of technology, but also in terms of volume. Back in the Nineties a corporate site could get away with being made out of flat pages and a sidebar navigation. Today, though, it might consist of hundreds of pages, if not thousands.

Organising such massive web presences is an increasing challenge; not merely the nuts and bolts of taxonomy, but also the messier business of implementing it all within organisations where political and technological arguments can hamper the process. People can agree that they need a better website, but no one likes to be told that they’ve been doing it wrong.

This is where information architecture – or IA – comes into play. It’s a discipline that made its name back when the web was finding its feet, and designers and developers were beginning to tackle the challenges of large-scale sites, but as a term it fell out of fashion for a long while. Now, though, it’s enjoying a resurgence, and Abby Covert is one of the practitioners bringing IA back – although it’s never really gone away.

Discovering IA

Educated in graphic design, she had her first taste of information architecture at university. “It was mostly focused around distilling complex subject matter into graphics like a poster or an information graphic,” she tells us. Then in her first job out of school she worked as an icon designer, which led to her first information architecture job.