Are you struggling with information architecture itself: What type of information should be organized, and in which manual? In the summer 2015 edition of ISTC Communicator, I present an approach to help you settle the struggle. Based on a viewpoint that users search for answers, I offer tips on how to design for findability.

To relieve the struggle of figuring out what information to write and how to organize it, one must begin by understanding a single fundamental concept: information need.

What technical communicators do, in the most basic sense, is satisfy information needs. A user has an information need if they lack sufficient knowledge on a given topic. But who decides when a user doesn’t have enough knowledge? This depends on how you define an information need in the first place.

In the ISTC Communicator article - an award winning UK journal for technical communication and information design, I begin by defining the concept of information need in two ways, and then discuss how the information design task differs depending on which approach is taken. Read more...