Information Architecture has not been in fashion of late; the argument has been that it should no longer be seen as a discrete discipline. Instead, it should be seen as simply interaction design, or user experience design, or ui design. But there are many great reasons why IA is now more important than ever. Here are a few of them:

1. A Path To Domain Knowledge. Understanding complex domains and their associated work practices remains a tricky business. IA practices teams get up a ramp quickly and understand the domain.

2. Mapping Above The Page. A non-IA design approach often starts by tackling a homepage, and then looking at second-level pages. But most software design needs a higher-level of abstraction. IA help surface issues of flow, aggregation, roll-up, break-downs, variant issues and invariant patterns and get up above the page-by-page approach.

3. Matching The Solution To The Challenge. The rise of excellent canned UI code libraries, including Yahoo UI, jQuery, Moo Tools, etc, has created a mistaken industry impression that UX and usability problems are mostly pre-solved and the only challenge is code execution. But the biggest challenge, framing the underlying user task and context appropriately, and matching it to the right solution, remains. IA practices assert that you need to roll-back user issues to the underlying challenge at-hand and then identify the best UI/UX solution from either existing or custom UI elements.

4. Team Facilitation. Because IA focuses on the intersection of information and user context, IA practices often equip a team with a shared language and a shared logic for working together. This is especially important in agile practices where UX issues, if not tended to, can wind up reduced to the role of “fit and finish,” ie, UI polish. Used appropriately as part of Stage 0 sprint, IA gives the team a map and a shorthand that accelerates velocity and team-decision making.

5. Attunement to Content and Containers. With the rise of social media and issues like hashtags, permissioning, data feeds, we can see that it’s increasingly hard to separate containers from the underlying content. IA focuses on understanding the content structure, content consumption, and content workflow first; these are issues that a purely visual or purely code-driven approach are not well-suited to solve.

These are the thoughts of one IA and UX veteran; I welcome yours.