Richard Saul Wurman coined the term "information architecture" in 1975, but it was Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville who, in 1998, defined it as a practice, one focused on organizing content, assigning clear labels, and designing navigation and search systems so people can find what they need. That practical, structure-first definition is the one this course uses throughout.
IA exists to achieve specific goals: making information easy to find, providing information scent so people know they're on the right path, supporting both browsing and search, creating a sense of place within a digital space, and combating information overload. Every structural decision an information architect makes should trace back to one or more of these goals.
IA is not the visual design of a page. It's the underlying decisions about what content exists, how it's grouped, and how people can find it, decisions that hold up regardless of what the page eventually looks like.
Statement 1: Information Architecture. Deciding how to group content and what to call the groups is a direct organizational-structure and labeling decision, the core of IA work.
Statement 2: Visual Design. Typeface and color are presentation decisions. They affect how the portal looks, not how its content is structured or found.
Statement 3: Content Strategy. Tone of voice and ownership of ongoing updates are content strategy concerns: they're about the content itself and its lifecycle, not its structure.
Statement 4: Information Architecture. This is a breadth-versus-depth decision in the navigation hierarchy, a defining IA concern covered in depth later in this course.
The overlap in statement 3 is real. Content strategy defines what the content says and who maintains it; IA defines how that content is classified and labeled so it can be found. In practice, the same person often does both in smaller organizations, but they remain distinct decisions. A content strategist could pick a perfect tone of voice for a policy that's still buried under the wrong category label. Getting the label right is IA's job; getting the tone right is content strategy's job.This distinction matters because it tells you what to fix when something goes wrong. If users can't find a policy: that's an IA problem: check labels, categories, and navigation. If users find the policy but don't trust or understand it: that's more likely a content strategy problem: check tone, clarity, and currency.