I have just found myself in the position where I have to wear an IA hat for a couple of days and it’s one that I haven’t worn in many years. But in the recesses of my brain I remembered there were a whole bunch of Visio stencils out there that could really help put your thoughts to paper (so to speak). Since I never blogged about them before here goes:

1. Jesse James Garrett’s ”A visual vocabulary for describing information architecture and interaction design”.
2. Michael Angeles’ Visio Wireframe Stencil
3. From the Information Architecture for Designers: Structuring Websites for Business Success book, another set of stencils for wireframes and an isometric site map.
4. Nick Finck provides another set of wireframe, sitemap and process flow stencils
5. this set of stencils is extremely useful for user interface prototyping.

Also if you want more information on using Visio for IA work I can seriously recommend reading up on Dan Brown’s series of articles on Special Deliverable (Boxes and Arrows in general is a pretty useful resource for all things IA as is The Information Architecture Institute).