The fundamental purpose of information architecture is to enable efficient information retrieval. We accomplish this with meaningful information structure and intuitive labels. And we bring them together with sensible navigation design.
UI design takes on an entirely different meaning when the UX doesn’t include a screen. That’s a lot of what automotive UX/UI design is all about.
In the early years of my career, every user experience I was designing comprised a single modality and a single visual UI. As my career progressed, I was able to work on an ever-expansive ecosystem of modalities, including products with smaller UIs, and even without UIs at all.