Creating the Information Architecture for a Website
When visiting a website, you want to be able to find what you need as quickly as possible and your experience to be as user friendly as possible. Just like signs and maps help you navigate a physical space, Information Architecture can help you navigate the digital space.
What is Information Architecture?
Information architecture (or IA) refers to the organization, structuring, and labeling of information within a digital product or service in a way that helps users effectively meet their needs.
The goal of IA is to bridge the gap between users and content by designing navigation and search, organizing the information, and labeling it. Well-organized content provides a better user experience by being much more intuitive to browse and search for.
Building the Information Architecture
When people think of Information Architecture, they often think of a sitemap or navigation. However, that is just a small part of it. In order to create a strong information architecture, you first need to have a deep understanding of the users, context, and content.
Follow this step by step process to create an effective website architecture.
1. Define user goals
Conduct user interviews to gather information about who the users of the website are and what they are looking to accomplish. Create user personas based on the results of your interviews, and create user stories to bring them to life and help you visualize their tasks.
2. Define company goals
Conduct a series of interviews with stakeholders to determine their needs and what they want to achieve. The goal of Information Architecture is to balance the users and business needs.
3. Analyze competitors
Do a competitive analysis to get an idea of what is already out there and what the customer expects. Sometimes you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Take note of what they are doing well and what they aren’t doing so well.
4. Define your content
Now that you have determined the users and business needs, you can determine what your website needs to include. If your website already has content, go through that first and decide what to keep and what to get rid of. The main activities to perform at this stage are content inventory and content audit.
Content inventory: The goal of the content inventory is to create a list of information elements on all the pages of a website and classify them by topic and sub-topic. This includes all page content, all downloadable content, and also any media or interactive content.
Content audit: The goal of the content audit is to determine the quality of the content, and measure it against your goals to determine how overall effective it is.
5. Group and label your content
Once you have a list of all content, you want to group that information together and label it in a way that makes sense and won’t confuse the user.
Use card-sorting to help you group the content into different categories and name them. The goal of the exercise is to understand the user’s mental models and how they expect the content to be structured.
6. Create a sitemap and define the navigation
After you have content grouped and labeled, you need to figure out how users will get to it. This is done through navigation design, labeling, and site mapping.
A sitemap is a visual representation of the IA and is often a diagram that displays the hierarchy of the content and how it is connected together.
The navigation system consists of many UI elements that detail all possible pathways users might take to get to each page. Labels are used to give context on what a user can expect when clicking on a link.
7. Wireframe and test with user
Where a sitemap is a representation of the content hierarchy, wireframes help to create a simplified and schematic visual representation of the layout and navigation of the website. They are meant to be simple so that you can focus on how the pages are connected rather than the visuals.
You can conduct user testing on the wireframes by giving users specific tasks of finding content that matches your website and user goals. This way you can identify whether the structure is clear and concise before moving forward with the design process.
Conclusion
Information architecture isn’t really visible to the visitors, but it presents the backbone of the website. If you’re designing a website or app, the information architecture has a huge impact on how user friendly it is and if it gets users to where they want to go. Remember that if a site is hard to navigate, users will quickly give up and move on.
