As with so much of the design process, you should always keep your goals in mind. Every decision you make needs to be in line with them in order to create the best product for your users. As a designer, understanding information architecture is an invaluable skill you need if you want to make the UX of your digital products seamless and user-friendly.
In this article we’ll discuss what information architecture really is, and why it’s a valuable aspect of the user experience process. I hope that the article showed you how important information architecture is and helped you to understand where to begin. If you want to gain a better understanding of IA, try going through websites and just observing how they structure content and how their navigation works.
Review and update the content
As you work through navigation, there are a few concepts that can help you create a system that works for your audience. Metadata is a method of labeling that makes it easy to find the different taxonomies you’ve created to organize your groups. The most effective labels help users quickly see where they can get the answers they want. For example, the label “Best Sellers” on the Thirteen Lune home page.
- It also shows us if the categorization is done in a user-centered manner, and if the titles are distinguishable from one another.
- Website information architecture tools come in many shapes, sizes and abilities – but Slickplan has a lot of tools baked into one single app.
- Just the thought of this question conjures up about a hundred different ways to answer because depending on the users you ask and how they use the skill, you’ll likely get a hundred different answers.
- Another thing to consider is how people will be using the site.
- In terms of our eCommerce example we’d put the product pages under clothing, the checkout flow under the shopping cart, and the map of stores under location.
Persona research baked into the design process has helped the team discern that its audience is fairly tech savvy. A website with a clear mission and value is more likely to have several minutes of user engagement. Information architecture strives to make a website’s value immediately understandable to users. Any website with that much information will need to rely on search so that users can locate content they’re seeking.
Notable people in information architecture
Next, apply your user research to prioritize and group that content. Information architects add structure and navigation systems to simplify complex information for users. Information architecture is the ultimate blueprint for your website. It should include everything from the hierarchy of pages, the content location, and SEO to call-to-actions, linking, and navigation. As you can see, we’re a bit obsessed with information architecture, because it brings your users in sweet harmony with your website and business.
You’ll understand the role of a UX designer within an organization and what it takes to overcome common challenges at the workplace. You’ll also learn how to leverage your existing skills to successfully transition to and thrive in a new career in UX. In the third and the fourth lessons, you’ll learn about the most common UX design tools and methods. You’ll also practice each of the methods through tailor-made exercises that walk you through the different stages of the design process.
Content audit
It involves deciding each page’s importance, how to organize it, and how to present it to a user. IA takes content, context, and users into consideration in order to plan a website architecture that provides value to your audience and meets business goals. The organization of information is the result of https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ UX, content strategy, and UI design decisions. This is particularly likely to happen when the designer is the one responsible for doing the information architecture work. Since designers tend to think visually, it makes sense for the designer to use wireframes to demonstrate the hierarchy of information.
With Facebook and Google both blocking websites with low valued content, it’s even more important that we produce content that the users will find valuable. Librarians in the library of Alexandria listed the content of the library on a 120-scroll bibliography. The principle is the same, only it wasn’t called information architecture, it was just good sense.
IA and UX design
In his article, Dan Brown, founder of EightShapes, defined eight principles of IA that do justice to this topic. Before we take a look at Dan’s principles, let’s discuss how UX design is related to IA. A content audit run against functionality and what you know about your target audience will tell you how to piece together your information architecture model. From there, you can press on to UX design and the other processes your site will go through before going live. Without architecture, your UX designer has no content structure to work into a product. Although in fairness to those pulling double duty on the keyboard, your UX designer and information architect might be the same person.
To drill the point home once more, all IAs are built for change. Products evolve, designs change, users adapt, and the cycle continues, over and over. Don’t take it too seriously and know that there will always be room for improvement. A common mistake is to just make IA, without resources, research, or other assets or work. That’s like telling an author to write a book without an outline, or a programmer to code an app without prototypes.
IA Summit
Information Architecture helps product teams prioritize key elements of a design. The metaphors designers and engineers use to describe information architecture are not just fanciful descriptions. They reflect the diversity of forms a website or app information architecture web design can take and important differences in how designers think about organizing the flow of information within and across pages. There’s also a primary navigation bar for different areas of the site (e.g. forums, job board, freelancing guides, etc.).
They should have numbers and some should have blank spaces, so the participants can create their own names for categories. As a result, you’ll see the approximate structure of a product and proceed with the first prototypes. But first, the categories must be labeled and defined in a navigation system.
Usability.gov is archived and no longer updated
In this post, we’ll take a deep dive into information architecture — what it means, its principles, examples, and tools you can use to create it. Once we have the main pages in our hierarchy we can start grouping content within those pages. Think about what you want users to do on each page, just like you organise objects in your house based on how likely you are to use those things for main tasks in each room. This understanding will help you to craft audience personas, which are marketing frameworks that get to the heart of your users’ pain points and motivations. From there, you can build out the site map and user flows to demonstrate how those individuals will interact with your website.
