Information Architecture
Stripped to the basics, all websites are just content and links. Information architecture encompasses the way content is structured and labelled. It’s the backbone of your website.
Get it right and customers will quickly find what they’re looking for – and they’ll feel the site is made for them. Get it wrong and they’ll feel uncomfortable, get frustrated and miss your key content.
The hallmarks of a good IA are:
- Intuitive navigation
- Labels that are meaningful
- Logical and relevant groupings
- Appropriate number of levels
- Users always know where they are
- They know where to go next
- Essential and added-value content is appropriately placed
- Essential and added value links appropriately placed
The key is that it has to be meaningful and logical to your customers, not just to your design team.
The way to ensure this is to involve users in the IA design. But it’s not about asking for their opinions. You need approaches which establish the groupings and labels based on customer mindsets, and which also rigorously test and refine these so that they are proven to work.
Whether you are undertaking a new site development or a re-design, making major new content introductions or looking to resolve issues identified by analytics data or usability testing, taking a user-centred approach to your IA can save expensive re-working later on.
We use two key methodologies for user-centred IA development:
- Card Sorting – delivering website structures that match customer perceptions.
- IA Performance Testing – delivering website structures that customers can use.
Both take a simple prototyping approach and can be conducted early in the design process.
