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; they’ll feel the site is made for them and are much more likely to buy or convert, resulting in more money for your business.
Why use RedEye?
RedEye’s specialist usability division optimum.web has over 10 years’ experience in understanding and interpreting online customer behaviour.
RedEye’s information architecture service will help you incorporate this experience into your website design, to ensure your online business is as meaningful and logical to your customers as it is to your design team.
At RedEye, we don’t just give our opinions. We provide scientific approaches to unearth deep insights into the behaviours and attitudes of your customers. The methodologies we offer are based on user-centred IA development.
The detail…
Hallmarks of a good IA:
- 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 are appropriately placed
The key to a good website design 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.
