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Information architecture is work that may go unnoticed by the customer, but it is a fundamental process in the creation of digital products.
To develop easy-to-navigate websites and apps, designers need to organize, plan, and structure content so that users can easily find what they’re looking for. This is where information architecture comes in — it helps you determine how best to organize and classify elements.
Keep reading this article to understand how information architecture works and what are the strategies for you to organize your website content!
What is information architecture?
Information architecture is the process of organizing and deciding what content to include or omit from your website or application.
Good information architecture should enhance the usability and user experience of the interface. One way to do this is to increase the findability of the interface.
Findability is a crucial aspect of information architecture. This means users should be able to navigate the interface seamlessly without wasting time trying to figure out where information is placed.
Here, navigation design also plays an important role. Therefore, it is essential to take a user-centric approach when creating AI. We can do this by paying attention to information architecture principles.
How is it structured?
Information architecture connects to three pillars:
- content: the information that contains the reason for visits to the site. It needs to relate to users;
- context: the context is the purpose of the project. It needs to define where and why the user uses the content;
- user: the user is the audience for the content. Understanding user behavior and flow is crucial to creating the right path.
How to apply information architecture in the best way?
Information architecture design is a long and complex process — you need to consider many different factors to organize content logically. Plus, it requires working collaboratively with almost every member of the team—designers, copywriters, user researchers, developers, sales and marketing specialists.
To make things easier for you, we’ve created a step-by-step process for developing an information architecture for a website.
Define company goals
Building the information architecture for a website should always start with defining your company’s overall priorities, such as:
- business goals: what do you want to achieve with your website? What business goals do you pursue?
- User Needs/Wants: Who is your ideal visitor? Why would they want to visit your site? What value does it bring to your visitors?
Conduct user research to understand their goals
The goal of this research is to understand the user’s mental model — what content your visitors expect to find on your site, where they expect to find it, and how they want to interact with it. At this stage, it is essential to consider several aspects that can influence users’ behavior and actions, including user emotions.
Conduct competitor analysis
Competitor analysis will help you understand how your competitors organize information on their websites and what your users can expect.
Create a content inventory
Content is the heart of the website and should be taken seriously early in the design cycle. The process of working with content can be divided into two major stages.
content inventory
As the name implies, content inventory is a process of collecting all the information you show (or plan to show) on your website.
If a site already has content, you first need to go through all your pages and collect everything you have on the site — text content, media files that visitors can download, videos that visitors can watch. If you don’t have a website, collect all the content you plan to display on your website.
It’s vital to understand what content you own and who in your organization will be responsible for it (ideally, assign ownership).
Content analysis
Analytics will help you understand how important your content is to end users and the business. At the end of this process it will be much easier to decide what to keep and what to discard. Try to rate each content item based on its usefulness to the user and accuracy.
Create an organizational system
The next step after conducting content analysis is to group this content into meaningful sections. At this stage, you need to label all of your content and define the main sections of your website.
What is the relationship between information architecture and user experience (UX)?
If you’ve made it this far in the article, you’re probably wondering if information architecture is the same as UX design. Although they are closely linked, they are not the same.
User experience revolves around the way a user thinks and feels when using a system or service. Mainly, UX focuses on the usability, usefulness and satisfaction of using a system — more than just the structure of the content.
However, it’s virtually impossible to create a great user experience without a solid information architecture. This is why every competent UX designer should learn the skills to be a relatively good information architect.
Remember, the information architect’s primary job is to create an experience that allows users to focus on their tasks.
Information architecture pertains to designing the design framework needed to generate wireframes and sitemaps for a website. UX designers use these wireframes and sitemaps to plan a system’s navigation.
This consequently allows UX designers to build a pleasant interaction model, so that users feel comfortable using a product. Thus, influencing user behaviors and actions such as emotion and psychology.
We live in the information age and the amount of information around us is increasing every day. It’s more important than ever to organize information clearly and logically so people can easily find what they’re looking for. A good information architecture is the foundation for a good user experience. The next time you work on a new website, build it around content, not the other way around.
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