Nick is a 12-year veteran of the web and considered a web craftsman by trade. His skills traverse web design, web development, user research, web analysis, information architecture, and web publishing. He is the author of numerous web design-related articles for various publications.
What is Information Architecture?
Information architecture is a more difficult field to define than many others. Unlike content strategy, which is accomplished by content strategists, or interaction design, which is accomplished by designers, information architect is very infrequently a job title. It is, however, a valuable and necessary field which crosses multiple roles.
In other words, information architecture is the creation of a structure for a website, application, or other project, that allows us to understand where we are as users, and where the information we want is in relation to our position. Information architecture results in the creation of site maps, hierarchies, categorizations, navigation, and metadata. When a content strategist begins separating content and dividing it into categories, she is practicing information architecture. When a designer sketches a top level menu to help users understand where they are on a site, he is also practicing information architecture.
To answer these questions, the information architect must focus on a number of things: the target audience, the technologies related to the website, and the data that will be presented through the website.
Literature on Information Architecture
Learn more about Information Architecture
“[User experience] is used by people to say, ‘I’m a user experience designer, I design websites,’ or ‘I design apps.’ […] and they think the experience is that simple device, the website, or the app, or who knows what. No! It’s everything — it’s the way you experience the world, it’s the way you experience your life, it’s the way you experience the service. Or, yeah, an app or a computer system. But it’s a system that’s everything.”
— Don Norman, pioneer and inventor of the term “user experience,” in an interview with NNGroup
As indicated by Don Norman, User Experience is an umbrella term that covers several areas. When you work with user experience, it’s crucial to understand what those areas are so that you know how best to apply the tools available to you.
In this course, you will gain an introduction to the breadth of UX design and understand why it matters. You’ll also learn the roles and responsibilities of a UX designer, how to confidently talk about UX and practical methods that you can apply to your work immediately.
You will learn to identify the overlaps and differences between different fields and adapt your existing skills to UX design. Once you understand the lay of the land, you’ll be able to chart your journey into a career in UX design. You’ll hear from practicing UX designers from within the IxDF community — people who come from diverse backgrounds, have taught themselves design, learned on the job, and are enjoying successful careers.
If you are new to the Interaction Design Foundation, this course is a great place to start because it brings together materials from many of our other courses. This provides you with both an excellent introduction to user experience and a preview of the courses we have to offer to help you develop your future career. After each lesson, we will introduce you to the courses you can take if a specific topic has caught your attention. That way, you’ll find it easy to continue your learning journey.
In the first lesson, you’ll learn what user experience design is and what a UX designer does. You’ll also learn about the importance of portfolios and what hiring managers look for in them.
In the second lesson, you’ll learn how to think like a UX designer. This lesson also introduces you to the very first exercise for you to dip your toes into the cool waters of user experience.
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.
In the final lesson, you’ll step outside the classroom and into the real world. 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.
You’ll find a series of exercises that will help you get hands-on experience with the methods you learn. Whether you’re a newcomer to design considering a career switch, an experienced practitioner looking to brush up on the basics, or work closely with designers and are curious to know what your colleagues are up to, you will benefit from the learning materials and practical exercises in this course.
You can also learn with your fellow course-takers and use the discussion forums to get feedback and inspire other people who are learning alongside you. You and your fellow course-takers have a huge knowledge and experience base between you, so we think you should take advantage of it whenever possible.
You earn a verifiable and industry-trusted Course Certificate once you’ve completed the course. You can highlight it on your resume, LinkedIn profile or website.
Information architecture design in seven steps
Step 1. Define your business goals
The aim of information architecture is to fulfill a business’s goals. Ask yourself, “What do I want to achieve with this product?” before the team starts working on a project. If you cannot articulate a business’s goals, chances are that you will end up creating poor information architecture.
Step 2. Conduct user research
Creating good information architecture comes from understanding your users’ expectations, wants, and needs. To design useful information architecture, you need to invest time into learning about your users. Evaluate and adapt content and features for them in your design.
One of the biggest information architecture mistakes that many UX professionals make is that they create what they think is optimal for the user, not what users have told them that they’d like. This is why user research is essential. The process of user research (and the actual user research methods that you choose to use) depends on the nature of your product.
- Invest time into user research early on in the design process. The insights you gain during user research will help you prioritize design decisions.
- Conduct acontextual inquiry. This exercise will help you to see how the users interact with your product.
- Conductcard sortingsessions. These sessions will help you to see how prospective users categorize a variety of information groups.
- Create user mental models. Mental models are the assumptions about a product that people have even before they start interacting with it. User mental models will help you find the answer to the question, “How does my product work from a user perspective?” They will also help you design information architecture that matches the user’s expectations.
Step 3. Conduct a content inventory, content grouping, and content audit
When it comes to product design, the product should be built around content, not the other way around. That’s why information architecture design should include a mandatory step in which your team identifies what kinds of content will be present in a product and how it will be presented.
Content inventory
Sample content inventory of a website laid out in a spreadsheet. Image source: Vinishgarg.
A content inventory is an essential procedure that will help you identify all of the content associated with a product. It will show you what content you have and where. A content inventory typically appears as a spreadsheet, listing out each page/screen of your product.
Content grouping
When you know what pieces of content you have, you need to understand how the pieces fit together. Once you have a list of all of the content, you should prioritize pieces and create relationships between individual items (both semantic and contextual).
Content audit
Content audit template of a product in Google Sheets. Image source: Benjamin Estes.
The next step after you identify the content and create groups is to evaluate the content according to its effectiveness. You need to rate the content based on its usefulness and accuracy. This procedure will help you decide what content to keep and what content to get rid of.
Step 4. Identify the typical scenarios of user-to-product interaction
The goal of information architecture is to determine how information is displayed and accessed across your product. A large part of that lies in the way users interact with a product, as seamless interaction leads to a higher conversion rate.
Typical scenarios usually match with the users’ goals—they help answer what users try to achieve when using your product. Designers rely on this information to optimize user flow and you can also consider storyboarding to visualize the process of interaction.
At the end of this procedure, you should have enough information to understand what features are the most important for your users (which will also help you avoid feature creep) and arrange your product’s information in a way that appeals to your target audience.
Step 5. Define the content areas and label them
Taxonomy is a discipline that helps classify and organize features or information based on the similarities and differences of the concepts that are involved. Information architects choose taxonomies for a product based on the mental model of their target audience (considering how people group similar types of content or pieces of information together).
Sources:
https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/complete-beginners-guide-to-information-architecture/
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/information-architecture#:~:text=What%20is%20Information%20Architecture?%20Information%20architecture%20(IA)%20is,looking%20for%20online%20and%20in%20the%20real%20world.
https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/information-architecture
Information architecture
Now that you’ve understood your goals and your content, you get a chance to meet the people who will interact with this content. Users are, indeed, the most important element in the entire process. The designers, in this step, are encouraged to step into the field, meet the users, create user personas, conduct surveys, perform user research, and get as many insights into their needs, problems, and expectations as possible. This step has a lot to do with the final shape of the IA and should, therefore, be completed with extreme care.
Information Architecture: The Concept And Best Practices
It is the practice of arranging and organizing bits of information in a way that the whole becomes more understandable. Another widely used definition of IA is that it is the act of “organizing, structuring, and labeling content” with the goal of helping the users understand and interact with the information.
What if you stumble upon a website with no menu or footer to help you navigate? What if you find a voluminous book with no table contents or page numbers? Your first few reactions will probably be a mix of surprise and frustration. That is because you are so used to structured content – information presented to you in an organized and understandable manner. If the organization and presentation of the content is off, you find it really hard to follow the content, understand its nature, and find it helpful, to say the least.
Humans, in most cases, need time or structure to process information. The world of the internet, however, is unforgiving and so full of content that we don’t always have the luxury of time. In the digital world, therefore, it is important to present any content in a structured way, so that the users have to spend minimum time in understanding and extracting useful information. When the content on a website or a mobile application is organized, it not only eases the journey of users but also makes it more manageable. A logical presentation and organization of the content is, arguably, the first step toward creating a strong online presence.
When it comes to the world of UI/UX design, the need for information to be impactful and useful at the same time gets more pronounced. Since interaction with new products and services is already a learning process, if the design is not familiar and easily understandable, the users will not stay for long. This is why the world of design needs information architecture. All UI/UX designers, at some point, get introduced to this term and find it extremely valuable in their work. For aspiring designers, it is essential to understand the concept of, and need for, information architecture, its core principles and primary aims, and the best practices involved in creating a quality information architecture.
In this article, we explore all these areas, with the aim to develop a solid understanding of information architecture. By the end of this article, you will have a good idea of the tools at your disposal and the steps to put this newfound knowledge into practice.
What is information architecture?
In the last few years, information architecture (or IA) has gained a lot of importance in the world of design and communication. The usage of the term, along with its practical application, has increased over the years, giving a new perspective to the way products and services are designed and, indeed, adding value to the process along the way. Technical communicators, content strategists, UI/UX designers, and product managers, therefore, need to develop a strong understanding of IA.
According to The Information Architecture Institute, it is the practice of arranging and organizing bits of information in a way that the whole becomes more understandable. Another widely used definition of IA is that it is the act of “organizing, structuring, and labeling content” with the goal of helping the users understand and interact with the information. There are numerous other working definitions of IA. One thing common in all of them is the user-centered focus of the practice and the act of structuring involved in the process.
To understand the term, it is a good idea to break it into words. IA is made up of two words – information and architecture – both having equal importance. If, on the one hand, information, referred to the meaningful content that serves as a knowledge source for the users, is valuable to the users. Then, on the other, the way this information is presented to the audience cannot be neglected. A designer must, therefore, give equal weight to the value of information and the way he/she architects the content, so as to give the users a holistic experience.
It is also essential to have some clarifications while working with IA. Given that UI/UX design is a fairly new field, some definitions tend to twist at times, with concepts not having a clear boundary. When it comes to IA, sometimes it can be confused with navigation or sitemap. A designer must, therefore, have a clear idea of what he/she is dealing with in order to create a better experience for the end-users.
IA vs sitemap
A sitemap is a textual or visual representation of a website’s structure. A sitemap is nothing more than a catalog of web pages, giving a bird’s eye view of the website. Information architecture, on the other hand, points out the connections in the entire knowledge network. Additionally, sitemap restricts itself to a single website but IA is not bound by a website, focusing, instead, on all the websites, blogs, and even offline communication channels that the users can interact with.
Literature on Information Architecture
Learn more about Information Architecture
“[User experience] is used by people to say, ‘I’m a user experience designer, I design websites,’ or ‘I design apps.’ […] and they think the experience is that simple device, the website, or the app, or who knows what. No! It’s everything — it’s the way you experience the world, it’s the way you experience your life, it’s the way you experience the service. Or, yeah, an app or a computer system. But it’s a system that’s everything.”
— Don Norman, pioneer and inventor of the term “user experience,” in an interview with NNGroup
As indicated by Don Norman, User Experience is an umbrella term that covers several areas. When you work with user experience, it’s crucial to understand what those areas are so that you know how best to apply the tools available to you.
In this course, you will gain an introduction to the breadth of UX design and understand why it matters. You’ll also learn the roles and responsibilities of a UX designer, how to confidently talk about UX and practical methods that you can apply to your work immediately.
You will learn to identify the overlaps and differences between different fields and adapt your existing skills to UX design. Once you understand the lay of the land, you’ll be able to chart your journey into a career in UX design. You’ll hear from practicing UX designers from within the IxDF community — people who come from diverse backgrounds, have taught themselves design, learned on the job, and are enjoying successful careers.
If you are new to the Interaction Design Foundation, this course is a great place to start because it brings together materials from many of our other courses. This provides you with both an excellent introduction to user experience and a preview of the courses we have to offer to help you develop your future career. After each lesson, we will introduce you to the courses you can take if a specific topic has caught your attention. That way, you’ll find it easy to continue your learning journey.
In the first lesson, you’ll learn what user experience design is and what a UX designer does. You’ll also learn about the importance of portfolios and what hiring managers look for in them.
In the second lesson, you’ll learn how to think like a UX designer. This lesson also introduces you to the very first exercise for you to dip your toes into the cool waters of user experience.
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.
In the final lesson, you’ll step outside the classroom and into the real world. 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.
You’ll find a series of exercises that will help you get hands-on experience with the methods you learn. Whether you’re a newcomer to design considering a career switch, an experienced practitioner looking to brush up on the basics, or work closely with designers and are curious to know what your colleagues are up to, you will benefit from the learning materials and practical exercises in this course.
You can also learn with your fellow course-takers and use the discussion forums to get feedback and inspire other people who are learning alongside you. You and your fellow course-takers have a huge knowledge and experience base between you, so we think you should take advantage of it whenever possible.
You earn a verifiable and industry-trusted Course Certificate once you’ve completed the course. You can highlight it on your resume, LinkedIn profile or website.
Information Architecture Design Styles
There are two basic styles of information architecture: top-down and bottom-up. The thing that many designers must realize is that it’s useful to look at a site from both angles to devise the most effective IA.
Top-Down Architecture
Top-down architecture starts with a broad overview and understanding of the website’s strategy and goals, and creates a basic structure first. From there, content relationships are refined as the site architecture grows deeper, but it’s all viewed from the overall high-level purpose of the site.
Bottom-Up Architecture
The bottom-up architecture model looks at the detailed relationships between content first. With this kind of architecture, you might start out with user personas and how those users will be going through the site. From there, you figure out how to tie it all together, rather than looking at how it all relates first.
Information Architecture Examples
Different websites require different types of information architecture. What works best will vary based on things like how often content is updated, how much content there is, and how visitors use the site. Here are some case examples to show you how content is structured on different kinds of websites.
News Website
CNN.com is one of the biggest news sites online. They cater to over 20 million visitors a month [2] ; visitors from all walks of life. Different visitors will have different goals when visiting the site and varying interests in the news they want to read.
Considering that most people going to the website are likely wanting to see recent and breaking news to catch themselves up with the day’s events, it makes sense to give these stories prime screen real estate. But a lot of people visiting the site will also want to see news related to a specific topic (e.g. U.S.
To accommodate this, CNN has multiple content blocks lower down on the page, organized by topic. It makes it easy to find new and relevant news on the most sought-after subjects. There are also links from the top of the page for many sections, including sports, tech, health, and politics.
CNN.com manages to organize a lot of content into a relatively small space. The site’s easy to use and the information architecture is intuitive and logical.
Single Product Website
The website for Coda is one of the more elegant single-product websites out there and it’s obvious they put a lot of thought into how the information on the page is structured.
Visitors to Coda’s website are likely looking for a good web design application, and likely already know the features they want. Coda doesn’t need to educate visitors on what web design is or how IDEs work; they assume that the main persona is of a web designer who’s familiar with this type of software and how it works.
It also keeps the purchase options front and center for visitors (along with the “Get Help” link, which is likely for those who have already purchased the software or those that want more specific information)
Ecommerce Website
For example, the Footwear category has its own spot on the main navigation, but it’s also included under Men’s, Women’s, and Kids’, as sub-navigation items. Doing it this way shows an understanding of how different target customers might shop. It uses hierarchies and prioritization to organize content into meaningful subsets.
High-Content, User-Driven Website
Wikipedia is one of the largest websites in the world in terms of sheer number of pages. As of September 2010, there were over 3.4 million articles on the site [3] . The English-language articles alone would result in 1,439 printed volumes of 1.6 million words each.
Considering the user-generated nature of Wikipedia, it’s a great feat that the site manages to have anything resembling good information architecture. But, for the most part, the site is organized in a manner that makes it easy to find content.
In addition to search, the interconnectedness of Wikipedia articles makes it easy to move from one article to virtually any other related article. This in itself makes Wikipedia’s information architecture one of the best online; they understand how visitors use the site and make it easier for them to do what they need to do.
Sources:
https://www.ramotion.com/blog/information-architecture/
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/information-architecture
https://www.webfx.com/blog/web-design/information-architecture-101-techniques-and-best-practices/
Information architecture
Navigation design accounts for the visual way of finding components (menus, links, sites, and pages) that help users understand how to interact with SharePoint sites and portals and what types of information is available. Options for implementing navigation differ based on the framework for your sites and intranet.
What Is Information Architecture in UX?
“If you think of a museum, there’s the sidewalk, and then the entrance, and then the lobby, and then floor one, and the route to floor two, or whatever that experience is. So, in that sense, sure — architecture,” Girma, a designer at the UX research and design firm Blink, said. “But when you look at the document, it’s this weird mappy thing, not architecture.”
To be fair, Girma’s objection to the term may be rooted in her personal experience. She trained as an architect at University of California–Los Angeles. Still, the gauziness of information architecture — a mental model to describe the organization and sequence of tasks users perform in a website or app — appears to be more than just a semantic concern.
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 can take and important differences in how designers think about organizing the flow of information within and across pages.
Opinions vary as to the best models to describe information architecture, but there is wide consensus in the design community that a thoughtful approach can make a significant difference to the performance and usability of a digital product.
“You’re not only thinking about the point-A-to-point-B experience, you’re thinking about behaviors, you’re thinking about objectives and the different modalities that go into every digital site. Without that, you’d be lost,” Sheehan said. “The frameworks aren’t sexy, but they’re super important.”
What is information architecture?
The same applies for information architecture (IA). When all is in order, it becomes invisible. Interestingly enough, this ‘science of order’ does not have one unified definition that experts would agree on. But they all agree that, in one way or another, IA is the practice of organizing content in an effective way.
The history of IA goes as far into the past as ancient Egypt. 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.
In 1998 Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld wrote the book ‘Information Architecture for the World Wide Web’ and even though the authors didn’t expect much success, the book became Amazon’s best internet book that year. So what did this show?
You could see that people were really standing up and paying attention. In the so-called information age, the work of information architects, UX designers, interaction designers, and content managers is more important than ever before. Without them, the web would descend into chaos. So, where should you begin?
Sources:
https://builtin.com/design-ux/information-architecture
https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/a-beginners-guide-to-information-architecture/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/information-architecture-models-examples