The importance of information architecture

Information architecture (IA) is an essential part of any user experience (UX) process.

Information architecture (IA) is an essential part of any user experience (UX) design process.

Many people don't fully understand what IA is, its potential, and why it's so important as one of the core foundations of user experience design.

But underestimate it at your peril, because nailing your IA can be the difference between the success and failure of your project.

Information architecture, put simply, is the process of organising and arranging information to make it easier for users to find and understand. It isn't only important online, it's essential when designing services in the real world as well. Imagine trying to find a book in a library with no classification system. It would be impossible!

Whenever we make things to be used by others, we should first consider the IA.

There are a lot of ways to organise information when building a digital product. Some of the most common include:

• language
• labels
• sections
• search
• categories
• menus
• page numbering
• links

This means arranging the structure of a website – or mobile app, software, interface, etc. – to allow users to easily navigate and make sense of a product or digital service.

Imagine these devices as signposts at the airport, directing the user to their destination with informative and useful information that they wouldn’t otherwise have.

A good IA creates a good user experience.

By organising and structuring information effectively, we help users to find what they need, drive them to our point of conversion and/or complete tasks in an intuitive and time-efficient way.

Without effective IA, the user is left with the frustrating task of trying to figure things out for themselves or forced into counter-intuitive pathways in order to use our sites, apps, products or services.

Good user experience, based on solid IA, reflects not only on your company’s online presence. It can also impact how your company as a whole is perceived. It's a reflection of how much you value the experience of your customers or audience.

A positive or negative experience can influence potential customers, investors and other stakeholders to the point when they are deciding whether or not to do business with a company.

Bad IA can compromise the brand strength, transparency, and trust of a company.

First, we need to understand who our users are, what their needs are and what pathways are best suited to them. By interviewing users, we can fully understand the journeys that they take to achieve goals or tasks and what the success areas, pain points or blockers are.

A content audit allows us to identify areas that are no longer needed, duplicated content, dead links, inconsistency between navigation labels and page headers terminology, as well as sections that have too much or not enough information.

Use short, simple and intuitive language for labels, section titles and other navigation items. These should follow common industry standards, so they can be easily recognised or translated, and scanned by your audience.

Create an architectural hierarchy with minimal sublevels. More information doesn't always equal good navigation and it can sometimes create problems that may need to be corrected in the future. Your users should be able to access information with the minimum amount of clicks or taps.

A breadcrumb is a common and recognised pattern that helps signpost the user to where they currently are within your site. A breadcrumb helps users feel orientated, gives them confidence in navigating easily, and they are able to go back to previous pages without the help of the browser, especially if they have landed on a page from an outside source, for example.

Keeping logical consistency and familiar patterns within the IA and user interface will increase a user's confidence in navigating the website. For example, placing breadcrumbs in the same position on each page, ensuring navigation behaviour is consistent throughout the site, and using the same template for all pages in a section will make it easier for users to locate themselves when navigating your site.

This method is a reliable and easy technique to identify the first steps of the IA or to test and improve an existing IA.

With the help of a group of participants, we can start to determine the categories and subcategories of the information architecture. This is done by sorting exercises using a collection (or ‘pack’) of cards or post-its.

There are two types of card sorting:

• Open card sort lets participants organise sections and categories into groups according to what makes sense to them.
• Closed card sort sees participants (or stakeholders) identify the top-level category, and we ask the participant to organise cards under each section according to what makes sense to them.

Tree testing is a method that allows us to validate a new IA or to test and improve an existing IA.

We ask participants to complete specific tasks or to find specific information without any design or user interface involved, using an online tool. In this way, they focus purely on the steps to complete a goal without any additional distraction.

With the use of an interactive prototype or wireframe, we ask participants to complete a specific task or find specific information by navigating through the site.

We observe the journey and how clear the process is to complete the specific goal.

Information Architecture is one of the fundamental pieces of the user experience process.

I always like to describe IA with the following metaphor:

Imagine you are building a house. IA is the blueprint or the floor plan of your house. It’s a way to make sure the rooms in the house make sense. We don’t want to end up in a scenario where there is no clear entrance, windows intersect with walls, there are no stairs to reach the upper floor and the bathroom is where the kitchen should be.

Having a blueprint of this imaginary house allows us to structure and create the foundations before we start to build.