Key Concepts

Information Architecture

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There’s a lot of discussion surrounding User Experience and the need to have an “intuitive” website. In this context, intuitive refers to a user’s ability to come to a website for the first time and easily find their way around without any effort, struggle, or really having to think about the actions they’re taking.

The intuitiveness of an website’s navigation is often evaluated through usability testing, but it is created through information architecture (IA). IA is often the least visible part of the UX process, but it’s one of the most impactful—most navigation and discoverability problems within a site can be traced back to issues with the IA.

What is information architecture?

In simple terms IA is the practice of organizing, labeling, and structuring content in a way that makes sense and enables people to find it. Unlike visual aspects of the design process your website’s information architecture is the structural system of logic and organization on which everything else is built.

To help illustrate the function and impact of IA think of a grocery store. It is information architecture that determines which products belong in which product categories, and which product categories should be grouped into an aisle together. In a physical space such as this the IA establishes how these aisles are labeled, what categories are highlighted on signage, and how easy it is to find additional services like customer service, checkout, and even restrooms.

As soon as you put a single item of content or information on a website, you’ve created an information architecture—which is why it’s important to make sure you’ve done so deliberately by determining what best fits the needs of your website and the expectations of its users.

Information architecture core components

While the needs of a website’s information architecture can be varied, the following items make up some of the major aspects that any IA should consider and solve for:

1. Organization

A comprehensive IA should define rules for how content is grouped and categorized. This can include defining different types of content, relationships of categories and tags for content, and how similar content is related or differentiated from each other.

When drafting up your plan for your website’s content organization consider not just the content you have today but the type of content you plan to have in the future. For example, do you plan to launch a blog at some point? Will it be one blog, or will there be different types of blogs on your website? Will this plan for your website’s organization allow you to easily add this blog content, or would you have to redo it?

2. Labeling

This defines the words that are used to describe the groups in which content is organized. Labeling can include specifying the categories and tags available to be used or defining navigation items, page titles, and section headers.

Labels should be clear, descriptive, and representative of the content it contains or action the user is about to take. Once you define a label make sure to consistently use the correct one—don’t refer to the items as different things in different places or you may confuse your audience.

3. Navigation

This is the system users employ to move through a website—ie. a menu. IA is responsible for establishing top level vs. secondary level relationships to navigation items as well as separating out primary vs. secondary and global vs. section level systems of navigation. The more complex a website is the more critical it becomes to have a well defined information architecture and system of navigation.

Especially important for content heavy or complex websites, offering search capability provides an important fallback for users to find information when browsing the website fails them.

Having a useful search is more than simply installing a basic plugin. A well designed search function should have its own information architecture considerations including but not limited to:

  • How are results organized
  • What filters are relevant and useful

5. Hierarchy

Last but not least in this list, everything mentioned above should be impacted by decisions you make regarding the hierarchy of the information on your website.

These decisions define what information is most important, what is secondarily important, and so on—as well as how that priority is communicated both structurally and visually.

How to evaluate your information architecture

Whether or not you built your website yourself, you likely played a significant role in defining how it turned out and what content went into it. As such, it will be almost impossible for you to personally judge the effectiveness of its IA, since you already know where everything is.

This curse of knowledge is one that presents itself often in user experience, and impacts everyone—business owners, stakeholders, designers, developers, and anyone else with intimate knowledge into the website or business. As a result, the decisions you’ve made will often feel completely obvious and logical, but may not be as clear to someone outside of the business operations.

This is why gathering outside feedback—whether through usability testing, or friends and family less familiar with the website—is invaluable when auditing your navigation and evaluating IA decisions.

Tools to audit

When evaluating your webiste’s information architecture try to do the following:

  1. Write down every page in your website. For each one, ask yourself what job it performs, goal it achieves, or value it provides.
  2. Ask someone unfamiliar with your business and website to find three specific pieces of information. Ask them to vocalize their thought process, out loud, as they go—make sure you observe and take notes, and try to avoid providing any hints or assistance.
  3. Take a look at your site analytics and see what pages have high exit rates. Often, but not always, these pages can indicate places where the IA is failing.

Common mistakes

The following items are easy-to-make mistakes we see frequently. Paying special attention to these items when evaluating your own IA will help you identify some starting points to make improvements:

  • Using industry jargon your visitors may not be familiar with for navigation labels.
  • Having too many top-level menu items that compete for attention—remember, if everything is important than nothing is important.
  • Burying important pages two or three levels deep.
  • Organizing content around the structure of your business instead of how customers think about your product or service.
  • Missing a clear path from the homepage to the most important conversion.

How users look for information

While the best IA will ultimately be unique to your business, website, and users; there has been a lot of research into the way people process information that can be leveraged to make some common assumptions when defining your IA.

  1. Most of your visitors won’t read everything. They’ll scan the page, looking for familiar landmarks that indicate they’ve found whatever they were looking for.
  2. Most users will follow the path of least resistance to accomplish their task, but will quickly abandon it if they hit friction.
  3. The language your audience uses to search for your product or services is often different than the language you use to describe them. Make sure your navigation labels reflect how your customer talks—not how you talk.