2022 Guide to Information Architecture in UX Design

For example, does your homepage provide enough examples of the types of products your company offers? Can your visitors easily infer what type of site they’ve landed on? If not, you may want to optimize your site for this principle and provide more examples.

This section gives advice about mobile and desktop design patterns that support orientation and wayfinding. It’s important to assume people won’t always be accessing your site from the homepage (aka “the front door”). They might well enter from a blog post link, or a search on Google, and they could find themselves on any of your site pages. https://globalcloudteam.com/ So it’s important to orient users and help them understand where they are. Once we have the main pages in our hierarchy we can start grouping content within those pages. Think about what you want users to do on each page, just like you organise objects in your house based on how likely you are to use those things for main tasks in each room.

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Provide consumers with a variety of various classification methods that may be used to navigate the site’s content. Assume that at least half of the users will land on a page other than the homepage when they first visit the site. It is important to avoid working in isolation while developing the information architecture of a website. In addition to logically arranging the information, there are a great many aspects, such as user behavior and future-proofing, that must be taken into consideration. The development of a consistent model that is representative of the desired result of the project. Imagine a news website that features the most important articles of the day prominently on the homepage and automatically updates the list when new items are published.

• Non-hierarchical IA, on the other hand, doesn’t have any hierarchy, so it’s not as detailed as its counterpart.
• Good IA serves as the foundation of effective user experience design.
• Now, assess its accuracy, style of presentation, and usefulness.
• In contrast to content strategy, which is carried out by content strategists, and interface design, which is carried out by designers, the professional title of the information architect is rarely used.
• People navigate an interface differently, and it’s the architects’ responsibility to provide multiple classification systems tailored to different needs; like a menu bar and search bar.

Pay close attention when naming your products, activities, functions, and features, as words should reflect meanings that are familiar to users, so avoid jargon or unusual terms. Information Architecture is the study and representation of how to organize, categorize and present a website’s content so that users can find what they are looking for. By keeping your information architecture logical and consistent , you put users at ease and give them confidence . When users have too many choices, it can overwhelm them and lead to abandonment.

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It’s helpful to take a close look at what might be blocking these goals. Designers want to make the user experience of their informational products as simple and stress-free as possible. Pages can be added or deleted and new categories might be introduced.

This principle refers to the psychology of how humans categorize things. Ultimately, we are able to categorize concepts by creating a list of examples that help us group different concepts together, no matter the criteria behind this grouping. The reason why this is a relevant principle in IA is that it allows you to treat your content with the flexibility it requires.

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This way, designing the navigation means establishing a strategy to find content on the site according to the focus you want. Brown noticed that many teams referred to the navigation menu as global navigation or left menu bar. However, the location where the menu appears should not be the defining factor. So at the top of the hierarchy, try to keep the options as narrow as possible. Stick to choices that give users exactly what they need at that point in their journey and nothing more. This structure can be organized, presented, and connected to other content in various ways.

In terms of information architecture, the navigation system is less about having a great interface and more about how the user can move through pieces of content or information. It’s important to always remember that IA is all about finding ways to help the user navigate the information in order to reach their goal. While sequential organizing aims to take the user by the hand down a series of designated steps, matrix structures will let the user choose their preferred means of navigation. This translates into giving the user access to all the information in the form of links and buttons, and letting them decide. The organizational structure is the act of making sense of your content.

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Similarly, a house looks clean when it is built on an architectural design. Therefore, the content inventory should show all of the product’s information and where to find them. Therefore, content gains prominence according to the hierarchy information architecture web established by IA professionals – which must be aligned with the company’s or product’s objectives. During the design workflow, a numbering system is often employed to keep everyone on the same page when discussing product content.

Below you can see a template for a content inventory spreadsheet for websites. It typically includes page ID, page level in the hierarchy, URL, content type, keywords, and description. The better the entire product development team knows the IA, the faster everyone will know what is and isn’t possible, and how serious any supposed “easy work” really is. Information architecture is, like a blueprint, a visual representation of the product’s infrastructure, features, and hierarchy. The level of detail is up to the designer, so IA may also include navigation, application functions and behaviors, content, and flows.

Can a UX writer be an information architect?

In a typical scenario, as sections of a design model take shape and evolve, multiple stakeholders — including engineers, content writers, customer support teams and executives — are invited into the process. Doing the front-end research to create a site map can seem like extra work, especially in a deadline-driven environment, but it is important not to rush it. There are several ways to define or conceptualize what information architecture is.