There are a lot of elements that go towards the creation of a successful website. One of the fundamental elements of a website that's easy for your users to navigate, though, is the information architecture.
Continue reading for a high-level look at what an information architecture is and how to build one.
What is information architecture?
Information architect Abby Covert defines information architecture (IA) as:
the act of deciding which order the pieces of a whole should be arranged in order to communicate the meaning that is intended to users.
Put another way, information architecture is the practice of creating helpful connections and meaningful distinctions (meaningful to your users, that is!) This practice usually involves a few different activities, including content inventories, content audits, and user experience research.
Information architecture versus sitemaps
In reading about website navigation and design, you may have seen the terms "information architecture" and "sitemap" used interchangeably. But are they the same? Not quite.
Basically, a sitemap is a visual representation of how your site's content is organized. This usually involves building a hierarchy of nodes that represent the content on your site. These nodes are then connected with arrows or lines to show how they're related.
While sitemaps are shown to a client as part of our redesign projects, they are not usually shown to users on the site itself. Instead, users rely on the website's navigational elements to find content that they're looking for. These elements can include the global navigation (the main menu), utility navigation menus in the page header, breadcrumbs, related links, and so on.
Remember: the sitemap is a smaller piece of a site's information architecture and only captures how content is organized!
Building an information architecture
When building an information architecture, there are some basic principles that are worth following. First, your IA needs to support two things:
- Findability: making sure users can find content that they assume is present on your site
- Discoverability: making sure users can also find new content that they were not aware of before
The key to these two attributes is information scent. Coined by Peter Pirolli and Stuart K. Card in 1999, this term refers to a user's sense of how relevant a link will be for completing their current task. Like a dog sniffing its way down a trail, users tend to follow links based on whether those links have a strong information scent.
Information scent, then, has three attributes:
- Link label wording
- Context cues and surrounding content
- User's prior experience
Each attribute is essential in making sure that users can find and discover content on your site. The first step towards this, though, is figuring out what's going on with your site's content.
Content inventories & content audits
The first step in any IA project is to compile an inventory of your site's content. The inventory should include pages, documents, images and any other assets. You can do this manually, but we recommend finding an application that can crawl your site, such as Screaming Frog's SEO Spider.
The next step is to conduct a content audit to determine its purpose and quality. Content audits help you identify any gaps in your current IA, find opportunities for updating stale content, and delete content that isn't needed.
Read more: Understanding types of content work
Card sorting & tree testing
Once you've audited your site's content and have some ideas for how to organize it, it's time for user testing. There are a few ways to do this, but the most common methods in IA work are card sorting and tree testing.
Card sorting involves having users sort a list of cards into categories. These categories can be pre-determined by your team, or users can be free to create their own categories as they see fit. This is a useful method for getting a holistic sense of how your users categorize the content on your site.
Tree testing, meanwhile, involves building a sitemap—the 'tree'—and giving users tasks to complete by navigating through each 'branch'. Users select the 'leaf' that represents where they'd find the information necessary to complete the assigned task. While card sorting is best used to generate ideas for categorizing content, tree testing is more often used to confirm an IA.
Read more from Optimal Workshop: Tree testing 101and Card sorting 101
Also see our Introduction to Tree Testing 6-minute video!
Conclusion
All of this is just a brief glimpse into what goes into developing an information architecture. If you would like to discuss your next web project and possible information architecture work, we would be happy to learn about your goals.
Please contact us to start a conversation or request a quote.