Information Architecture

Have you ever gone to a website and couldn't find what you were looking for? Information architects solve that problem. A website can have an appealing visual design and well-thought-out user flows for a checkout process, but if the information is poorly organized, your users and your business will suffer.

Information architecture organizes and structures content within a technological solution to create meaningful user experiences to meet user needs and business goals.

A project often includes designing navigation systems, content models, and user interface patterns. This design work helps users understand and navigate the product or digital environment. I practice information architecture in three complementary phases.

Discovery and Alignment

In the discovery and alignment phase, an information architect needs to understand your business goals, user needs, and the current state of your digital product.

Information architecture projects are usually large and complex. It's good to take time to understand the current state and create alignment. When everyone makes enough time for research, conversation, and thinking, it's less expensive and leads to better results.

These are common activities during the discovery and alignment phase:

  • Stakeholder interviews
  • Content audits and analysis
  • Competitive analysis
  • Identifying business goals and user needs
  • Performance metrics and analytics analysis
  • User interviews and card sorts
  • Baseline usability tests and tree tests
  • Technology audits and analysis
  • Current state models

By the end of the discovery and alignment phase, everyone involved should clearly understand the problem space and technological constraints and agree about the user's needs and the business's goals.

Strategy and Design

The strategy and design phase has two goals:

  • Design a new structure that is true to both your business goals and user needs
  • Help your team align around the design decisions so that you can implement it

Information architecture strategy is about understanding how your user needs, business goals, and brand translate into a structure. A good information architecture for your digital product, can't be a generic structure that any other organization can use. It needs to reflect your brand, work with your technology, embody your organization's values, and serve the people who use it.

These are common activities during the strategy and design phase include:

  • Establishing design principles
  • Diagraming and modeling future state structures
  • Content modeling
  • Establishing success metrics
  • Producing site maps and navigation systems
  • Sourcing, adapting, and designing taxonomies and metadata schemes

Testing and Iteration

I want to help you settle on a new information architecture. While the research upfront should produce significant improvements to the original state, testing at this stage is significantly less expensive before implementation.

Common activities include:

  • Tree tests and usability tests
  • Prototype tests
  • Improvements based on testing
  • Finalized site maps, content models, taxonomies, etc.

By the end of the testing and iteration phases, you will be ready to implement the changes. This may require mapping content from the old information architecture to the new information architecture.