Whenever you visit a website, the team behind it has thought carefully about what information to show you, where, and how to navigate place to place.
If you think of your favorite website - are your thoughts along the lines of “Wow, this is so easy to use!” or “thank goodness I could find that information quickly”. Then, you know careful thought and work went into that website’s information architecture.
If you care about getting all the features used on your site or product, and all the information read - you’re going to want to spend some time on the IA.
Still confused? We’re here to break down this topic and get you going, so you can apply this practically on your own work. Let’s begin!
In a quick, brief nutshell - Information Architecture is the field of organizing and formatting website (and product) content to make it contextually understandable while also being efficient to search.
Even more generally, IA is in the business of solving complex problems, and representing them in a logical and easy to read way.
As the Information Architecture Institute puts it,
“A good IA helps people to understand their surroundings and find what they’re looking for – in the real world as well as online.”
It can also vary in depth. A marketing website that is very wide (but not very deep) may be more straightforward to manage.
However, ecommerce websites with loads of products, or an enterprise application will require more thought spent into how a user might navigate and find information.
No - not quite. IA is certainly a large part of the UX umbrella, but does not share all of the same methodologies, exercises, and deliverables.
However It does go hand-in-hand with many UX Design methodologies, so you may find overlap when searching about navigation, or content organization.
IA is more focused on the raw content, its organization, and how to find it. Research and client provided material will fill in the data aspect. But before you can even think about what the page might look like and what kind of components to use, you need to first lay out the content's relationship to each other. This is IA, and it’s ideally before you get to the UI.
Without an explicit plan and foundation for your website, building new features on top of it may result in disorganization, rework, and overall no connection between features and workflow.
Look at a website like
Questions to think about before you get started:
Like much of the UX Design process, it’s more important than ever to prove your value to your business or client.
Of course, you may make things easier or more beautiful for them - but how do you quantify those metrics?
Executives may not care a whole lot how ‘nice’ it is that your data is grouped more beautifully. They will care more if this improvement can provide more profit, drive more traffic, or create more leads. This is how they know it’s a worthy ROI (Return on Investment) for them.
As a UX designer or information architect, you might have to keep this in mind. Some decisions might not make sense logically, but will be required or pleaded for by executives (can we promote this page in the navigation? We NEED to drive more traffic here. I don’t care if it’s out of place!)
Here are some areas you can think about if you need to prove to your clients or bosses why information architecture is important to do
Benefits Employees
Drives more Traffic
Creates more Leads
Saves money
SEO Ranking
It’s no surprise that thorough, specific user research will help inform the information architecture that you’ll be creating. If you want an in-depth place to start, we talk a lot about what UX Design is.
You’ll be wanting to conduct studies on both stakeholders and end-users.
For stakeholders, it's imperative to capture and record all the kinds of data that needs to be represented in your site or product. Every necessary page, data groupings, and workflows they will need.
End Users tell a different story. They’re going to inform you how they like to conduct their work - the flows and steps it will take to complete their task. From there, you can utilize that data to make it as efficient, logical, and consistent as possible.
Talking to users is an art in itself. Knowing some basic psychology principles can help you go far.
One of the most efficient ways to gather information from these user groups will be to conduct user interviews. Whether online or in-person, having a first-hand conversation is extremely valuable.
A pivotal exercise is card-sorting. This allows you to see how the clientele view their own data - so that you’re not working in the vacuum of your own team, and you can help enhance the current classification or organization of their information.
User research is a lengthy but important process - it will inform nearly everything you need, and its truly the meat of the work behind the information architecture.
Important information to get out of your user research:
Although often forgotten, how you describe your data and the exact language you use matters a lot.
If you are given pre-set data from a client (who isn’t ready to budge on language change) then you might be lucky - or will have to make some compromises.
However if you’re working from scratch and doing your own data research - you may have more room to define and categorize in a way that makes the most sense for your team or client.
Language formality will depend on context, and even might require outside help from a knowledge area expert.
Whatever the case, having solid definitions and category names will help your user navigate to content easier.
Once you’ve pulled together the information that needs to be represented, you can take a look at how it all comes together.
Let’s take a look at Patagonia’s site. This is an example of how data might be grouped for an e-commerce website.
This is where useful deliverables such as site-mapping comes in.
Patagonia’s very top-level navigation consists only of:
The secondary items are:
These are the categories they’ve deemed to be both the most accessible and also the highest classification of the rest of the content that lives on their site. Everything else they have fits under these categories.
In this image, I have the shop tab highlighted. There is an abundance of content in the 2nd and 3rd tiers down, organized thoughtfully.
It’s unlikely that you’d see “Shorts” under a category like “Packs & Gear”. Your first guess
This is why our first step - naming conventions - is so important. With the right labels and tags, we can further create sub-categories that make sense.
Hierarchy is a wonderful step to start visualizing your product.
We can begin using site-maps and database diagrams to represent our data side by side.
While you may never have to create one of these yourself - it’s important to know what kind of workflows are out there for your team.
Database Diagrams specifically call out any kind of backend database (or tools, software) a project may use, and how they connect.
This might be more relevant to Product designers, but UX designers working on marketing websites might find value in it!
Essentially, understanding the backend that holds up the frontend is a crucial part of Information Architecture. If you’re involved in this process, your developers would be the one’s creating this document to show what data is in what table, and if there are separate databases, how they connect and what information is transferred.
Tools like dbdiagram are good tools for developers to visualize this data.
Site mapping is laying out the full pages on your site, and how they link together.
Often, you start with the landing page - the very first page anyone arrives at. Some questions you can ask:
Once you have identified every single page that you will need, you can begin piecing them together.
Whatever tool you choose to use is fine, but if you need options you can check out Whimsical, Lucidcharts, zenflowchart, omnigraffle, or gloomaps to name a few.
Here, I’ve used Patagonia as an example. I’ve stripped away the lowest tiers to show you the simple structure of their site map.
Navigation is a key component of IA design. Since IA is concerned with the organization and page hierarchy of a site or product, navigation is crucial to get users from A to B. But, you can really only design the navigation once you’ve solidified the organization and structure of a site. From there, you can make the best decisions about what kind of navigation will be useful for the type of data you want to represent.
Menu navigation is the most obvious, but what are the many ways users track from page to page?
Search is an elaborate topic that is better described in its own full-blown article.
For now, you likely know that search is a critical component to modern day sites and products.
With incredibly powerful and accurate search tools existing in our day and age (Google, bing, yahoo, you name it) people are accustomed to getting their information fast, all while using few key words and even misspelling!
Now, you don’t have to be Google to have a useful and efficient search tool.
Some facets to consider:
There is a lot that goes into Information Design, but don’t let it intimidate you. All of the facets we covered are simply tools that you can use to your advantage. Apply them where they make sense, and reap the benefit of a more thought-through product with a strong foundation.
