How to create — and improve — Information Architecture?
A well thought out Information Architecture (IA) is one of the best ways to guide your audience through your content. If your IA serves its purpose, getting a new audience and retaining old ones becomes easier than ever. If your content is not properly organized — or architected — your users are bound to feel lost and overwhelmed, and this can happen more than once. Overwhelming and frustrating your audience is tantamount to losing them, both in that instant and in the long run. A good IA is one that takes care of the needs of the users, ensures that their journey is at the heart of the presentation of content, and provides them with ways to rectify the mistakes they might make along the way.
There are certain steps involved in the creation of an effective IA. Though you may not need all of these steps, based on your content and audience, the process more or less follows the same track. Let’s walk through this practice in a sequential manner.
Step 1: Define Your Goals
Whether you sell a product to your users or run a non-profit, you must have some objectives, some parameters that define your success. For example, a bookshop might set a target of books to be sold per month, an educational non-profit might consider the number of children enrolled per year, and a website might track the number of unique visitors every day. All of these have one thing in common: well-defined goals. Your goal can be as simple as ‘making a million dollars a year’.
The definition of goals and objectives is an essential step in the creation and improvement of IA. If you’re unclear about the purpose of your content, the benefits you want to achieve from it, you will not be able to make it better. While drafting the goals, make sure to follow the SMART principle. In order to keep your content effective, it is important that you have a good answer to the question: what do you want the content to do?
Step 2: Content Audit
A content audit is extremely important for you to get to know your own content. The importance of this particular step is elevated when your purpose is to improve your existing IA. A content audit is a ruthless analysis of every bit of information that you have created so far. From promotional content to user manuals, from pretty pictures to analytical charts, the entire content is scrutinized in a comprehensive audit.
A content audit will tell you what works, what doesn’t work, what is outdated, and what needs to stay the same.
You need a content audit to be able to develop a better IA because you need to bring your content in conformity with your goals. Analysis of your content brings you closer to what you already have, providing you with an objective analysis. This step will help you identify the weak and strong points of your content, what works, what doesn’t work, what is outdated, and what needs to stay the same.
This audit and analysis of content is, indeed, a whole project in itself. There are certain steps, rules, and best practices that need to be considered to make the most out of it.
Step 3: Organize Existing Content
Once you have identified your goals and you know what your content is doing at a certain stage, you’re all set for the next step, that of organization. An important aspect of truly understanding your content is to see how small units of information link up, creating groups and clusters to become a whole package. At this stage, you can lump your stand-alone pieces of information together into larger groups. These groups are not only easier to understand but also help in identifying the overarching themes your content is dealing with.
With adequate information on the current content, you can now create a sitemap of the existing information. A sitemap provides a holistic picture of the entire content that you own. While creating a sitemap, do not just focus on the primary menu and main navigation, as these do not always provide the complete picture. It is important that you focus on the links between various bits and fragments of information and how they come together to deliver a more meaningful message. A good sitemap also presents the choices available to users, in the form of forks, and how they’re lead to other pieces of content based on their needs and choices.
The entire practice of creating a sitemap is necessary to map out the users’ journey and also to have a better look at your content.
Step 4: Understand Your Users’ Needs
All the steps, up to this point, focused on you, your goals, and your content. The people who will interact with this content were not in the picture, yet. Now is the time to switch the perspective, to get to know your audience. It is at this stage that you must bring the users in the loop, as their expectations and reactions can have a strong impact on your IA.
The whole idea is to get into the heads of the audience and look at your content from their perspective.
Comprehensive user research developing a better IA involves developing user personas, interacting with your users, knowing their needs, and understanding their expectations and pain points. Be careful when choosing the people to interact with. Using a random sample can be effective, but it might not be possible in all cases. Even if you handpick users based on your convenience, try to gather people of different backgrounds, with different interests, and from different regions. If you talk to five people of the same family, living in the same town or even under the same roof, there’s a good chance that you’ll get similar answers. A diverse sample, therefore, is always the best way to go about it.
Another key aspect of this stage is to be as objective and unbiased as possible. Yes, you love your content. Yes, your ideas make the most sense to you. Yes, you have a deep connection with your work. But, remember, it is your audience that you’re creating the content for. If they are not happy, your efforts will most likely go to waste. It is, therefore, important to distance yourself from your biases and to listen to the people with an open mind. It does not mean, however, that everything the people say is right. But if a lot of people hold the same (or similar) opinion, then maybe you need to listen to them.
You can interact with your audience in a number of ways. Conducting online and in-person surveys, face to face interviews, and focus group discussions can provide you with a lot of insights. You can also use more interactive methods such as card sorting, A/B testing, and usability research. The selection of tools and techniques depends on your needs and the extent to which you can interact with the audience. Whichever method, or methods, you use, the end goal is to have a clear idea of what the people want when they interact with your content. The whole idea is to get into the heads of the audience and look at your content from their perspective.
Once successfully accomplished, this step will not only leave you with some key issues to focus on but also give you numerous recommendations that can then be implemented in the next stages.
Step 5: Process All the Information
You have come a long way, from knowing your content to understanding the needs of your users, you have gathered a lot of data. Now is the time to put this information to use. A small recap of the stuff you have at this stage:
- Well-defined goals and objectives
- Content audit report highlighting some key issues
- A complete sitemap
- A clear understanding of the needs and expectations of your audience
In this step, you’ll bring all these things together. On the one hand, you have your current content (or a plan for the content) and on the other, you have the needs of your users. Analyzing your sitemap in the light of the content audit report and the findings of your user research will help in identifying the gaps that you need to fill with your new IA. Your new IA, in other words, will serve as a bridge between the place where you stand with your content and the place where you want to be to meet your users’ needs.
Some of the important things to achieve in this step include:
- An objective analysis of your current content
- Identifying the key areas that you need to target in your new IA
- Devising a plan for the creation of IA
Remember, it is important to be realistic at this point. You cannot give the users everything they want. You will have a number of limitations including, but not limited to, budget, time, availability of technological resources, and human resource. So, while creating the plan and identifying the target areas, make sure that you’re not overly ambitious. Your IA can resolve some pressing issues now and you can always revise it in the future.
Step 6: Develop Your IA
You have a plan. You know which areas you have to target. All that is left is for you to actually execute the plan. You only need some software and tools to actually see your new IA. This is where you transform your research and ideas into a real thing.
An important task in this phase is to make sure that your IA is presentable and understandable. Since this draft will be used by the content and website developers, you need to make sure that it is both easy to understand and easy to use. It is also essential to identify links between different sections and segments of content so that the developers get the whole picture.
Focus on the needs and expectations of users at all times. Remember, you will not consume your content, your audience will.
Some tools that you can use to make your IA presentable include
It is also a good idea to take a look at some excellent Information Architectures of popular websites. As you have your own findings from the research, looking at some competitors can be of great help.
Best Practices
While conducting the research and creating your IA, some of the practices must always be followed, like guiding principles.
- Be objective and unbiased (as much as possible). Leave your personal attachment with your content aside for some time.
- Have a clear idea of your goals. Define your goals in a specific manner.
- Do not overwhelm your audience with links and information, as this might frustrate them.
- Keep an eye on the accessibility of information. Some people might need special assistance, such as screen readers, and you must meet those needs.
- Make sure that the IA you create is presentable, understandable, and reusable if needed.
- Focus on the needs and expectations of users at all times. Remember, you will not consume your content, your audience will.
- Provide your users with an exit door at all times. So that making one wrong decision does not lead to complete failure. Help them in a way that they can right their wrongs.
Sources
- Usability.gov. Information Architecture Basics.
- UX Planet. Information Architecture. Basics for Designers.
- WebFX. Information Architecture 101: Techniques and Best Practices.
