WHAT IS AN IA?Information architecture (IA) or site structure is the foundation for great web design. It provides a strategy for presenting information to your visitors so they can quickly and easily achieve their goals for coming to your website.

It also provides an understanding for the future growth of the site. Giving an idea where content will need to be created in the future. And since we don’t have time machines yet this is a really good thing.

WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?

INFORMATION ARCHITECTUREIt’s a simple structure of categories creating an understanding of site pages and what type of content those pages should house.

What?!

It’s like trying to turn your website into a nice way of finding the right beer. Or in your case business information.

Beer

Lager IPA Hefeweizen Stouts

Sierra Nevada

Dale’s Pale Ale

Lagunitas

7 RULES TO FOLLOW FOR INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

GETTING STARTED

First we’ll review the basics of information architecture.

This will help us understand what we’re looking to achieve by creating categories as well as some thoughts to keep in mind while creating the information architecture.

1. OBJECTS

Treat content as living things. Build upon the site as if you were creating a recipe that anyone could follow to create a good end product.

YOUR SITE

Brown, Dan. Eight Principles of Information Architecture. Silver Spring, Maryland: American Societyfor Information Science and Technology, Aug.-Sept. 2010. PDF

2. CHOICES

Create pages that offer meaningful choices. The more options your provide a user the more cognitive effort you ask of them, the more effort you ask of a user can lead to more anxiety which increases the chance of a user leaving the site.

Brown, Dan. Eight Principles of Information Architecture. Silver Spring, Maryland: American Societyfor Information Science and Technology, Aug.-Sept. 2010. PDF

3. DISCLOSURE

Show only enough information so a user knows what they’ll find by going deeper. Think of the site as being built in layers.

Brown, Dan. Eight Principles of Information Architecture. Silver Spring, Maryland: American Societyfor Information Science and Technology, Aug.-Sept. 2010. PDF

4. EXAMPLES

The brain will use a network of good examples as categories when trying to understand a concept knowing this we should describe the contents of categories by showing examples of content.

Brown, Dan. Eight Principles of Information Architecture. Silver Spring, Maryland: American Societyfor Information Science and Technology, Aug.-Sept. 2010. PDF

BREAD

5. FRONT DOORS

Assume that at least half of the visitors will be coming from a place other than the home page.

Brown, Dan. Eight Principles of Information Architecture. Silver Spring, Maryland: American Societyfor Information Science and Technology, Aug.-Sept. 2010. PDF

6. FOCUSED NAVIGATION

Where a menu appears should not dictate the name you give it. Provide a more informed name for the navigation based on the purpose and links it provides to the user.

Brown, Dan. Eight Principles of Information Architecture. Silver Spring, Maryland: American Societyfor Information Science and Technology, Aug.-Sept. 2010. PDF

Bill SimonPreston Esquire

7. GROWTH

In a normal situation we don’t remove information from a site, we add content to it. We should assume the content we have today is a small fraction of what we’ll have months to years from now.

Brown, Dan. Eight Principles of Information Architecture. Silver Spring, Maryland: American Societyfor Information Science and Technology, Aug.-Sept. 2010. PDF

PAPER PROTOTYPING

CREATING THE IA

The best approach to accomplishing an information architecture when you’re working with a team is to do some paper prototyping.

Paper prototyping is a method where you write on pieces of paper the names of navigation items or actual page content. For the purposes of this exercise we should stick to just navigation items to be more focused as how we want the site to be structured.

CREATING THE IA

By putting each item on a piece of paper it becomes easier to move the items around and shift their groups, and also gives us a better sense of what is on the site so we’re not creating duplicated items.

Note: pages can be crossed linked so don’t worry if you want to put items in two categories, just keep those items grouped with what is most relevant to the information a user would find by clicking on the topic.

CREATE CATEGORIES

Considerations:•Think about how content and categories relate to one another.•Think of what may be familiar or memorable to our user personas.•For now, forget about all the other types of visitors who might come to the website.•Think of how the categories can grow with the future of the site.

ACTIVITY