Information Architecture

Topics on This Page

• Creating the Information Architecture
• Your Home Page
• Defining Your Categories & Labels
• Creating a Site Map
• Creating a Wire Frame

Creating the Information Architecture

It is your job to ensure that user coming to your Web site can quickly find information. The information architecture (IA) informs your users what categories of content you provide on your Web site and the IA becomes the main categories for your navigation menu. Users quickly scan the navigation links on the home page to learn more about your site and the information you offer.

To create the IA, you want to begin by thinking about the site goals, what you want to accomplish by having a Web site and what your users’ goals and needs are. Begin by reviewing the information you learned about your users and the personas you created. Who are your users and how much do they know about your organization?

Review users' goals. Why and how frequently are users coming to your Web site? What do they want to do when they get to the site? Review the information from the Task Analysis and Scenarios you developed in order to set priorities for your navigation and home page.

Your Home Page

You want to ensure that your home page reflects the reasons users come to your site. Therefore, you want to ensure that the most important and most frequently performed tasks are represented on the home page. Remember that users are more interested in the information you provide than the way your agency, organization or business is structured.

Defining Your Categories & Labels

Your categories and the labels you choose inform your users what types of content you offer on your Web site. By getting a better understanding of how users view your content, you can begin to define a category structure (or taxonomy) that makes sense to users.

The information you gather from card sorting will help you to group your content. Participants in a card sorting session are asked to organize the content from your Web site in a way that makes sense to them. They view items from your Web site and then group these items into categories. You can even have your participants help you label these groups.

You will likely have several categories that come out of the card sorting activity. The key is to look at the categories to see which groups of information (and labels) have the most agreement among users. Consider the following questions:

• How did the majority of users group the content?
• Did users create similar categories or groups of content?
• Did users use similar terms or labels for the categories?
• Was there a lot of disagreement?
• Are there content items that users struggled to place into groups?

By asking these questions as you review the results of your card sort, you can begin to select the groups of content (or categories) that were logical to users. You can also begin to identify the types of content that were difficult for users to categorize and develop a plan on how to deal with those pieces of content.

Creating a Site Map

You may want to create a site map to help you organize the structure for your site. A site map is a visual representation of the information architecture of your site.

In order to create a site map for your Web site, you should first try to gain an understanding of all of the features, functionality, and content that the Web site will contain.

Refer to the Web Site Requirements and the Content Inventory you created to help you identify all of the features and content on the site.

Next, review users' priorities from the Task Analysis and Scenarios, to determine the items that need to appear on the home page. Use the data from the Card Sorting activity to identify the main categories and the labels for the home page categories.

Once you've identified the links, features, and content that needs to appear on the home page, you'll want to define the content that will appear on second-level and content pages.

Example

Below is high-level site map created for Usability.gov in the early design and development phases:

Creating a Wire Frame

A wireframe is a visual illustration of one Web page. It's simply meant to illustrate the features, content and links that need to appear on a page so that your design team can mock up a visual interface and your programmers understand the page features and how they are supposed to work.

One of the main purposes of a wireframe is to show you where each item should be placed on a page. A wireframe:

• identifies all of the features on a page
• prioritizes the features so that the most important features are prominently positioned on a page
• visually communicates this information to the rest of your design team with a diagram of the web page

Wireframes can range from a simple mock-up of an information-based page to an extremely complex diagram illustrating an intricate process with several steps, such as a registration process. Wireframes do not dictate how a site should look.

Wireframes can be created using various tools, from a simple word processing program to a complex diagramming program.

Example

Next Steps

While you are developing your site's information architecture, you also want to be working to ensure that your site's content is easy to use. Not only do you want users to be able to easily find information on your site, but once they find a piece of information, you want users to be able to quickly understand the content.

Find out how to create usable content pages and learn how to Write for the Web.

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