Design Template by Anonymous

Creating Information Architecture

We have now covered the basics around the history and cause for Information Architecture as well as a couple of examples of what good and bad representations are however, implementating good IA extends further than understanding the background knowledge and dives more into the step by step process in which developers will undergo to create a great strcuture along the project.

User goals

Before even diving into any sort of mapping or defining content you must first understand the user goals so that we can cater and deisgn a product specific for the user needs. Questions like “Who is using the product” and “What are they going to do” are questions that the developers need to know the answer to prior to implementation for better efficency and less headaches in the long run

Content

Now that the user goals are understood and prioritized by the team of developers, the next step in the process of creating IA is defining the content that will be used for this system inside an inventory. The idea behind this is to acknowledge the content that our product offers and other important information about the our website so that we may have a clear starting point for organzing the website. Often times this is done in a spreadsheet.

Create Categories

This is the step where we begin to organize the content of our webpage into seperate categories to ensure a seemless yet logical navigation system. This step is often influenced by the target audience and how important it is to them. The team is then tasked to take these categories and organize them into smaller sections. This step in the process takes more inference from the developers however user testing can alleviate some of that ambiguity.

Labeling

Now that we have created a sort of dropdown structure for our project, the next concern is labeling. Often overlooked, this step in the process is a main componenet to how well users can use your website. You may see developers reuse the names given for the categories as the labels, this approach is often times a poor strategy is grasping the users attention to the website and its content. Instead, use the labeling to tell the user what to expect when they click on the label and ensure that ontop of relevant, the labels are easy to scan.