What is Information Architecture? UX Tips and Examples

Individualized mentorship Nurture your inner tech pro with personalized guidance from not one, but two industry experts. They’ll provide feedback, support, and advice as you build your new career. Learn online, not alone Our career-change programs are designed to take you from beginner to pro in your tech career—with personalized support every step of the way. The latest articles about interface usability, website design, and UX research from the Nielsen Norman Group.

If you are directly paying traffic to the particular page then it might be easy for them to land on the right page where you want them to take action. But this way you will be spending more and more money on marketing. Most of the time businesses do this because users landing on their website fail to find the right page where they need to take action. With the help of well-planned information architecture, you can ensure that your website is helping your site visitors to find the right information and product/services in your website. This way you might be able to save a lot of money in marketing and sometimes remarketing to drive more traffic and conversion on your website. Websites spend hundreds and thousands of dollars in driving more traffic and conversion on their website.

Step 5: Categorize & prioritize content

Reach your ranking goals with our comprehensive SEO management services. Download our free ebook The Basics of User Experience Designto learn about core concepts of UX design. With 151,446 graduates, the Interaction Design Foundation is the biggest online design school globally.

It gives the designer a bird’s eye view of the entire product. It not just enhances a User’s experience but serves as a critical resource for decision making, adding new features to the site, and expanding the site in the right direction. A website holds a hub of information that includes text, images, GIFs, videos, etc. It is essential to create a hierarchy of information for a better User Experience. Together, the efforts of an information architect and a UX designer ensure a pleasant experience for the user.

Why a Well Thought Out IA Matters

Without architecture, your UX designer has no content structure to work into a product. Although in fairness to those pulling double duty on the keyboard, your UX designer and information architect might be the same person. This site map describes the different content pieces on the nngroup.com site and the relationship between them. Blue nodes represent 1st-tier information objects, green nodes are 2nd-tier objects, and yellow are 3rd-tier objects.

Recognition patterns make it easier to pull up that stored information. For example, during the 2020 pandemic, many people had a hard time focusing. This “brain fog” often extended to simple and routine tasks due to increased cognitive load. We’ve already mentioned some of the popular tools that are used for creating IA. Here, we’ll briefly list what can be of help at different stages. Applying these principles, you are likely to effectively structure existing content and leave a space for growth.

Responding to users’ needs

The goal is to help users find information and complete tasks. To do this, you need to understand how the pieces fit together to create the larger picture, how items relate to each other within the system. Using tools https://globalcloudteam.com/ like SearchAtlas can make long-term organization easier by allowing you to group pages into categories. This allows you to see the category performance, so you can target where you can eliminate or improve content.

In this type of information architecture pattern, the main page contains subpages. That is the reason why index page pattern is widely used by different websites on the internet. If you are a savvy internet user then you must have come across many websites using index patterns. It consists of the main page which is a website homepage and has multiple subpages linked to it. In the index pattern, the subpages in the website have equal importance with respect to hierarchy. That is the reason why near perfection has become crucial to service in the competitive marketplace.

Navigation and Hierarchy Creation

Information architecture must include usability testing because it allows designers to assess how well their ideas work in practical situations. Designers can spot usability problems, enhance navigation, and hone labeling and categorization systems by watching users engage with a website or application. what is information architecture in web design Moreover, usability testing can reveal information about user preferences and behavior that will help with future design choices. User experience design includes information architecture as a subfield, whereas information architecture focuses especially on the organization and structure of information.

The quality of your metadata and headings will also drive more visitors to your site and reduce your bounce rate. Users should be able to locate all desired information on your website quickly and easily. XMind is a productivity tool used professionally to solidify brainstorming.

8 Principles of information architecture

But, the most valuable content will not get discovered if the information architecture is bad, which is bad news for both the user and for the business. As you can see, there are many things to take into consideration. Depending on the size of a website, IA can be a complex task requiring ongoing maintenance. In his quest to design a good site structure, information architect Dan Brown laid out 8 principles that he keeps coming back to.

• Flat structure – one with linear hierarchy, where all the pages are equally important.
• For instance, e-commerce websites need distinct product categories and filtering tools, whereas journalism websites would need a more comprehensive taxonomy to help readers identify pertinent content.
• It sets the relationship and links between the different elements.
• The navigation system, in terms of IA, involves the ways how users move through content.
• Testing will show if the names of categories fit the needs of your users.