2. 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.
4. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
It’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
6. 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.
7. 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 Society
for Information Science and Technology, Aug.-Sept. 2010. PDF
8. 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 Society
for Information Science and Technology, Aug.-Sept. 2010. PDF
9. 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 Society
for Information Science and Technology, Aug.-Sept. 2010. PDF
10. 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 Society
for Information Science and Technology, Aug.-Sept. 2010. PDF
BREAD
11. 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 Society
for Information Science and Technology, Aug.-Sept. 2010. PDF
12. 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 Society
for Information Science and Technology, Aug.-Sept. 2010. PDF
Bill Simon
Preston Esquire
13. 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 Society
for Information Science and Technology, Aug.-Sept. 2010. PDF
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 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
