Information Architecture for UX designers
What is Information Architecture?
Information Architecture is the process of organizing and structuring the elements, describing them clearly and making ways for people to meet their needs effectively. It can be used in websites, intranet as well as in our daily life where we need to organize content in a more structured way. The main goal of well-informed architecture is to help users to complete tasks and goals more effectively and efficiently.
Good information architecture helps in reducing the cognitive load by reducing the number of distractions and helping users to have a more efficient and focussed experience.
Importance of IA
Information Architecture aims to make sense of information so users don’t have to. IA is important whenever we create groups and describe things other people need to use or we need to use. IA is the skeleton of any design project. We can take the example from our daily life while organizing the Almira, we tend to create categories and place the clothes and other stuff accordingly. It helps to make better decisions, and ease our daily process.
What do you need to create a good IA?
There are three important understanding that is required for well-structured architecture.
1. People
How they think, what they know and what they need to know, how they use the information and what is their terminology.
User research is important for understanding the requirement of people. Having knowledge of your target audience and empathizing with them will help you to group content in a way that makes sense to them and find them easily. Planning for user research involves figuring out the stakeholders who to research, how much to research and what you want to learn from the user, surveys.
Common research methods include user interviews, card sorting, observations, and data.
2. Content
What you have, what you should have and what you need. A good understanding of content helps in making design scalable and maintaining it across iterations.
Sitemaps are one of the ways to organize the content. It is the hierarchical diagram showing the structure of a website or application to define the taxonomy through the grouping of related content. They are an important step of the user-centered process to define the breadth and depth of the content and ensure content is in place users would expect to find it.
3. Context
What are the constraints and who else will be involved. This requires the understanding of both the target audience and the business.
Card sorting in IA designing
Card sorting is a simple and inexpensive method to understand how the users would like to organize and structure the content in a way that makes sense to them.
The insights of card sorting will help you understand how users expect to see content grouped and how they expect to label that group. There are three types of card sorting techniques:
- Open card sorting: Users are asked to organize the cards into groups that they feel is appropriate to them and then they are asked to label those groups. Open card sorting helps to gain insight while designing the initial information architecture and understand how users naturally categorize information.
- Closed card sorting: Users are provided with both content and category cards and they are asked to place those content cards into given categories. A closed card is good for ranking and prioritizing the actions or tasks.
- Hybrid card sorting: It’s a premix of both open and closed card sort. You can create some pre-defined categories and allow participants to create as well. Running hybrid sort gets you to enable users’ input in potential categories.
How to design IA?
The most important challenge while building IA is to understand how the product works from the users’ perspective and organize information in a more readable and legible format.
The major requirement for constructing a well defined IA is structuring it through the visual hierarchy of features, functions, behavior and creating a legend for displaying different types of visual, flows and features.
IA patterns — organization of information
Richard Saul Wurman — the person who coined the term “information architect”, in his legendary book “Information Anxiety” wrote :
“Information may be infinite, however… the organization of information is finite as it can only be organized by LATCH: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, or Hierarchy. I’ve tried a thousand times to find other ways to organize, but I always end up using one of these five.”
The only way to provide a meaningful experience to the product is through structured information organization. LATCH process defines the 5 most efficient ways to structure the architecture.
Location
To organize information based on the location you need to think in terms of geography and topology. Let us consider the example of food ordering products and imagine you are trying to order the food and it shows the restaurants from the entire city.
Instead, they use the location and display relevant restaurants that must deliver in that area.
The same goes for cab booking apps.
Alphabet
Arranging information alphabetically is the most significant and accessible way of organizing the information as it eases the process of content scanning. However, we should ensure the labels are the actual mental models that people use.
Consider an example of E-commerce products where the user sees all the available brands of shoes and the brands are arranged alphabetically.
Time
This requires thinking about the temporal nature of the information and arranging it chronologically. It is mostly used in social media products ie Facebook, Linkedin for displaying posts or notifications.
Category
It is the technique of arranging information in meaningful clusters and groups. As with all of these organizational schemes, it’s clearly important to identify the categories that make the most sense to your users. Myntra, amazon uses categories to look for the right product easily.
Hierarchy
Hierarchy refers to arranging information by any order, such as size, cost (Low to High OR High to Low), popularity, etc.
Conclusion
The goal of information architecture is to deliver a meaningful experience to the user and classify the content in a clear and understandable way, allowing users to find what they need with less effort.
