Yippee AI: Six Keys to Information Architecture

Yippee IA: The Six Keys to Effective Information Architecture

In the digital world, users primarily engage in two activities: consuming content or navigating to find it. The goal is to maximize the time people spend interacting with your content while minimizing the time spent searching for it. A well-designed information architecture (IA) tells a story, creates a flow, and facilitates discovery for users of your products or services.

How Do Users Perceive Navigation on Your Site?

What feedback are you receiving from your users regarding content search on your site? Here are some recurring comments observed during usability testing:

• "I can't buy a product I can't find on the site... it's like I have to pull out a treasure map to find anything." This type of feedback is often a moment of frustration for the product team, who may feel powerless in the face of ineffective information architecture, leading to a decline in sales.

• "I don't know how I got here. I'm going in circles. I can't find what I want. Maybe it doesn't exist." Even if you have invested time and effort in creating content, if it is unfindable, that effort is in vain. Success is not measured by the publication of content, but by its consumption and the actions that follow.

• "When I need to find something on our site, I just use Google. I have no idea how our consumers find anything." If even your colleagues, who are aware of the content's existence, struggle to find it, how can you expect users to succeed?

If you hear similar feedback from your users and colleagues, it’s time to reassess your information architecture.

Principles for Effectively Structuring Your Information Architecture

Over the years, by helping organizations improve the findability of their content, I have distilled many insights and checklists on information architecture into six key principles. These principles serve as a guide to critique and create a successful site structure.

1. The names and sequence of global navigation terms determine the proposition, personality, and story you communicate. What story does your main navigation tell about your site? What is your invitation and offer to the site visitor? Which paths within the site do you highlight as being the most useful for visitors?

2. Organize content around the key tasks of the target audience and how they think and structure information. Why do users visit your site? What are their goals and tasks? What constitutes a successful visit? Do the answers to these questions reflect in your navigation?

3. Limit the number of choices in the main navigation to create small, guided, and confident steps; an abundance of information creates a poverty of attention. How many choices do you show? What is the clarity of the labels used? What can you prune to avoid overwhelming users with a paradox of choice?

4. Having content that is found and consumed is more important than being represented in the global navigation. Which pages in the site structure are highlighted because they are someone's favorite project? Which pages break the organizational logic of the site? What seems out of place where it is located?

5. Labels should be short, meaningful, and consistent; use terms that the audience understands, expressed in the way they speak. When you listen to users, what words do they use? What labels do you have that use internal product names and organizational jargon? Where will you regularly listen to your users' language? Online forums, your call center, and service desks, as well as observing your customer-facing staff, are excellent places to discover the language used by your audience. A colleague, Ellen de Vries, calls this content harvesting.

6. Create a flow in, around, and through a site by establishing and consistently reusing organizational metaphors. What entities do you use (e.g., a person, a place, an object) on your site? How do you connect them? Where is the list of entities recorded, and how is it shared within your organization?

Taking a First Step Towards Improved Information Architecture

Your information architecture should be viewed as a product rather than a project. It requires continuous revision to remain optimized.

Examine my three-point checklist to spot the telltale signs indicating that your information architecture needs attention before it becomes truly deficient. We ask two precious and finite things from site visitors: their time and their attention. Your information architecture should be designed and refined to help users spend more time at the destination and less time on the way.