Importance of Information Architecture in UX Design

An architect is a person who deals with the manipulation of space, structures, and layouts. The goal of an architect is to craft a space and build a structure that has harmony and a solid foundation. This discipline of design is called architecture.This concept of architecture is not only limited to the physical world and spaces but also applies to the digital world and information spaces where it is called Information Architecture (IA).

Information Architecture is an art and science of organizing, structuring, and labeling content effectively and sustainably with the goal to help users find information and complete tasks

IA is one of the key components of UX and plays a crucial role in creating a great user experience.

Components of Information Architecture

IA comprises of four components that play a very important role in defining and designing it.

• Organization Systems: This consists of how you categorize and group the information and build a layout.

• Labelling Systems: This system involves the ways of information representation through the choice of words.

• Navigation Systems: It is a set of actions guiding users throughout the app or website, enabling them to fulfill their goals.

• Search Systems: This system is used in IA to help users search for the data within the digital product.

To understand, let’s take an example of an everyday life scenario.Imagine you go into a lifestyle store where you can find a bunch of different items like shoes, electronics, home decor, etc. Now think that there are no areas reserved for each category. No labels are attached. In the shoe section, shoes are not arranged by gender. No sales person available to guide you. It would be a very difficult experience for you to land in the right section and get the right product. There is a high chance that you’d leave the store and not visit it again because the shopping experience was frustrating.

That is the reason why these 4 systems play a crucial role in designing information architecture.

Techniques used in Information Architecture

There are certain techniques that are being used to design good IA; making it easy for users to navigate through a system and perform the desired goal. Generally, an IA is formed by following these steps:

1. Taxonomy

2. Card Sorting

3. Tree Testing

4. Hierarchy & Navigation

5. Prototyping

1. Taxonomy

Taxonomy is a practice of categorizing and organizing information/things, typically in a tree structure with a hierarchical sequence.

In taxonomy, we do this on the basis of its metadata — properties that are associated with an object. For example in the case of shoes, it could be their size, color, type, etc.

Let’s look at some examples of taxonomy used on websites

Example 1:
On this Mango website initially, the user has to select the age group, then they have to select the desired category, and then they can pick and choose the right product that fits their need. Imagine they land on the page and they have no taxonomy to filter out the data. It would be a painful experience for the user to find the product and purchase it.

Example 2:
Another example is the Apple website. Here, the user first has to select what category of product they want to explore and upon selection, they are presented with the relevant options. This makes the user experience seamless and helps the user find the relevant product easily.

In the digital world, taxonomy is vividly used in applications and websites. Designers use it to carefully organize categories based on the metadata that can be used in the navigation system. It provides the user ease in navigation to find the desired items.

2. Card Sorting

Card sorting is a research methodology to figure out how people conceptualize and categorize information. It helps information architects uncover the user’s mental model.

Method:
Card sorting involves presenting a list of cards to a group of people with some information on them. This information could be topics, objects, questions, etc. Each person in the group then has to group the similar nature of information together i.e. categorize the similar information. Once the categorization of cards is done, a category name will be assigned by that person.

Card sorting — UX tweak

The card sorting method mainly consists of 3 types:
- Open: Users are allowed to give names to categories. This is used to generate ideas.
- Closed: Users need to place cards in predefined categories. This is used to validate the categorization that the architect has defined.
- Hybrid: It’s the merger of the two; open and closed. Users can create a new category, assign a name and also put cards in predefined categories.

3. Tree Testing

It’s a testing method that is mostly used after the card sorting process. In tree testing the designers evaluate the hierarchical category structure by letting users find the locations in the tree where a specific task can be completed.

Method:
During tree testing, the information architect presents a tree hierarchy to the users along with certain task questions. Based on the task prompt, the users click on the part in the hierarchy where they think they can complete that task.

The architect then analyzes where in the given hierarchy the users have clicked to perform the task. Based on the number of clicks on the hierarchy, analytics are generated and results in a decision whether the hierarchy needs to be changed or not.

In the below example the task provided to the users is “Where in the website can they find the information about the company’s culture”. The right side indicates the number of clicks on a specific section in the hierarchy, helping the researcher know about the mental model of users.

4. Hierarchy & Navigation

The hierarchy defines the structure of content, while the navigation defines how users will move through it. This step is all about how users will interact with the actual product and move from one part to another. This information is used to design IA diagrams also known as sitemaps

Sitemaps are a visual representation of the hierarchy of website pages and show how pages are linked with one another.

5. Prototyping

The final stage in the IA process. Following the research phase, the architect sketches out the concepts for the product’s screens, the content that will be displayed on those screens, and how they will be arranged.

The hierarchy at this phase is presented in the low-fidelity version with the goal to test utility, which shows how pages are linked. Testing is intended to confirm whether users are following the architecture correctly and where adjustments or re-work are needed.

The topic of information architecture covers a wide range of techniques and processes. Whether you are working on a website or an application, you can use these methods to achieve well crafted IA and hence a better user experience with the goal to help users find information easily and complete tasks.

Special thanks to Nimrah Ahmed for sharing extensive knowledge on this topic.