How to Create an Information Architecture That Is Easy to Use — Smashing Magazine

Organizations typically make two common mistakes when deciding on the content for their website. First, many mindlessly migrate the content from their old website to the new one. They fail to ask whether this content is relevant.

However, the second and more significant issue is that stakeholders start from the wrong premise when creating content. They start by asking themselves, “what do we want to say” rather than “what does our audience want to know?”

The starting point for any information architecture project should not be to define what the organization wants to say, but what questions, objections, and tasks the user has in their mind as they come to the website

So, before we begin organizing content, we first need to gather a list of questions, objections and tasks. Now

I highly recommend identifying the critical elements using top task analysis if you have the time. This approach created by Gerry McGovern prioritizes content by surveying users and asking them what they most care about.

If you have limited time or budget, then a conversation with customer-facing staff such as sales representatives or call center staff is often enough to identify what questions, objections, and tasks come up the most.

In either case, you will find that a large percentage of user inquiries will revolve around a relatively small number of questions, objections, or tasks.

Once you have your simplified list of top content, you need to organize it into top-level sections. If the budget or timescales are tight, you could make an educated guess as we will be testing later. However, if you do, you will probably receive pushback from stakeholders and end up doing more rework. Therefore this route can often be a false economy.

A better approach is to do an open card sort. Traditionally, card sorting has been done in person. However, I prefer to do it online with a tool like UX Metrics, as it is quicker, easier to arrange, and makes analyzing results straightforward.

This process is not an exact science and takes experience. Try to keep the number of groups down as low as possible. Approximately four is ideal as we can only hold four pieces of information in our short-term memory at a time. Certainly avoid going above eight elements and when adding more sections, try chunking the groups into separate navigation.

Closed card sorting is similar to open card sorting, with one difference. Instead of users organizing cards into their own set of groups, they organize them into a predefined set of sections that you give them.

We can use UX Metrics to run closed card sorting, but I suggest adding an extra top-level section labeled “I don’t know.” This approach helps collect cards that the user has no idea where they should be placed. That will help us identify if our site structure fails in certain areas.

One of the most influential usability studies was “First Click Usability Testing” by Bob Bailey and Cari Wolfson. They explored the importance of the user’s first click being correct. They found that if the first click was correct, people had an 87% chance of finding the content they wanted instead of just 46% if the first click was wrong

To create a tree test, you need to recreate your site’s information architecture as a hierarchical tree. Once you have done that, you can decide what you wish to test. First, select a small number of pages you want to check that users can find. For example, you may wish to ask users to find a page on the site that they believe will answer specific questions or complete a particular task

When considering what to test, I recommend focusing on three types of content:

Content that is particularly important to the user or for the site’s success; Content that users placed in varying sections during the card sorting exercises; Content that you suspect may be hidden too deep in the information architecture

probably the most significant issue you will find will be that users are unsure which of two or more sections a piece of content will be in. When faced with that situation, they often guess, and if they guess wrong, they may give up before exploring the other options.

To address this problem, you need to include links to the page in the alternative sections people look in. That way, they can recover even if they make an initial mistake.