What Is Information Architecture And Why Does It Matter In Web Design?

Nowadays, a website is the first-place customers interact with a business. Therefore, it is very important to provide customers with a good seamless experience from the very first moment they enter a business website to the very end. Any business that is serious about its performance online must pay a lot of attention to this as we all know the first impression matters the most.

When we talk about user experience (UX) in web design, most often the same line of topics are discussed such as website navigation, website speed, website’s mobile responsiveness, etc.

But many forget to talk about one very important topic that directly influences the user experience of a website visitor. That is Information Architecture or otherwise abbreviated as IA.

What is Information Architecture you ask?

Well, in this article, we’ll explore what IA is, the importance of IA in web design, and how it can help businesses create more effective and user-friendly websites for their customers.

With that said, let’s dive right into the fun stuff, shall we?

What is Information Architecture?

As the name suggests, Information Architecture or IA refers to how all the information on a website is structured. Nobody likes a website that makes it hard to find relevant information. Therefore, the purpose of IA is to make it easy for website visitors to find the information they are looking for in the correct order and give them a positive user experience.

IA involves things like creating categories, subcategories, a hierarchy of relevant information, and creating a seamless navigation system throughout the website via extensive research on both the target audience and the website industry.

Just like a building that has to have a proper architecture to allow people to use that building effectively and efficiently, a website has to perform the same way and give the website visitors a seamless experience. 

Importance of Information Architecture in Web Design.

As you know by now, IA improves the overall user experience of a website. This alone is a very important reason why IA should be used in a website design process as it directly impacts the success of a website.

Although User experience holds a big part of importance, there are still some other factors that you should know about as well.

1. Better Website Navigation – IA help website owners create simple and efficient navigation systems through the website. This allows website visitors to get to their desired information within the website easily without getting stuck looking for the information they wish to read.
2. Better management of content – IA also allows you to effectively categorize your content. This will make it easy for both the website owner to maintain the content and the website visitor to find related information fast and efficiently. This is really useful for large-scale websites with a lot of information to display.
3. Better SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Performance – Nowadays, major search engines such as Google primarily focus on the user experience of a website to decide its search ranking position. As IA improves the overall user experience of a website, website owners will benefit greatly from this by receiving free organic traffic from search engines.
4. Scalability – As IA enables website owners to keep their content organized, it helps them in scaling the website as well. With organized content, website owners are able to identify topics that haven’t been covered before and add them in a more organized manner.

IA and User Experience (UX) Design: How They Relate

We know that we already covered UX with respect to IA a bit above. But we feel like it is not enough. Therefore, we dedicated a separate section in this article to it. If you feel that this is not necessary, please feel free to skip this section.

Some might think that IA is the main determinant factor of a good UX in a website. But in reality, it is only a single component of many others.

This does not mean that IA does not matter much, in reality, it is just one major factor of many when determining the UX of a website. The main function of IA is to provide a good user experience in terms of content and navigation, nothing else. Factors such as page speed do not factor in here.

IA vs. Navigation Design: What’s the Difference?

Although IA and navigation design are closely related and work together on generating a good user experience, they both require different skill sets and different approaches. While IA has the major focus on the structure of the content on a website to help website visitors to find a more organized set of content, navigation design primarily focuses on the UI (user interface) of a website which makes it easy for website users to move through the website.

As you can see, they both perform in favor of user experience but in two different ways.

Best Practices of IA.

Now that you have a clear understanding of what Information Architecture is and other relevant information on the topic, it is also important to know how to properly create an information architecture as well.

With that said, here are some best practices for creating effective information structures for your website:

1. Conduct Research – This is the very first step that you should initiate when creating an information architecture structure. Here, you will have to conduct research on both the website industry and the target market of that website. This will allow you to gain very valuable information such as the type of content the target market needs and likes to consume along with several other information such as how they consume it. After all this valuable information is gathered, you are able to create an effective information structure on your website that your target market will be very interested in reading. We will cover how you can conduct this research in detail later on in this article as well.   
2. Make sure to properly separate the content – Separating the information on your website with proper headings and subheading is key to making the content on your website more retable to the visitors. Having headings as labeling elements on the content allows website visitors to directly jump on to the information they require and provide them with an efficient information-consuming system. Also, keep in mind to use less jargon here and clearly mention what the information sections are about to give the best UX possible.
3. Have a logical content hierarchy – Have all of the related content grouped together thus anyone who reads the content gets all the information they desire quickly and in a logical flow. Clearly state the relationship between grouped content to make it easy for the readers to understand the information provided. For example, if your website talks about diets, there are several types of diets that can be followed. Therefore, your aim should be to have all the information about each diet grouped together so that a reader who is interested in a particular diet can read all information related to that diet easily without having to waste energy and time trying to find other related information on your website. 
4. Have a simple yet proper navigation – Please do not overcomplicate navigation systems within your website. This is one area where most websites fail without them even knowing. Your main goal should be to provide a simple navigation system that enables website visitors to navigate through your website. Properly label the menus in the navigation system and have related content grouped with a dropdown here as well. Not to mention, make sure to include breadcrumbs on the website to allow users to locate where they are on the website and to allow them a method to go back to the previous navigation step easily.
5. Have a search function – A search function is a crucial option on larger-scale websites. This will allow the website users to search for the information they look for easily along with all the related articles on that search term. Also, keep in mind to add relevant tags, especially tags that people will search for in each content piece posted for better search performance.
6. Design for visual appeal – Don’t make the mistake of displaying a huge block of text on a website. Use as many visual elements such as icons, highlighting text, and typography changes as possible to make the information more visually appealing to the readers while at the same time making it easy for them to scan through the content.
7. Keep on optimizing – Just like any other thing in website design, content architecture is not something that you can get right the very first time. You will have to constantly analyze the performance of the current content architecture and optimize it accordingly until you nail it. You can use tools such as Google Analytics to see how the pages are performing where you can indirectly get an idea of how the content architecture is performing as well. Also, you can use surveys via exit popups to get valuable input on the IA of a website from visitors who are leaving the website.

How to Conduct IA Research

As we mentioned earlier, IA research should be conducted in two ways. One is to conduct research on the website industry and the other is to conduct research on the target audience.

First, let’s look at how you can conduct research on the website industry.

Here, first, you must identify your goals. What is the purpose of the IA? Is it to educate your website audience? Is it to sell a product or service to your target audience? Or is it to do both? Having a clear goal in mind for your IA will allow you to conduct the rest of the research more effectively.

Now with your goal set, you must do some research on the industry. Here you can dive into some top-performing competitor’s websites and see how they have structured their content. Make sure to do research on at least five competitors so that you can compare each website and see what each competitor is missing in terms of content. This will allow you to have a rough structural copy of how your website content must be structured.

After that, you must jump directly into target market research. It is not enough to just do competitor research as we don’t know if those IA structures of the competitors are actually liked by the target market. Therefore, the next best thing to do is conduct actual target market research yourself.

There are several methods to conduct target market research. Three of the most common methods can be identified as;

1. Conducting interviews on the target market and getting their direct opinion on how the information should be structured.
2. Conducting surveys on a test model of your IA structure and getting an honest opinion from the real target market.
3. Analyzing existing data via web tools can also be used to identify if the target audience is into a certain information architecture of a website. Here, website traffic and engagement rates on a page-level basis must be analyzed.

With both website industry research and target market research combined, you will be able to develop an effective IA that will take your website to its desired goals.

Tools and Software available for IA

We already talked about a few tools such as google analytics that we can use to conduct IA research by gathering valuable performance metrics of a website. Now let’s look at some other tools that help us to organize, structure, and label our content to develop an effective website IA.

1. Mindmapping Tools – Maindmapping tools are tools that allow you to visualize your website’s IA. They help you structure and build a solid hierarchy of your content. Some of the most popular mindmapping tools are MindNode, XMind, and FreeMind.
2. Diagramming Tools – These tools help you create diagrams, flowcharts, and other required visual representations of your content to help you better understand how to structure/group the content into an organized hierarchy. Some of the most popular diagramming tools are Microsoft Visio, Gliffy, and Luvidchart. 
3. Taxonomy Tools – These tools help you create and manage a hierarchical classification system that can be used to properly organize website content. Some of the most popular tools of this nature are Synaptica, Smartlogic, and PoolParty.
4. Wireframing tools – Wireframing tools are tools that help you create a visual representation of the overall website IA. Usually, this is done before building a website to get a clear idea of how the website is going to look at the final stages of the design process. These types of tools can be used to test out the final website design via surveys and interviews as well without even hosting the actual website online. Some of the most popular wireframing tools are Adobe XD, Sketch, and Balsamiq.
5. Content management systems (CMS) – Content management systems are online platforms that enable webmasters/website owners to manage their website’s content more efficiently. These tools make it easy for people with no coding skills to manage a website along with its content easily. Some of the most popular Content Management systems are Drupal and WordPress.
6. Card Sorting Software – Card Sorting software helps webmasters to collect valuable feedback on content organization and labeling of a website. Some of the most popular tools are OptimalSort and Treejack.

Future of IA, what should you expect?

As we see it, IA is not going to be less important in the future but be more important. IA will always be on the top priority list when designing a website as it directly influences the UX of a website which is one of the most important elements of any digital product.

Although this is the case, it is not likely to not have any advancements in IA in the coming years. With the current trends in the website design industry, there will be a greater focus on personalization. As more and more data are being collected about users and their behaviors, it is more likely to be incorporated into IA as well. This will allow website owners to provide ultra-personalized information that will allow them to guide those website visitors toward the end goals.

Not to mention, IA will also be focused on increasing the importance of accessibility. There are so many people in the world using the Internet with disabilities and it is becoming more and more important to design websites that cater to these groups of Internet users as well. This could involve using intuitive navigation systems, creating web content with more multimedia, and optimizing and structuring website content for screen readers as well.

All things considered; IA will continue to serve as a key UX element in website design in the future.

Final Thoughts.

There you have it, all the things that you need to know about Information Architecture in web design. While a lot of people just create content for the sake of completing and launching their website online, we now hope that you understand the importance of IA and will put more emphasis on your website’s content to direct it to success.

Thank you for bearing with us over this long-form content and if you have any questions or if you think that we have missed out on something regarding this topic, please make sure to use the comments section below.

Until next time, cheers!