Guide to Website Information Architecture Primer

Know your users

The most important thing to get right from an Information Architecture standpoint is to know who your users are, how they think, and what they want from you.

I recommend: Find out as much about your web audience as you can. Do customer surveys, create a customer database, discover demographics, and monitor everything. Look at every piece of feedback from a customer, whether positive or negative, as a way for you to learn more about your user base.

Determine your purpose

This is kind of like the mission statement of your site. If you're trying to sell products or services, then don't overwhelm your users with a bunch of historical information about your business. Instead, give them brief descriptions and comparison points for the items you're trying to sell. If you're trying to get customers to come to your physical location, your site needs to tell customers what they'll gain from doing so and be very clear about providing the address, directions, and a map.

I recommend: Gear your website according to what you are trying to accomplish with it. Check out example goals or find your purpose.

Walk through it step-by-step

If a user wants to buy a product, what steps are involved in that process? Probably something like Locate a product, Compare/Learn About similar products, Select a product, Select more products/Continue shopping, Check-out, Arrange for shipping, Payment, and Payment verification/confirmation.

I recommend: Develop some use cases for how your audience is likely to use your site according to their needs and the goal you have in mind. Understanding these use cases, develop a process flow diagram that walks through the logical completion of each of the use cases. How many steps and in what order? This should give you an indication of the types of pages you'll need to develop and some of the navigation elements the site will require. This will give you the foundation for your site map.

Keep pages clean and simple

Ideally, every page on your website should help you achieve your goal. Avoid cluttering up pages with extraneous information. Keep the layout and page flow clean.

I recommend: Mock-up some wireframes that focus user actions according to the types of pages you determined you would need in the previous step.

Get organized

Grouping things into categories is human nature. The challenge is to group the things on your website into categories (and draw relationships among these categories) in a way that has meaning for your users. In some cases there will be standard categories used in your industry; in other cases, you're on your own to try to figure out how to lump things together. Instead of thinking about how you organize your wares according to your business needs, try to envision how your customers will look for them. A good categorization structure will be intuitive to users and help them discover items on your site more effectively.

I recommend: Are there specific attributes of the products or information that are more important than others? Does size matter? Color? Use the most important attributes to guide your categorizations.

Talk the talk

It's not going to do you any good if you are trying to sell baby pacifiers and rattles to working class moms and dads, but your website groups these products into a category called "Apparatus for Infant Appeasement". Part of getting and keeping customers is speaking the same language they do.

I recommend: If your users are varied and their needs tend to be those of the general population, use tools like Overture Keywords and WordTracker to tell you how your terminology stacks up against terms that people are searching on. If your user base tends to use a lot of industry or technical jargon that an average person wouldn't know, make sure you speak their lingo by reading up in trade and technical publications.