Do you often find that you don’t know where to put new information?

Adding a few pages should not require you to rethink the whole structure of your site. One trait of a robust information architecture is its ability to adapt and change.

Where do we start Implementing a functional Information Architecture? Lets organize them here step by step.

Preparation

In this phase, we initially do preparations such as understanding of business objectives, common user tasks, and technical constraints.  With these, we give focus to the functionality which is the crucial part of everything and offer recommendations to be implemented.

Content User Analysis

This is the phase wherein we audit what information exists and see how they are related with each other. Then we conduct user research to identify what do they query and how do they want it. It’s what we call researching for user search behaviour.

Information & Navigation Design

Correlate patterns in the content and user analysis structure information in a way meaningful to people. By capturing these into series of diagrams and understanding the process flow of how user search for data and how they want it delivered. With these functionality, we detail how users interact and how we handle errors as well. It’s about fitting together the bare-bones depictions of components on each page.

Nomenclature Design

Labels, Labels, Labels. Users need to understand them or they won’t find the way around your site. Remember when we try to gather user routines, queries and behaviour during step 2? We just extracted surveys from them and learned how to speak their language so that we may be able to put the labels in a way they could definitely understand. It’s all about ensuring consistent communication.

Metadata Design (optional)

We can develop a framework for describing your content in detail. We’ll create schemes that allow you to easily link related items in your site. We can also make your search smarter. By connecting your search engine to a thesaurus, even the most unusual queries can be mapped to relevant content.

On-going User Testing

Throughout the entire process we’ll be testing our design to ensure that it meets objectives. We’ll use different techniques to address different aspects of the design. For example, we’ll test prototypes to see whether navigation is efficient, card sorting to test whether content groupings are logical, and surveys to test whether labels are intuitive.

A full-scale information architecture design takes 1-3 months, depending upon the size and complexity of your website. The most important sign of quality is not how many steps it takes to complete a process, but whether each step made sense to users and whether it followed naturally from the previous step. Users will always favor a clearly defined seven-step process over a confusingly compressed three-step alternative.

So basically, you got the most basic ideas in organizing things when planning to build up a certain site.  Information Architecture has a way of letting your users stay and constantly keeps them as returning customers. Imagine it as the host when they enter your site, a guide to make sure your users doesn’t go around wandering like a lost kid.

Get a doze of more information architecture strategies.

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