lauri@imke

In this short article, an overview of information architectures (IA) will be given. Author describes the concept and the need for IA’s and also brings out a quick way of creating IA’s - the card sorting method.

Let’s define the IA

Some definitions that could clear us what information architectures are all about:

• The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support findability and usability. (Information Architecture Institute)
• How the information (text, images, menus etc) is structured on a website and if it flows and reads nicely. (Web Design & Life)
• The design, including organization, labeling, and navigation, of systems that help people share information. (Microsoft Development Center)

As we can see IA’s are used to structure the data and what’s most important - it must be done in a way that it would be as usable as possible. As the flow of information increases constantly, IA’s play a huge role in the whole design process.

Effective IA must reflect the way people think. (Barker, 2005)

Developing the IA

During our Interface and Interaction Design course (lectured by Hans Põldoja), we we’re designing a web 2.0 application with some social-networking flavor. Our idea was to design a site about finding good, but cheap eating-places and trustful hostels to stay. Just like creating your personal travel-plan in the net.

Although the course was quite short, we started from scratch and even ended up with some code-writing. Ofcourse, working on the IA was the most complicated process, because as we were developing the system, we continously came out with new ideas and ways how to improve the application. The IA was changed quite often.

The IA development will start with a in-depth analysis in order to find the requirements. Also analysing the competitors and already existing solutions is very useful - you can find the good-practices how to solve common situations and take notice of the things that have been designed badly and could be done better.

Writing personas can help the developers to understand the target-group of the application and scenarios tell us about the functionality of the systems. It is important to analyse personas and scenarios just to get an overview of the whole system. Later, it is a good idea to hold some interviews with experts in order to ask feedback (if the scenarios make sense, if they are understandable, how they could be improved etc).

Card sorting

In our course, the next thing we did, was writing down all the functionalities the site must contain. Later, we were categorizing them and it became the basis of the IA. And that is what card sorting is generally all about.

Card sorting is a user-generated inexpensive and quick design method for increasing the system’s findability. The process involves sorting a series of cards, each labeled with a piece of content or functionality, into groups that make sense to users. (Barker, 2005)

Finding the right categories was not easy - as the front page of the site should be as simple as possible, then we wanted to cut down the number of links. Finally, we managed to divide all the labels under 3 main categories and I can say that finding the right names for them can be quite complicated. After making the first versions, always ask feedback if the structure does make sense and if people who will start using the system do think the same way you did.

We used the structure as the basis and draw the first version of the IA, which was later, after several improvements, used in creating the prototypes and simple HTML-pages.

Conclusion

Designing the IA is the most important part in the whole design process - only IA sets if the users will keep using the application you designed or not. It is important to come up with a fully-tested and workin IA, before starting to code. Afterwards making the changes in the IA and re-coding the application can be very expensive.

One of the most important goals on an IA project is to institute a consistent user experience for two key elements: the visible navigation user interface, and the underlying — invisible — structure (where things are found on the intranet). (Nielsen, 2007)

References

1. Barker, I. (2005) “What is information architecture”

2. Maurer, D., Warfel, T. (2004) “Card sorting: a definitive guide”

3. Nielsen, J. (2007) “Intranet Information Architecture (IA)“