Digital Marketing - Study Notes:
What is information architecture?
Another of the key ways in which we establish trust with the user is in how we enable them to navigate through our website. You’ll know of course that this is a process of clicking links, images, and other interactive elements to work towards particular content we want to get to.
In the physical world, traffic signs are primarily designed and placed for people who may know where they want to get to, but not necessarily how to do it. They may be sure of their destination, but unsure of the route.
Designing websites is very similar in that we should not assume that users either will know how to get the content or will persevere until they find it.
How to create it
The structuring of information to enable people to navigate through it is called information architecture and it is a core discipline of user experience work.
Information architecture involves being able to group content into meaningful categories, logical sections with associated labels which adequately communicate the content that sits behind them. This type of work can be a mammoth task, but thankfully there are exercises that can contribute to the process and give designers insight on the way forward directly from users themselves.
These exercises are:
- Card sorting
- Tree testing
Rick Monro
Rick Monro is UX Director at Fathom. He has extensive experience in user research, interaction design, user-centered design, and design strategy with private and public sector organisations throughout the UK and Ireland.
