IA (Information Architecture)
Information architecture (IA) focuses on organizing, structuring, and labeling your website content in an effective and sustainable way. The goal is to help users find information and complete tasks on your website. To do this, content strategists and designers collaborate to investigate and understand how the pieces fit together to create the larger picture—in other words, how items relate to each other within your website.
Among the many things a strategist will consider when creating your information architecture include:
- Organization Schemes and Structures: How you categorize and structure information
- Labeling Systems: How you represent information
- Navigation Systems: How users browse or move through information
- Search Systems: How users look for information
Depending on project goals and budget, an IA can take the form of a very high-level “map” of your website, where you will see a diagram of which pages belong in your main navigation and a sampling of pages that could fall underneath. A more complex or deep audit of the IA might result in looking at all pages in a specific section that is critical to site users. The depth of investigation should relate directly to your goals for your updated website. For example, if your goal is to improve a specific process within an existing website, such as making the application process for student housing clearer for your students, a strategist may dive deeply into the Housing Application section but leave About Us relatively untouched.