How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your IA?

1 Define your objectives

Before you start evaluating your IA, you need to define what you want to achieve with it. What are the main goals and tasks that your users have? How do they align with your business objectives? How do you measure success and failure? Having clear and specific objectives will help you choose the most appropriate evaluation methods and metrics for your IA.

2 Choose your methods

Evaluating your IA requires an understanding of your objectives, resources, and stage of development. User testing is a common method that involves tasks, scenarios, and questions to measure performance, satisfaction, and feedback. Card sorting can help you understand how users categorize and expect to find information. Tree testing is another popular method that tests your structure and labels without any visual design or navigation cues. Analytics can track user behavior and accomplishments with your IA. Finally, surveys can collect user opinions and preferences.

3 Collect your data

Once you have chosen your methods, you need to collect your data. Depending on the method, you may need to recruit users, create prototypes, set up tools, or conduct sessions. You should also plan how to record, store, and organize your data, such as using spreadsheets, screenshots, audio, or video. You should aim to collect enough data to make reliable and valid conclusions, but not so much that you get overwhelmed or lose focus.

4 Analyze your results

After collecting your data, you need to analyze your results to look for patterns, insights, and answers to your objectives. Additionally, you should search for any problems, gaps, or inconsistencies in your IA and identify the causes and possible solutions. To analyze your data, you can use quantitative analysis - which involves numbers, statistics, and graphs - qualitative analysis - which involves words, images, and stories - or visual analysis - which uses diagrams, maps, or charts. For instance, quantitative analysis could measure success rates, completion times, or satisfaction scores; qualitative analysis could involve user comments, feedback, or quotes; and visual analysis could involve affinity diagrams, dendrograms, or heat maps.

5 Report your findings

The final step of evaluating your IA is to report your findings. This involves summarizing and presenting your data, analysis, and recommendations to stakeholders such as clients, managers, or developers. It is also important to explain the methods, objectives, and limitations of the evaluation in relation to the overall project goals and scope. To report your findings, you can use reports written documents with text, tables, and figures; presentations with slides, videos, or demos; or dashboards with interactive tools that show evaluation metrics using charts, indicators, or filters. Evaluating your IA is an ongoing process that should inform and improve design decisions. By using various methods and tools to measure the effectiveness of your IA, you can create user-friendly and effective information environments that meet user and business needs.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?