The Product Thinking Playbook Explained: Information Architecture

Elevate your user experiences and product success with Information Architecture. In this Product Thinking Playbook Technique overview, Mandy K Yu covers how information architecture shapes user connection, enhances findability and drives effective design.

Discover vital components of information architecture, when to apply it, and best practices to avoid common pitfalls.?

What is Information Architecture?

Create, organize, structure, and label information-rich systems that support discoverability, findability, and task completion for users. Activities can include content auditing, taxonomy development, information grouping, card sorting, site mapping, etc.?

Why would product teams do it?

Information architecture (IA) is a field of study, a practice, an art, and a science rather than a tactical method or play. IA defines the relationships between an experience’s users, content and context through the identification, evaluation, organization, and documentation of information. Simply put, IA helps connect people to the content they’re looking for and it helps you:?

• Design experiences based on user mental models that aid users in driving decisions
• Understand how to categorize, present, and label information to users?
• Define the intended user flow as they experience a website or mobile application

It informs content strategy and all aspects of interaction and UX design, so ultimately, it is the backbone for creating effective and sustainable experiences or products.?

The main components of IA are:

• Identification and Definition – the purpose of the information
• Organization Schemes and Structure Types – how to categorize, classify, and create hierarchies of information
• Taxonomy and Labeling Systems –?how to represent information
• Navigation and Wayfinding Systems – how users move through information
• Search Systems – how users find information

When should product teams apply it??

IA is a crucial application to our process when approaching the design of any experience. It should be considered during the project planning, user research and UX design phases.

• User Research / Product Testing: Planning and conducting IA tests with your users is a key process to allow real feedback to inform the UX design phase. For example, card sorting allows you to discover how users understand and categorize information, while tree tests tell you how effectively users can locate information and where they get lost.
• UX Design: Based on the research insights, creating visual artifacts like sitemaps, user flows, and/or wireframes can help summarize and communicate how users will be presented with content and how they will navigate and interact with it.
• Product Roadmapping: Depending on the nature of the engagement, you might be creating IA from scratch or improving an existing one. There are IA techniques that are suitable for either case. Planning for IA activities and techniques during product or roadmap planning is important.?

How do I do it? (Best Practices):?

For practitioners, there are two streams we need to consider to avoid bad information architecture: the structure (the invisible way the site is structured) and navigation (the visible way users understand and manage that structure). Here are the top 3 mistakes for each:

Structure Pitfalls

• No organizing principle for individual items without connections to related items
• Search and structure not integrated where sites do not indicate the user’s current location
• Missing category landing pages such as a section overview

Navigation Pitfalls

• Invisible navigation options due to hidden bars or “banner blindness”
• Uncontrollable navigation elements such as oversensitive hover states
• Inconsistent navigation where these elements change across pages

To view the entire list of 10 pitfalls, see this NN/g article .

Who is required?

• Design Research: Lead, plan, conduct, and synthesize user tests.
• Product Manager/Strategist: Help define the purpose of IA-related techniques and assist with research planning and conducting.?
• Product Design: Help define the purpose of IA-related techniques and assist with research planning and conducting.?
• Developer: May lead the planning and creation of data models.

Our Product Thinking Playbook is filled with tactics and techniques that help product teams build better products. Click here to download your copy of the complete playbook and stay tuned as we share more from it in the coming weeks.