Yippee IA: Six principles for creating a successful information architecture

The useful part

You want people to spend more time engaging with your content and less time struggling to find it. A great information architecture (IA) tells a story, creates flow, and aids discovery for the people using your products or services. Here are some things I've repeatedly heard (or close variations of) in usability testing sessions.

How it works

• Perhaps it doesn't exist." You've put effort into creating the content, but if it can't be found, however well-written and designed it is, that effort is all in vain.
• I have no idea how our consumers find anything." How can you expect users to navigate your website when your colleagues who know the content exists find it an impossible task?
• "I can't buy a product I can't find on the site … it feels like to find anything I have to get my treasure map out." This is the moment the product team observing the session hit their heads on the desk or...

What to take from it

From stakeholder interviews … "When I need to find something on our website, I just use Google. Over the years of helping organisations improve the findability of their...

Details worth keeping

They are either consuming content or navigating to it. A poor information architecture leads to a drop in sales.