“Our site needs to be easier to use.”
“We organize our website like an org chart.”
“I just want to be able to get to the things that are most important to me.”
“What’s a bursar, anyway?”
“I just search for everything.”
“I know the file is there, I put it there, but I can’t find it.”
“It’s so hard to find anything on our site, and I’ve worked here for 15 years. I can’t imagine how someone who is just looking at it for the first time would find anything.”
Sound familiar? These types of comments are a sampling of some of the common reactions to one of the first questions I ask a client when we first meet: “Tell me about your website. What are some of the pain points?”
These statements highlight just some of the common problems related to a website’s information architecture (IA). The way you organize, label, sequence, and group elements on your site — from the smallest files and paragraphs to pages and entire microsites — all of it is managed through information architecture.
But what is information architecture? I’ve been working with IA in some capacity for my entire career, and I still have a really hard time answering that question. IA is ambiguous: It’s most noticeable when it isn’t working, which gives us a great idea of how not to do it, but not much help with how to do it. It is cross-disciplinary with many different components and even more complimentary disciplines that overlap: user experience, user interfaces, information design, graphic design, copywriting, content strategy, and much more.
You may be sitting there thinking it really isn’t that complicated. After all, we’ve largely figured out the IA for higher education. You go to any higher education home page and you are likely to encounter a primary, informational navigation that looks close to this:
and an audience navigation that looks like this:
But that’s the easy part. That’s the tip of the iceberg. The hard stuff starts when you dip below the surface of that placid, top-level lake and into the depths of the other 99 percent of your website. It’s a dark, scary place where pages haven’t been touched since 1995, and the beautiful consistency you worked so hard to implement during your last redesign turns into a hodgepodge of link farms, competing navigation spaces, and borderline chaos. Everyone has a deepest, darkest corner of their site that they are glad nobody knows about. In fact, you probably thank your terrible, low-level IA for hiding these pages so well!
It’s impossible to encompass everything about IA in one blog post, so I won’t. But I will offer some starting resources that I think are worth your time as you begin to dive deeper into the discipline: