We often overlook the importance of how to make complex information clear, concise, and easy to navigate. Presenting the information in a way that will best support the audiences’ tasks and the company’s objectives means there needs to be a cohesive display of information architecture, or IA.

“Information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable” —IA Institute.

Information architecture is at its best when it’s meeting the basic needs involved in making your website content accessible, clear, and findable. Navigation systems and the visual design you interact with on websites are common forms of IA. However, our interactions with IA often are invisible.

When looking for a specific topic, you may use the search tool on a website to get results related to that topic. Your first assumption may be that the results were automatically produced through an algorithm. In some situations, a person behind the scenes may be modifying the IA so you see specific options before others. This is an example of invisible information architecture.

And on top of the ways people interact with information architecture, there are multiple categories that define IA.

In Louis Rosenfeld’s book, “Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond,” he identifies the four essential components within IA: organization systems, labeling systems, navigation systems, and searching systems.

This summer, we worked with a client’s website, focusing on the navigational component of IA. We carefully noted the content categories pertaining to the entire company and to the specific audiences. When creating the navigation systems, we thought about what the audience might ask when interacting with the homepage, including:

How do I interact with this site?
I know what I need to search for; what tools do I use on this site to find it?
What makes this organization unique?
Where can I find people to contact?
I need to know about this specific topic; who do I contact?
How do I figure out if this organization has the program I need?

By addressing these common questions, we made sure the website’s layout and content supported the tasks the users want to complete.

Information architecture is critical as content becomes more specialized and structured. It’s the backbone of a user’s online navigation process. We must emphasize the significance of solving intricate IA decisions purposefully by making information accessible, organized, reliable, and, perhaps most importantly, findable.