Website - Information architecture
The famous UX designer, Jared Spool, once said: “Good design, when it’s done well, becomes invisible. It’s only when it’s done poorly that we notice it.” The same goes for information architecture (IA).
But why is Information architecture so important?
Information architecture plays an important role in shaping the user experience, navigation, and overall success of your website. If your website is tricky to navigate, your users will soon give up and move on. But by carefully structuring and organizing your website’s content, you provide visitors with a seamless and enjoyable journey, resulting in increased engagement, satisfaction, and achievement of your business goals.
Also, if you have a simple and intuitive information architecture, users will spend more time on your website and click on your different pages which may have a huge impact on your Google search ranking for example.
What needs to be done before designing your website information architecture?
Step 1- Define your company’s goals
When defining your company’s website goals, you should ask yourself different questions: why do you need a website, what do you want to achieve with it, what type of message do you want to convey to your clients, how do you want them to remember your brand, etc. If you’re unable to express your website’s objectives clearly, chances are you’ll ultimately develop a bad information architecture. Clearly defining the purpose of your website, its target audience, and the goals you want to achieve through the website will guide the entire design process.
Step 2- Define your users’ goals
Developing an effective information architecture comes from the understanding of your users’ expectations, wants, and needs. While designing your website information architecture, it is important that you think about your different types of users and how they will navigate your website. You have built your user’s persona in a previous session of this course, this will help you understand how to accommodate different user needs and how different people might look for the same type of information. For each of these user types, you need to understand how they will be using the website, what they hope to achieve, what information should be directly available to them, etc. For increased efficiency, you can find some users in your target audience and ask them these different questions.
Step 3- Check what other actors in the market are doing
Before designing your own website, check what your competitors are doing - how they structure the information on their website, what categories they have, what type of content they have (video, text, etc.). This will give you an overall idea of what your customers expect from a similar product. You need to analyze which information is available on all their websites, what are the strengths and weaknesses of each website, what type of content they produce, etc. Competitors might be implementing effective strategies or user experience elements that you can learn from and apply to your own website. This can also help you refine your unique value proposition and find ways to emphasize your unique selling points to attract and retain users.
Step 4- Define your content
Now that you have analyzed your users’ goals, and your company’s goals as well as done some research about your competitors’ websites, it is time to create your own content. You need to define what type of content should be made available for your users. If you already have a website and/or existing content, you can conduct a content inventory and decide on what you would like to keep and what you would like to remove from your new website. If you don’t have any content, start from scratch and start creating content for your website.
Best practices on the information architecture for your website:
In this article from Hubspot, find different Information Architecture best practices that can help you design your website in an intuitive and user-friendly way. You can also find a step-by-step guide on information architecture design in this great article from UXplanet.
If you have a lot of content on your website and have issues deciding how to structure your content and if all categories are relevant, take a look at this video about the Card sorting methodology.
Suggested Prompts
How can user feedback be systematically incorporated into the ongoing refinement of a website’s information architecture?
In what ways might the principles of information architecture differ when designing for mobile versus desktop platforms?
How can the card sorting methodology be effectively applied to identify optimal content categories for a complex website?
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Introduction and Onboarding
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Welcome to Startup 101 - Ideation module!
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What is Launch?
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Meet the Launch team
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Get connected to our network
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What to Expect
CHAPTER 1 : CUSTOMER DISCOVERY AND LEAN CANVAS
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Chapter 1: Customer Discovery and Lean Canvas
Defining Your Startup Idea
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Articulate your startup idea
Forming Your Core Team
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Team and background
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Do you need a cofounder?
Market and Competition
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Market analysis
Competitors analysis
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Competitor analysis
Build Your Lean Canvas
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The Lean Canvas
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The Lean Canvas - Capture Your Business Model in 20 Minutes - Lean Canvas
Find Your Early Adopters
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Talk To Your Customers
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Find Your Early Adopters
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Build your Predictive Persona
User Interviews
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#1 User interview - Path to product
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#2 User interview
Defining Your Value Proposition
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#1 Determine your value proposition
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#2 Determine your value proposition
Build your pitch deck
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#1 The art of the pitch
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#2 The art of the pitch
Build your website
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Name & Logo
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Create your landing page
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Building a landing page with Canva from start to finish
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Website - Information architecture
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Website - Hosting & Building
CHAPTER 2: PRODUCT MARKET FIT & MARKET RESEARCH
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Finding Your Product Market Fit
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Market Research and Creating a Go-to-Market Strategy
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CHAPTER 3 : BUILD YOUR PRODUCT
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Building Your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and Prototyping
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User Testing & Gathering Feedback
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Product Demo
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Revenue model
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Get your first customers & generate revenue
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CHAPTER 4: MARKETING, PR & BRAND IDENTITY
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Start building your brand
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Marketing & PR
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Social media footprint
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CHAPTER 5: FUNDRAISING & FINANCES
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Elevator pitch
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Develop your network
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Fundraising
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Accounting and Finances
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WRAP UP
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