How can the work done behind-the-scenes to ‘design’ information affect the visual design the user interacts with?

The two articles “Creating a Successful Information Experience for Your Users” and “SEO Smackdown: Information Architecture vs. Technical Architecture” together promote the importance of understanding the user when building the information architecture and the importance of information architecture in overall web development. Not only does information architecture affect the user experience but it also affects search engine optimization. Technical architects and information architects must work together towards the goal of creating a positive user experience. Creating the information experience and integrating it into the user experience requires planning and an understanding of your users.

In her article “Creating a Successful Information Experience for Your Users,” Linda Newman Lior describes her five simple rules for creating an information experience

Rule 1: Understand your users

Rule 2: Create a process for integrating the information

Rule 3: Create content guidelines

Rule 4: Map your content to user tasks

Step 5: Evaluate the experience[i]

In Shari Thurow’s article “SEO Smackdown: Information Architecture vs. Technical Architecture,” information architecture is defined as the organization and labeling of website content to support usability and findability.

The main features of an information architecture project are: Organization, Labeling, Usability and Findability.

Organization is grouping related content into categories and providing user-friendly access to that content via global, local, and contextual navigation. There are many ways to organize content including:

Date/time, Alphabetical, Geography/location, Topic, Target audience, Task/process, and Attributes/facets.[ii]

Conclusion

Organizing information based on the importance of understanding user needs in terms of user tasks and workflows is imperative to building information architecture, which is key to overall web development. A website’s information architecture should occur long before a site is coded and programmed. Understanding this key concept is helpful to me in designing navigation and page layout.

[i] Lior, Linda Newman (2013) Creating a Successful Information Experience for Your Users. Retrieved from http://uxmag.com/articles/creating-a-successful-information-experience-for-your-users

[ii] Thurow, Shari (2011) SEO Smackdown: Information Architecture vs. Technical Architecture. Retrieved from http://searchengineland.com/seo-smackdown-information-architecture-vs-technical-architecture-91419