What is Information Architecture
The Information Architecture it is the practice of deciding how to organize the parts of something to be understandable.
According to Andrea Cantu the Information Architecture it is “The practice of organizing, labeling, and designing search and navigation systems that provide structure, find your way, complete objectives, and make sense of information in digital environments”.
Therefore, we can say that it consists of organizing content and information in the clearest and most logical way possible, taking into account the mental model of users to facilitate access to it as much as possible.
How to perform Information Architecture
The basic tasks to perform a good Information Architecture are organizing, labeling and structuring all the elements.
1. Organization
It is the first step to take. The most used forms are the chronological, alphabetical or thematic organization.
The goal is to be able to categorize information to generate groupings that help users process and understand large amounts of information without getting lost on the path they take to find it.
At all times, it must be taken into account not to produce a cognitive overload for the user.
2. Labeling
It is about defining the terminology that the system will use. Textual tags, also called literals, can refer to titles or headers, the names of each section of the main navigation menu, keywords, etc.
In this phase of construction of the Information Architecture, organic positioning or SEO comes into play. For this reason, it is advisable to use certain techniques that involve users, such as the technique of and the .
3. Structure
It consists of defining the access model that will contemplate the navigation and search tools. It will be closely related to the grouping, depth and labeling of the contents.
If the structure is too deep, it can generate a cognitive overload for the user.
Users will tend to ignore the navigation of a site if the navigation does not meet their expectations. Navigation must be natural and familiar to the user.
Types of navigation structure within the Information Architecture
Hierarchical navigation structure
Is a navigation structure well known and one of the most used. It is shaped like a tree, where the root is the origin.
The main advantage is that the user will always know where he is located. It allows users to generate a mental structure of the site, where they are and their current position within the structure.
In this type of structure to go to another site, you must retrace your steps or start again from the point of origin and make different decisions.
On the other hand, the free navigation of users through the website is not allowed.
hypertext navigation structure
In this type of structure, the information is not organized linearly. The information blocks are connected by any type of association, whether hierarchical or not.
They are very flexible structures that allow numerous relationships to be made between the elements and the information blocks.
On the other hand, this type of structure is not easily understood by users and poses a lot of complexity when it comes to assimilating the concepts and paths to find what they are looking for.
Flat or linear navigation structure
This type of structure is the simplest. From an information block you can go to the next or the previous one.
The main advantage is that it is especially useful if we want the user to follow a fixed and guided itinerary without offering them the possibility that other blocks of information may cause distraction.
Network navigation structure
This type of structure allows other blocks of information to be accessed from the origin without any apparent order. It is a freer structure but not recommended when there are a very large number of information blocks, since the user will become disoriented and not know exactly where he is.
The information architecture It is part of the documentation that must be provided along with the rest of the documents.
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