INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE [IA]

Hiring an architect for your information may seem a little over the top. A house, maybe. An office complex, definitely. But a Web application?

Then again, think of all the sites out there that cause us daily pain with their hodge-podge structure and labyrinthine navigation. Sites where you don’t know how you got to the right page and you're not sure if you could ever do it again.

Confusing page flows and navigation systems might seem like a design problem, but most often the trouble originates with the architecture.

At Polymer Studios, we see information architecture as a critical underpinning of any site or application, whether it's static or dynamic. It’s how we begin to get our heads around the project. It’s how we map out the information flow. It’s how we uncover the issues that are best discovered early on.

So, on your next project, before too much time passes – before too much ka-ching is invested – we beg of you to consider the architecture of things:

• What’s the full scope of information (words, pictures, data, files, etc.) that your site or application will be brokering?
• What are all the relationships between all the bits and pieces of information?
• How will users want to interact with that information?
• How and where will you store that information?
• How will you retrieve it?
• What are all the possible ways you might retrieve the information in the future?
• How will the information change over time?

Next :: Usability evaluation