UX Design Fundamentals · 18 min · 120 XP

Information architecture people can find their way through

Organise and label content the way people already think about it, and check they can find things before anything is designed.

Information architecture (IA) is how content and features are organised, labelled and reached: what goes in which section, what each section is called, and how people get there. It's invisible when it works. When it doesn't, people use search for everything, support answers the same “where do I find…?” question every day, and every new feature gets its own top-level menu item because there's nowhere obvious to put it.

The most common IA mistake is organising by your company's structure instead of by the user's task. Billing, Accounts and Payments may be three teams internally; to a customer who wants a refund, they're one question. Labels have the same problem: internal names (“Workspaces”, “Entities”, “Fulfilment”) mean nothing to people who weren't in the meeting where they were chosen.

Two cheap methods test IA before anything is designed. In a card sort, people group cards (one per piece of content) in a way that makes sense to them. An open sort lets them create and name their own groups, which shows you how they think and what words they use. A closed sort gives them your categories to sort into, which checks whether a structure you already have makes sense. In a tree test, people see only the text hierarchy, with no visual design, and are asked to find things: “Where would you go to change your billing address?” You measure how many succeed and how many get there without backtracking.

A tree test result that tells you where the problem is

Task: "Change the card you pay with"          Success 38%   Direct 21%

First click:   Settings ▸ Account        54%   ✗
               Settings ▸ Billing        31%   ✓
               Help                      15%   ✗

→ People look for payment details under "Account".
  Move it, or link it from there.

Card sorts generate structure; tree tests check it. Run an open sort when you're starting out or reorganising, then tree-test the hierarchy you build from it. Testing navigation inside a finished visual design mixes two questions: you can't tell whether people failed because of the structure or the layout.

Do it this week: write the ten most common things people do in a product you work on onto cards and ask three people to sort them into groups they name themselves. Compare their group names with your navigation labels.

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