Information Architecture 1: Structure (How to Organize Your Site)

• Washington, D.C.: Thursday, April 9
• London: Thursday, May 21
• San Francisco: Friday, June 26
• New York: Thursday, July 16
• Sydney: Friday, July 31

Garret Goldfield
Full-Day Tutorial

Information architecture is the cohesive structure that brings all the pieces of a website together in a uniform manner. After the strategic plan, information architecture is the single most important element driving website success.

Unfortunately, many web teams do not have the expertise or time to undertake a full-blown IA development phase; it often gets combined with navigation and interface design. We understand this reality and have developed this seminar to help those teams for whom IA is a small (yet important) part of their Internet responsibilities.

There are hundreds of books and courses about information architecture (IA). How is this one different? It is based on empirical findings about user behavior from our extensive usability studies. How do people interact with websites and intranets that are structured in different ways? What types of navigation are easy to use, and under what circumstances? These questions are answered in this presentation and illustrated with video clips of real user behaviors, navigation strategies, and difficulties and successes on real websites.

This seminar will help you get up to speed; understand the whys, whats, and hows of developing a useful, usable, and extensible information structure that saves your company time and money during and after development.

This integrated pair of courses (IA1+IA2) is not about library school theories or a speaker's pet ideas. It's about what has been shown to work in user testing.

What You’ll Learn

• Human behavioral principles as they pertain to website organization
• Key elements of Information Architecture (IA)
• Common IA pitfalls
• How to determine which organizing principles best suit your site and its users
• How to test and refine IA
• How to communicate the important principles of IA to your organization

Course Outline

• User behavior
• Underlying user behaviors on the web
• How users seek information and make decisions
• What users look at
• What users click on
• Why they do the things they do
• How to identify your users and their needs
• Attributes of effective information architectures
• Identification of which attributes are most successful and why
• Company politics and Return on Investment (ROI)
• How to communicate the benefits of Information Architecture
• ROI of improved usability (via IA)
• Including IA in the redesign process
• Website organization: Structure and schema
• Hierarchy/Taxonomy
• Narrow and deep
• Broad and shallow
• Polyhierarchy
• Linear/workflows
• Multi-dimensional hypertext (e.g., Wiki)
• Relational database
• By topic
• By type of task (e.g., payments, registrations, applications)
• By format (e.g., forms, calculators, whitepapers)
• Segmentation by target audience (e.g., small/medium/large businesses, or “For Parents,” “For Educators,” etc.)
• Alphabetical
• Chronological (timeline)
• Spatial/relational/geographical
• Attributes/facets (e.g., price, color, shape, etc.)
• Social/classified by users
• Popularity (viewed, sent, bought, tagged)
• Keyword tags
• “Mini-IA” — structuring and navigating the set of information about a single product or topic
• “Mega-IA” — Publishing content to other sites/utilities (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr)
• Labels and Identifiers
• Navigation (global/local)
• In-page links
• Indices
• Search
• Politics (search is not just a technology)
• Indexing information
• Listing and sorting
• Retrievable by keywords/tags/attributes
• IA Processes
• Defining the Information Architecture
• Testing methods for successful architectures
• Card sorting
• Feature and content prioritization
• Tips, tricks, and techniques

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lecture and active participation.

Handouts

Copies of the presentation slides

Who Should Attend

Anyone responsible for their organization's website, whether as a manager, content contributor, or designer. The course assumes little to no knowledge of IA.

Related

See our companion course: Information Architecture 2.

IA1 covers the underlying structure of the site, whereas IA2 covers the presentation of this structure in the user interface. Structure and navigation combine to form an integrated user experience, but they are different concepts and raise different usability issues, which are explored in these two seminars.

Instructor

Garrett Goldfield is a User Experience Specialist at Nielsen Norman Group. Previously at Intuit Inc., Garrett managed the User-Centered Design (UCD) group for Intuit's Tax Division. At Intuit he focused on incorporating UCD processes within Intuit's development cycle for TurboTax software and its Web applications. At Nielsen Norman Group, Goldfield has consulted for clients in a broad range of industries, including e-commerce, automotive, health care, financial, media, telecommunications, education, and nonprofits, as well as highly specialized B2B sites. He has published works in various journals and proceedings and has presented original research at several conferences, including: Usability Professionals Association, Institute for International Research, HCI International, the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), and the Northern California Association for Behavioral Analysis. Garrett co-founded the San Diego chapter of SIGCHI and held the position of Chair for the organization. Garrett has also consulted on the User-Centered Design curriculum at National University, San Diego Campus. Prior to working at Intuit, Goldfield worked at General Electric’s Information Systems Division where he conducted ground-breaking work in the area of e-commerce interactions for marketplace transactions, and at The Aerospace Corporation where he pioneered standards for the presentation of HCI telemetry data for Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. Goldfield's research has focused on the areas of usability testing, contextual inquiry and ethnographic user studies. In addition he has published and presented information on cost justification and return on investment for usability practices, brainstorming methodologies, analysis, and interpretation of qualitative user data.