Information architecture is the practice of organizing content so that you can present your organization’s content to your customers with the best possible user experience. It is the creation and development of a model or concept so that your customers can more easily find and use your content.
A key element of information architecture is creating a consistent standard and logically organizing content to match users’ needs and expectations of the content. This means that information architects must understand the goals of the content as well as the requirements of the customers who are consuming that content. Users are provided a much better user experience when the content is modeled and organized in a way that makes sense to them, so information architects design the content model with that goal in mind.
When creating a plan for presenting content to customers, information architect must consider the following broad categories:
- Organization of content in topics and subtopics
- Conceptual standardized presentation of content
- Visual and navigational standardization of content
- Monitoring and update of the architectural design based on user metrics
An advantage to using information architects to design a content model for your organization is greater efficiency through reduced development costs and faster development cycles. Also, customer satisfaction is improved through more standardized presentation of content, and through higher quality of content.
