UX for Beginners

Chapter 40. Types of Information Architecture

There are many ways to organize a bunch of information. Depending on the type of content or the goals of your project, different structures can be better or worse.

Ok, so now that you can write user stories, we need to bring your IA back into this. The structure of your pages determines the steps in your user stories. And to structure your pages, you have to pick a type of IA to work with (or a couple types, but let’s keep it simple for now).

Types of IA include:

• Categories

• Tasks

• Search

• Time

• People

Let me break it down for you (cue the DJ):

Categories

When you think of a retail store like H&M, you probably imagine its menu as a set of categories: “Men, Women, Kids, Sale,” and so on. Types of content. When you click those categories, you expect to see content that fits in that category.

This is the most common type of IA. However, if the categories are complex, like banking products, industrial chemicals, or sex toys (a friend told me), then you and your users might not have the same expectations about what is in those categories, and that can get confusing. If I want to buy a butt plug, is that under “Battery-Operated” or “Glow-in-the-Dark”? Life is full of hard questions.

Tasks

Another way to organize your site or app is by the goals the users need to achieve. If you are a bank, perhaps something like “Save, Loan, Invest, Get Help, Open an Account” would make a simpler menu. If the user knows what they want, this is a great way to structure your ...