World IA Day – the results are in!

For the past four years the Information Architecture Institute has established World IA Day, a means of raising awareness and connecting Information Architects across the globe.

Assessing, evaluating, researching and creating IA is a core offering from User Vision, and over our 15 years we have worked on some massive IA conundrums, including developing the first ever IA for Businesslink and Directgov (ground breaking work in the public sector at that stage), numerous Local Council websites, major retailers including Epson and Dell, and many leading banks including RBS and HSBC.

Over the years we have refined and honed our techniques, including establishing more accurate ways of evaluating and validating an IA, and remote methods to quickly, efficiently and cost effectively capture both qualitative and quantitative insights. We’ve also provided many training courses for our clients to give them the skills and knowledge to continue this work in-house.

With the advent of Word IA day (21st February), we decided to ask our own clients their views on IA, its importance and the kind of techniques they use.  The results were thought provoking …

Although, unsurprisingly, everyone said the IA is ‘Very Important’ as information gets updated constantly and its categorisation changes, as well as to ensure overall IA is consistent and intuitive, most hadn’t reviewed their IA in the past 12 months to 3 years.

In-house teams are primarily those involved in conducting IA tests/reviews, but less conventional means of assessing the IA are used, namely user testing and analytics.  Categorisation (tree testing), a highly useful and speedy method of validating IA’s, are used least often.

So is this because IA testing is being considered alongside other UX issues/methodologies or just not really being considered at all?

Information architecture is so important and there are many useful tools that can help quickly gauge this.  Using web analytics to assess the IA is only telling an element of the story – in the context of IA, analytics primarily show where people went, but not:

• why
• whether they intended to
• if they understood the route they took (was it intuitive)
• if the labels/categories made sense

So what does this all mean?

• IA needs management buy-in and attention as much as any other element of a site. The fact that internal teams consider this important but it doesn’t get reviewed annually despite sites being updated more frequently, suggests an education piece upstream to ensure IA is included in discussions and reviews in Business As Usual projects instead of just when new designs are being considered.
• Quick, cost effective techniques which draw on larger sample sizes (more beneficial for IA and also for convincing senior management of the validity of potential change) are not used or necessarily known of widely. Remote tools that allow you to reach out to your customers / prospects and validate IA decisions could be used more widely and more often to great effect.
• Use analytics with caution; there is no doubt analytics can provide useful insights for many design decisions, but for IA this is limited based on the fact your analytics tell you nothing about the people moving around your site, their intention, satisfaction, understanding or overall ease of use.

There are many excellent tools and techniques out there for especially for card sorting and tree testing – what do you use?

We’d be interested to hear if this resonates with anyone in client UX teams and how best you ensure IA is kept in focus.