What is information architecture? ✏️

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According to Abby Covert, a leader in the field of information architecture, IA is ‘the way we arrange the parts to make sense of the whole.’ Information architecture (IA) is found in every digital product, from websites and apps to an intranet. 

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For the purposes of this article we focus on the importance of information architecture to user experience (UX) design because IA is fundamentally important to the success of your user experience. It determines how users will access your  content and ultimately how successful their experience is when using your product. 

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When put like this it does seem pretty straightforward. Maybe even simple? But these tasks need to be straightforward for your users. Putting thought, time and research in at the front of your design and build can help build an intuitive product. IA is the structure that sits in behind and allows the design to tell the story and the content to be found in an easy way.

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The role of information architecture in UX design 🏗️

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Information architecture forms the framework for any UX design project. You need to consider the visual elements, functionality, interaction, and navigation and if they are built according to IA principles. If not considered fully even the most compelling content and powerful user experience design can fail without an organized and functional IA design. Disorganized content can make finding your way through difficult, meaning users get lost, annoyed and frustrated. Frustrated users don’t stick around and most likely don’t come back.

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Through solving or preempting users’ issues with research and designing powerful and effective IA it reduces usability and navigation problems. Meaning that researched, thought through and designed information architecture can save both money and time for your organization in the longer term.

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What is the difference between IA and UX? 🤯

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Often it can be confusing that there isn’t much difference between IA and UX design. While these terms do relate to each other and need to be considered alongside, they are not one and the same.

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“Information architecture (IA) is the discipline of making information findable and understandable, helping people understand their surroundings and find what they’re looking for online and in the real world” - Interaction Design

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“User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products
that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users” - Interaction Design

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UX design is well grounded with good functional information architecture but that’s not where it stops. The user experience focus is on influencing users’ behaviors and actions through emotion and psychology. Information architecture is focussed on the users' goals and task completion. They work together to create the very best user experience. IA provides the foundation of a well organized space that is easy to navigate and UX design ensures that the overall experience meets (or exceeds) users’ expectations, through their wants, needs and desires.

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The key components of IA 🧱

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There are four key components to consider when building a strong information architecture:

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Labeling

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How information is named and represented. Labels need to communicate information to users without using too much space or requiring much work on the user’s part.

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Navigation

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How people make their way through information. Without robust IA which has been thought through this is the quickest way to confuse users. If they can’t find their way to the information they need, they won’t be able to complete their task. It really is that simple.

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Search

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How people will look for information (keywords, categories). A search system is especially important when there is a lot of content to wade through. A search engine, filters, and many other tools help users search content. Great UX design will consider how the information will be displayed once searched.

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Organization

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How the information is ordered. These help users to predict where they can find information easily:

• Hierarchical is the hierarchy of the content and literally the order of importance
  the user expects to see information against what the organization needs.
• Sequential Taking a stroll in your user's shoes can be valuable. Considering the path a user would take and the journey they make. Walking step-by-step, ensuring that as users progress through their tasks they are easily led to the next step.
• Matrix This is a little more complicated for users as it lets them choose how to navigate on their own. Users are given the choice of content organization. For example, the searchability of a website. Where the user could choose to search by topic, size, price or any other filter or option.

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Wrap up 🥙

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Information architecture is a key part of a powerful user experience design. Efficient IA helps users quickly and easily move through content and find what they want.  And what do users want but to find what they want, complete their task and get on with their day!

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Provide an IA that functions well, is intuitive to use and well labeled, coupled with UX design that is smooth, attractive and responds to users needs, wants and desires and you’ll have a winner on the day.

Knowing and understanding why and how your users use your product can be invaluable for getting to the nitty gritty of usability. Where they get stuck and where they fly through. Delving deep with probing questions into motivation or skimming over looking for issues can equally be informative.

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Usability testing can be done in several ways, each way has its benefits. Put super simply, usability testing literally is testing how useable your product is for your users. If your product isn't useable users will not stick around or very often complete their task, let alone come back for more.

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What is usability testing?

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Usability testing is a research method used to evaluate how easy something is to use by testing it with representative users.

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These tests typically involve observing a participant as they work through a series of tasks involving the product being tested. Having conducted several usability tests, you can analyze your observations to identify the most common issues.

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We go into the three main methods of usability testing:

1. Moderated and unmoderated
2. Remote or in person
3. Explorative, assessment or comparative

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1. Moderated or unmoderated usability testing

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Moderated usability testing

Moderated usability testing is done in-person or remotely by a researcher who introduces the test to participants, answers their queries, and asks follow-up questions. Often these tests are done in real time with participants and can involve other research stakeholders. Moderated testing usually produces more in-depth results thanks to the direct interaction between researchers and test participants. However, this can be expensive to organize and run.

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Top tip: Use moderated testing to investigate the reasoning behind user behavior.

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Unmoderated usability testing

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Unmoderated usability testing is done without direct supervision; likely participants are in their own homes and/or using their own devices to browse the website that is being tested. And often at their own pace.  The cost of unmoderated testing is lower, though participant answers can remain superficial and making follow-up questions can be difficult.

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Top tip: Use unmoderated testing to test a very specific question or observe and measure behavior patterns.

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2. Research or in-person usability testing

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Remote usability testing

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‍Remote usability testing is done over the internet or by phone. Allowing the participants to have the time and space to work in their own environment and at their own pace. This however doesn’t give the researcher much in the way of contextual data because you’re unable to ask questions around intention or probe deeper if the participant makes a particular decision. Remote testing doesn’t go as deep into a participant’s reasoning, but it allows you to test large numbers of people in different geographical areas using fewer resources.

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Top tip: Use remote testing when a large group of participants are needed and the questions asked can be direct and unambiguous.

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In-person usability testing

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‍In-person usability testing, as the name suggests, is done in the presence of a researcher. In-person testing does provide contextual data as researchers can observe and analyze body language and facial expressions. You’re also often able to converse with participants and find out more about why they do something. However, in-person testing can be expensive and time-consuming: you have to find a suitable space, block out a specific date, and recruit (and often pay) participants.

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Top tip: In-person testing gives researchers more time and insight into motivation for decisions.

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3. Explorative, Assessment or comparative testing

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These three usability testing methods generate different types of information:

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Explorative testing

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‍Explorative testing is open-ended. Participants are asked to brainstorm, give opinions, and express emotional impressions about ideas and concepts. The information is typically collected in the early stages of product development and helps researchers pinpoint gaps in the market, identify potential new features, and workshop new ideas.

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Assessment research

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‍Assessment research is used to test a user's satisfaction with a product and how well they are able to use it. It's used to evaluate general functionality.

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Comparative research

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‍Comparative research methods involve asking users to choose which of two solutions they prefer, and they may be used to compare a product with its competitors.

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Top tip: Depending on what research is being done, and how much qualitative or quantitative data is wanted.

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Which method is right for you?

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Whether the testing is done in-person, remote, moderated or unmoderated will depend on your purpose, what you want out of the testing, and to some extent your budget. 

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Depending on what you are testing, each of the usability testing methods we explored here can offer an answer. If you are at the development stage of a product it can be useful to conduct a usability test on the entire product. Checking the intuitive usability of your website, to ensure users can make the best decisions, quickly. Or adding, changing or upgrading a product can also be the moment to check on a specific question around usability. Planning and understanding your objectives are key to selecting the right usability testing option for your project.

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Let's take a look at a couple of examples of usability testing.

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1. Lab based, in-person moderated testing - mid-life website

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Imagine you have a website that sells sports equipment. Over time your site has become cluttered and disorganized, much like a bricks and mortar store may. You’ve noticed a drop in sales in certain areas. How do you find out what is going wrong or where users are getting lost? Having an in-person, lab (or other controlled environment), moderated usability test with users you can set tasks, watch (and record) what they do.

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The researcher can literally be standing or sitting next to the participant throughout, recording contextual information such as how they interacted with the mouse, laptop or even the seat. Watching for cues as to the comfort of the participant and asking questions about why they make decisions can provide richer insights. Maybe they wanted purple yoga pants, but couldn’t find the ‘yoga’ section which was listed under gym rather than a clothing section.

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Meaning you can look at how your stock is organised, or even investigate undertaking a card sort. This provides robust and fully rounded feedback on users behaviours, expectations and experiences. Providing data that can directly be turned into actionable directives when redeveloping the website. 

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2. Remote, moderated assessment testing - app product development

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You are looking at launching an app for parents to access for information and updates for the school. It’s still in development stage and at this point you want to know how easy the app is to use. Setting some very specific set tasks for participants to complete the app can be sent to them and they can be left to complete (or not). Providing feedback and comments around the usability.

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The next step may be to use first click testing to see how and where the interface is clicked and where participants may be spending time, or becoming lost. Whilst the feedback and data gathered from this testing can be light, it will be very direct to the questions asked. And will provide data to back up (or possibly not) what assumptions were made.

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3. Moderated, In-person, explorative testing - new product development

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You’re right at the start of the development process. The idea is new and fresh and the basics are being considered. What better way to get an understanding of what your users’ truly want than an explorative study.

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Open-ended questions with participants in a one-on-one environment (or possibly in groups) can provide rich data and insights for the development team. Imagine you have an exciting new promotional app that you are developing for a client. There are similar apps on the market but none as exciting as what your team has dreamt up. By putting it (and possibly the competitors) to participants they can give direct feedback on what they like, love and loathe.

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They can also help brainstorm ideas or better ways to make the app work, or improve the interface. All of this done, before there is money sunk in development.

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Usability testing summary: When to use each method (and why)

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Key objectives will dictate which usability testing method will deliver the answers to your questions.

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Whether it’s in-person, remote, moderated or comparative with a bit of planning you can gather data around your users very real experience of your product. Identify issues, successes and failures. Addressing your user experience with real data, and knowledge can but lead to a more intuitive product.

An impressive line-up of researchers, strategists, and designers from the global UX community shared their ideas, experiences, insights, and approaches to effective ways of working at this year’s 100% virtual 3-day UX New Zealand conference.

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We introduce 7 speakers, highlight what they had to say, and share their full video presentations.

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1. How to design for designers at scale

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Designers focus on creating great experiences for customers but who’s looking out for the designers themselves? Marine Bucher, Service Designer at Humankind shared how a Design Ops approach is creating and maintaining a healthy environment for 170+ designers globally and 40+ locally in New Zealand, to thrive at ANZ bank.

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“The goal of Design Ops is to remove all operational headaches so designers can focus on designing and researching.”

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2. Human centred design in crisis

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An impressive trio from Deloitte Digital: Carol Yung, Georgia Chetwynd-Talbot, and Matt Cobham took us through what it was like to be part of the agile team tasked with designing and piloting a core service of the UK’s pandemic response in just weeks, and delivering it at scale in just 2-3 months.

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"Our lifecycle from design, to build, to deployment was extremely quick, learning as we went.  We had to think and act like a start-up’."

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3. Using one pagers to communicate research findings

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Have you ever had a stakeholder ask you to present the findings of your study one hour before a meeting?  Michael Ryan, User Research Director at Liberty Mutual Insurances shared his solution to this and other challenges researchers face presenting their work in a practical and entertaining talk.

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“Can you present the findings from last week’s study now? Scenarios like that used to stress me out as a UX researcher so I came up with 1-pagers.”

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4. Research Ops at Trade Me: Building a shared approach to research

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Sarah Goforth, Senior UX Researcher at Trade Me considers herself and her fellow researchers, Kaitiaki, 'guardians of our people'.  Sarah shared the challenges and wins of building their particular type of UX research operations (ReOPs) at Trade Me which includes everyone, (researchers and non-researchers), in the process.

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"Not having an impact with your research really sucks as a researcher…and should not be wasted." 

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5. The design of policy and the policy of design

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Phil Balagtas, President, and Founder of Futures Thinking believes designers have a responsibility to design better futures and policies for generations to come by embedding a future-thinking mindset into the products and services they design.  He referenced the confusing, often intelligible world of Terms and Conditions to illustrate the need for designers to take a more human-centered approach. 

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"Policies are not always designed as a dialogue.  Yet it's a gateway to using a service."

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6. The 4 day week in the digital age

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After introducing the four-day week at Perpetual Guardian, Andrew Barnes, Founder of 4 Day Week Global, actively advocates for its adoption by others as part of the future of work.  He talks through the issues, challenges, and opportunities of embracing a 4 day working week in the digital age.

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“When we started back in 2018 we were a pretty lone voice…The 4 day week has been given rocket fuel by Covid-19.”

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7. Tackling complexity with object oriented UX

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While many avoid or despair when faced with UX complexity, Sophia Prater, Founder & Lead UX Designer at Rewired UX embraces complexity, untangling it with an approach she calls Object-Oriented UX.  She shared four tough questions to ask early on to help wrangle complexity to benefit the user.

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"I see portfolio pieces like this a lot. I can tell complexity has been completely swept under the rug and the end-user ends up handling it.”

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For a taste of what even more speakers from UX New Zealand 2022 had to share, head over to our highlights reel.

User research is key to discovering the inner workings of your users’ minds – their emotional, organizational, informative needs and desires. These are all super important to creating a user experience that is intuitive and meeting your users’ needs in a way that means they feel loved, cared for and considered. All the deep understanding stuff that keeps them coming back!

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Qualitative research allows you to collect verbatim data from participants that give insights into why they do or feel things. You can even get into whether ‘Dee’ understood how the website worked or why ‘Andrew’ would (or wouldn’t) revisit the app outside of testing.

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Gathering these awesome insights is one step. Analyzing and organizing these is a skill and talent in its own right. And armed with the right tools or methods it can be immersive, interesting and a great way to get under the skin of your users. Let’s take a look at affinity mapping as a method of analyzing this data - as a tool it can help researchers visualize and easily group and theme data.

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Affinity mapping is used outside of the UX world and can be done independently, however is a great analysis method to use collaboratively. For researchers, it can be a great tool to collaborate and engage the team and potentially stakeholders. Bringing people together to identify, discuss and resolve user experience issues. 

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Here we’ll lay out what affinity mapping is, specifically why it’s useful for user research and set out key steps to get you underway. 

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What is Affinity Mapping? 🗺️

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By definition, affinity mapping is the process of collecting, organizing, and grouping qualitative data to create an affinity diagram.

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Put simply it is a tool to group, map, sort and categorize information. A tool where you’ll look at the information and patterns of your qualitative user research and work to group these together to make sense of them. It helps you to find patterns, similar outcomes and insights that allow you to draw conclusions and collate results in a cohesive manner, then report to the wider team in a way that makes sense and provides a clear road to applicable and achievable outcomes.

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What is an Affinity Diagram? 🖼️

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An affinity diagram is what you have once you have gone through the affinity mapping process. It is the final ‘diagram’ of your grouping, sorting and categorizing. An ordered visual sorting of insights and information from your user research. And the place to filter or funnel observations and information into patterns and reach final outcomes. 

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Allowing you to see where the key outtakes are and where there may need to be improvements, changes or updates. And from here a roadmap can be decided.

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Essentially the mapping part is the process of creating the diagram, a visual sorting of insights and information from your user research. So how do you make affinity mapping work for you?

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1. Start with a large space

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This could be a table, desk, pinboard or even a whiteboard. Somewhere that you can stick, pin or attach your insights to in a collaborative space. Becoming more common recently is the use of shared digital and online whiteboard tools.  allowing people to access and participate remotely.

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2. Record all notes

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Write observations, thoughts, research insights on individual cards or sticky notes.

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3. Look for patterns

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As a group read, comment and write notes or observations. Stick each of the notes onto the board, desk or whiteboard. Add, and shuffle into groups as you go. You can keep adding or moving as you go.

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4. Create a group/theme

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This will start to make sense as more sticky notes are added to the map. Creating groups for similar observations or insights, or for each pattern or theme.

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5. Give each theme or group a name

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As more notes are added there will be natural groups formed. Openly discuss if there are notes that are more difficult to categorize or themes to be decided. (We’ve outlined some ideas for UX research themes in another section below.)

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6. Determine priorities

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You’ve tidied everything into themes and groups, now what? How do you decide which of these are priorities for your organization? Discussion and voting can be the best way to decide what outcomes make the most sense and may have the biggest impact on your business.

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7. Report on your findings

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Pulling together and reporting on the findings through your affinity diagram process should be key to putting actionable outcomes in place.

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How to define research themes 🔬

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Commonly, user research is digested through thematic analysis. During thematic analysis, you aim to make sense of all the notes, observations, and discoveries you’ve documented across all your information sources, by creating themes to organize the information. 

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Depending on your role and the type of research you conduct, the themes you create for your affinity diagram can vary. Here are some examples of affinity groups that you could form from your UX research:

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• User sentiment and facial expressions when completing certain tasks
• Frequently used words or phrases when describing a product or experience
• Suggestions for improving your product or experience

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Wrap up 🌯

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Qualitative user testing and the resulting observations can be some of the best insights you get into your users’ minds. Filtering, organizing and ordering these disparate and very individual observations can be tricky. Especially if done in silo.

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So, draw a team together, bring in stakeholders from throughout your organization and work collaboratively to sort, organize and categorize through affinity mapping. This opens the doors to discussion, buy-in and ultimately a collective understanding of user research. Its importance and its role within the organization. And most importantly the real-world implications UX research and its insights have on organizational products and output.

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Information architecture (IA) is everywhere. Like the best websites and apps in the digital world, information architecture also brings clarity and understanding to the real world. It helps us navigate complexity and clutter, enables us to get things done more easily even with enjoyment, and reduces our cognitive load as we go about our lives.

As Abby Covert, IA advocate and author of ‘How to Make Sense of Any Mess’, puts it: 

‘I believe information architecture has the power to make the world a clearer place’

We share five examples of information architecture at work in everyday life.  

Access Apps

Does your phone home screen look like a random bunch of icons or a well-laid-out work of art? Fitness, entertainment, shopping, transport, banking…these days there’s some kind of app for every aspect of your life. While it’s handy to be able to access all these apps on the go, keeping track of them can be a mission unless you have some kind of system. If finding the right app at the right time is driving you crazy - maybe it’s time to give your phone information architecture some love?

Look up books

Are your books arranged by subject, category, author, size, color, or something else? Do you go for the common approach that everyone understands like a library or something more personal like ‘books I read a lot’ or ‘books I’ll never read’? However you do it, there’s some kind of system, (or information architecture), at work that drives your decisions about where individual books end up on your shelf - what’s yours?

Enlist a list

When you’ve got lots on and feeling overwhelmed or you’re packing for that well-earned holiday and don’t want to forget anything, chances are you enlist the help of some kind of list. What a relief to get all that stuff out of your head somewhere, in some kind of order. Whether you put pen to paper and stick it on your fridge or carry it around on your phone, the main thing is you’ve got a list somewhere - that’s a great information architecture starting point.

Shop around

Supermarket shopping - love it or hate you - it’s got to be done.  Do you browse the aisles or aim to get in and out as quickly as possible?  Whether you’re pushing a trolley around your local haunt, out of town in unfamiliar territory or simply shopping online, you’re relying on some kind of signposts to guide your way through the myriad of products.  Phew - Information architecture can be a lifesaver.  It can also change lives as Jennie Leng discovered in her case study on online shopping at Countdown.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abnHLaGV_aw&list=PLKQWFP9YS6b479paxcG89cOjHUjQcPlem&index=19&t=7s

Find who's who

Imagine you’re doing a spot of research ahead of a job interview,  looking for the right person in a big company to pitch your product or you’re the newbie at work and unsure who’s who - an organizational chart can save time, and embarrassment - and generally make life easier. All power to information architecture!

So there you have it. Information architecture isn’t all about content audits, complex site maps or complex tree testing projects. It’s also about systems and structures that help us navigate everyday life in the real world.

Having access to the specialist subscription-based tools you need to do your work is a reasonable thing to expect. But what if you’re relying on someone else’s SaaS account to access what you need? Sounds like a good solution but think again. It’s risky - even fraught. Here are 3 good reasons to avoid shared login credentials and why you need your own.

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1. Safety first - sharing account login credentials is a risky business 🔐

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If you don’t know who’s signed up and using the subscriptions your organization pays for and holds, how can you protect their data once they’ve gone? As the account holder, you’re responsible for keeping the personal data of anyone accessing your subs safe and secure. That’s not only the right thing to do - it’s pretty important from a legal perspective too.

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In today’s data-driven world safeguards around privacy and security are essential. You only need to look at the fallout from serious data breaches around the world to see the damage they can do. There’s a myriad of privacy laws around personal data out there but they’re based on the universal principle of protecting personal data.  One of the better-known laws is GDPR the EU’s data protection law. 

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The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulates and protects the processing of the personal information of EU citizens and residents by establishing rules on how organizations such as companies and governments can process this personal data. It’s important to note the GDPR applies to those handling the data whether they’re EU-based organizations or not.

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Avoid encouraging shared logins in your organization to ensure peace of mind that you’re doing everything you can to keep people’s personal data safe and secure - as well as keeping on the right side of the law.

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2. Ease of administration - save time and energy managing multiple users 🎯

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Having single logins rather than shared logins saves time and energy and makes the whole administration smoother and easier for everyone.

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For instance, maybe you need to delete data as part of honoring GDPR rules. This could be tricky and time consuming if there are multiple users on one email as a generic email isn’t specific to a person. 

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Generic email addresses also make it harder for SaaS providers to understand your account activity and implement the changes you want or need.  For example, customers often ask to retrieve information for account billing.   Having multiple employees using a single login can make this problematic.  It can be a real struggle to identify the right owners or users.  

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And if the ‘champion’ of the tool leaves your organization and you want to retrieve information on the account, your SaaS provider won't be able to do this without proof you’re the real owner of this account. 

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Another added benefit ,(which your IT & security team will thank you for), of having a personal login, is the way it makes setting up functionality such as single-sign-on (SSO) so easy. Given the way single sign-on works, shared emails just don’t cut it anymore. Also if your organization uses SSO it means you’ll be able to log into tools more quickly and easily.

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3. Product support - access it when you need it 🙏

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When things go wrong or you just need help using products or tools from your friendly SaaS it’s important for them and for you, that they’re in the best position to support you. Supporting people is a big part of the job and generic emails make it harder to connect with customers and create the people to people relationships that enable the best outcome when problems arise or training or help is needed.

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You may be surprised to hear what a blocker multiple users on a single email can be. For instance, generic email addresses can make it harder for us to get to the right person and communicate with you.  We won’t know if you have another email active in the system we can use to help you.

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Wrap up 🌯

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We’ve given you 3 good reasons not to account share - still, need convincing?  

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What about getting the right plan to meet your organization’s needs - so you don’t need to share in the first place? There could be all kinds of reasons why you’ve ended up having to account share: maybe a workmate signed up, shared it, and got you hooked too.  Or your organization has grown and you need more subs.  Whatever the reason there’s no need to account share - get in touch and sound us out to find a better, safer solution.