Information Architecture helps people find what they are looking for.
Information architecture is an effort to take many pieces of information and figure out the relationships between them. Why? To bring some order to the hundreds of separate things that characterize modern life (and websites).
How? 1) Put things into categories and prioritize them so that people can make sense of today's giant information overload. 2) Fill in what seems to be missing and cut out the unnecessary junk.
An example would be the arrangement of the books in a library. If the thousands of books in the library were all put on shelves at random, it would take forever to find the books or subjects you were looking for. It would make the library a frustrating, much less valuable place... unless you had forever to look. It would be more like a disorganized warehouse than a library.
The organization of articles and pictures in your daily newspaper is another example. Without the sorting of material into categories like news, sports, business, lifestyles, features, and so on, finding out what's going on would be even more difficult than it already is. Prioritizing the material is crucial as well. The most urgent and important stories should be most prominent.
Even a simple task like going to the grocery store involves many of the principles of information architecture. By sorting the foods into categories like fruit, vegetables, canned goods, meat, baked goods, frozen foods and so on, the store enables us to find what we want...
... and buy it from them.
Your website needs to utilize these principles. If you want people to utilize your services and interact with you, make it easy (or, at least, easier) for them to find what they are looking for and to make sense of it.
What's the cost of not making sense?
Contact Workable Web Solutions by e-mail. Let's see what we can do together to start making sense.
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