How do you define the information architecture for your site?

When you define the navigation for your site (or revise the navigation for an existing site), you want to begin by thinking about the goals of the site. What you want to accomplish by having a Web site? And, what do your users want to accomplish when they get to your site?

Users are motivated by their needs. All users come to a Web site with a goal in mind. For instance, users' goals may include:

• finding information on heart disease
• signing up for a clinical trial
• applying for a job
• finding a grant

It is your job to ensure that when users come to the Web site, they can quickly find this information.

Begin by reviewing the information you learned about your users and the personas you created. Who are your users? How much do they know about your organization?

Next, review users' goals. Why are users coming to your Web site? What do they want to do when they get to the site? How frequently do they come to the site? Review the information from the Task Analysis and Scenarios you developed in order to set priorities for your navigation and home page.

The navigation (or information architecture) of your site should clearly communicate your Web site's purpose. When users visit your Web site, they will quickly scan the links on the home page to learn more about your site and the information you offer. Therefore, it is very important the navigation reflects your organization's primary purpose and helps users quickly find information. You may want to review the goals you developed during your kick-off meeting.

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How do you determine what should go on the home page?

When designing the home page of your Web site, you want to ensure that your home page reflects the reasons users come to your site. Try to ensure that the most important and most frequently performed tasks are represented on the home page.

Many organizations dedicate a large portion of their home page to their organizational structure and news items. It's important to remember that users are more interested in the information you provide than the way your agency, organization or business is structured. Revisit the goals of your users and then try to design a home page that will quickly allow users to achieve these goals.

Since most users will not be familiar with your organization, it's important to remember that organizing content by your organizational structure may not be the most logical to users. To learn how users think about your content and the ways in which they would organize the information on your site, consider performing a card sort.

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How can you use card sorting to define your categories and labels?

Card sorting is a way to involve users in grouping information for a Web site.

Participants in a card sorting session are asked to organize the content from your Web site in a way that makes sense to them. Participants review items from your Web site and then group these items into categories. Participants may even help you label these groups.

By getting a better understanding of how users view your content, you can begin to define a category structure (or taxonomy) that makes sense to users.

You will likely have several categories that come out of the card sorting activity. The key is to look at the categories to see which groups of information (and labels) have the most agreement among users. Consider the following questions:

• How did the majority of users group the content?
• Did users create similar categories or groups of content?
• Did users use similar terms or labels for the categories?
• Was there a lot of disagreement?
• Are there content items that users struggled to place into groups?

By asking these questions as you review the results of your card sort, you can begin to select the groups of content (or categories) that were logical to users. You can also begin to identify the types of content that were difficult for users to categorize and develop a plan on how to deal with those pieces of content.

Once you've grouped your content into categories, you should start to prioritize the groups of content based on users' tasks.

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How do you create a site map?

You may want to create a site map to help you organize the structure for your site. A site map is a visual representation of the information architecture of your site.

In order to create a site map for your Web site, you should first try to gain an understanding of all of the features, functionality, and content that the Web site will contain.

Refer to the Web Site Requirements and the Content Inventory you created to help you identify all of the features and content on the site.

Next, review users' priorities from the Task Analysis and Scenarios, to determine the items that need to appear on the home page. Use the data from the Card Sorting activity to identify the main categories and the labels for the home page categories.

Once you've identified the links, features, and content that needs to appear on the home page, you'll want to define the content that will appear on second-level and content pages.

Below is high-level site map created for Usability.gov in the early design and development phases:

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What is a wireframe and how do you create one?

A wireframe is a visual illustration of one Web page. It is meant to show all of the items that are included on a particular page, without defining the look and feel (or graphic design). It's simply meant to illustrate the features, content and links that need to appear on a page so that your design team can mock up a visual interface and your programmers understand the page features and how they are supposed to work.

While a site map may list all of the features and links that should appear on the home page, it doesn't tell you which features are the most important and where they should be located on the page.

One of the main purposes of a wireframe is to show you where each item should be placed on a page. A wireframe:

• identifies all of the features on a page
• prioritizes the features so that the most important features are prominently positioned on a page
• visually communicates this information to the rest of your design team with a diagram of the web page

This placement should be based on the users' needs to ensure that the most important tasks or most frequently-used content appears on the first screenful of information or "above the fold."

Wireframes can be range from a simple mock-up of an information-based page to an extremely complex diagram illustrating an intricate process with several steps, such as a registration process.

Wireframes can be created using various tools, from a simple word processing program to a complex diagramming program.

For the Usability.gov redesign, we created a series of wireframes that underwent several rounds of iteration based on users' needs and the results of usability testing. The following wireframe is only one of several that were considered for the layout of the Usabilty.gov home page.

As you can see from the above example, a wireframe does not dictate how the site should look. This is particularly helpful if you are interested in learning whether or not your site's navigation is effective. One technique used to evaluate your navigation is to conduct a usability test using click-through wireframes. The wireframes will help you learn if the categories and the placement of the information is effective before your design team begins to create a graphic design for the site.

This technique is also effective to measure how well your graphic design works. For instance, if you conduct a usability test of your information architecture using click-through wireframes, you will want to see an improvement in usability when the graphic design is created. Every layer of a site should improve the usability of the site, from the content, to the navigation, to the look and feel. To learn more, see the article on Learn About Usability Testing.

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Next steps

While you are developing your site's information architecture, you also want to be working to ensure that your site's content is easy to use. Not only do you want users to be able to easily find information on your site, but once they find a piece of information, you want users to be able to quickly understand the content.

Find out how to create usable content pages and learn how to Write for the Web.

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