TL;DR

Despite being one of the most important aspects of good information retrieval and, therefore one of the most important things for search, we still regularly encounter sites built without basic IA principles in place. That needs to change.

What is information architecture?

Information architecture is a term applied to how information is structured, organised and labelled on the open web. Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville pretty much defined the modern discipline when they described the information architect’s role as someone who:

• Clarifies the mission and vision for the site, balancing the needs of its sponsoring organization and the needs of its audiences. 
• Determines what content and functionality the site will contain. 
• Specifies how users will find information in the site by defining its organization, navigation, labeling, and searching systems. 
• Maps out how the site will accommodate change and growth over time. 

In architecture, good placemaking and wayfinding are almost invisible – visitors know where to go almost without thinking about it. Good information architecture works the same way – it’s the invisible (if done correctly) process of allowing users to move unimpeded and intuitively around a digital space, able to find where they’re going and what they’re looking for and, importantly, to understand it when they get there.

In this respect, as the below diagram shows, it’s the act of understanding three things:

1. Content (what exists?)
   1. What are the kinds of information available?
   2. What is its relevance to the user?
2. Context (where will they find it?)
   1. Where is the user looking to seek out the content?
   2. How, when and why are the users engaging with this content?
3. User (who needs it?)
   1. Who is the user consuming the content?
   2. What value does the content provide them?
   3. What are the user’s preexisting expectations?

Why is information architecture still under-optimised?

If you consider that the core concepts of information architecture (as it applies to the web) were laid down in the above, 1998 text, by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville titled Information Architecture For The World Wide Web, it’s difficult to understand how we arrive (almost 30 years later) in a world where the internet is an integral part of our everyday lives, but such a foundational aspect of early thought is still implemented in such a patchy manner.

Don’t get us wrong – no world in which Wikipedia and Wikidata exist can be said to have abandoned information architecture, and there are plenty of sites that do it well, but a significant number of the sites we encounter on a day to day basis are lacking in at least one of the key aspects of good information architecture, which are as follows:

• Organisation systems (where information lives): this is how content is categorised (ideally a consistent hierarchy that flows from your most important to least important pages in a folder structure) into useful taxonomies.
• Labeling systems (how users recognise it): this is the terminology used to represent things like categories, links, title tags and navigation items (not just the menu, but also things like internal linking) so they’re instantly recognisable and useful to the user.
• Navigation systems (whether they can reach it): these are methods and pathways which users take to move through your site and to find what they need (menus, filters etc.).
• Search systems (whether they can retrieve it): how and whether users can query and retrieve specific onsite data within the website.

Already, just from reading this list, you’ll be able to understand the number of websites which fail in one way or another – whether it’s a mega menu unusable on mobile, or with sections invisible below the fold on desktop, or broken product filters, H-tags used for design rather than as part of a hierarchy, non-descriptive link anchors, or search bars that are less useful than a Google search in a new tab, all of these are aspects of broken information architecture implementation.

The reason? It’s our general feeling that, just as the original edition of Information Architecture For The World Wide Web stated, the people building the sites are siloed from those that are (or should) be making decisions pertaining to the four “main job[s]” of the information architect. This is why we always push for the early and consistent inclusion of SEOs in any website development.

Why does information architecture matter?

Information architecture is about users – and increasingly those users are of the non-human variety. No, not aliens, sadly, but LLMs, bots and other ‘AI’ search platforms. While humans are good at finding their way around problems (hence the fact that most of you will have done the precise ‘second Google search’ workaround for a poor onsite search function we mentioned), they are not typically the most patient consumers; on the other hand, bots have infinite patience, but less of an ability to just work stuff out.

For both of these users, good information architecture makes it easy to find, contextualise and assess content and, then, to make decisions based on that content – whether that’s transactional or simple information seeking. Poor information architecture, therefore, costs brands money every single day – and as platforms grow which need far more digital wayfinding, that cost is only going to increase.

Final thoughts

We’d love to end on a high note here – but the fact of the matter is that the rise of AI website design is likely to push the progress of online information architecture back substantially.

Despite the fact that developers and website designers are seldom trained in information architecture best practice, many of those best practices have become standardised.

The democratisation of web development, along with an increase in security vulnerabilities, is going to lead to a lot more websites built by people without even the fundamentals that have become baked into a new website build. 

As such, it is every webmaster, marketer or digital marketing manager’s job to make sure the site they’re responsible for is not going to be a cul-de-sac designed to trap and frustrate users before they leave for a competitor.