It might not look very obvious some,
but Research plays an integral part in an optimal Web IA design. The design of
complex websites requires an interdisciplinary team that involves graphic
designers, software developers, content managers, usability and database
engineers, and many other experts. Hence, in such cases, integrating IA into
the web development process is simply the norm. There needs to be effective
collaboration between all parties involved, which in turn will require agreements
on a structured development process. This process will thus involve Research,
Strategy and Design at the earlier stages, followed later by Implementation and
Administration. The research phase usually begins with kick of meetings with
the strategy team and a review of existing background materials in a bid to
garner a high-level understanding of the goals, business context, the existing
IA, the content and the intended audiences. Research then continues with a
series of studies, employing a variety of frameworks and methods to explore the
information ecology. When done, the research actually provides a contextual
understanding that becomes the base for the development of an IA strategy. Design
is where you shape the high-level strategy into an Information Architecture,
creating detailed blueprints, wireframes, and metadata schema that will be used
by graphic designers, programmers, content authors, and the production team. This
is where IAs are most involved. Implementation is when your designs are put
into test as the site is built, tested and launched, involving tagging
documents, testing and troubleshooting. At the end of the program/project is
Administration which involves the continuous evaluation and improvement of the
site’s IA. It includes daily tasks like tagging new documents and wedding out
old ones, monitoring site usage, and identifying opportunities to improve the
site through major or minor redesigns.
Research in IA involves paying
due diligence and seeking as much information as possible in the areas of
Context, Content and the Users. A conceptual framework of the broader
environment involving these three key entities is usually necessary to realize
this phase of the IA web development process.
The Context of your IA research
will involve a thorough investigation of the business goals, funding and their
various sources, organization politics and culture, the existing technologies
within the environment and the various human resources that will be engaged in
the effort. Researching the context by the IA will be achieved, first by
getting a buy-in from the stakeholders, background investigation, meetings
strategy meeting, content management meeting and IT meeting), and
presentations, interviews with stakeholders and an assessment of the
technologies in place.
Content is actually what
end-users see on and get from your web site, like data, documents,
applications, e-services, images, audio and video files, personal web pages, etc…
Users need to be able to find content before they can use it – findability precedes
usability. Researching the IA content will involve finding out what types or kinds
of content (listed above) will be included, and from what sources. This will
involve judicious content analysis (gathering and analyzing metadata and content),
content mapping (what data, document or image goes where), and benchmarking (both
Competitive and Before/After). Heuristic evaluations are very effective in
testing a website against a formal or informal set of guidelines. They come in
very useful in content analysis. The heuristic evaluation will analyze the Visibility
of current System Status, match between the system and the real world, user
control and freedom, consistency and standards, error prevention, recognition
rather than recall, flexibility and efficiency of use, aesthetic and
minimalistic design, how the system helps users recognize, diagnose and recover
form errors, as well as help and documentation.
Users are visitors to your sites,
respondents, actors, employers customers, etc…They are why you’re employed and
why you’re a building a web site in the first place, hence they’re the ultimate
designers. That’s just how important they are to your web IA project. Carrying out
end-user research involve finding out the very audiences we’ll be serving, the
tasks they’ll be performing on the site, their needs and information seeking
behavior, their various experiences and vocabulary used. This research can be
done by carrying out usage statistics, search logs and clickstream analysis,
i.e. accessing data from the web server logs and analyzing this information,
use case and personas analysis, contextual inquiry, as well as surveys, focus
group meetings, face to face interviews, card sorting, questionnaires and user
testing. Google
Analytics is a great tool for gathering web usage statistics. When gathering
information and analyzing the usage statistics, the IA should be focused on various
characteristics of the various web visits (popular pages visited, length of the
visits, most popular pages visited), who the users are (country or region of
origin, the various platforms and Operating Systems used for their visits, browser
choices and screen resolution. Most, if not all of this information should be
present in web server logs and can be analyzed using google analytics.
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