Held in conjunction with World IA Day 2018, this practical session was an introduction to the core skills and methods of thinking that you will use as part of your day to day work in IA. Topics covered include the foundations of IA, the importance of a ‘content first’ approach, thinking like a user and how to present your work to clients. The session was led by Jon Fisher, Head of UX at Nomensa, an award-winning UX design agency based in London, Bristol and Amsterdam.

1. February 2018
FoundationsofIA

2. 2
Objectives This training course will introduce information architecture
and how to create a new user focused structure.
Practitioners should understand:
Practitioners should understand:
- What is Information Architecture (IA)?
- The necessary inputs for creating an IA
- Types of digital product structure
- Principles of organisation
- Information scent
- Expert IA Creation
- Validation of an IA
A reading list of useful resources is provided at the end of
this deck

3. 3
Structure Throughout this training course there are a number of
different slides to help you in your day to day work at
Nomensa:
Purple slides: Practical
tips regarding a
technique from a sales
and timescales
perspective
Please note that this training assumes you are a UX practitioner and
therefore does not need to explain basic UX concepts. It is intended to
outline the base level way, of doing particular activities. Your individual
project may require an alternative approach.
Red slides: Practical
exercises to conduct
during the training and
refresh yourself in
downtime.

4. 4
Scope of this
IA training
This training covers the design of information architectures
for single digital products e.g. a responsive website or an
app. It covers many of the traditional views of information
architecture such as sitemaps and user journeys and flows
over time.
In recent years with the advent of multiple channels for
clients, Cross Channel IA and Service Design Thinking has
become important. Nomensa covers many of these types
of services however this is outside the scope of this training
course.
A later training course (to be developed) will cover cross-
channel design work and Service Design Thinking.
For today don’t worry! Lets focus on one digital product
at a time (after that is what most of our client work is)

5. 5
Whatisinformation
architecture?
We talk about it a lot but what do
we really mean?

6. 6

7. 7
AnomensaDefinitionfor
practicalagencywork
Information Architecture is the design of a user
centred structure for a digital product (including
content delivery rules and logic), that underpins
the User Experience we are designing
- Jon Fisher, A cold Saturday afternoon in January 2015
So to be clear. What we really mean is structuring
information around the things that users want to do and in
a way that they talk about them

8. 8
What is
Information
Architecture?
• Information Architecture is talked a lot about at Nomensa but rarely
in client side organisations.
• It is a poorly understood discipline for many reasons and has many
cross overs with other disciplines such as Content Strategy and
Interface Design.
• Ironically it has been a very difficult subject matter to define (“DTDT
or Define the Damn Thing”) since the early days of the web.
• Started its origins in library science as we realised early on that we
needed to classify the web and structure information properly in
order to make it usable, findable and searchable.
• However, library science is only one aspect and modern
information architecture has to consider the psychological aspects
of users engaging with content:
Why? Because digital products are used in a self serve context

9. 9

10. 10

11. 11
The Self Serve
problem of
the web
• In a self serve context a user brings their own biases expectations,
quirks and most importantly, their language to their experience of
your digital product.
• Repeat after me! They use their language not your organisations.
• How they look, search and find information is different to what
most organisations expect.
• Therefore we must ensure that digital products:
Are structured
in a user
centred way
Use language
that users
understand

12. 12
Structure
Part 1
To choose a good structure for
what you are making, you need to
find one that:
- Makes sense to your users
- Reflects your business intent
- Helps you reach your goals
Structural methods for organisation
are called Taxonomy.
Common examples of Taxonomy
include:
- The scientific classification for
plants and animals
- The Dewey Decimal System
- Navigational tabs on a website…
Abbey Covert, How to make Sense of any Mess, 2014

13. 13
Structure
Part 2
Sorting things into groups isn’t the
hard part, classification is.
Sorting is easy when clear rules are
in place. Without these rules,
assumptions take over and things
end up in places where they can be
harder to find
For example, an ambiguous
classification could be Comedy and
Drama. How would a movie critic
review a dark comedy…
Abbey Covert, How to make Sense
of any Mess, 2014
Ever got a user to group things?
Ever asked them to give their group
a name? They are shit at naming.
Jon Fisher, a cold Saturday
afternoon in January 2015

14. 14

15. 15
Language
We know the web is inherently made up of structured content
Therefore almost everything we are dealing with is affected by
language!
We need to think about:
- Terms that conflict with a users mental model
- Terms with alternative meanings
- Terms with historical, political baggage
- Acronyms and homographs (Pool – Do we mean swimming pool
or betting pool?) that may cause confusion
Abbey Covert, How to make Sense of any Mess, 2014

16. 16
Value vs. Pain
“When discussing any product, technology, or idea, it’s easy to focus
only on its value, what problem it is trying to solve for the user. This is
a good start, and has historically been the only consideration.
Recently however, people have started to realize that it also has to be
well designed; it can’t be painful to use.
These two primary aspects of any product, it’s value and it’s pain are
usually treated as independent variables. Of course you want a high
value product and just as importantly the pain of use must be low as
well. What people don’t appreciate is that these two are intricately
linked. What’s most important is their relationship: as long as value is
greater than pain, you’ll be ok.”
Scot Jenson, Mobile Apps Must Die, 2011

17. 17
Structure,
Language,
value and pain
Remember the UX Golden Rule about Value and Pain
If content has the potential to deliver Value to a user then finding
that content has the potential to deliver Pain and frustration
Ultimately Information Architecture has the potential both for us
to reduce human error in the products we design as well as create
delightful moments through clever content delivery across TIME.
A good information architecture removes the pain from your
service or product. Its not that sexy but it is essential.
Information architects need to be humble (and patient)!

18. 18
Hey,niceIA
Said by no one, ever.

19. 19
InputstoIAcreation
What do we need to begin
creating a user centred structure?

20. 20
Inputs to IA
creation
Before starting to create an IA what do we need some of
the following things (depending on the project they are not
always available):
- Content Evaluations / Audit from an existing digital
product
- Content Models
- Lists of content types and elements
- Task matrices (patience: these are coming up next)
- Audience definitions e.g. Personas
- User research

21. 21
Inputs to IA
creation
Stuff to do with our clients
content:
- Content Evaluations / Audit
from an existing digital
product
- Content Models
- Lists of content types and
elements
Stuff to do with what our user
base want or are trying to do:
- Task matrices (patience:
these are coming up next)
- Audience definitions e.g.
Personas
- User research
Lets think about this list again and break it into two.
1 2

22. 22
The
ingredients
of an IA
We know information architecture is about structure and
language
If we know everything about what our client has and how
they want to deliver it we can structure it (who likes Lego?
I do!)!
If we know everything about what our users are frustrated
with and the way they talk and see the world we can use an
appropriate language for them.

23. 23
We will not
always have the
time and money
available for all
of these inputs…
Ask yourself:
• Is there any existing research on customer problems and language?
• What are people saying on social media?
• Can we have a workshop with the client to explore audience types?
• Can we meet with customer facing staff in the clients organisation?
• What does analytics tell us about popular content on the existing site?
• Ultimately how much can I learn from just a really good root around
the clients existing website?

24. 24
Task
Matrices
• A task matrix is very valuable technique that you can use
at the beginning of a piece of information architecture to
help you get a sense of:
- Who your digital product has to support i.e. audiences
- What they are trying to do!
• It does exactly what it says on the tin! You map
“Audience” across the y axis and “Task” down the x axis.
• Look out for clumps and overlaps across audience types
as these typically indicate very important tasks and can
aid you later with making structural groupings. Obviously
if you have nine audiences and all of them want to do the
same thing then that thing must be important!
• Finally task matrices are doubly valuable if you are
planning to validate your IA at some point in the future.

25. 25

26. 26
Createataskmatrixfora
website(10 minutes)
Get into pairs and then:
1. Choose an imaginary website from either “Musical
Instrument Shop” or a “Travel website”
2. Identify all the potential audiences for the website.
List them in a horizontal line
3. Start to think about all the tasks each audience group
may want to do on your site List these in a vertical line
4. Start to fill in your matrix to show which audiences are
doing which tasks

27. 27
Content
Models
• A content model shows us the relationships between
content types
• They are a really useful design tool to help us visualise the
system we are defining
• Can be quite quick! Initially it’s a design tool!
• Can help with very early backend development work,
particular when talking about what objects exist in the
system and need to be dynamically delivered.

28. 28

29. 29

30. 30
Createacontentmodel
forawebsite(10 minutes)
Get into pairs and then:
1. Using the same website as exercise 1, work through and
identify all the potential Content Types that make up the
website
2. See if you can draw a content model that reflects the
relationship between the different types
3. Do you start to think differently about how you might
approach the websites structure?

31. 31
You can make an IA in two days or 9 months
(Department of Energy and Climate Change, – To be
fair it was 19 websites and over 9000 pages…)
The rest of this training course will teach you a set of
principles to follow for making user-centred structures
Remember,
depending on
your project…

32. 32
Typesofdigitalproduct
structure
Which one will suit our design
problem best?

33. 33
Types of
digital product
structure
• There are five common types of structure for a digital
product:
- Hierarchical
- Linear
- Hub and Spoke
- Hypertext pattern (wiki)
- Combined
• You might combine some different structures for more
complex sites. For example a hierarchical structure
with a database element of records at a lower level
• Your choice of structure should be focused around the
types of tasks and behaviours that are going to occur
on your digital product

34. 34
Hierarchical
Structure
e.g. a lot of sites!

35. 35
Hub & spoke
structure
e.g. Dashboards

36. 36
Linear structure
e.g. Applications/checkouts

37. 37
Hypertext
structure
e.g. Wikipedia

38. 38
Combined
structure
e.g. Hierarchy & database

39. 39
Not normally a
deliverable but
could be nice to
plot out thinking
and show client
It can be really beneficial to your project when you start
to think about this kind of foundational systemic
thinking early on. Depending on the structure of your
digital product can have massive implications on the
interface design. Explore different ideas. More than 30
minutes and you have over thought it!
These kind of structures are typically too abstracted to
show a client on their own but they can be useful for
telling the story of your design decisions
Also talk to your design partner at the beginning of the
interface design stage to see what they think.

40. 40
7Themesof
organisation(structure)
Topical / Chronological /
Geographical / Alphabetical /
Hierarchical / Task / Audience

41. 41
Seven themes
of organisation
• There are seven core ways that information can be
organised into groups:
- Topical
- Chronological
- Geographical
- Alphabetical
- Continuum
- Task
- Audience
• As long as you remain consistent within a particular
grouping then the easier it is to use. Confusion and
ambiguity comes when you group information by
more than one type of organising principle e.g.
“Topical” and “Task”

42. 42
Topical
Organisation
• This is the most common type of organisation or
scheme you will use.
• You will probably be developing your Topic Grouping
from scratch!
• A Topic based scheme groups similar things together
based on common attributes based on what they are
about
• For example, Nomensa’s blog uses a topic based
scheme built around “UX”, Research”, “Design”
“Information Architecture” etc
• Everything in a given silo is about the top-level topic.

43. 43
Chronological
(Time)
organisation
• Organising information into a time based scheme
according to when something happens.
• Only use when time is the key characteristic of the
content, for example:
- News
- Weblogs
- History
- Listings
- Flight times etc

44. 44
Geographical
Organisation
• Like time, geography is an exact scheme. If you
understand the boundaries (country, region, continent
etc) then you can search accurately
• Obviously geography has to be a key component of
the content!
• Two really good use of geographical schemes:
- Your target audience wants to access information that way e.g.
looking for a holiday
- They understand the geography you are using. For example
would a global audience (particularly US) understand British
county council boundaries?

45. 45
Alphabetical
Organisation
• Can be used for practically any type of information but
doesn’t mean they are always best.
• Work best when people know what they are looking
for, know how to describe it and our chosen labelling
matches that of a user
• Dictionaries and glossaries are good examples of
Alphabetic schemes
• Question: You work in a record store that uses an
alphabetic coding scheme. Where would you put
Michael Jackson’s Thriller?

46. 46
Continuum
Organisation
• This organisational scheme organises by magnitude.
• For example, highest to lowest or smallest to biggest.
• Rarer and also generally tends to act as more of a filter.
Obviously valuable in a comparison scenario with
users.

47. 47
Task Based
Organisation
• On the surface, task based schemes are interesting and
are often suggested by a client
• But the number and type of tasks can quickly spiral and
often pieces of content can straddle more than one
task. This is a problem!
• Task based schemes work best when:
- There are only a small set of tasks
- The tasks have clear boundaries
- Your content is easy to allocate to a group
• A good example of this is lots of media providers (Shop
/ Watch / Help)

48. 48
Audience
Based
Organisation
• Audience schemes are like task schemes. If you are
not careful they can become ambiguous despite
sounding like a good idea at the start of a project.
• Audience schemes are suitable when:
- You can split your audience into groups, with very clear
boundaries
- At any point in time a user can identify which group they
belong to
- Your content assigns across audience groups without too
much overlap

49. 49
Mixing
organisational
schemes
Its absolutely fine to change the organising principle
across levels of a digital product. For example:
Organisational
Principles #1
Task
Topic
Chronological
Organisational
Principles for Gatwick
Find your flight
Air Travel
Latest flights

50. 50
InformationScent
(Language)
Sniff, sniff, woof! – Why dogs
don’t belong with chairs!

51. 51
Information
Scent
• A major IA principle to remember is that of
“information scent”.
• As a user moves through a digital product they are
effectively foraging for information in each section of
your digital product.
• They are constantly searching and scanning for
pertinent words and images that meet their needs.
• “In essence they are always asking themselves: “Does
this section contain what it is that I am looking for?”
• If the answer to this question is “No” then the user
leaves.

52. 52
Trigger Words
• A Trigger Word is essentially a suitable label for a
section of content in our digital product that enables
the user to continue searching.
• Think of it like a smelly breadcrumb!
• Hopefully now you start to see how important talking
in a user’s language becomes!
• If an organisation insists on speaking in meaningless,
ambiguous phraseology then it is a users information
scent that is lost.
• Then we end up here…

53. 53

54. 54
Trigger Words
• The art of writing good labels for sections of content is
a valuable skill. Both clients and users are bad at this!
• When using the principle of information scent
remember all you are trying to do is get the user to the
next section of content. You do not need to describe
everything that lives in a section.
• Your choice of organisational scheme for that section
of content may help guide your labelling choice,
especially if it Topic based.

55. 55
The best
labels
• Call things by their correct name
• Are consistent
• Use terms that your audience uses
• Are as clear as possible
• Looks simple but in practice (particularly with technically
verbose clients) can be very hard.
• Plus you never know when you will get struck by…

56. 56

57. 57
Identifying
Trigger Words in
your research!
Your user research is where often good candidate trigger words
will be identified!
Listen out for the way your user base speaks about certain topics
Look at social feeds for language and terminology used
Ask them to give names to groups of content. Although they will
be probably be bad, from a dozen users you will consistent words
cropping up all the time!

58. 58
Basic Level
Categories
We typically think in the
middle of hierarchy e.g.
Chairs
Furniture
Office Chairs
(the middle of the hierarchy
– This!)
• We call these “Basic Level Categories”
and they have the following attributes:
- They have a short name and are learned
easily
- You can imagine the category with a simple
visual representation e.g. its easy to think of
“chairs” but hard to think of “furniture”
- There may be a representative action for the
category e.g. chairs are for sitting in. There is
not general action for furniture
• Basic Level Categories are typically the
easiest “things” to identify from research
and therefore make the most sense to
start with when starting to make an IA.

59. 59
Basic Level
Categories
• In essence think of Basic Level Categories as a “Schema”
that a user may use in their head to classify the content of
that section of the website.
- Chairs have four legs but so do dogs. Therefore the category
“Things with four legs” doesn’t help…
• Basic Level Categories are typically the easiest “things” to
identify from research and therefore make the most
sense to start with when starting to make an IA. They are
probably your initial groupings (from either an expert led
approach or a card sort).

60. 60
StructuralPatterns,
OrganisationalSchemes&
TriggerWords(15 minutes)
Get into pairs and choose a website that you have
recently used. At the end of the 15 minutes:
1. Identify what kind of structural pattern the website uses
2. Find three examples of bad labelling on the site
3. Suggest an improvement on the bad labels using the
principle of Trigger Words and Information Scent
4. Look at the groupings of content on the site and attempt
to identify what organisational schemes have been used.
This may prove difficult if the site has a bad IA!

61. 61
CreateanIA
Bringing theory to practice and
creating a new structure

62. 62
Create an IA
• By this point in time you should have:
- An understanding of the range and type of content that your
digital product contains
- An understanding of your user’s needs and wants (“Task Matrix”)
• An understanding of principles around organisation and
structure
• An understanding of information scent and labelling
• Have we identified our Basic Level Categories
• What are you waiting for? Bring it all together!
• Do what Uxers do best…

63. 63

64. 64
User
Journeys
• In the process of playing with groups of content and
labelling you should also sketch out user journeys.
• This allows to see whether your new structure is
cumbersome or overly long.
• It allows you to see how many steps are involved in a
particular task with your new structure
• Are you too narrow and deep, resulting in loads of steps
to get to the right information?
• Are you too broad and shallow?
• When sketching user journeys you are starting to cross
into interface design

65. 65
Days out

66. 66
User
Journeys
• When sketching user journeys you are starting to cross
into interface design
• You will spot opportunities to remove steps from your
structure, thus making it easier for users.
• For example, this hierarchical structure does not mean
five pages of content:
• Product
- Price
- Weight
- Size
- Colour
• It means one page with a filter with four facets on it!

67. 67
IA deliverables IA Work requires a level of abstraction that many clients can
struggle with. Your job is to make it as tangible as possible
Remember a hierarchical display of information does not
necessarily mean a page although a client may think so!
Potential deliverables could include:
1. A site map
2. Some user journeys (typically skectched)
3. A diagram of a proposed structure (e.g. hub and spoke)
4. A content model
5. A list of content types and elements

68. 68
IA deliverables Its up to you and your project team to define with the
client what is a deliverable. At the end of the day,
many IA deliverables are tools to help us in the next
phase of design
The key thing to remember is that an IA has a set of
rules in order to function correctly.
How are you documenting and explaining the rules of
the system to those who need to use it?
Good governance of content is critical to your IA’s
health in the long run.

69. 69
Information
Architecture Site
Map Key
• Remember don't just make a hierarchical tree. You can
use a key and visual vocabulary to help explain and
simplify your sitemaps
• For more information see Jesse James Garrett’s Visual
Vocabulary: http://jjg.net/ia/visvocab/

70. 70
Validatingandupdating
How to write good test plans,
running a Treejack and updating
our structure

71. 71
Validating
an IA
• But how do we know if our new IA works?
• Validate it using an online path finding tool called Treejack
(http://www.optimalworkshop.com/treejack.htm)
Watch this video!
• You don’t want your results polluted by audience
members doing the wrong tasks. Therefore you may
need to construct multiple Treejacks.
• Write a testplan…no…wait…you already have! Your Task
Matrix already tells you what questions to ask what
audience members when you validate your IA.

72. 72
Validating
an IA
• Minimum of five people on each task
• Remember when testing the IA we are testing our
proposed structure and use of language. If you get a
good score at this stage then adding the interface layer
should only help boost it!
• We typically use scoring criteria for tasks such as this:
0-39%
Poor
40-60%
OK
60%+
Good

73. 73

74. 74

75. 75
Informationarchitecture
inasuccessfulcompany
IA is literally the foundation of a
successful user experience…

76. 76
Thinking in
Systems
• When combining the principles of Content First and
Information Architecture we are effectively “thinking in
systems”
• We are saying to ourselves how can we deliver the right
content, at the right time to the right people in an easily
understood language
• No user will ever thank you for thinking about
information architecture because if you do your job
properly then “it just works”

77. 77
Hey,niceIA
Said by Senior UX folk at Nomensa

78. 78

79. 79
Checklistsandresources
Stay on top of your IA game!

80. 80
Books to
read, videos
to watch
• Practical Information Architecture by Donna Spencer
http://www.amazon.co.uk/A-Practical-Guide-Information-Architecture-
ebook/dp/B004WH4OF4
• How to make sense of any mess by Abbey Covert
http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Make-Sense-Any-Mess/dp/1500615994
• Everything First: Structured UX Thinking by Jon Fisher
https://www.slideshare.net/Nomensa/collaborate-bristol-2015-jon-fisher
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (3rd edition)
by Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Architecture-World-Wide-Web/dp/
0596527349
• Designing the search experience: The information architecture
of discovery
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0123969816/ref=as_li_ss_tl?
ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=19450&creativeASIN=0123969816&linkCode=
as2&tag=dtse-21
Essential Reading
Essential Reading
Wider Reading
Wider Reading
Wider Reading

81. 81
Blog and
websites to
read
• Boxes and Arrows (The original IA bible)
http://boxesandarrows.com/
• Optimal Sort: Treejack
http://www.optimalworkshop.com/treejack.htm
• A List Apart: Information Architecture
http://alistapart.com/topic/information-architecture
• The IA Institute
http://iainstitute.org/
Essential Reading
Essential for validating
Wider interesting
Wider interesting

82. 82
Foundations
of IA
Checklist
✓ The web is effectively self service therefore users bring their own bias,
expectations and language
✓ Information Architecture is about structure, language and context in order to
make content usable, findable and searchable
✓ Do you understand what content you have to work with (“Content First”)?
✓ Do you understand what audiences you are dealing with?
✓ Do you understand what tasks each audience group is trying to do?
✓ Have you considered / do you need to make a task matrix?
✓ Have you made a content model to help understand the objects in the system?
✓ What type of information structure could your digital product use?
✓ Remember the seven organisational schemes for grouping information
✓ Remember the role of Information Scent!
✓ What Trigger words can you use to aid in the retrieval of information?
✓ What Base Level Categories can you define?
✓ How will you validate your new IA?

83. Thank you
Q&A