How to Validate your Information Architecture?

Chris Shayan
Aug 24, 2017 · 6 min read

What is Information Architecture?

Information architecture is a more difficult field to define than many others. Unlike content strategy, which is accomplished by content strategists, or interaction design, which is accomplished by designers, information architect is very infrequently a job title. It is, however, a valuable and necessary field which crosses multiple roles.

The Information Architecture Institute is a non profit organization dedicated to furthering the field of information architecture. They explain IA in a concise quote:

Information architecture is about helping people understand their surroundings and find what they’re looking for, in the real world as well as online.

In other words, information architecture is the creation of a structure for a website, application, mobile app, or other project, that allows us to understand where we are as users, and where the information we want is in relation to our position. Information architecture results in the creation of site maps, hierarchies, categorizations, navigation, and metadata. When a content strategist begins separating content and dividing it into categories, she is practicing information architecture. When a designer sketches a top level menu to help users understand where they are on a site, he is also practicing information architecture.

Regardless of what task is being accomplished, here are some of the questions we ask when doing information architecture:

  • What is the flow of users through our site/app?
  • How does the application help the user catalog their information?
  • How is that information presented back to the user?
  • Is that information helping the customer, and driving decisions?

To answer these questions, the information architect must focus on a number of things: the target audience, the technologies related to the website/app, and the data that will be presented through the website/app.

How to validate Information Architecture?

In my last post I introduced two of our important products at iCare Benefits; following figure shows the total picture of all products being managed under engineering portfolio:

iCM App is simple mobile app (android and iOS) that helps iCare Members to (a simple video that shares very basic features of iCM App) :

  • Monitor their repayments and loans with iCare Benefits
  • Purchase from iCare Benefits; A benefit of purchasing from iCM app is that these sales orders will have a higher priority for order commitment and thus can be delivered faster.
  • Stay in touch with their internal HR
  • Evaluate iCare Benefits services
  • and our very new initiative called Happy Saving which I will share more about it in another blog post

Main users of iCM app are factory workers whom have recently started using smart phones and iCM App is basically their 3 app they’ve ever used and it’s quite important for us that we get our information architecture (IA) right so users don’t feel lost and frustrated with iCM App.

Hence we needed to validated our information architecture (IA) and I read a really great book called “ Validating Product Ideas” which was recommended to me by a real UX guru called Dr.Yaakov Greenshpan. In this great book, I came to learn a technique called “Tree Testing” which helps you to validate your information architecture (IA) and in this post I share the 10 responses of iCM App Tree Test.

Tree testing is a way of evaluating a proposed site/app structure by asking users to find items based on the sites/app organization and terminology.

Tree testing allows you to show a menu structure to users in its most basic form without worrying about the layout and design. Users are asked to complete a series of tasks looking for items using the site/app structure. Typically, tree testing sessions are quite short so only last about 15–20 minutes. On average you would have about 15–20 tasks per session as users tend to lose concentration if the tasks go on for too long. By using this method to evaluate your site structure you have a way to measure how easy it is for users to find items.

Tree testing is normally conducted early on in the design process using online tools like Treejack. This part of your research could be after a card sorting session to confirm that your findings from the card sorting are correct.

Tree testing results are normally much easy to analyze than the card sorting results and the online tools provide clear visual graphics for each task allowing you to quickly see where the problem areas of the site structure are. When looking at the results there are some key measures that you will be looking for:

  • Directness- the percentage of users completing the task without hesitation and getting the correct answer first time
  • Success — the percentage of users that completed the task
  • Time — the time it took users to complete a task

Once you have analyzed the data you can work out what worked and didn’t work within the site structure. This research will help you to make changes to the site structure and understand whether the problems relate to the organizing of the content or the labelling of the category.

So let’s review the iCM App tree testing. In following figure you can see the detail of information architecture of iCM App in many layers:

Then we’ve defined following sample of tasks that we want our users to perform so later on we can analyze the relevant metrics to validate our Information Architecture (IA).

iCM App Tree Testing Result

This is the overview of our test result:

Now let’s go to tasks result updates.

Tasks

Task #1. Make a Purchase

Task #2. Reaching out to Customer Care

Task #3. Returning a Product

First Click

This page shows which branches were clicked first for each task, and what percentage of participants did so. Compare the percentage of first clicks on a branch with the total percentage of participants who visited that branch at any point during the task.

Paths

This table shows the paths your participants took for each task. See where they went wrong or skipped the task entirely.

Task #1. Make a Purchase

Task #2. Reaching out to Customer Care

Task #3. Returning a Product


Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on August 24, 2017.

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Chris Shayan

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Scaling Up, Growth and Digital Transformation guy.

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