That’s because the information architecture isn’t just for navigation, it’s also for orientation, wayfinding, and discovery.

Orientation

When you first visit a site or start using an app, you need to get an overview and see the whole picture so you can work out what’s on offer and how information is structured.

That’s typically the job of the following interface elements:

• Home page content, category pages
• Mega menus
• Footer areas (if they include typical items such as corporate and press links)
• Site Maps (if done well)

I’ve purposefully missed out one interface element here, and that is introductory slides/animations or overlays. These attempts at teaching people how a site or app works are most often excuses for poor in-interface discovery. They appear at a time in the process when users’ focus is on other tasks, so they aren’t actually very useful to help explain the information architecture.

Navigation

After you’ve worked out what a site or app is about, it’s time to choose a destination and then get there. This is where what we typically think of as navigation – menu systems – are most useful.

Of course, it’s not just traditional menus that perform this role. There are several interface elements that are primarily designed for navigation.

• Menus (including hierarchical menus, category/subcategory click-throughs, etc.)
• Tabbed interfaces
• Lists, tables (in-page menus, basically)
• Search with Filters (This isn’t strictly navigation, but is often used that way by site visitors. Officially, this is “winnowing” behavior)

Sites with large quantities of content may also benefit from structuring category and sub-category pages to follow their primary navigation system so that users can click through within the content area of these pages to drill down in the navigation menu while benefitting from the extra context that these category pages offer.

Wayfinding

When you’re on your way to your destination, or after you’ve completed your task, you’ll be presented with sets of choices at key moments or junctions in the flow.

Think of wayfinding as “you are here, and these are the places you can get to next.” The interface components most often associated with wayfinding are:

• Breadcrumbs, page headings, other in-page “you are here” style content
• Inductive UI and wizard-like interfaces (these streamline wayfinding to one task at a time, followed by a chance to choose from a list of subsequent related tasks – for example consumer tax preparation software)
• Content (often forgotten as a form of navigation, but good content will be hyperlink-rich)
• Related links/you may also like/people also bought style suggestions

Wayfinding is also useful for people who enter a site somewhere deep within the content. Being able to quickly work out where they are, and how to get to the place they want to be, is key to their satisfaction with the site.

Discovery

Often, visitors to your site or app won’t know what they don’t know. In other words, they’ll be looking for something without knowing what it is exactly they want.

You can help them in this discovery process by providing information that describes other features and destinations that might be of interest:

• Category pages
• Search results pages
• Content (this requires a conscious effort to write for discovery)
• Related links/you may also like/people also bought style suggestions
• Assistance text/KB articles (but don’t rely on these because they are most often a last resort, and only for a certain tenacious subset of your users)

IA is more than just navigation

If you’re developing or re-working your information architecture, remember to budget time to consciously consider all the places in the interface that your visitors and users will expect to find clues.

Those elements are spread throughout the interface, and will be necessary at different points in your users’ journey. And it’s not just the site’s design, but also the style you choose to use when you write in-page content, that helps determine whether people can find their way to where they need to be.

By thinking about orientation, navigation, wayfinding, and discovery you’re more likely to guide users to the content and outcomes that they want, which in turn makes them more likely to be satisfied with the service you offer.

To learn more about creating an information architecture, see my LinkedIn course UX Foundations: Information Architecture.

I talk about the structure of content in the Navigation, Site Layout, and Category and Landing Pages sections of my User Experience for Web Design course.

Spend 20 minutes learning how scenarios and storyboards fit in to the user centered design process. Scenarios and storyboarding provide a reality check for your designs, allowing you to see how the interaction will play out in a real environment.

This course explains how to write scenarios and transform them into visual storyboards that show elements of the interactions that are hard to describe with words alone, such as emotion, action, detail, and progression.

What are the uses of scenarios and storyboards? from UX Design: 5 Scenarios and Storyboards.

This course is part of the UX Design series I created to help teams conduct their own design thinking exercises.

If you aren’t already a LinkedIn Learning subscriber, check with your employer, school, or library – many have org-wide plans.

Ideation is the process of generating a lot of different ideas in a short amount of time. And in UX design, a broad set of ideas is more likely to lead to a more creative, more satisfactory solution for your users.

In this short LinkedIn Learning course, I describe the variety of ideation techniques available, their benefits, and how ideation can help designers “think outside the box” when it comes to user experience.

The benefits of ideation techniques from UX Design: 4 Ideation

This course is part of the UX Design series I created to help teams conduct their own design thinking exercises.

If you aren’t already a LinkedIn Learning subscriber, check with your employer, school, or library – many have org-wide plans.

To make sure everyone on the project has the same vision of who you’re building for, create a single picture of “the user.” Assumption personas are fast to create and easy to verify later.

Personas are a topic I’ve mentioned on this site before. If you want the full-on audiovisual extravaganza, head over to LinkedIn Learning and watch UX Design: 3 Personas. This online video course shows how personas fit in the product design and development lifecycle. The benefits of personas are a more focused development process and more likelihood of creating something that your target users actually want to work with.

How personas fit into UCD from UX Design: 3 Creating Personas 

This course is part of the UX Design series I created to help teams conduct their own design thinking exercises.

If you aren’t already a LinkedIn Learning subscriber, check whether your employer, school, or library has a group subscription.

How do you turn data from site visits and other user observations into something coherent you can use to guide product development? Create Experience Maps and extract pain points and user goals!

I’ve covered Experience Mapping on this site already. However, this half-hour LinkedIn Learning course – UX Design: 2 Analyzing User Data – puts it into perspective in the product design and development lifecycle. It’s quick to watch, and full of tips for creating a foundation document full of user insights that you will come back to throughout the development process.

Turn observations into actionable data from UX Design: 2 Analyzing User Data

This course is part of the UX Design series I created to help teams conduct their own design thinking exercises.

If you aren’t already a LinkedIn Learning subscriber, check whether your employer, school, or library has a group subscription.

I’m sharing the early-stage user centered design techniques I use with clients in a series of courses on LinkedIn Learning. Each of the quick courses covers a different technique. Taken together, they should give you a solid set of tools for running a design thinking exercise or “iteration zero”. This isn’t Big Design Up Front, it’s Just Enough Design to Start.

Overview

The UX Design: 1 Overview course introduces the six steps of the user-centered design process that form my variant of design thinking. These are: gathering and analyzing user data, creating personas, using ideation techniques, storyboarding, designing and testing prototypes, and planning your development cycle with all this information.

Here is one of the free videos from the first course:

Understanding the benefits of User Centered Design from UX Design: 1 Overview

Each of the subsequent courses in the series goes into detail on the tools you can use in each step.

Gathering and analyzing user data

How do you turn data from site visits and other user observations into something coherent you can use to guide product development? Create Experience Maps and extract pain points and user goals!

I’ve covered Experience Mapping on this site already. However, this half-hour LinkedIn Learning course – UX Design: 2 Analyzing User Data – puts it into perspective in the product design and development lifecycle. It’s quick to watch, and full of tips for creating a foundation document full of user insights that you will come back to throughout the development process.

Turn observations into actionable data from UX Design: 2 Analyzing User Data

Creating personas

To make sure everyone on the project has the same vision of who you’re building for, create a single picture of “the user.” Assumption personas are fast to create and easy to verify later.

Personas are a topic I’ve mentioned on this site before. UX Design: 3 Personas shows how personas fit in the product design and development lifecycle. The benefits of personas are a more focused development process and more likelihood of creating something that your target users actually want to work with.

How personas fit into UCD from UX Design: 3 Creating Personas 

Ideation

Ideation is the process of generating a lot of different ideas in a short amount of time. And in UX design, a broad set of ideas is more likely to lead to a more creative, more satisfactory solution for your users. In this short LinkedIn Learning course, I describe the variety of ideation techniques available, their benefits, and how ideation can help designers “think outside the box” when it comes to user experience.

The benefits of ideation techniques from UX Design: 4 Ideation

Storyboarding

Spend 20 minutes learning how scenarios and storyboards fit in to the user centered design process. Scenarios and storyboarding provide a reality check for your designs, allowing you to see how the interaction will play out in a real environment. This course explains how to write scenarios and transform them into visual storyboards that show elements of the interactions that are hard to describe with words alone, such as emotion, action, detail, and progression.

What are the uses of scenarios and storyboards? from UX Design: 5 Creating Scenarios and Storyboards

Designing and testing prototypes

I’ve written about paper prototypes here before. I love the fast, cheap, inclusive nature of them for making sure your concepts are sound before you write any code. This 24-minute course takes you through the process, including making separate sketches of each interface element, highlighting areas where there would be interaction between a system and a user, and then running through paper prototype user testing so you can observe the user’s experience, reposition elements, and make adjustments.

Benefits of paper prototyping from UX Design: 6 Paper Prototyping

Planning your development cycle

UCD artifacts aren’t just for the visual aspect of design. This is the course where it all comes together into a plan! I show you how to use the paper prototype screens you built and tested to help plan the implementation of your design in a Story Map.

User-centered planning from UX Design: 7 Implementation Planning

I’ve been really impressed with my experience with LinkedIn Learning. They have very professional production values.

If you aren’t already a LinkedIn Learning subscriber check with your employer or school – many have org-wide plans.

We often overlook one of the biggest benefits to following user centered design techniques. Good user centered design is great at turning empathy-based concepts like users’ thoughts, feelings, frustrations, and desires into something systematic that development team members can use to build products.

In other words, user centered design helps you to translate empathy into systematic principles, so that your products stand more chance of making an emotional impact on users.

Development team members often find it hard to truly understand the wants and needs that drive users. Team members are often experts in their domain, with a great understanding of technology and a systematic approach to thinking about the world.

End users, in contrast, are often not so expert at working with software and apps, and don’t have such a focus on understanding how technology works. They just want their tech stuff to help them in their lives.

If you apply it properly, user centered design lets you translate the wants and needs of end users into specifications for building technological solutions. So how do you turn the empathetic needs of users into systematic building blocks?

The answer is to use user centered design techniques to systemize empathetic moments. There are plenty of these moments during the design and development process. If you get the whole team involved in user centered design activities, individuals who normally work in a systematic way can quickly learn how they are different from their users and start empathizing with their users’ needs and pain points.

Observation techniques: don’t interpret, just record

Team members may feel uncomfortable trying to work out why users do what they do when performing the tasks you care about. That’s OK. Especially for novice observers, it’s better that they just record what they hear and see rather than trying to work out what’s going on. We have techniques like Experience Mapping to draw the meaning out from these observations later. Even the most literal developer can write down quotes and the sequence of a users’ actions, whether they understand what that “means” or not.

Assemble data in a way that encourages  exploration of underlying themes

Systemizers are also typically pretty good at grouping items and finding themes. The Experience Map takes user observations and groups them by user task and activity. Then, the team gets to vote on the most serious pain points that the Experience Map uncovers. By using such a systematic approach to data assembly and analysis, again we are helping systemizers to empathize with their users.

Create user descriptions from user data, not opinion

We are not our users. However, it’s often hard to get developers to understand this. By using data points from site visits to create thumbnail personas, systemizing developers can see the veracity of the personas, and then see how those personas have different attributes, needs, and capabilities.

Tie design input to user pain points

It’s easy for team members to work on pet projects rather than the highest priority user issues. By making user pain point extraction a key part of the user centered design process, based on the information you collate in the Experience Map, you now have a way of prioritizing design goals based on users’ issues rather than team members’ personal gripes.

Verify design with tests

There’s nothing quite like immediate user feedback to help persuade stubborn team members. Performing early paper prototype usability tests really helps everyone involved in the design process to see which elements of their work are resonating with users and which need more work. If those same team members were involved in creating the personas that were used as the basis for the usability test recruiting, they will find it hard to argue that you recruited “the wrong users.”

Create 1-1 mapping from design to implementation plan

Story Mapping is a wonderful way of creating a story backlog with dimensionality and built-in priority. It’s only a small step from your paper prototype design to the story map, and that step is where systemizers can excel, because now the empathetic design process turns full circle back to a systematic implementation plan.

Pair systemizers with empathizers 

Pairing is a wonderful development technique, and some more enlightened teams also practice cross-functional pairing. I’d also suggest practicing pairing between systemizers and empathizers. This way, you’ll end up with a more rounded product, and also more rounded team members.

Footnote

This post draws on information in the talk I gave at the Balanced Team San Francisco 2013 conference. 

Linking UX Ideas for an Aha Moment from Non-Empathizers from Balanced Team on Vimeo.

Many of the other sessions at that conference were also captured on video. Check out the full set.

For more on empathizing and systemizing, see the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, for instance: Simon Baron-Cohen (2003) “The Essential Difference” NY: Basic Books

How prevalent is systemizing in software development teams? just ask William Hudson:

William Hudson “Reduced empathizing skills increase challenges for user-centered design” (CHI ’09)

Want to know where you stand? Try this online survey, but please don’t read too much into the results.

As always, the recording process was great fun and the graphic designers went to town with the images in the videos.

Here’s a sample video from the course, on how to run a paper-based card sort. The course also covers online card sorting and paper and online reverse sorting, as well as how to interpret the information you get from participant sessions and turn it into a suitable information architecture and navigation system.

Running the session from UX Foundations: Information Architecture 

Topics in the course include:

• What is information architecture?
• Why do research?
• Creating and running a paper card sort
• Recruiting test participants
• Analyzing paper card sort results
• Running a computer-based card sort
• Creating abstract information architecture
• Validating your plan with a reverse card sort
• Translating information architecture to navigation and layout
• Watching the server after you go live

The whole thing is just two hours long, and is easy to follow along with.

If you aren’t already a LinkedIn Learning subscriber check with your employer or school – many have org-wide plans.

You can download a sample chapter FREE (2.5Mb PDF) – all I ask in return is that you tweet about it. If you like what you read, get the book on Amazon USA, or Amazon UK. The paper edition is almost as cheap as the e-book, and it’s a full color high quality book, so I really suggest you buy that version.

In the course, I talk about how to recruit participants, design suitable tasks, moderate and observe a session, and analyze the results so that you can make improvements to your product.

Check out a video from the course below, and follow the links to see the whole course.

The observer’s role: Active observation from UX Foundations: Usability Testing

The experience of recording with Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) is impressive. This time it was a “live action” shoot – which means I was on a sound stage with two cameras pointing at me. I had my own “green room” for the week I was down at their studios in Carpinteria, CA. Yes, they invest a week of time to film a one and a half hour video, and then spend more time editing it and producing the graphics you see in it. I don’t know of any other online training company that invests that much in their videos, and it definitely shows in the final quality.