Information Architecture and Navigation Design

We'll create a complete, coherent framework for your site or product.

Adaptive Path provides the full range of information architecture and navigation design services (including information rearchitecture and navigation redesign) for Web sites and other information-heavy products. Our goals are to improve user experience, achieve the business objectives of the product, and identify opportunities to create stronger relationships between separate content offerings.

Typically, we begin with a content inventory, a thorough cataloguing of all the content that exists on your site. Correlating the underlying relationships in the content with people's expectations and behavior, we develop a new overall information structure.

We then extensively document the new site structure using a rigorous diagramming methodology, carefully selected labels, and a controlled vocabulary of key terms. Using this architecture, we create a navigation design that allows people to move easily and quickly around the information, helping them find and use what they're looking for.

During a typical information architecture process we will:

• Collect and organize product requirements. We focus on more than the list of desired functions, investigating the stated and implicit factors that the company considers to be most important in the product's success.
• Collect and organize user needs and expectations. Either using existing research or by performing a task analysis, we identify what the products' users want from it and how they expect to use it. We put this knowledge together into a mental model of the user, an understanding of the user's wants, needs and expectations.
• Perform a content audit. The depth of the audit depends on the final outcome-high-level navigation redesign requires only auditing a sample of content, whereas a CMS migration necessitates a rigorous page-by-page inventory. The audit is the analyzed to define primary content types, which are then laid out in a Content Map.
• Create a new information architecture by coupling the content audit analysis with our understanding of users' mental models and the product's business goals. This architecture will define the overarching user experience of the site and will be documented in a diagram specifying every step of the user experience within the section under review.
• Provide detailed navigation specifications indicating the navigation elements required for every page, in order to guide the implementation of the new architecture.
• If needed, these specifications will be supplemented by wireframe schematics indicating the placement of all navigation elements. We can also provide a style guide that will outline naming conventions for key content areas, URL conventions, and conventions for sitewide wayfinding cues.

For more information on having us create an information architecture for your company, please contact us.

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