What Matters in User Experience Is Invisible

Have you ever found yourself with rising frustration and confusion, searching for alternatives because you could not perform a simple task on a website you visited, could not find what you were looking for, or could not understand how you got to the page you were on?

If your answer is yes, do not immediately blame your memory or attention, because you are just one of millions of users who experience similar feelings every day. One of the most important reasons for this problem is that the information architecture, an invisible part of the user experience design (UX Design) process, has not been properly structured. Now let us take a closer look at what information architecture is and its impact, as it forms the structure of the user experience and its lack profoundly affects the entire experience, yet it is frequently neglected.

What Is Information Architecture?
If you wish, let us first briefly define the concept of architecture by breaking down this imposing term into its atoms to make it a little more understandable. This physical design field, with which we interact every day without even realizing it, consists of the planning, design, and construction phases of a structure. To explain it at a basic level, it aims to build physical structures that allow users to move comfortably, pleasantly, safely, and without getting lost, in line with their needs and desires. Helene Sears, Google's architecturally trained user experience designer, in her talk titled Design Parallels: Architecture & UX, states that architects try to understand and model their environment before starting to work on a space, and that the user flows revealed in this process are one of the most important branches of the design process, adding: "Architects look for answers to certain questions: For what purpose will users use a space? How will they move from one point to another within the building? What are users' desires, needs, and things they are trying to achieve? Can a user in a wheelchair move around easily here? If a fire breaks out, where should be the first point people should head to? How do we divide spaces according to their intended uses?"

Similarly, information architecture always aims to make the information that users are trying to reach in the digital world easily findable, understandable, and accessible by considering their wants and needs. It is a set of structural actions aimed at helping users better understand the environment they are in, clearly see where they are and where they can go at any moment, and thus move more comfortably between pages. In a way, we can also say that it is the projection of architectural understanding in the digital world.

The Building Blocks of Information Architecture
In their book Information Architecture for the Web & Beyond, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville divide the main components of a user experience architecture into four:

Organization Systems: Like the way thousands of books in a library are categorized and structured according to a specific order, these are systems that ensure content is classified in a way that users can easily use and understand.
Labeling Systems: Systems that describe how information clusters will be represented.
Navigation Systems: Systems that allow users to move between content without confusion.
Search Systems: Systems concerned with how users search for information.
If these systems are set up correctly according to user needs, the experience users have when interacting with your product or service will be very positive. Let us take a closer look at one of the most successful designs of recent years that best applies these systems.

The UK's Biggest User Experience Investment: GOV.UK
In 2004, the British government established the Direct.gov site with the aim of providing the public with access to all public services and information about the state and government from a single center. With goals such as bringing the government closer to the public, facilitating everyone's access to public services, and reducing costs, this site, just six years later, needed a new structure in order to keep up with rapidly developing digital technologies and changing human profiles.

In the report titled 2010 and Beyond: Revolution Not Evolution, presented to the government by digital advisor Martha Lane Fox, the need to make radical changes to the state's website and simplify the user experience is discussed. So how can the foundation of the user experience to be provided by such a complex digital service, visited by 30 million users a month and hosting 160,000 pages and thousands of different types of information, be efficiently designed?

The information architects working on the GOV.UK project define their task as "organizing, labeling, and grouping content so that people can easily find what they are looking for." Therefore, as a team, they have taken on the difficult task of organizing information across a very wide range, from transportation to fishing, from precautions to be taken in flood disasters to the establishment of non-profit organizations, from divorce cases to driving license applications. The first solution they developed for this was to establish a two-level structure by determining the navigation system, one of the main components of information architecture. According to this system, the top level is divided into general themes such as transportation, visas, justice, citizenship, environment, and tax, while the sub-levels consist of the sub-headings of these themes.

If you wish, let us take a look at the structure of the user experience on the motor vehicles page as an example. On this page,

You can see where you came from to your current location. (Home > Transport)
Like the "You Are Here" markers found on maps in large parks or shopping centers, you can see which site you are on and exactly which page you are on.
You can see which pages you can go to from the page you are on.
You can see that information is grouped according to its content and even the audience trying to reach the relevant information, and labeled appropriately. For example, a user planning to travel to a distant point can access the traffic conditions, while a supplier can easily access the document list required to use the main roads from the same page.
Another good example to see how a carefully prepared information architecture, considering user needs, can positively affect the user experience is the official holidays page. You can take a look at the simplified version of the page, whose previous version consisted of a large stock vacation image, long descriptions about holidays, and an ordered list of all holidays within the year, after user research revealed that the great majority of users just wanted to know when the next holiday would be.

Five Methods to Properly Structure Architecture
Of course, behind such large, detailed, and complex structures, there are many principles, methodologies, and applications that are successfully implemented. Unfortunately, due to certain misconceptions and lack of information about information architecture, the extent to which this important phenomenon will affect the user experience of a digital product or service is not sufficiently understood. Therefore, this effort can be deprived of the time, budget, and labor investment it deserves.

In our country, there is a tendency to consider information architecture as merely a site map (sitemap) or the navigation elements in the menu of a website. Yes, determining navigation elements (and the frequently used card sorting exercise in this context) is important, but most of the time, it does not mean anything on its own. For this reason, I would like to briefly tell you about a few important methods that I think will be useful when starting to organize complex structures:

Content inventory. Content inventory is the listing of all content on a website, application, or software. This content can consist of many information derivatives such as metadata, category information, label, format, date, and content type.

Taxonomy. It aims to group, classify, and organize complex information clusters. Considering that even just a few pieces of clothing can be grouped in different ways such as color, season, type, and fabric, you can imagine how important taxonomy will be for an e-commerce site selling thousands of different products.

User stories. This is a detailed work prepared to determine users' needs, the order of importance of these needs, and the features that will meet users' wishes, rather than the organization of information. Since it determines the priority goals users want to achieve, it directly affects the information hierarchy. Although it is a concept belonging to the agile approach, it is also a method frequently used in UX processes.

User flows. This method is, briefly, maps that allow visualizing all the decisions users can make while using a product or service and all the possible paths users can take based on these decisions.

Wireframing. These are drawings without UI elements expressing style such as color, texture, graphics, and illustration, drawn to focus on the hierarchy and structure of the content, which we can also define as "digital sketches."

Whatever method you use, your goal should be to increase the user experience by organizing content so that it is findable, accessible, and understandable.

Information Architecture Is the Backbone of User Experience
In light of all this information and examples, we can say that information architecture forms the backbone of a user's digital experience.

Maybe no one will look at a final product and say "What a beautiful information architecture has been worked on," but this does not change the fact that this virtual structure is the invisible hero of the user experience. Therefore, in any area where user experience is important, this critical field should not be neglected in order to develop products and services where users can easily reach the information they are looking for and use with pleasure.