Information Architecture Training

Summary: Intranets are enhancing findability and discoverability by organizing content by task instead of department, using megamenus to provide deep content, offering obvious cues to assist orient customers, and supplying cutting corners to big pages and tools.

Intranets have a considerable amount of knowledge that should be readily available. Applying the best information architecture (IA) and taking advantage of appropriate navigation elements are crucial to some effective intranet along with a good consumer experience.

In addition, intranet IA designers face a significant challenge: they've limited causes of inspiration. Due to the character of intranets, designers frequently have couple of possibilities to determine how other intranets structure their information.

To supply intranet designers with some ideas and solutions, we examined 77 intranet information architectures and presented their detailed navigation structure, screenshots, and our analysis within the second edition in our Intranet IA Design Techniques and Situation Studies report.

The very first edition was released many years ago, so evaluating the 2 teams of situation studies enables us to recognize new trends in intranet IA. The greatest change is based on the navigational elements of design used, away from the subjects presented within the primary menu. We haven’t seen nearly the equivalent change in the IA level over this 7-year-lengthy period, as we view in the page level. Page-level intranet design continues to be changed, as recorded within the Intranet Design Annual series.

Confusion Between Groups

Many intranets are afflicted by confusing menu labels. Such labels allow it to be hard for customers to locate what they’re searching for.

The most typical causes of confusion are:

• Terms are extremely broad and finish up serving as catch-all (e.g., For Workers).
• Sections for example How can I… or Tools grow too large.
• Different section names on the website lack distinction (e.g., Human Assets and Administration &lifier Management may seem within the same menu).
• Language is polluted with jargon or top quality terms.

Unclear naming is among the greatest and many important projects to tackle if this involves the intranet IA. Each navigation category should be descriptive, specific, and mutually exclusive to ensure that customers can select where you can navigate without hesitation.

User-research techniques for example card sorting, tree testing, and usefulness testing might help identify ambiguous labels and unclear information types.