Information architecture extesibility and flexibility..

Clients would love their websites to be limitless, beyond reasonable extensibility and flexibility built into a structure. So would I...

An e-mail from a client prompted me to put this entry up.

Website information architecture or IA, the navigation structure and design work for as long as the forces (see below) operating when it was produced, stay (mainly) constant. In the long term, a website navigation model and design will naturally have to change depending on the strength, number and type of forces exerted on a business such as:

• Changes in the market the business is operating in
  
• New products and services
  
• Competitors behavior
• Brand and brand values changes
• Technology change
• Wider market forces and world events

Humans naturally limit ‘flexibility’ in topic expansion over the life of the website. They need to build a picture in their head of the main areas of the website quickly (a mental model of the site).

Putting too many topics on a branch of your navigation can cause people to get lost and frustrated if there are too many options at each level.

If in doubt try 7 plus or minus 2, a common limit based on short term memory studies. (I'll probably get shouted down for that one heh heh)

Going back a step, if the site affects a large audience you should be getting input from your target website audience into the IA in the form of a card sort (Donna Maurer provides the definitive card sort guide).

When analyzing and gathering requirements for a website. You should generate a set topics for the target website audience, to sort. The following inputs contribute to the topic set. This gives you built in flexibility of your information architecture (IA) and website templates to cope with additions:

• Your clients immediate and 3-5 year business, product and marketing strategies for future proofing
• Key topics generated from a content audit of the current website, product and service mix

The sort provides a guide for your overall IA which should also have inputs from:

• Business requirements
• Strategic plans (e.g. business, marketing, product road map etc)
• A content audit of the current website, prioritizing current content
  

These inputs also provide a design team and information architect with direction regarding the breadth and depth of information on the current web site to be considered now and over the 'lifetime' if the website. Web page designs then are built considering the sites structure and the business direction.

New topics should have a natural fit until forces exerted on a website are different from the forces it was created in. (e.g Porters five forces)

All sites structures and web page designs have reasonable limits to their flexibility before they have to change. The original requirements and card sort topics anticipate how much flexibility is required.

Information architecture (IA) is a structured topic set for a website ‘of its time’. It's based (hopefully) on requirements, business plans, user research and testing. New topics in line with a business plan should fit naturally in the structure and allow for new additions. The IA and design templates created to fit it, should be then extensible to a point.

Pete