You’re visiting a website and you see several navigation choices. Who decides what choices to provide, when and where? That’s Information Architect!
Information Architecture (IA) is the process of organising and presenting data to the user in a meaningful, clear and intuitive manner. IA is the foundation of all great websites. It helps your customers and colleagues quickly find what they need.
Orbit One ensures that the information on your website, intranet, or extranet is well-structured and presented in an easily accessible interface. We help you decide which navigation choices you should provide, what to call them, and where they need to take your visitors.
Our Methodology
We use a number of sophisticated techniques to define the architecture of your website:
- Interviews help you understand how users interact with information and documents. They also uncover missing features, services, and usability issues on your site.
- User observation - we ask subjects to perform tasks on your website, and then watch how they try to achieve their goal, where they lose time or get stuck.
- Card sorting involves your audience in structuring information. Subjects are asked to group cards (representing the information on your site) in a way that makes sense to them. This reveals a navigation structure that is intuitive to your audience.
- Eye tracking uses a special device to measure eye positions and eye movements. By analysing how people look at your website, you can define the optimal position for important elements (navigation, buy button, advertisement, ...) on your webpages.
Bringing different perspectives together
We look at the various target groups and propose an information structure that works for each of them. Example for an ‘intranet portal’:
- Perspective of the author: need an intuitive structure for storing documents.
- Perspective of a team member: find documents authored by colleagues.
- Perspective of other staff members: find information created by other departments.
- The perspective of a visitor: ind information easily by topic, without being familiar with your organisational structure.
With regard to privacy and permission levels, it is much easier to secure documents and information if they reside at the same location.