Information Architecture

Organise things around what people want to do, not around how your company is organised.

Group by user task, not org chart. Limit top-level to ~7 items.

Information Architecture, side by side

Group by the user's task and keep the top level short. A flat list of everything makes people hunt.

How to apply it

Run a card-sort with users; collapse adjacent concepts; promote the primary task.

Information Architecture in practice: a concrete example

Naming things the way users think

A shop that files a product under the team that owns it internally (“Business Unit 4”) hides it from the shopper looking for “camping gear”. Good IA groups by how people think about the task, not by the org chart, and keeps the top level short enough to scan. When Amazon or a solid docs site gets this right, you find things by guessing the correct category on the first try; when it's wrong, search becomes the only way through.

Common Information Architecture mistakes

Structuring navigation around internal teams or the org chart instead of the user's goals.
Overloading the top level with a dozen or more items nobody can scan, rather than grouping into a handful of clear categories.
Labelling categories in internal jargon, so users can't predict what lives where.

When Information Architecture doesn't apply

Search-first products (a huge catalogue, a sprawling knowledge base) lean on strong search and filters more than a perfect tree, because no hierarchy scales to millions of items. And expert tools sometimes mirror a domain's real structure even when it looks complex, because that structure is the mental model the expert already carries.

Practise it on a real challenge

Navigation — 14 top items fighting a 12-item sidebar

A 14-item top nav competes with a 12-item sidebar. Users can't find anything.