You know that feeling when you open a document and immediately feel lost or overwhelmed? Or you click on a website after hearing about an exciting new product or service, but can’t find what you’re looking for. The blame should probably go to poor information architecture. It is crucial to effective communication; yet it’s often overlooked.
Information architecture essentially refers to organising information to make it easy to understand. While it is mostly associated with UX design (e.g. creating user-friendly websites), the principles apply to all content types and formats. Good information design involves planning, structuring and presenting or labelling content in such a way that readers can easily find what they need and understand it. Think of it as the skeleton of a piece of content that connects the various parts in a way that makes it possible to easily identify and grasp both the bigger picture and individual parts.
Why it matters: first impressions count
Information design is essentially what people perceive about a content piece before they’ve read a single word. It’s what makes them decide whether they will invest the time and effort to read it or not. Even high-quality content risks being unread if it is not structured and designed well.
The findings from various studies on how people consume content nowadays underpin why making a good impression quickly is so important:
- It takes less than two-tenths of a second for a website visitor to form an initial opinion.
- Almost 25% of emails are scanned for between only two to eight seconds before people decide whether they are going to engage with it or move on.
- The average dwell time on an online article is about one minute.
In general, skim-reading has become the norm. Researchers describe a strategy called “satisficing”, whereby readers set a threshold for how useful information needs to be to get their attention and convince them to read the detail.
Key elements of effective information architecture
The foundation of effective information architecture is to think like your audience: what is important to them, what they need and the context in which they will likely read the content. These audience insights help inform the format or platform and the main structure or framework, including which messages to frontload.
From there on, there are various practical tools you can use to create content that is easy to read and understand. Here are a few examples:
- Clear sub-headings that guide readers: These headings should be short enough to be skimmable but descriptive enough to tell readers what the content that follows is about so that they can get the gist.
- Layered information that makes content more digestible: For longform content, providing an overall summary can help readers orientate themselves. Starting each section with a summary and ending each one with key takeaways or actions (clearly labelled) is also a good idea.
- Easy-to-use navigation: Making it easy to move between different sections is crucial. This can be done through, for example, interactivity or clear signposting (e.g. using specific colours or icons for different sections or themes).
- Visuals to create variety and lighten readers’ cognitive load: Consider whether you can show the content visually instead of using only words. For example, instead of explaining a process in a few paragraphs, create an infographic. Or, instead of listing figures and percentages in text or bullets, use a table.
Quality content and information design go hand in hand. Having the one without the other will compromise the effectiveness of your communication, so make sure you pay just as much attention to how you say what you want to say as you do to what you say.
