Although you want to start talking about development frameworks, interaction design, and visual language of your site, there’s something you need to get right, right now, if you want your site to come together on time, and on point: your information architecture. Define what information your site is going to share and how it’s going to be organized & make sure you don’t skip right over such mundane questions as “what goes in the primary navigation?”

Information Design: the practice of organizing and structuring content so that users can find what they need easily and understand where they are within a system.

Sitemap

A site map is like a floor plan for your site. Site maps give you a visual representation of the site’s organization and how different sections are linked together. Site maps are diagrams that show the flow information and structure of how pages on a website are grouped and organized. A site map for a website acts like a blueprint, listing all its pages. Your sitemap directly reflects your website’s content,
it reveals a website’s structure.

Sections can contain other sections or content nodes, which is an atomic unit of content. Often on a website, a content node ends up being its own page, but IAs (information Architects) prefer to talk about nodes at this stage because a single node can be represented in many ways (a page, a pop-up, a light-box, a section of a page) and/or in several places (a blog post, for example, gets its own page and shows up on the home page when it’s new-ish).

Different constituencies on a project will get different things from a sitemap:

• Stakeholders can confirm that their goals are represented in the organization.
• Developers can validate assumptions about scope and complexity and get an early view of feature requirements.
• Visual designers can get an idea of how much variation may be required and whether the design will need to be modular and extensible.
• UX designers will reference the site map when exercising the design wireframes to make note of the hierarchical information in a site (primary and secondary navigation).

In this class, we are all the constituencies at once.

…when developing a SiteMap

When you look at a site map remember that you’re looking at the floor plan of the site, so make sure that all of the sections that you think are important are accounted for.

Ask yourself / consider:

• Do all sections need to be there?
• Are there any sections that try to cover too much?
• Both too many and too few sections make it difficult to find things. Too many sections overwhelm users; too few, lack the descriptive power to give users confidence that they’ll find what they’re looking for.
• There isn’t a “correct” number of sections for all sites, rather, it depends on the scope of the site and the content.
• Within each section make sure that all of the sub-sections and sub-pages are present.
• Define a clear expression of the primary navigation (typically the first level of hierarchy under the homepage).
• Consider whether the sections that make up the primary navigation are actually the most important and commonly accessed.
• Consider whether the section names are meaningful. Do they describe the section clearly?

User Journey Map

A user journey is a timeline of user actions that describes the relationship between your brand and its customers. It’s a visualization of all of a user’s interactions with your product, from their point of view.

User journey mapping creates a timeline of all touchpoints between a customer and your organization. With user journey maps, you can make granular but pivotal tweaks that help users accomplish their goals easier and faster, come back to do it again and build habits around your product—all from your initial UX blueprint.

These user journey maps help your company gain insight into how users experience your product, based on their unique motivations and goals.