Extending IA past taxonomies: A case study of retail IA
Over the last 17 years, since the writing of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Information Architecture (IA) has changed its focus; from encompassing wireframes, site maps and flows to becoming a much narrower field of taxonomies and findability. But it can be so much more.
In this case study, we present the work done with a large UK retailer on their IA, and how it connected with the rest of their web development endeavours.
To this retailer, IA is intrinsically connected to two things: people finding their products, and their product data. Therefore we had to focus on increasing the views of product pages and incorporating changes into their product information.
But as we discovered, the IA was interconnected with so many more parts of the retailer’s online ecosystem than we realised.
This case study discusses five areas of the retail IA and their interconnection with the rest of the business:
SEO and IA: How product categories, human readable URLs and content hubs all work together to get users to the right product categories.
IA and product data: How describing content with user centred terms and better-structured product information helped users identify the right product.
IA and user research: How understanding the users’ mental models helped us understand the levels of description and product information needed for different categories, and how we continuously tested our and the business’s assumptions with users to make the right decisions.
Technology and IA: To make the IA effective on the site, the technology team needed to be on board and able to change configurations of search, CMS and URL generation. All the IA changes were reviewed and negotiated with the IT teams before implementation was discussed.
Change management and IA: Changing the IA had impacts on many teams across the organisation; from the Buying and Merchandising teams and how they thought of products; the online Trading teams who needed to sell more product; to the Product information team who became more than loaders of product data to becoming product information specialists.
This case study will provide attendees with actual examples of developing retail IA, and help them understand how they can apply it.
