What is Taxonomy / Information Architecture in UX?
By: Shekhar Agarwal
Tags: User Research, User Experience Design, User Interface, User Experience, Marketing

As things are evolving in UX globally, people have their own ways of saying and explaining things so do I :). One of the very important parts of the UX process is IA (Information Architecture) and Taxonomy, and I am sure many people do get confused here.

Image from the external resource

Today I’m going to be talking about information architecture I love information architectures so much even though it sounds like just weird words for people that aren’t in the UX field but I’m going to explain it to you today.

“Information architecture is organizing labeling structuring information in a sustainable and efficient way” you could have found that out from the internet.

So let’s talk about why this is important and like always I’m gonna use a story.

This is interesting —

Case 1:

So if you were to go to the grocery store and I were to say can you get me an apple how would you find the Apple you’d probably think okay it’s gonna be in the fruits and veggies section and then it’s gonna be the fruit section and then it’s going to be in maybe they’re organic or non-organic section if your grocery store has that and then you would go and you would pick up your Apple.

Case 2:

But if I would ask somebody that lived in a garden for example and I were to ask them to give me an apple they would not do the same thing that you would do they would instead say okay I’m gonna go out to this particular garden with this Apple and I’m gonna pick the Apple and then I’ll come back and give it to you.

Two totally different ways of getting the same thing so this Apple is a metaphor for information and the way that you get to the Apple is the structure the way that it’s been organized basically so that you can find the thing that you’re looking for so why is this important for your business if you have a website and people are looking to buy the things that you happen to sell but they can’t actually find it to purchase on your website then you’re missing out on sales right like you were missing out on sales just because people are confused and that’s a terrible reason to miss out on sales right so instead of trying to guess what people think in the way they structure things and trying to think like okay if a woman wants to buy shoes we’re going to have or go through the women’s section and then go into shoes versus going into the shoe section and then going into women the better way is to actually ask your users right and there’s a lot of different ways you can ask your users but my favorite way is card sorts so if you were to look at your website and you took all the different pages on your website and you put them on two index cards and then you gave it to somebody to organize in the way that their brain works in two categories you would very quickly find out which way they think and if you were to do this with a lot of different representative users you would start to see themes and patterns all throughout the cards and start to realize Oh everybody thinks that shoes happens before women I really don’t know which one it is you would have to do the research information architecture also relates to other things besides just the way that your site is organized in terms of your site map it’s also the way that each page is organized so what is the most important thing that you’re putting at the top of your page and what is the hierarchy of the page that you’re putting together you have to make decisions to decide which is the most important thing but you should be making those decisions based on what your users think are the most important thing right.

So far so good, now I hope you got a fair understanding of IA, and just because I have lots of energy right now I also want to talk about taxonomy so taxonomy and information architecture a lot of times get a little bit muddy together and I want to kind of describe what taxonomy is and now I’m using big words but really don’t matter that much but the principles of those things do so “taxonomy is the labeling that comes along with your websites” so if you were to label something say if you were to make a website for a hospital and you decided to use the word departments instead of specialties you have to make that decision on which word or labeling you’re going to use and the importance of that is you want to make sure that you’re actually using the word that the people that you’re serving would recognize so maybe there’s a more like technical term for it that is the correct term but people aren’t actually relating to that term so you need to use the more casual term for that word just like I use labelling instead of taxonomy it’s easier to understand.

So to bring this all together information architecture and the organization of it and taxonomy labeling the reason that these things are important is because it makes your website a lot easier to use and if your website is easier to use you’re affecting the user experience and the perception of your business because if it’s easy for me to buy from you or it’s easy for me to learn information from your websites then it must be easy to do anything else with your business right there there becomes a connection between the two obviously we all know that that’s not true but the opposite certainly is if it’s really difficult for me to find what I’m looking for and if it’s really difficult for me to get around your site or to find the information I need then I’m certainly not gonna want to interact with your business because you’ve already made it difficult for me and you haven’t made it easy so you’re probably gonna make my life harder if we continue to interact so that’s why it’s important because customers really need to be able to trust you as a business and you need to be able to give them a reason to trust you.

Write to me if you wanna, understand the same with the diagram. Stay safe.

Cheers.