Planning a User-Centric Site.

The standard measure of success for a web site is traffic, the number of visitors a site gets and the frequency with which those visitors return. Raw traffic does not indicate succcess for all kinds of sites, but every site does need a single thing to be successful: a reason for people to visit it. Something people have a use for, whether it's information, a product, or another type of service. By providing something useful (the content) to a group of people (the target audience), you have the basis for a potentially successful site.

Information architecture is the process of defining and examining the target audience in order to structure the content to make it accessible to that audience. In other words, finding out who the target audience is, what they want, and how to make it easy for them to find what they want. This leads to user-centric site design, which is absolutely necessary in making a web site useful to users and keeping them on the site when a million other web sites are only a click away.

Here's a quick look at the information architecture process:

1. Define Site Goals: Decide what the site is trying to achieve, and why it is being created in the first place. Questions include: What are the short-term and long-term goals for the site? Why will people want to visit the site?
   
   
2. Define the Target Audience: Describe the different types of people that make up the target audience, and list their needs. These lists are then filtered and ranked to determine what types of content will be most important to members of the target audience. Questions include: Who are the users? What will they be doing on the site?
   
   
3. Competitive Analysis: List the competitors and develop a criteria to evaluate them, in order to learn from their mistakes and incorporate some of their stronger features, if needed.
   
   
4. Organize Content: Create a list of the necessary content and group content items that fall under the same subject. Arrange the content groups so they form a logical, intuitive structure that the target audience will be able to navigate easily.

At the end of the information architecture process, the site will be planned out and optimized for the needs of the target audience so that the project can proceed smoothly into the next phase of design.

Parts of the content on this page are based on John Shiple's Information Architecture article on Webmonkey.