Practicing Impactful Information Architecture: A Conversation with Lisa Maria Marquis

Lisa Maria Marquis’ book, Everyday Information Architecture, published by A Book Apart.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a UX or content designer, learning to organize information better on the web is all about mindset. You need to see the bigger picture while also working with others to create experiences that respect and empower people and align with business goals at the same time.

Independent consultant Lisa Maria Marquis, author of “Everyday Information Architecture”, specializes in helping organizations more intentionally understand, organize, and structure their web content to make it easier for their customers to find and act on it. She firmly believes that properly creating sitemaps, designing navigation menus, and setting up taxonomies has impact well beyond the reach of our digital products.

We caught up with Marquis to talk about the power of information (for better or worse), how to start thinking in systems, and how to improve site navigation.

What are the consequences of a poorly implemented information architecture?

Marquis: It can break the user’s trust. They have to trust the way you’ve structured the environment and the information in order to actually use it and feel like they can make decisions, take actions, or accomplish tasks with it.

When we ignore the information architecture, phone it in, or don’t do it in a way that is respectful and empowering to the user, we end up with inconsistent linking behaviors, labels on menus that don’t necessarily mean what they say, and menus that don’t enable the user to backtrack and undo what they’ve done. We inhibit the user from making the choices they want to make on a website.

Poorly implemented information architecture also makes users lose faith in the whole system they’re operating in. We may be okay with a menu that’s a little confusing but for a user it means they don’t know where they are - and if they can trust what they’re reading on your site, they may lose trust in other aspects of the site as well. This can result in us making their life difficult and unpleasant for a few minutes, or in the worst case scenario losing them as customers altogether.

Instead, we should want to make them feel like they’re in control of their experience and that they can explore our digital products safely. Good information architecture plays a role in pulling all that together and making sure it’s happening consistently throughout the entire digital system.

What steps do you go through when you start consulting with a new client?

The first major step is to ask a lot of questions. The key is to listen rather than to jump into diagnosis or solution thinking. When you start a discovery process, you need to ask questions at the beginning, and good information architects are very curious and interested in hearing answers.

Ask questions of as many people as possible, specifically with the purpose of understanding the history of the system. Don’t just look at what you have right now but how the decisions were made in the past that led to the way the system is currently set up. That’s going to expose how the system works, how decision-making happens within that organization, as well as power dynamics and values. It’s also going to help you understand what’s working well and what has been tried unsuccessfully, so that you don’t end up losing the good parts or repeating past mistakes. That’s absolutely crucial. You can’t build a better system if you don’t understand its history.

What are the most common mistakes organizations make in designing their site navigation?

A navigation system sometimes doesn’t map to the website structure. When an organization treats the navigation as a separate layer, almost like a separate interface, to apply on top of the system rather than an outcome of the system itself, it creates a disconnect that users will notice. They might not be able to articulate what exactly they’re seeing, but they will notice it through cognitive dissonance. They will struggle to move through the system and find what they need or back out and undo things that they’ve done. The potential for error is huge here because it’s going to feel like a burden to the user.

Instead, we should be using navigation to create transparency. In other words, organizations should not use navigation to fix a systemic structural problem. If an organization hasn’t clearly structured the information for themselves internally, there’s going to be a mismatch. The structure won’t be reflective of reality either to the business or the users. Fix that first and then expose it through the navigation, not the other way around.

Navigation shouldn’t be treated as a band aid or gap fill, but as the wiring itself. The information structure and mental model has to be in place internally before it can show up externally.

How do you help organizations improve their navigation in practice?

Testing with real users is an excellent way to see what’s happening, and I really appreciate testing in prototypes. A lot of organizations use A/B testing to see which version of a website is getting the most clicks. That can be fine, but it can cause a lot of accessibility and performance issues as well. I prefer testing offline, and my favorite tool for testing navigation in particular is Optimal Workshop’s Treejack tool. It doesn’t test the design or functionality of the navigation but labeling and affinity, which should be the first step.

When you design a navigation, you can use it to show users and ask them to find what they’re looking for. It helps you see whether the labels you’re using make sense to them and whether the information hierarchy and the affinity groupings that you’re presenting match the user’s mental models. Set a baseline with the current navigation, test that first, and then test changes to the navigation and compare. Find out if users are clicking on things in a way that makes more sense to them in the new or the old version. Learn from that and gain insights to strengthen your navigation.

It’s also really important to bring people along on the journey when you are creating a sitemap, a navigation structure, or a taxonomy. Involving the people who have to work with it every day is key. Don’t just pander to them but include them in the change process, make them feel heard, and use their insights to develop new ideas because they know better than you do as someone who is new to the project. Then test those ideas with them and get feedback internally before you test with real users.

It’s really important that the people who are the end users of the system, the in-between users, the people in the organization who are managing the system, as well as the customers or visitors, all participate. Everyone needs to feel that they were thought of when the system was put together.

Can you give us one example of a project that you successfully applied information architecture principles to?

A couple of years ago I worked on a very successful website redesign project with a non-profit organization called the Posse Foundation. Our team was able to express their mission and values through the structure and navigation of the website, which just looks fantastic.

What I love about that website is that the navigation was able to tell the story of the organization. Beforehand they had a very audience-driven navigation, which isn’t ideal because we don’t want to force users to self-identify into a box, so they only go to one section. Instead, we want to be able to approach it more from a narrative experience and present all the options in a way that allows users to explore it at whatever pace. Being able to find new affinity groupings for website sections and coming up with labels that spoke to a variety of users, rather than pigeonholing one label per use context, was a really successful example of IA, design, and content working together with the business goals.

What are your hopes for the impact of information architecture?

Information architecture can have a great impact but it’s just one tool in our toolbox. On its own it’s not going to fix the internet any more than interface or content design. It’s very much a matter of many different disciplines and perspectives working together to solve big problems.

The only way to really have an impact is to think about the larger systems that we’re part of, not just the menu on a single website, one section of the navigation, or even just one label. We need to think about the website, the digital experience, the internet, and society as a whole, which can feel overwhelming. These systems are very large.

How can one person, one web professional make a difference here? It’s important not to be intimidated but to think through that larger system in order to make small incremental changes that we can control. To see the most impact, we have to collaborate and work as a collective.

To see more of Lisa Maria Marquis’ work and insights, pick up your own copy of “Everyday Information Architecture”.