Web from above.

Design your information architecture like a good city planner.

Here’s a simple exercise. Close your eyes (when you’re done reading this) and imagine yourself taking in an aerial view of your website. Each page of your site is a building dotting the landscape. The roads and streets are pathways from building to building. Some roads are wider, capable of routing more traffic. Others are one-way ribbons of pavement taking travelers to notably smaller buildings. And even others still, take commuters to neighboring communities. So you’re high above this town or city that represents your website. As the city planner, do you imagine that traffic is moving smoothly? Would you be happy trying to get from one place to the next? Is there land that needs developed or maybe some new roads that would make getting around easier?

Too often we don’t think beyond what we’re seeing at street level—we don’t step back far enough to first take in the whole picture and get a fresh perspective. In the same way good city planning can make your visit to that place more enjoyable, good information architecture (IA) can benefit your web guests, decreasing the time it takes them to find content, eliminate backtracking and prevent them from taking the next exit out of town.

Here are a few simple ways to plan and consider the layout of your online offering from a high level:

Accommodate the traffic.
If you’ve taken the time to organize your website content in a way that’s meaningful to your audience you’re half way to achieving this one. Next it’s time to define relevant and concise navigation to access this content. You can organize all day, but if you’re not appropriately directing someone with the right terminology you won’t be helping them. Have you ever tried to find an item in a library that doesn’t have a sign that says “periodicals” or “science & industry,” but only call numbers? It’s probably organized, but you’re not going to find it anytime soon. Accommodating your web traffic doesn’t just mean bandwidth, it involves giving accurate direction to get visitors where they want to go quickly.

Keep relevant destinations close together.
This is about efficiency and just like successful navigation, it flows directly out of organizing your website content. Internally organizations have a tendency to categorize and group their goods by divisions and departments, but this doesn’t always translate well to the web. Let’s say you sell lawn supplies. Your materials division supplies landscaping rock, flagstone and dirt. The tools department has wheelbarrows, chisels and shovels. In a web environment would it not be a good idea to have a link from flagstone to chisels or from dirt to shovels? Taking a different look at your information architecture can help identify opportunities you’ve been missing. Thus, reducing the steps visitors have to take to learn about related content.

Don’t create dead ends.
How many times have you been navigating a site only to realize you’ve hit a dead end? What next? You either go into a back-button clicking frenzy until you get to previous navigation, hit up another Google search, or type in the URL of a different site. Unless there is a very specific reason for creating a click path that ends in static content, make sure you’ve kept the navigation options open. If you want to keep it interesting, have a link to other relevant content in your site or a call to action to sign up for your newsletter or download a white paper.

Now close your eyes. What do you see?

Written by Jeremy Elder, Interactive Designer at Introworks.