Rosenfeld and Morville once mentioned “Information architecture involves the design of organization, labeling, navigation, and searching systems to help people find and manage information more successfully.” (Rosenfeld and Morville) Information architecture defined as term used to describe the structure of a system (Barker, 2005) is very important to on online marketers because effective information architecture helps marketers make search and navigation effective and support user goals.
First of all, effective information architecture helps marketers make search and navigation effective. For example, if customers go to air line website, they probably want to search information such as flight schedule, tickets information and connect information. If the airline has built the links to customers, customers can find the information much easier and more quickly. As Mnfrancis said that as long as there is an apparent progress from one link to the next, and the indication is that they are still on track to reach their end goal, users will tend to continue through a site. (Mnfrancis, 2008) When information architecture has been built, customers can search the information they want without thinking and like to use the website more.
In addition, effective information architecture (IA) websites support user goals, which can make websites usable. Vivian Biss, as a knowledge management analyst at Microsoft Library mentioned “IA encompasses all the design and structure from the back-end to through the content to the resulting representation necessary to create an information system useful to end-users.”(Biss, 2000) Website users always have particular goals to visit the websites. For instance, when customers go to online shop websites, they may have the goal to buy something. As information architecture is built on websites, it provides useful information to users and let customers finally achieve their goals.
In conclusion, effective information architecture is extremely useful and important on building website. It not only makes search and navigation effective but also supports user goals which can make websites useful. To make websites more useful and effective to user, online marketers should build information architecture.
Renrence:
Biss, Vivian 2000, “What is Information
Architecutre” http://www2.hawaii.edu/~mwhang/SGIA/ia/index.html
Barker, Lain 2005, “What Is Information Architecture”
http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_whatisinfoarch/
Mnfrancis 2008, “What Does A Website Need?”
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/7-what-does-a-good-web-page-need/
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