Tested With Users
Card sorting and tree testing, before anything is built on it.
Information Architecture Services
Information Architecture Services Organised Around How People Look
Most navigation reflects how the organisation thinks about itself: divisions, product lines, internal categories. Visitors do not know any of that. Information architecture services reorganise around how people actually look for things — and test that with real users rather than agreeing it in a room.
We Test the Structure Before Building It
A structure everyone in the meeting understood is not evidence that anyone outside it will.
Their Words, Not Yours
Labels people recognise rather than internal terminology.
Depth Controlled
Every extra level costs a share of the people navigating it.
Search Considered
Structure that produces findable URLs, not only usable menus.
Scales
Room for growth without a reorganisation every year.
Information Architecture, Explained
What Does IA Decide?
Four things, and all four are testable before a line of code.
Discuss Your Structure →- 1
Grouping
What belongs together, from the visitor's point of view.
- 2
Labelling
What each group is called, in language people recognise.
- 3
Depth
How many levels, which directly affects how many people arrive.
- 4
Cross-References
Where something legitimately belongs in more than one place.
What IA Work Covers
Research, structure and validation before anything is built.
Restructuring changes URLs — SEO migration covers protecting them.
How We Build Information Architecture
Research, propose, test, then build. The testing step is what makes it evidence.
Inventory the Content
Everything that has to be placed somewhere.
Research the Grouping
Card sorting with people outside the organisation.
Propose a Structure
Built from what the research showed.
Tree Test It
Can people find things in it, before anything is built.
Map the URLs
With redirects where paths change.
Testing
Why Tree Testing Is the Cheapest Insurance Available
It validates a structure before anything is built on it, and it takes days.
What is tree testing?
Participants are given the proposed structure as a bare list of labels — no design, no visuals — and asked where they would look for specific things.
It measures whether the structure works, isolated from whether the interface is attractive, which is the only way to test the two separately.
It runs remotely, needs no build, and produces a completion rate per task. A structure that fails it will fail after launch too, only far more expensively.
Why does internal language get in?
Because everyone specifying the navigation uses it daily and has forgotten it is specialised. Product names, division names, internal category terms — all obvious to the people choosing them.
Visitors search using ordinary words for their problem. A menu labelled with your taxonomy asks them to translate, and most do not.
The fix is testing labels with people outside the organisation, which surfaces the problem within an afternoon and is skipped almost universally.
Questions,answered.
Information architecture services organise content and navigation around how people look for things — grouping, labelling, depth and cross-references — validated with card sorting and tree testing.
Test it. Tree testing gives a completion rate per task using nothing but the labels, runs remotely, needs no build, and takes days rather than weeks.
As shallow as the content allows. Every additional level costs a share of the people navigating it, so depth should be a deliberate trade rather than a consequence of the content model.
Because visitors do not know them. Internal terminology is invisible to the people who use it daily and requires translation from everyone else, and most will not bother.
Yes, where URLs change. A restructure without a complete redirect map loses what those URLs earned — see SEO migration.
Still deciding if information architecture services is right for you?
Talk to UsEveryone in the Room Understood It
Navigation structures get agreed in workshops. The categories are discussed, argued over, refined, and eventually everyone present agrees the result makes sense.
It does make sense — to a room of people who know the organisation, its divisions, its product names and its internal vocabulary. That shared knowledge is precisely what the visitor does not have.
Testing the structure with five outsiders takes an afternoon and reliably finds the categories nobody else can interpret. It is skipped because the workshop already produced agreement, and agreement feels like validation.
Free Structure Review
Find Out Whether People Can Find Things
Send us your navigation. We will assess the structure and, where it is worth it, tree test it with real participants.
Claim Your Free Marketing Audit
Enhance Your Brand Potential At No Cost!
- Expect a response within 24 hours
- NDA available upon request
- Dedicated product specialists