Structure before screens – Information architecture

Before anyone draws a single screen, someone has to decide what the product even contains, how it’s organised, and what everything is called – the invisible skeleton the screens hang off. That discipline is information architecture, and Nielsen Norman Group’s definition carries a discipline inside it: IA is documented “in spreadsheets and diagrams, not in wireframes” – it’s deliberately pre-visual, worked out in lists and hierarchies before drawing starts, because structure decided while drawing ends up shaped by the drawing.

Three terms hang off it:

• Navigation – the on-screen components (menus, tabs, breadcrumbs, filters) that expose the IA. Navigation designer Nathaniel Davis’s image, via NN/g: navigation is the tip of the iceberg sitting atop the IA. Choosing a nav pattern before the structure is settled bends the structure around a hamburger menu nobody needed.
• Sitemap – the visible diagram of the hierarchy. Derived from finished IA work – content inventories, naming decisions, research into how users categorise – never the canvas for inventing it.
• Findability – the outcome all of it serves: can someone locate the thing using only the labels the product gives them, without already knowing where it “should” be.

The failure you’ll actually meet

The single most common IA failure in the wild: navigation organised around the company instead of the user – department names, product-line names, internal category boundaries. Users can’t find things filed under how the organisation thinks about itself. Feel the difference on the same product:

Find the setting, twice

Task: change the email that receives your monthly statement

Your task Change the email that receives your monthly statement

• ›CoreBank
• ›Engagement
• ›Revenue systems
• ›Platform

Groups opened: 0

Information architectureVersion A – the org chartVersion B – your task

The fix is boring and underused: test category names and labels against real users’ own words, not the org chart. (This site practises it – courses, glossary, library: learner words, while the machinery’s own name for them, “content collections”, appears nowhere you navigate.)

The rule of thumb that needs no vocabulary

If a feature conversation jumps straight to “what should the screen look like” before anyone has answered what’s it called, where does it live, how would a user expect to find it – that’s a sequencing error, and you can name it out loud without any design training: “have we settled the structure yet?” It’s the most avoidable mistake in the discipline, and it’s especially worth stating to AI agents explicitly: asked to “build the settings page”, an agent starts generating screens immediately. Asked to first list what settings exist, how they group and what they’re called, it does the IA step – the one that was about to be skipped.