White Whale / services / IA

Users like sites that are easy to navigate; although our designers may wish it wasn’t true, navigability is a more highly regarded attribute than beauty.

Our experience creating sites for universities and colleges gives us a solid starting point for creating a user-friendly information architecture: We know how students (prospective and current), staff, faculty, alumni, and the broader community generally want to navigate a higher ed site; we work with you to draw out the elements that are unique to your school while simplifying the process of getting from point A to point B (and back again).

In the least glamorous and most important part of revamping an IA, we completely dissect and map out the current site organization. Then we step back, take a look at it, and start to think about how it might be made more intuitive. Information design is a delicate science; while there are some who simply insist that “no piece of information should be more than two clicks from the homepage,” we prefer a more labor- and thought-intensive approach that takes time to consider audiences, expectations, and the relative weight or importance of the many things an enterprise-sized Web site needs to say.

Once this review process is complete, we recommend detailed changes to your current site information architecture that start with the top-level navigation and then drill down into lower-tier pages.