Information Architecture is the act of organizing the data and tasks found in a website or application to ensure that they offer an intuitive and usable set of interfaces to the user. With our list of desired features, pages, and some idea of the content that might be needed, we can move onto defining how everything will fit together.
We start by creating a site map to examine the pages needed to support the features and tasks we have created during the research phase. This map will help us understand how all these pages connect to each other. Our site map looks like this:
As you can see from this example, our site map is a very simple diagram. Each cell represents a unique web page required to support the features and tasks we expect the user to accomplish while at the site. The arrows connecting the cells show how we expect to get from one page to another. We went a step further and colorized the pages to represent what type of task or content would be found...