What Information Architecture Means

Picture a dentist who has written the first text for their site, an answer to the question “Does an implant hurt?”. Since the site has only this one text, they put it on the site’s home page. They send the link to a few patients and put it in their Instagram bio as well.

A month later they want to write the answer to “My tooth still hurts after a root canal. Is that normal?”, and find there is no place for it. The home page belongs to implants. If they write the root canal text under that same page, the page becomes about two topics. If they want to turn the home page into a list of topics, the implant text has to move to a new address, and none of the links they sent to patients or put in their bio reach that text any more.

This problem did not start with the second text. It started the day the first text was written without the place of the texts to come being settled. Information architecture means deciding, before the first text is written, how the site’s texts will be grouped and where each text will sit, even texts that have not been written yet.

An example

Suppose you have heard these eight questions from your patients (a hypothetical example):

• Does an implant hurt?
• After a tooth is extracted, how long should I wait before getting an implant?
• My tooth still hurts after a root canal. Is that normal?
• Does a root-canal-treated tooth always need a crown?
• My denture is loose. What should I do?
• Is an implant better, or a denture?
• Is the practice open on Thursday?
• Do you accept supplementary insurance?

If you put these side by side by topic, you get four groups:

• Implants
  • Does an implant hurt?
  • After a tooth is extracted, how long should I wait before getting an implant?
  • Is an implant better, or a denture?
• Root canal
  • My tooth still hurts after a root canal. Is that normal?
  • Does a root-canal-treated tooth always need a crown?
• Dentures
  • My denture is loose. What should I do?
• The practice
  • Is the practice open on Thursday?
  • Do you accept supplementary insurance?

With this grouping, the dentist in our example knows from day one that the implant text sits in the implants group, not on the home page. The root canal text written a month later also has its own place and does not touch the first text. And the site’s home page stays free to guide patients to these same groups later.

Take the group names from the patient’s words

In the example above, the groups are named “root canal” and “dentures”, not “endo” and “removable prosthodontics”. A dentist naturally thinks in textbook categories, but patients do not know these categories. A group’s name is repeated in the site menu, in text titles and in links, and a patient who does not know the word “endo” walks past a group with that name, even if their answer is right there.

Two situations that come up

Some questions fit no treatment group, such as opening hours or insurance in the example above. These questions are usually about the practice itself, and their place is next to the practice information, that is, where the address and phone number are written.

Some questions fit two groups, such as “Is an implant better, or a denture?”. Put this question in only one group, the one the patient is mostly thinking about when asking it. In our example the patient is making a decision about an implant, so its place is the implants group. It can be reached from the dentures text with a link, but the text itself is not written in two places.

This very site

The DentCast site, where you are reading this text, is built this way. Its content sits in several separate groups, and each group has its own name. Some groups hold hundreds of texts and some only a few, but all of them have had a definite place from day one. When a new text is written, it is only added to its own group and that group’s counter goes up by one, without touching any other text on the site. If this grouping had been done after hundreds of texts, the address of every one of those texts would have had to change.

Exercise

Do what you saw in the example with the questions you have collected from your own patients. Write each question on one line, put questions on the same topic side by side, and give each group a name the patient would use. Questions about the practice itself go into the “practice” group.

The result is one page with several groups and a few questions under each. Most of these questions have no text yet, and that is fine, because this page only settles where they go.

The test of correctness is three things. Every question is in exactly one group. No group’s name is a word patients never say. And if next week a patient asks a new question, you can say where it goes without changing the groups. If you had to rearrange the groups to fit a new question, the grouping does not yet match how patients think.