Information architecture (IA) is how a product's content and features are organized and labeled — the structure a user navigates through, decided before a single screen gets designed. Getting IA wrong means every individual screen ends up fighting an uphill, structural battle no amount of visual polish can fix.
A sitemap is a simple diagram showing every page or screen in a product and how they connect — effectively a family tree of the whole product. It's usually the first concrete artifact built after research, before any wireframing starts.
| Scheme | How content is grouped | Example |
|---|---|---|
| By topic/category | Content grouped by subject matter | A recipe site organized by cuisine type |
| By task | Content grouped by what the user is trying to do | A banking app organized by "Pay," "Save," "Borrow" |
| By audience | Separate paths for different user types | A university site split into "Prospective students," "Current students," "Faculty" |
| Chronological | Content ordered by time | A news site, a project timeline |
Card sorting means giving real users a set of content items (on physical or digital cards) and asking them to group them in a way that makes sense to them, without dictating categories. The resulting groupings — not the designer's own instinct — reveal the labels and structure users actually expect.
The 3-click rule of thumb
A quick rule of thumb for depth: a user should reach almost anything in a product within 3 clicks. Past that, either the structure is too deep, or the categories at each level aren't the ones users would actually guess.