Information Architecture employs a number of tools with site maps and wireframes emerging as standards.  While outlining your website or application with these is a critical first step, it is also important to go beyond into more user-centric practices.

Once the foundation is documented in a site map, it is time to test it from a user’s perspective. Even though you and your team may have poured hours into the company’s site, ultimately the site is for its users. It is time to take a step back and see if the site allows your potential customers to get to what they want in the fastest and easiest way possible.

This does not need to be an elaborate process, in fact industry leader User Interface Engineering has been talking about quick yet effective methods such as the 5-second test for years.  Detailed user profiles have made way for user personas, which represent a more personalized version of the potential user. Ultimately, when a person comes to your site, they want to perform a specific task. They want to find something, purchase something, learn something, return something, etc.

In a recent podcast, Jared Spool discusses this with Ginny Redish, author of the recent publication Letting Go of the Words, about how a user’s interaction with a website should be viewed as more of a telephone conversation than as leafing through a filing cabinet. Reddish helps explain how simple, direct, and natural a usability pass on architecture can be when using personas. Simply imagine a particular type of user, even give he/she a name, and then step through the site thinking about what Jane would want to get  done.

This exercise, along with methods like the 5-second test are quick, efficient, and economical ways of improving on the foundation set by site maps, yet make a critical difference in creating an usable site that is successful.