"Design, Design, and Design Again": An Information-Architecture Redesign Workflow from Case Studies of a Government Portal and a Learning-Management System.

While heuristics are useful resources for designing the web’s information architecture (IA) from scratch today, IA practitioners occasionally receive requests to redesign established products, and guidelines are also needed to address such “redesign” requests. Past studies on IA design tend to focus on prototyping and how iterations contribute to final products, but such iterations have more to do with how users interact with the prototype than with its IA per se. This commentary paper reports a workflow for re-designing and optimizing two websites’ information architecture (IA). Based on two case studies, we explored a redesigned workflow of IA, which contains five stages: 1) screening, 2) synergizing, 3) synchronizing, 4) IA development 5) evaluation & execution. Compared to designing an IA from scratch, a team who redesigns an IA may communicate with more stakeholders and consider internal politics’ impact. Our proposed IA redesign workflow helps web designers allocate resources and prioritize work when given redesign tasks.