Design and product work
Information architecture (IA)
Also calledIA
How content and features are organised, grouped and labelled so people can find what they need.
Information architecture is the structure underneath a product: the navigation, the categories, the names of things and how they relate. It is invisible when it works and the first thing people complain about when it does not.
Good IA follows how users think, not how the company is organised. Card sorting helps you discover the user's model, and tree testing checks whether a structure you designed actually works.
In practice
A bank that files 'Report a lost card' under 'Security' because that team owns it, when customers look for it under 'Cards', has an information architecture problem.