Help Users Find Answers on Your Site with Information Architecture
Every user to your site arrives with a question.
Who is this company? Are they located near me? Do they offer the service I need? The questions may be more complex in nature.
How legitimate is this company? Are they trustworthy? Would I want to work there? If your organization is thinking about redesigning its website, you may be thinking in terms of a fresh color scheme, more engaging imagery (including better stock images), and enhanced graphics. But the core of a successful website starts with this: How easy is it for your user to find the answer to his or her question.
Information Architecture (IA) serves as the backbone for user experience (UX). It controls how users will find information on your site. A good IA process will dictate how you arrange your content to ensure the best user experience possible. Your website is your digital home. Consulting an architect is the first stop in building a healthy foundation for your content.
Audience Understanding
Start by defining your audience and their goals, and think across many segments. Your audience can be customers or potential customers, but there are so many other groups to consider: employees, job applicants, and potential partners. If you’re a government agency, your site has unique informational needs, whether aimed at the general public (a veteran looking up a form) or a specialized stakeholder (a scientist looking up research results). Nonprofits have unique segments as well, including donors and members.
Study these users, their needs, and the tasks and information they require from your site. Through focus groups, surveys, and analytics of user behavior on your current site, you can get a better sense of the difficulties they face and the questions they have.
Auditing Your Current Content
Assessing your current content and its hierarchical structure is the next step. You can track your current pages and content in a spreadsheet. You can also use whiteboards and sticky notes for this exercise—this is your chance to look like a TV detective with an elaborate wall diagram showing how all the clues connect—or software tools designed for the purpose. Your audit includes not only pages, but videos and downloadable content such as brochures.
Content Analysis
With a completed content audit, you’re ready to analyze your content and make decisions. Your focal points of analysis could include:
- Key messaging: What information should users take away from the page or content? Does the page do its job?
- Accuracy/relevance: Is the content up-to-date and correct?
- Content quality: Does the content use the right voice for your brand?
- Stakeholder/customer value: Do users actually need this content, and if so, who are they?
Google Analytics can be used to learn more detail about a page’s relevance. How many conversations does a page produce—i.e., how often does a page convert users to take action like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter? Looking at clicks, bounce rates, and other stats can help guide the decision-making process.
Armed with this knowledge, you can make decisions about the page or the content. Should it be kept, removed, improved, or merged with another page?
Using IA to Build a Stronger Website Foundation
After all of this research and analysis comes the hard work of organizing, labeling, prioritizing, and connecting content to support usability and findability. IA helps users find and understand information. IA isn’t the same thing as building a navigation framework for your redesigned website; instead, IA is used to inform navigation and wireframes. Again, whether you use the white board and sticky note method or software, connecting content in ways that are meaningful to users ultimately results in a site navigation system. This mapping will also result in a site that has higher ranking in search engine results.
IA is the backbone of a website redesign. It’s not a process to rush through if you want to build a site that gives customers, stakeholders, and employees the information they need to make decisions or take action. If your company is planning on revisiting its website, turn to experts for a meaningful result.