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Why do you need to optimise your website’s information architecture? A simple question that requires some serious thought; this is because IA (information architecture) has a big influence your website's commercial success or failure because it is at the heart of the user experience (UX).

Who designed your IA?

How does IA design go wrong? The seriousness of some decisions made about IA are often not understood by those making the decisions.

In our experience, whilst many decision makers get many of the issues relating to IA, through common sense, commercial acumen, training and/or an autodidactic interest, they rarely know or appreciate all of the issues.

The factors from whence these issue can derive are generally:-

1) The HiPPO factor

Highest Paid Person's Opinion in which senior decision makers fail to delegate to expert knowledge within your organisation and impose their own will and opinions.

2) The Not My Bag factor

A lack of knowledge and/or experience in some areas of IA design and implementation by those directly responsible for your website.

3) Inherited problems factor

The website is old, inflexible and cannot be overhauled without redevelopment (and nobody seems willing to tackle this because the opportunity-cost and cost-benefit analysis have not been considered or assessed).

What do I need to fix in my IA?

We thought it might prove useful to broadly outline as many of these issues as we can in a primer on the commercial benefits of optimised website information architecture.

Our aim is to aid further research and study for those passionate about improving their website’s commercial performance and enhancing the user experience.

Your website's business objectives

Our apologies up front; this section on your objectives might sound a bit patronising at first – but bear with us as it should help you clarify your web strategy and bring to light some potential issues.

Commercial websites are designed to turn a profit. So logically a central objective of a commercial website should be to achieve sales/orders/enquiries that generate revenue for your company or activate new consumers that will want to buy your products or services. Pretty straight forward stuff!

So generating revenue is the name of the game. Let us ask a series of basic questions to see how your IA might enhance or detract from your conversion funnel.

Basic IA Health Check List

Here are three simple questions to detect if you might have issues with your IA from a commercial perspective:-

1) What do you sell?

Pretty easy right? Your offering is probably well known and understood to you.  But what about to your target audience?

Now let us look at it from a potential customer's perspective.

• What do you sell?
• Will a user landing on any page of your website know or guess what you sell?

Take a users' point of view and judge your website with a critical eye. Consider that the user might not know anything about your company; even if they do know a little about your company, is what you are offering clear to them looking at any page in the website?

Generally what you sell (your offering or proposition) should be indicated to users on every page of your website. This information should be present above the fold (towards the top) on all pages. This information is usually imparted through persistent elements such as the primary navigation, the site ID and any strap line you might employ; this is information architecture design at its most basic level.

Persistent IA Elements Explaining What You Sell:-

• Primary Navigation (Global)
• Site ID (Your Brand Logo & Strap Line

The key is to ensure what you sell/do is made clear without the user having to go anywhere or do anything - you set out your stall with your page design so no matter how someone reaches your website (or where they are within it) they'll know what you are about and what you have to offer - from your primary navigation and/or site ID.

If your website does not explain what you do at this basic level your ability to convert traffic into revenue is already fighting an uphill battle.

2) What do you sell?

• Are the names used in your primary navigation the most searched for keywords used by your target audience?
• Are you matching your offering to user expectations?
• Are the names used in your navigation also reflected in page titles, headings, breadcrumbs and the URLs?

There are many ways describe any object or concept, but are the names of the things you are selling matched to the ways people are looking for those same things? Categorisation, whether you use a hierarchical taxonomy (traditional parent-child relationship of logical topic grouping) or facets (guided search based on tags or attributes) need to be named in meaningful ways that the users will understand and be able to browse or navigate by.

The nomenclature (naming conventions) you use to describe things needs to be optimised for your target audience. This will aid comprehension and search volumes.

It is no good using industry jargon or stylised language if consumers do not use these terms. Why use "knits" or "sweaters" in the UK when most people search for "jumpers"?

Make life easier for your users by using language in the IA and structure of your website that is more natural and intuitive to them.  So don't say "Stream of Consciousness" when "Blog" will be better understood!

3) What do you sell?

• Can the user search, browse, sort and/or filter your offering inventory to find exactly what they are looking for?
• Will they know where they are (i.e. have a sense of website geography)?
• Can they extract salient data from the individual products or services detail pages easily?
• Can they work out the unique selling points and differentiation you have to offer?
• Do you articulate benefit statements?

Allowing users to find what they are looking for (what you sell) is at the heart of any online transaction or acquisition.

They may be just browsing or they may be looking for something very specific, or they may have already reached what they thought they wanted, but now want to look at alternatives.

The question really is does your website allow them to do this?

Information architecute is often thought of as things such as navigation and site structure; but it is so much more.

IA covers anything which you use to impart data to a user:-

• Does your website have an internal search function?
• Does it work?
• How relevant is it?
• Does it allow natural language searches, or is it guided on fixed criteria?
• Can users refine, filter and sort search results?
• Are your categories or facets called something useful (that people know things as - and search for?)
• Are things logically grouped or related?
• Are the names of things pithy/punching rather than longwinded/verbose?
• Can the browsing navigation be seen easily - is it above the fold in the dimensions of an optimal page size?
• Is it clearly navigation (conventional location in layout, underlined text, button-like, coloured differently to normal text)?
• Does the user know where they are within your website's structure - do you use category indication, tags or a breadcrumb trail to impart a sense of geography?
• Does the information on the page adhere to a visual scale - are important things such as headings and the call-to-action bigger/stand out more than less important information?
• Do the page titles and the page headings uniquely identify the web page and their content?
• Does the layout and structure of text and information on the page make it easy to quickly infer meaning and context such as USPs and benefit statements, prices and need to know information, help and advice?
• Can you scan read the page using just the subheading and/or bullet points to infer meaning/comprehension?

These are all fairly basic things, but it is amazing how many commercial website don't even stack up to these requirements.

What Next?

If you think your website might be falling short with its IA we'll show you how to start planning your improvements in part 2 where we will tackle navigation & structure.