Designing effective Information Architecture for small business sites Part 2 of our series on Good Navigation - an article from Web Marketing Resources LLC

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Designing Information Architecture part 2 of 3 Navigation Design Series

By Todd Follansbee April, 2009 First published in Web Marketing Today the largest, oldest internet marketing newsletter on the web - and still free. This originally appeared in Web Marketing Today here.

Designing Effective Navigation - an introduction and three part series by Todd Follansbee April 2009
A great User Experience starts with good navigation and good navigation begins with a good Nav Bar. Carefully follow these four guidelines and conversions should improve. Existing sites may have a hard time complying with all four but a new site should have little trouble. Any improvement will help so gather your information here and plan your redesign strategy.
Intro to our Designing effective navigation Series	First appeared in Web Marketing Today or you can read our version
Part 1 -Designing effective navigation Series - Navigation	Guidelines for a good nav bar. How to's and essential behaviors. First appeared in Web Marketing Today or you can read our version
Part 2 -Designing effective navigation Series - Information Architecture	This article will address how to design your Information Architecture, how to present the information in your site and how to test your results. First appeared in Web Marketing Today or you can read our version
Part 3 Designing effective navigation Series - the rest of the story	This article explains how to insure that the remaining navigation elements such as hyperlinks, graphic links, video links, calls to action, and offsite links, provide the correct visual cues and behaviors. First appeared in Web Marketing Today or you can read our version
	Web Marketing Today is the largest, oldest internet marketing newsletter on the web - and still free.

We define Information Architecture (with thanks to the Information Architecture Institute) as:

• The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support findability and usability

• We added – insuring that customers have sufficient information to enable a successful conversion

Simply put, you have good information architecture when visitors can easily find the desired product along with the answers to any product question that may arise. Easily stated, not easily achieved. If you remember from part 1 in this series, as many as 50% of visitors can't even find the products they want to buy. By building a good IA, those once frustrated visitors are likely to become your customers.

Good Information Architecture begins with creating the Product Information Set. We define this as the complete set of information needed by a customer to make a buy decision. That set of information will vary by customer because of elements like: job role, personality profile, where they are in the buy decision, level of competition, sense of urgency and more. The goal though is to try to cover every possible question and let the buyer decide what he needs. On more sophisticated sites we research personas and learning styles to refine the message but that only comes once the basic information set is assembled.

Building the Basic Product Information set.
To build the product information set, we start with a one hour brainstorming session with people who handles sales, phone calls and email. If possible include some new potential prospects from outside the company. Build a list of all possible questions for one lead product and list them individually on a 3 X 5 card. Be sure to explore questions including but not limited to:

We next rank the importance of each card to the buy decision. Each team member votes on its relative importance: crucial, helpful, and not significant. Next we note on each card all the places (pages) where the questions belong, for example: Product information general, Product information specific, thumbnail or full size photo, FAQ's, Home Page, Alt Tag, and About Us. Many questions will belong in several places.

One question might be: “what if the shirt doesn't fit”. That is a common question ranked “crucial”. No clothing customer would consider an order without understanding the return policy. We might find that question addressed on: the home page, Warranty, FAQ's, a return policy page and the products page.

For sites with many products this sounds like a huge undertaking but you typically only need to do it for each major product category, if that. Once you have filled out the cards for one category, you will use many of these same questions on the rest of the product categories and the process will go quickly.

With this brainstorming session done, “lay out” the pages for your site and paste the appropriate questions everywhere they belong. Title and organize these pages logically according to your best guess (it is easier then it sounds).

What you now have is a set of pages with titles and these pages include the questions. The pages are organized where your “brainstormers” decided that they arise in the buy decision. Be sure to include add one page for: “review/submit order” as the final cart page. Pay special attention to the details on this page to make sure you have a good, complete, summary of the essential product information on the order.

With the product information set “complete”, at least in the form of questions, and the nav bar labeled according to the guidelines in article 1, the next step is to build out the site map to match the page order just completed. If the Nav bar is the heart of good information architecture, then the Site Map is the visual representation of the “structural design”.

Group the products in a logical manner as shown in the example below. Consider using your “brainstorming team” to review the categories. Avoid naming product categories with special terms which may be unfamiliar to visitors new to the company.

This sample piece of a site map shows one product category from a sample sites' nav bar (Sailboat Products) and its two submenus along with an About Us page with one submenu:

If you are building a new site you must now answer all the questions you have gathered. You can answer them using the variety of web tools including:

If you are redesigning your existing site, your job is to revise the existing content to insure that all the questions you raise are answered at the right point. If page content grows unmanageable, your site map and menus should change as the design evolves. Consider using hyperlinks to access more detailed information in the product information set. If you put in the necessary time to complete this step in addition to a better site, the building or redesign will go much quicker.

Where the process can fail . Your team has carefully assembled the questions and built answers. You know where the information is. As one example, you know that product return information is available in the 4 th paragraph of the policies page and question 34 on the FAQ page. It is obvious to you that the question about “returns” has been answered. However no customer is likely to dig deeply for this essential information and if you have failed to address important issues like this early enough, you will lose conversions. Until you can find objective users to review your site, you will make mistakes on placement and will overlook questions.

How to avoid failure and measure the effectiveness of your IA - 2 approaches

1. By far the quickest and most effective approach is direct user testing. Only direct user testing can provide conclusive proof that the information set is complete. Fortunately, more and more readers committed to building a great UX, are reporting back on how helpful even the simplest direct user testing can be. To evaluate your IA, you need only sit down with 5 (or less) people and task them with finding and purchasing one of your products while they discuss their experience out loud. Be sure to read Zero Budget Usability testing for more details. If you have to explain anything , something needs revision.

2. If you are not ready for direct user testing, your alternative is to try to discover gaps in your product information set by monitoring email and incoming phone calls. Query as many customers as you can about the site and listen carefully to the questions and comments they raise. Many questions may have several meanings , for example: How long have you been in business? Do you have a store? What is your phone number?

In addition to the simple and obvious answers (10 years, yes we have a store etc), I would infer from these questions that my company was lacking credibility. I would review and improve: the About us, testimonials and probably the home page to improve credibility. Similarly if there calls about basic questions which were very prominently answered on the site, I would assume that people felt the need to connect with someone before ordering. If this were the case, I would expand and/or personalize customer service and support pages. Rather then wait (and hope) for questions to come in and also run the risk of misinterpreting them, the simplest, fastest and best way to really understand these issues is by direct user testing.

Making products or services easy to find and with clear information that is easy to understand is the single best thing you can do to improve sales. Improved Information Architecture will also cut customer service costs, reduce returns and improve customer satisfaction. More and more vendors are discovering that time spend improving the IA directly affects their bottom line.

Please feel free to contact Todd directly with your comments, questions or suggestions.