Prioritizing Content

The field of "information architecture" is essentially about organizing. Where do things go? What's the hierarchy? You can't answer questions like this without first figuring out your content and prioritizing it.

This is extremely challenging for a lot of clients. It's like asking them to pick a favorite child. How can you say that product A is more important than product B? Or that one type of information is more important than another?

The reality, however, is that prioritizing is not optional. Even if you somehow designed a website where literally every single piece of information was given equal weight, you'd still have the bias of the order in which that is presented. Something neutral like "alphabetical" now gives weight to A-named things. Abandoning any particular order and randomizing every time you load a page now completely leaves the user helpless as they have no way to find anything as there is no structure anymore. You have to make a choice in terms of priority.

The good thing is that you don't have to make these decisions in a vaccuum. There are two key methods to determining priority: user goals and business goals. Fairly basic site statistics can tell you what your users are doing (more advanced analysis could of course give you additional insights). If 20% buy products, but 60% go to the help forums, you could probably surmise that the majority of your site visitors are existing owners of your product who come back to look for assistance (it also may suggest that your product has some problems!).

But hold on one second. If you followed that priority path, you would be greatly diminishing the prominence of shopping for your products. This may match user behavior but is probably not a great match for your business goals -- no doubt your top priority is selling your product. And this is where that delicate balance of both comes into play.

The key to managing both sides of the equation is understanding that users looking for particular things tend to exhibit different behaviors. Most people will probably expect that the main area of your home page will be promotional in nature. If they are coming in with the intent to get help with your product, they will probably start by looking in your menus, footer, or other contextual link areas searching for key words like "support," "help," or "FAQ." You can cater to them by making such a link highly visible and easy to spot, without sacrificing your promotional space for products.

Conversely, someone who is in a "shopping" mindset may skip your menus altogether and interact directly with your main content area. Further prioritizing here (showing the most popular products, for example, or the best new discount) gets that user to the content they're looking for right away.

This is all rather high level, I'll admit, and prioritization decisions are often much more difficult than this. Take, for example, a website with a homepage that has three clearly defined areas for promotions. If these three areas are different in size and location, you can probably give a clear order to their visibility. Let's say you have a large banner, a medium-sized tile area, and a small text link, going from "most visibility" to "least." Now let's say you have three new promotions coming up simultaneously. Your first instinct for each may be to give them all top priority. They are all important, right? Can't we just make three large banners? You could... but then your website would start becoming a monster with no organizational structure. It's never a good idea to re-structure a website based around a single one-time occurrence, unless it's something truly huge (like, you're going out of business, for example). You confuse return visitors and disrupt the visual "brand" your site establishes.

It becomes so much easier to solve design problems when you get comfortable with the idea that not everything is going to be equally important, and that the way to give visibility to content may differ based on the type of content you are presenting. Smart prioritization not only makes your website easier to navigate, it can increase user satisfaction and supports your business goals by steering people to the content they want while also giving them an easy path to turn from visitor into customer.