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.

Trust and faith in design

It's a cliche to make fun of older generations and their discomfort with technology, but that stereotypical technophobia is really just an extreme version of something all of us probably feel at some point or another: a lack of trust and faith in the system we are using.

What does this button do?
I remember having someone ask me, "What do I do to submit the form? Do I press the submit button?" The answer, to most of us, is "yes, duh." But what if the question is less clear? Navigational terms don't match what you thought you'd find. Something you thought was a free trial asks for your credit card and doesn't explain why. A link that seemed obvious takes you to a completely unexpected page or site. In each case, the design is playing fast and loose with the user's trust and faith, and as a result, is probably failing the user's needs.

Anticipate the next step
Good design anticipates what the user will want. On your homepage, offer links to the things your visitors most likely will want. Look at the search terms people use to find things on your site, and make sure your navigational terms match them. Whenever you ask a user for information, explain why you want it and how it will be used.

Explain yourself
One place that I frequently see abused is the "contact us" page -- many sites will ask for name, address, phone number, email, sometimes even fax number and company, and in worst-case scenarios, they'll even tack on some "survey" type questions -- even if all you wanted to do was maybe email them to ask about the release date of an upcoming product. In that scenario, literally the only piece of information the company actually needs is your email address. So why ask for the moon? Is it because your designer just used a "contact us" template and didn't really think about what that means for the user? Is it because you are adding me to a database you are going to sell to third parties? And even if all you do ask for is my email address, will you start sending me unwanted email newsletters without asking? Tell the user up front, and let them make the informed decision. (Even better, in this scenario, you could save the user and yourself time by having just clearly listed the product release date on your site in the first place.)

Expect questions, and provide answers
One thing I try to do when starting any project is just write down a list of questions I think a user/visitor may have, based on the type of site/product and the customer base. I try not to get overly specific but the questions should not just be the broad ones either -- for example, on a shoe site, I wouldn't write out questions about a particular pair of shoes, but I might write out questions about broader types of shoes, or questions that might apply to any individual pair of shoes.

Prioritize and group logically
From there, I try to group the questions logically, and see if they align to particular terms. If possible, prioritize the questions as well, and make it easier to find the answers to those more essential questions. This is also where some statistical data can come in handy -- search terms used, frequency of visits to particular areas of a site, volume of support emails/calls about particular topics. Maybe half the visitors to your site are just trying to find your address, and already know all about your product/service. You could have a beautiful, highly usable presentation of your product line, but if that address is hard to find, you are failing half your audience from the start.

I've found that structuring a website around this is a good way to meet user's needs, and a lot of this work can inform other decisions down the line, and make it easier to work in changes/new ideas -- just follow a mini-version of these steps (asking questions, grouping them, working out logical answers) and see if your architecture already accommodates these changes or if you need to restructure.

By anticipating everything the user will want, and providing easy answers to key questions and presenting them at logical points, you build that trust and faith. You're more likely to have a happy customer, and you reduce anxiety.

Cut cut cut!

For many people who have websites, this is a sad but almost undoubtedly true fact: No one wants to read what you have to say.

First, let me give a caveat - if you have a blog or some opinion-based or news-based site, chances are people that visit your site do actually want to read what you have to say. But, most sites do not fall into that category. Also, this is not to say that visitors won't read anything at all -- but all most visitors want to do is find a specific piece of information very quickly and move on. Nobody sets out looking for self-hyping or vague filler, and any amount of that present on your site is an obstacle to their goal.

What I've said in previous posts about being self-aware or maintaining objectivity applies strongly here -- do you read websites? When you search for something and find a relevant hit, do you explore a site, patiently sit through a flash intro, and read paragraphs of marketing copy? The answer is probably no. So why would you expect your visitors to do that?

I've seen cases where I get the distinct impression a client is afraid that not having a lot of pages and a lot of text will send a message to the visitor that there is a lack of substance there. This couldn't be further from the truth. A trim, efficient, streamlined site that is light on fluff but clear and direct on content will send a message that you know what you're talking about, you know what the visitor wants, and you don't waste time and energy on the superfluous. Probably the only commodity more valuable than money is time, and no one wants their time wasted.

So I'm going to listen to my own advice and keep this short. Some simple rules:

• Be ruthless and be willing to edit - because your visitors are ruthless with the "back" button and will ditch your page in seconds if they don't see what they want right away.
• Every piece of content you write needs to deliver vital information that the visitor wants to read, otherwise you need to get rid of it.
  
• Be willing to delete entire pages if their content is unnecessary or so light it could easily be combined with other pages.
  
• Don't be long-winded; write concisely.
  
• And perhaps underpinning all of this: don't be emotionally attached to any of your content, or you'll cheat yourself out of making the best site for your visitors.

Using breadcrumbs to define IA

"Breadcrumbs" is a technique used to let visitors know where they are in a site as they get deeper into content. An example might be:

Home > About the Company > Staff > Creative Director

Usually all but the current page is also a link, which lets you go up how ever many levels you want in one click. Generally it's a rather useful technique, particularly in large sites with many layers to them.

Rottentomatoes.com has an interesting take on breadcrumbs. In addition to setting up the hierarchy in a left-to-right manner, they also scale the text to match the relative "size" of each section. It's a good way of enforcing a mental map. Just as the United States is bigger than Massachusetts, which in turn is bigger than Boston, RT shows that the "Movies" section is bigger than "In Theaters" which is also bigger than the individual page for "The Dark Knight."

While there are a couple potential issues with how they have set this up (the breadcrumbs themselves don't really look like links, the / is not necessarily the best separator, and it is a bit odd that the movie name is in a different font), the overall concept is one I hadn't seen before and quite appreciate. It not only tells you where you are but reinforces the hierarchy and information architecture of the site.

Kudos, RT.