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.

The road sign metaphor

I've mentioned before how I think road and highway signs are a really interesting example of usability in action -- they have to be extremely clear, concise, and informative, and it is literally a matter of life or death in some cases (consider a world without "stop" signs).

I've begun using them as a metaphor for web design in the hopes of making it easier for clients to get in the mindset of their site visitors. We'd all like to believe that people coming to our website are deeply interested in our materials and want to read everything we have to say about them. Unfortunately, it's much more accurate to think of your site visitors as ruthless hunters with non-existent attention spans who are scanning for relevant content rapidly, and are willing to toss you aside if they don't see what they want in 2-3 seconds (note, that 2-3 seconds is actually borne out in testing -- that's about how much time you have before someone hits the back button and leaves your site altogether if they don't see what they want).

So that's all well and good to get that in your head -- your visitors want everything fast and easy, and want to do as little reading as possible -- but I think you need to add a little more to the equation in order to figure out how to deliver that content.

That's where road signs come into play.

When you are driving down a highway at 65 MPH, it's generally not that hard to read road signs. They typically do simple things like list the name of a place with an arrow, or they indicate with symbols and short words whether there is food, gas, lodging, or other amenities available at this exit. A road sign wouldn't say "Turn right at the next exit if you're heading toward the greater metropolitan Toledo area, where we have a number of fine hotels and dining options for the whole family." It might simply say "Toledo" with an arrow, as well as "FOOD" and "LODGING" icons. Those thirty words have been boiled down to three words and an arrow. Was any valuable information really lost? And furthermore, if you were flying down the highway, would you have even gotten past the first few words before the sign was gone behind you?

This is a good way to think as you construct your site, particularly when it comes to navigation and basic site structure. You want to pick "content-heavy" words -- typically short words that clearly indicate the content they will lead to. And just as a signpost with 25 signs is going to be harder to parse than one with 5 signs, you want to keep the number of options to a minimum.

This is not to say that you should avoid writing sentences at all -- it's important to keep prose available, but make sure it's where it counts. You don't need to describe in detail how great your parking garage is, but you do need to provide directions that tell you how to get there. Conversely, if someone is trying to pick your next book to buy online, a simple title, author, star rating, and genre is not going to be enough -- a brief prose description of the plot, potentially with quotes from reviewers, is probably going to do a lot more to sell the book than just providing the bare bones. That said, providing a quick look at the genre and rating information on a previous page may be all you need in terms of navigation to get that visitor to the full product page.

If you're not sure how to set up the text and navigation for your site, it may be helpful to stop and thinking of your visitor cruising down the freeway, looking for a particular destination. What would they be able to quickly read on a road sign that would make them turn in your direction?