Addressing the problem of redesigning a website is about understanding it not as a thing but as a set of complex relations of people, processes, and content that supports the website users’ needs and the website owner’s business goals.
Information architecture (IA) is both the process and the product of organizing, structuring, and labeling content. Its main goal is to help users find information, complete tasks, and set expectations about a content environment. The idea of “environment” is key here. No matter what website builders’ ads tell you, a website is not an object you create in a week, put it online and move forward. Like any piece of content, a website is a conversation; perhaps the most important online conversation your organization has with its audiences. And, as in any conversation, it implies multiple actors, topics, and a context. Sounds like something you want to hand out to some web designer/developer you’ve just met on a platform to sort out in isolation in a week? Yeah, I don’t think so either.
A content problem is usually a symptom of a broader business issue
That’s what we confirmed when a translation company that operates in the USA and Europe called us to redesign their website (name omitted for confidentiality reasons). At the time they called us, the company was growing rapidly and redefining its business model. They’ve opened a new office and were working on a new line of business, all while deciding to let go of B2C clients for good and focusing only on B2B. Their website was three years old and calling for a revamp since the content was outdated and didn’t fit with the new strategy.
As a part of our research (which included stakeholders interviews, content audit, and a heuristic evaluation), we observed that:
- The site’s purpose and targeted users weren’t clear: the content was a mix of one-size-fits-all branding materials with hard-sell copywriting for lead generation.
- There were usability issues. The navigation options were limited to a long and cluttered menu, and there was conceptual overlapping between categories, broken links, and pages where the content was incomplete.
- Translation companies rely heavily on a freelancer-driven workflow, and the current site failed to channel their job requests. People looking for job opportunities didn’t have a clear way of reaching out to the people hiring. As a consequence, they wrote to the only contact email available, which was managed by the Sales team. Salespeople were constantly receiving emails from people searching for a job, while HR didn’t have any channel available to hear from those people on the website. Any of those emails taken in isolation may seem like a trivial misunderstanding at first until you do the math of the hours in a quarter a Sales executive stops focusing on business development to answer wrongly directed emails.
Something to build on
The client was a small company growing rapidly in a highly competitive market, a scenario in which every penny counts and every bit of information can turn into an advantage. Since the company didn’t have the budget or people to implement a more comprehensive research plan, the website’s analytics played a significant role in gaining knowledge about their audiences.
Along with improving the overall experience and fixing the usability issues, one of our main goals for the new website was to set a robust and strategic information architecture to provide clear navigational patterns for the users. The idea behind it was to give the company input about what people did on their website so they could start gaining knowledge and start asking better questions about their audience’s behavior.
Regarding users, the main challenge was to build a solution that could help two extremely different personas seamlessly: the potential clients searching for information about the company’s services and a way of contacting a representative, and the potential employees, searching for a way to apply for a job.
With all that in mind, we ran a card-sorting workshop, built a prototype, tested it, and iterated it into the final design. The major improvements were:
- We cut down the long navigation menu with overlapping content from ten sections to five, more clearly delimited. Having fewer sections and fewer pages in each section benefits users by reducing choice overload. For the organization, it also means easier maintenance. On top of that, having the sections more clearly segmented makes it easier to track user behavior when doing data analysis.
- We structured the content on each page with a clear hierarchy and using terminology familiar to the users, which was also popular on searches in the targeted languages for SEO purposes.
- We reduced the six original languages into two to reflect the company’s target markets while cutting down content translation costs and shortening the publishing workflow.
- We created a specific section in the main menu for people searching for jobs to help them find the HR contact info easily. This allowed reducing the workload of the Sales team by relieving them from answering job search questions.
- We replaced the template aesthetic with a dedicated design system in line with the branding to help the company differentiate and enhance the overall users’ experience.
- Over the three months after the launch, we kept in contact with the client to monitor the new site’s performance.
Take away
Think of a website as a conversation between the different areas of a company and the different users of its services. When designing, make sure the content meets all the users’ needs and also helps your employees work better.
Plan the content structure so that every part has a clear purpose and the value it brings to the business can be easily evaluated.
Consider the whole content lifecycle and have a plan to create and maintain everything published.
