How To Improve the User Experience of Your Website Through Information Architecture
What if you could get your customers to do whatever you wanted them to? Wouldn’t that make business so much easier?
Unfortunately, we don’t have a magic potion or hypnosis technique for guarantee yourself a bigger customer-base and more sales, but we may have the solution you’re looking for to help you in the right direction: Information Architecture.
In this post, we’re going to cover how you can improve your user experience on your website, through the practices of information architecture, to help boost the number of people buying your product or service.
What is information architecture?
Information architecture – often referred to as “IA” – is the study of the organization, structuring and labeling of content, in order to make it as effective as possible. The end-goal of information architecture is to allow users to quickly and easily find the information that they need to be able to fulfill whatever tasks that they’re trying to do.
Essentially then, it is a way to make a website or app more effective at doing its job, be it allowing people to use a service, or simply making it easy for someone to find a product they’re looking for. This means that your website could, for example, be structured in a way that would improve the user experience and encourage more sales.
In order to be able to do this, it is crucial to understand how the pieces of content on a site or platform fit together and relate to one another, so that you can best order and structure them within the system they exist.
How does good IA create more customers?
IA is a huge topic, with various facets that we simply couldn’t fit into a single blog post! Instead, we want to focus on the key parts of information architecture that are most important.
Organisation Structures: This is how you categorise and structure information on your site or digital platform. When an effective structure is created, there is a better user experience on your site, making visitors more likely to stay on it, return to it and potentially purchase.
Labelling Systems: This is how you represent information. By considering labelling carefully, you can help people to find exactly what they’re looking for, thereby making purchasing easier.
Navigation Systems: This is how customers explore the information on your site. By understanding this journey and improving it, your website can point people in the direction of purchase more successfully.
Search Systems: This is how your customers look for information, often that which they need before making a purchase!
Four simple steps to creating a website with better IA
Considering your information architecture may feel overwhelming, especially when you are new to the area. However, as you now know, it is a hugely important aspect of ensuring that your website converts into actual sales/customers.
To get you started, here are four simple things that you can do to improve your IA in a relatively short space of time.
Step 1. Conduct user and market research
In order to know how to improve your site for your users, you need to know as much as possible about who those users actually are! That’s where market and user research come in.
The purpose of any type of research is to help you make informed decisions within your business. It allows you to de-risk the choices you make and strategies you create, by basing them on evidence, as opposed to assumptions.
Market research is the process of gathering information about what your customers and users want and need, so that you can ensure your product is as good as it can be. This can be done through primary research, where your company gathers quantitative data or qualitative insights about your customers and their behaviours. It can also be done on a secondary basis, using data that has already been collected about your ideal customer and the market you exist in.
On the other hand, whilst market research is focused on understanding your customers, user research is more specific, acting as a way for you to understand user behaviours and needs. It can also give great insights into what motivates your users.
Mike Kuniaysky claims that it is “the process of understanding the impact of design on an audience” (Source). That is to say, that user research can inform design decisions, as well as acting as a way to test them with the people that actually have buying power.
Through conducting user and market research, you can begin to understand your customers and how they may want to be communicated to. It can also be particularly useful to use your insights to create a persona, which you can then use to make decisions about your website, to improve the information architecture.
Step 2. Review your website content
Start by looking at each page of your website. Read through the actual content (don’t worry about anything visual at the moment) and start categorising each section by topic. For example, if you are a branding agency, topics may include the importance of branding, your story as a company, pricing, services offered, testimonials, explanations of key terms.
Once you have categorised your page, it’s time to start cutting!
Hopefully you know what your customers are looking for from your research, so really ask yourself whether each topic of content is relevant and necessary to getting them to make a purchase.
Cut anything that you don’t think your customers will actually want or need, helping to streamline your site and immediately make it more user friendly.
Step 3. Card sort your content
Every single piece of content on your site needs to be named effectively. That is to say, that each name given to a type of content must not confuse your site visitor/ideal customer.
That’s where card sorting comes in.
Essentially, card sorting is an activity conducted in small groups of between 15-20 participants who are given various cards with pieces of information on them. The aim is to assess how your customers perceive your content, and therefore to understand how to be categorise everything on your site. Having been given cards with your website’s content on, participants arrange it into either predefined categories which you have created, or “free-label” them.
In doing a card sorting activity, you will gain real insight into how your customers can better understand your website.
Step 4. Perfect your navigation
You know how to make your content easy to understand, now it’s time to figure out how you can help your customers to navigate your site more effectively.
A navigation system is comprised of everything from buttons and menus, and tables of content. However, there are three main types that we think you need to know for now:
Hierarchical: Information is shown in a hierarchy from main categories to subcategories. For example, a drop down menu.
Global: This is a navigation element present on every single page of your site, allowing a visitor to quickly access the home/main page. For example, sticky menus or hamburger menus.
Local: This shows the navigation of one specific part of the site, such as a single page. For example, a list explaining what is to follow as you scroll down a page.
All of these can be used in conjunction. However, one of the most important aspects of good navigation is simplicity: Don’t overload your site and overwhelm your users!
In order to test which of these systems is right for your customers, we recommend conducting an A/B test with different versions of your site to see how it impacts your metrics. You can find out guide on the topic here.
The Key Takeaways
Like we said, information architecture is a very complex topic that can’t be covered in one blog post. However, we hope this has given you a good foundation for starting to organise and structure the content on your website more effectively.
If there’s one thing we hope you take away from reading this, it’s the importance of truly understanding your market and users before you make any business decisions, including those related to information architecture. Armed with these insights about the people that will be using your site, you’ll be able to make evidence-based decisions about everything from content types and structure, to navigation options.
