Redesign information architecture

According to usability.gov, Information architecture (IA) focuses on organising, structuring, and labeling content in an effective and sustainable way. The goal is to help users find information and complete tasks.

Organisations often ignore user needs when it comes to the creation of information architecture. We need to start from a different premise.

Most websites begin life with the question “what do we want to say?” However, to ensure a site is user-centric, we should start with the question “what do users want to know?” This shift in emphasis will make all the difference in the world to both site architecture and content.

Collect questions and tasks

Some internal brainstorming will be a good start, but don't stop there. Look at site analytics and in particular search terms that people use on the BMMI Shops website. These will help uncover further questions users are asking.

Using Alosra as an example, a quick look at Google Analytics showed us that the search term 'Organic' was used more times than 'Water' was over the course of 12 months. This information tells us that there is a significant interest in organic produce from users looking to purchase online. The easier we can make it for these people to find organic products, the more likely they are to buy from us. With this in mind, we restructured the menu so that 'Organic' was the first item on the 'Groceries' dropdown.

Running a simple survey on the BMMI Shops website is also a useful way for gathering insights into what users wish to do or what questions they need to be answered.

Finally, running workshop sessions where you ask users to brainstorm questions or tasks they might have, will further expand the list.

The result of this research should be an impressively long list of potential things somebody might want to do, or know, when visiting your website.

However, not all questions or tasks are equal. Some things will be more important to users than others, and it is essential to identify which these are, as that will inform our visual hierarchy and site information architecture. That is where a top task analysis can help.

Run a Top Task Analysis

Top task analysis is a process developed by Gerry McGovern to help identify the things that users most care about on your website.

Gerry discovered that the majority of users only care about a small subset of the content that exists on your website. However, they often find it hard to locate that content because they are distracted by other information. To avoid this problem, we need to identify the top tasks. The things that users most care about and want to know.

The first step in a top task analysis is to gather all of the potential tasks that a user might want to complete. That is what you will complete by gathering questions and tasks as outlined above. Following that, we need to reduce that list down to something a little more manageable.

Create a Shortlist

Creating a shortlist of potential tasks and questions is principally about removing duplicates and combining overlaps. Also, cut out anything that isn't a task or question.

Finally, keep your tasks universal. Don’t start adding tasks and questions specific to individual audiences at this stage.

Your final shortlist will vary in length, but try and keep it under the hundred item mark. This is because the next step is to survey users to find out which ones they care about most.

Getting Customers to Vote

Typically this involves either posting a survey via your website and social media or sending out an email. In either case, you are asking participants to rank their top five tasks by giving five to the most important one, four to the next most important and so on.

At face value, this seems unlikely to be effective. Asking users to select between potentially a hundred different options and rank them seems like too much. In a sense, this is correct.

The reason this approach works is the very fact that it can be overwhelming. There is too much information for them to go through each result individually and assess whether it matters to them. Instead, they are forced to ask themselves what they want to do, and then scan the list to find it. That prevents the tasks themselves from influencing them too much.

What will be evident when looking at the results is that a small proportion of the tasks get the vast majority of votes. These are BMMI Shops top tasks, and they are the elements that the information architecture can be built around.

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