Posts by Eric
Creating a site-map
Producing an accurate site-map isn’t just an early step in our process; for us it’s a critical piece of the entire project. In simple terms, an effective site-map should accomplish two things. First, it should get users to content without a fuss, and second, it should utilize architecture and labels strategically to express your brand.
We spend a lot of time and energy when creating a site-map, but in the end, it actually looks pretty modest. In fact, it’s basically a simple bullet list arranged hierarchically to demonstrate each piece of content’s permanent home in the website architecture. The top level items in the hierarchy of the list establish the consistent website navigation, and sometimes, depending on the project, we’ll also depict callout navigation right in the same list. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning.
Our site-mapping process is straight forward, balanced, and flexible with a twofold focus on user centered architecture and brand expression. In most cases, we follow a simple three step process.
Step one: identifying your content
First, we’ll want to identify what content will be offered in your website. Often this is pretty straightforward, but in some cases you may not have all the specifics nailed down. Basically, we want to make sure we understand your content as clearly as possible before proceeding. We’ll do a lot of research and have a lot of conversations with you. We’ll talk about your business goals, about your brand, and about your industry. The final goal here is to identify what your content is, and how your users can consume it most meaningfully, in a way that strengthens their relationship with your brand.
The deliverable for this portion of the process is a simple, concise content list, which, as you’ve probably guessed, will be a list of the content you plan to offer. We’ll collaborate around the list until we can all agree that it’s definitive, at which point we’ll move on. The content list will look something like this:
Step two: understanding your users
Once we’ve got your content figured out, it’s important to understand how your users will interact with it in the real world. Specifically, we want to know where in a website they’re most likely to look for each individual “stop” on the content list. How do we know how people think about your content? We ask them. By performing some user-led design exercises on the content list we created in step one, we’re able to get some additional perspective on the taxonomy, or classification, of your content. This can provide surprising insight that improves general navigability and ensures we don’t blunder into “we’ve just always done it that way” mistakes. The deliverable for this portion of the process is the results of the user-led design exercises, which look like this:
These types of results will make more sense if you read the user-led design exercises blog post linked above.
Step three: recommend, rinse, repeat
Backed by the conversations and collaboration with you from step one, the real-world user behavior data from step two, and our experience with norms on the web, we’ll create and present an initial candidate for your site-map. We’ll collaborate with you around the site-map until we get something we can all agree will really work - and a little later on in the process, we’ll even test it to make sure. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the final deliverable, while the result of considerable effort, actually looks pretty modest.
So what’s the value of all this? A fluid, intuitive user experience that embodies your brand and performs. Here’s to you, site-map.
Building websites for content
We take a content-first approach to building websites. That means that one of the first things we’ll do in a project is ask you for all of the content you plan on publishing to the web. That’s right, all of it.
What if you don’t have all of it?
Well, then we’ll want to have some really in depth discussions about what it’s going to be. Content is an incredibly important part of every project for us, here’s a few reasons why.
Where’s the beef?
Users want stuff. Whether it’s products, news, images, articles, local weather, social networking or a plethora of other things, your content is the reason people come to your website. Your content is what we’ll design for during the creative phase. It’s what we’ll build for during development. In fact, putting your users in touch with your content in a no-nonsense way will be our motivation in every step of the project. When it comes to building a website, understanding your content isn’t only a good way to start, it’s the only way.
Your content, your brand
The copy, images, video and rich media applications that you serve your users are the heart of your brand on the web. They’re how you communicate with your audience; how you build and maintain relationships that perform. The better we know your content, the better we know your organization - which helps us create a website that communicates your vision, embodies your brand, and invigorates your audience.
Everything in its place
People expect to find things in specific, sometimes arbitrary or surprising, places. Shoe polish? Look next to light bulbs. Camping gear? Try sporting goods, next to automotive.
Web content is no different. Your users expect to find content in specific places, and we need to make sure it’s there, waiting for them. A solid information architecture can mean the difference between frantic, frustrated clicking, and smooth, intuitive browsing. So how do we know your user’s browsing habits? Among other things, we ask them how they’d find your content.. This process is a critical step in building your website, and we’ll need a comprehensive list of your content to complete it.
Unique approach for unique content
Your content helps to define our development approach. Do you plan on promoting company events? We’ll need to build a calendar. How about feature staff biographies? We’ll probably want to integrate profiles with user accounts. Each type of content that you feature on your website could mean a custom tailored solution, so we’ll need to be as prepared as possible. Having access to all of your content up front assures that we build out the functionality of your website realistically, with no surprises, and in a way that fits your needs like a glove.
Details, details, details
When it comes to the front end, it’s the small things that take a website from good to great. Getting the style right on an author’s name, a publication date, an address for an event, a blockquote, etc., profoundly improves the overall readability and aesthetic of the final product. Getting familiar with these details from the get-go, that is, the specific challenges your content presents, gives us much more time to get it right, and minimizes any “crunch” leading up to the launch date.
So what does all of this mean for you? Basically, expect to deliver a whole lot of content, and to do it really early on in the project. The way we see it, we’ll both reap the rewards. You’ll get an effective, smooth process and a high performance website that you can really be proud of, and we’ll get - well - pretty much the same thing, actually.
Card Sorting: Getting the right results
We’ve been been performing simple card sorting exercises for some time now to gain insight on how people think about content. If you don’t know what card sorting is, read about it here. The results can be fascinating, and more importantly, useful.
Why we like it
Card sorting has found a comfortable home in our information architecture process, somewhere between market strategy and industry conventions. In addition to helping us develop navigation language, card sorting puts our assumptions about information architecture to the test. We learn where people expect to find content, and what other content they expect to find there. Sometimes, card sorting provides some surprising and exciting feedback, and it’s always fun to work those results into our final product. Generally, though, the results coincide with our expectations, which is valuable in itself because it helps to get our clients on board with our recommendations that much quicker. We can simply say “it’s in the cards”.
The old method
At first, we were doing all of our card sorting manually. We’d solicit a few participants, get together some numbered index cards, sticky notes, and a few pens, and go for it. Our participants would scratch out their categories, which cards go where, and any notes they had on a sheet of paper, then collect their money and leave smiling. Afterward, I’d do the dirty work of putting the results together in a huge spreadsheet and counting how frequently different sets of cards were categorized together.
The spreadsheet was a mess. Participants were represented as columns (A, B, C, etc), and cards were represented as rows(1,2,3,etc). In each cell, I would write the number of the other cards that were sorted with the card number of that row, by the user defined in that column. Afterward, I would count up the frequency of each card appearing with another card, or a specific group of cards. It was a pain.
The new method.
Optimalsort. To be fair, Brad mentioned this to me awhile back, and it’s taken me some time to really look into it. To be fairer, if I’d googled “card sorting”, google would have mentioned it to me, too. I take little consolation in it being a paid ad.
Optimalsort is an online card sorting application. It’s free for up to three projects, with ten participants each. It’s easy to use. No more index cards and messy spreadsheets, right? Kind of.
The Problem
Optimalsort saves us tons of time and trouble actually administering the card sorting tests, and I’ve got no complaints there. They also provide a few result analysis options that are useful in their own right - including results standardized for use in an analysis spreadsheet designed by Joe Lamantia. These work great in a closed sort.
The problem is that the analysis options provided by Optimalsort for an open card sort don’t offer the metrics that I’m most interested in - how frequently individual cards are grouped together, or in other words, a cluster analysis. In Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld mention just one “obvious” quantitative metric to capture during open sorts: The percentage of time that users place two cards together.
The solution
Optimalsort offers the open card sort data in raw CSV format, which is great, because it means you can figure out how to do just about anything with the results - given a little time and effort.
Or, even better, someone else can figure out how to do just about anything with the results. Aapo Puskala, a Finnish psychologist with a focus on user interfaces, is just the guy. His card sort cluster analysis tool turns raw Optimalsort CSV data into a whole pile of useful metrics, including, of course, the percentage of time that users place two cards together. Sweet.
Thanks, Aapo.