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.