2010 revisions to the top-level navigation
Project:
Information architecture, navigation, taxonomy
Strategy
In 2007, when I became web director at AIGA, the professional association for design, the organization had recently launched a lovely new design but usability issues emerged. Staff and member reports revealed:
• People weren’t finding what they wanted.
• There were too many steps to perform simple tasks.
• Site visitors couldn’t figure out what the organization was and what it did.
• Return visitors didn't recognize new content, leaving some with the sense that the site wasn't current.
• Members couldn’t figure out how to create or maintain their portfolios. Employers couldn’t figure out how to find designers. Designers couldn’t figure out how to search for jobs.
• Everyone regularly confused login and search fields.
• Staff lacked means to promote organization events, deadlines and news.
Goals:
It was soon clear that we needed to:
• Discover what visitors wanted but couldn't find, and what tasks they had trouble performing.
• Revise taxonomy, particularly navigation labels, to be consistant with user expectations and business goals.
• Improve form design and simplify processes.
• Remove extraneous or duplicative pages and steps in task flow.
• Clarify that AIGA is a member-based organization with chapters around the country and world.
• Promote organization news and events without increasing staff workload.
Process:
With no budget for a site re-evaluation, we worked with tools at hand or freely available via web services. First up was to institute site evaluation with Google Analytics. In addition, we set out to:
• Perform informal user-testing with staff, strangers visiting the office, members attending events – pretty much anyone we could get in front of a web browser.
• Evaluate existing site map and taxonomy to identify redundancies, inconsistencies and orphaned content.
• Identify low-hanging fruit, i.e., things easily remediated by moving content within existing architecture.
• Determine where editorial rewrites would suffice or browser redirects required for eliminated pages.
• Each time we instituted changes, online behavior and member requests served as live usability tests, leading to further iterative changes.
Results:
Over three years, changes to AIGA’s navigation were gradual but significant, drastically reducing support requests and complaints, drawing broad praise for increased ease of use, without causing alarm to regular site visitors.
The improvements included:
• Iterative, subtle changes to navigation labels and elimination of redundancies addressed a host of usability problems.
• The separation of login and search tasks resulted in near-elimination of a large set of support requests.
• Increased real estate devoted to chapters and member benefits helped to broadcast that AIGA is a member-based organization.
• Moving the login to the topmost nav bar and making it link to a member management page – with upsell opportunities for non-members – communicated that there is “something extra” available for those able with credentials.
• Clearly differentiating and sampling content from the two formerly most not-found links – AIGA's member portfolios site and Design Job listings site – drove much traffic to them while eliminating support calls.
• Consistant presentation of information across the site eased user-experience across the board.
• Simple additions to the CMS toolset permitted re-use of data to populate news throughout the site and to RSS feeds.
• Addition of social media feeds helped keep the site looking up-to-date.
Homepage revisions illustrating additional space allocated to individual chapters and member benefits.
Fields to login and search had been closely placed and looked similar enough that even staff mistook one for the other.
This revised layout eliminated that risk.
