Navigation and Information Architecture

The Process

Content Audit and ROT Analysis

Pulling a report of all 400+ website pages, I rated each page as current content ready for migration or as Redundant, Outdated or Trivial (ROT).

I was also able to categorize each page by content goal, intended audience, language, and focus. This helped me to determine how pages were related to each other.

Card Sorting

We deployed a card sort prior to making any assumptions on our users behalf. After preparing the unmoderated, remote test using OptimalSort. We sent it out to 700 of our highly engaged customers. Unfortunately, after leaving it open for 3 weeks we only received 8 responses. These results were not enough to be considered statistically significant and these results did not impact our overall approach to our menu design.

Key Lesson Learned
We may need to incentivize our customers if we hope gather meaningful feedback.

Sitemap

I created some sitemaps to understand which pages we would be building, as this is a live embed of my Whimsical sitemap. This is the final version and includes pages that we decided to delete.

Wireframes

In order to effectively prepare for internal presentation and discussion with stakeholders, I prepared some initial wireframes of the marketing navigation.

Tree Test

Tree testing helps you evaluate the findability of topics on your website. It is an information architecture validation test to determine if the content is available where your customers expect it to be.

This test was incentivized and completed by 79 users, who took an average of 5:27 to complete the eight tasks. 51 Customers and 28 staff respondents.

Questions

I wrote the following questions for the test. These questions were designed to mimic key scenarios that our customers might face.

Key Findings

Staff and Customers not aligned
When staff are eliminated, the success rates across the board drop dramatically. The staff understands, customers don’t.

External users expect navigation to be subject/action/topic based, rather than audience-based.
This is most starkly reflected in answers where navigation elements are interpreted as subject areas (e.g. “finance solutions” and “provider solutions” for credit).

Users do not understand what Connection Hub is due to the vagueness of the term

Solutions, Resources, Support, and Connections Hub as navigational elements are too similar and don’t provide enough of an information “scent.”

Examples of Results

Where would you go to learn about RouteOne’s tablet based menu presentation tool?
Answer: (Dealer Solutions > Menu Tools > Tablet Menu)

Where do you go to find finance sources that support eContracting?

• Dealer Solutions: 27 per cent first; 39 per cent during
• Finance Source Solutions: 52 per cent first; 61 per cent during
• Provider Solutions: 5 per cent first; 15 per cent during

Key Problems Identified

Revisions based on research

Final Results

Key Lessons Learned

A key lesson I learned here is how difficult it can be to recruit users for research. We tried to just ask them initially to help us improve the product for them, however this proved to be an ineffective tactic. What ended up being more useful was to incentivize our users to give us feedback. This dramatically increased the response rate and gave us valuable insights to help guide our approach.