Project Overview: Information Architecture Participatory Design Workshops
Methods and Skills: Content inventories, participatory design workshop facilitation, card sorting, sitemapping
Deliverables: Sitemaps
Tools: Sticky notes, whiteboards, Omnigraffle
Problem
The University of Michigan-Dearborn website was undergoing a redesign process that involved many moving parts, including:
Building a new CMS
A visual redesign
An information architecture (IA) overhaul
Previously, the site had been structured with the university org chart in mind, something that didn’t resonate with the site’s primary audiences - prospective and current students. Prior to the redesign efforts there was also no consistent web content strategy in place and in many instances, the site was being used as a storage system for internally-facing files, rather than as its intended purpose of an externally-facing communication and marketing tool.
Before I began working at the university, IA consultants proposed a high-level sitemap based on stakeholder priorities and user interview data. However, four colleges and several non-academic units needed to find a place for their individual webpages in the university-wide sitemap. They also needed to clean house on the over 10,000 webpages that had been created but not well maintained for many years.
Process
Who was involved: University stakeholders/subject-matter experts, me
To get stakeholder buy-in on the reorganizing of pages into the new sitemap, I turned to participatory design. I worked with the director of the UM-Dearborn web team to design information architecture workshops, where we collaborated with our stakeholders on creating a starter sitemap for their section of the site that they could organize their webpages into, as well as get them to start thinking differently about what content they put on the site. We designed the workshops to be interactive to engender a sense of ownership and repeatable for the large number of departments we needed to meet with. We invited a cross-section of stakeholders: both managers/directors of a department, as well as people who were at the frontline of their offices fielding calls and emails and could speak to user needs. Prior to the workshops, we asked our stakeholders to perform a ROT (redundant, outdated, and trivial) analysis to take the first step in eliminating old and unneeded content. My task was to help them sort what was left by conducting a workshop and creating a sitemap afterwards.
THE WORKSHOP FORMAT
An introduction to IA. We began with a definition of information architecture and why it was important (if people can get what they need on your site, that can mean fewer calls to field and more time to do other work), as well as an explanation of the new navigation patterns found on the university website (e.g., What’s the difference between a local and related navigation menu? What is a breadcrumb? What’s a hamburger menu?)
Definition of audiences and goals. We asked stakeholders to tell us who they served in their offices and who they wanted to serve with their web content. We also asked them to define their goals for the site and speak to the content frequently needed by their audiences. We then matched audiences to goals and looked for patterns.
Development of high-level categories. Based on the audiences and goals conversation, we developed high-level categories for their section of the site.
A card sort of existing pages into the newly defined categories. I had sticky notes ready!
A department-level sitemap, which existed as a part of a whole university-wide sitemap.
Deliverables
Global Sitemap (very large file but shows scope of project)
Outcome and Next Steps
Each department/group was given a high-level sitemap (their chunk of the larger university-wide sitemap), designed to grow as their services and offerings grew. Previously, there was no university-wide sitemap or information architecture strategy.
The number of pages went from over 10,000 to about 3,900, thanks in large part to the removal of redundant, outdated and trivial pages identified in the content inventories. We also put in place a new governance model, limiting those who could add a page to the site to specially trained website power users who are better equipped to identify when a new page should be created and where it should live in the sitemap.
Increased site traffic. We saw a 9.8% increase in page views in the first year and a significant increase in traffic (including over 20% from search).
A culture shift. People who rarely thought about their websites before now come to my team asking for help with their web content and information architecture.
As a next step, we’ve established a regular content maintenance plan. We also have started testing key portions of the sitemap with actual users through Treejack testing and other methods. Ideally, we would have incorporated additional user research into the project earlier on but we did have the data collected by our IA consultants and referred to analytics data when appropriate for decision making.