Utility Warehouse- From Content Audit to overall Information Architecture Recommendations
UW wanted to inform their content strategy and to feed recommendations into their roadmap. They knew that content was old, meandering and heavy. A content audit would provide UW with the opportunity to create a better customer experience, streamline our content and reorganise the IA from the ground up.
For this project, I collaborated with a Senior User Researcher and SEO analytics specialist and was later called back to create a website’s sitemap. This project had three rounds of testing from audit to user testing insights.
Round 1: Audit
Understand.
UW was already in the design making. They needed to evaluate their content through a high-level audit following a report on its findings. I collaborated with the project lead to define the content to audit, the timeframes and the requested outcomes.
Create.
I conducted a content quality (R=Redundant, O=Outdated, T=Trivial (ROT) analysis (Halvorson, K. Casey, M.) on 53 web pages, analysed the content in terms of page views, usage stats, content quality, usability score notes and outlined significant actions to aid UW with decisions:
What material is working well/could work better
What pages are being visited
What pages are not utilised
High-level next steps, (e.g. migrate to the new site, improve or delete)
One of the leading Audit findings was poor content quality, lack of Information Architecture and lack of interactivity both at a site structural and page level.
Deliver
I then built a report including the executive summary of audit findings, the audit method and a set of recommendations with examples from competitor companies. The audit spreadsheet, along with the presentation deliverables, were particularly valued by the new Product Owner. He was looking where to start from to get a better understanding of the service.
Round 2
Understand
After the Audit report, I was soon called back to define the website’s Information Architecture (IA). I needed to understand where different stakeholders want to put their content and where do users expect to find it. Where would their mental models match? IA problems usually call for card sorting or tree-testing maps methods.
Create
I designed a Research plan using ‘parallel card sorting’ method. First, a workshop for business stakeholders and then UW target user group to an ‘open-ended’ card sorting to look for patterns in their way of thinking.
I facilitated a workshop for 8–12 stakeholders who planned to create, maintain or approve content within the UW website. The workshop followed a collaborative approach across departments allowing people to exchange ideas and re-imagine ways of organising content that surfaces the UW’s primary proposition.
Deliver
Unfortunately, the workshop was not so well received as it was found confusing, needed extra time to conclude, and stakeholders could not see the value at that stage. However, the work had yet to be completed without user testing. The workshop outcomes included three sitemaps created by each subgroup, which I then used to juxtapose with the sitemaps deriving from the card sort.
Round 3
Understand
What content structure makes more sense for UW users so that users can achieve their goals?
At first, I wanted to conduct a tree test on the resulting sitemaps to validate the stakeholders resulting work. However, due to lack of time and budget, it was better to build an “open-card” sort allowing the user to be more creative and suggest their structures, product categories and name them.
Create
I led the user research implementing the learnings of the workshop in a new Research Plan, testing with participants individually, so they don’t feel pressured to compete in groups. The labels used for this practise included the workshop’s outcomes so that each phase of research informed the next. I also created the discussion guide, the consent forms and organised a pilot test and facilitated the user test. Finally, I analysed the user feedback using a thematic analysis method, clustering patterns of groupings in both the stakeholder and user mental models.
Deliver
The deliverables included the website sitemap including main navigation hierarchy and footer and the Card sorting report sharing research findings common themes on how users group services and products creating a user journey.
Outcome: Both deliverables informed the backbone of content or so call information Architecture (IA) of the redesigned website and could be used to initiate the design of user journeys and personas, further developing the work grounded on user insights.