Information architecture (IA), considering the impact of social, user generated content and mobile

London | 20–24 Feb, 2012 | #seslondon

Guava UK
• Edward (Teddie) Cowell, SEO Director, Guava
• Thoughts around developing a modern information architecture (IA),
considering the impact of social, user generated content and mobile.

goo.gl/XqQQP+ @GuavaUK


What do we mean by IA?
• IA refers to the structure and organisation of your website. It describes the
planning process that defines the goals , content, organisation, navigation,
labelling (link text) and wireframe designs that will become the foundation
of your website.

• If I skim brutally between what some of you think as IA but others classify
as technical architecture, that's because in some instances I think it is
pointless thinking about one without considering the other.
Image source: Princeton University - Guide to Creating Website Information Architecture



Why do the IA projects arise?
Greenfield or Retrofit?

Very few websites are what I'd call Greenfield projects any more. Which is both
good and bad.

• Greenfield projects have the luxury that you can plan all the IA and technical
architecture cleanly from the start.

• Start with a completely clean slate or something so bad there's practically
nothing worth preserving.

• They are really fun to work on, some of my favourite projects...
– Confused.com
– Talksport
– Just The Flight
– Classic Cottages



Rebuild, retrofit IA projects
• Rebuild or retrofit projects add another layer of complexity, because you
may come up with a new IA that’s fundamentally different from what is
already in place.

• Might need a content migration and redirection plan (as some of you will
have seen in the presentation yesterday afternoon).

• Additionally whatever technical architecture is in place may be less than
ideal. Less than ideal URLs? CMS may or may not support all the
functionality required to do everything you want?



Rebuild, retrofit IA projects
However these types of projects also have some benefits... in that you should
already have your own data to work with, which can reveal what your
customers want and how they want to engage with you, which can help guide
your content, wireframes and navigation.

• Look at your analytics data:
– Landing pages and referral keyphrases
– Which pages are in the user journey - next page choices?
– What are users searching for next in on-site searches?

• Every page in a website is a potential landing page and access point to
elsewhere. Healthspan - “93% of our website traffic enters through the side
door, only 7% goes via the homepage, but it’s pretty hard to convince our IT
team that the homepage isn’t the most important page in the website ”



A failure to plan, is a plan to fail.
• The IA process can take a long time, much longer than most people may
think it will. This is because unless a single person has complete control of
everything, thinking things through in a group and gaining consensus isn’t
always easy.

• You will and should look at a lot of things other people are doing online for
ideas. Use the IA time to work out what’s good about them and make
those ideas even better.

• You will probably develop and throw away many sets if plans. That’s
nothing to be ashamed of.

• But getting it right means you'll have a better idea how your new website
will function and what you're going to get.



Does everyone here know what their website looks like?

Which device were you looking at it on...Laptop, iPad..... Smart phone?

Where were you looking at it?



Modern websites perform a variety of functions.
• Sales / Customer Acquisition
• Marketing Support
• Customer Support
• Legal
• PR



On different devices.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/



Using different services.

http://www.google.com/producer/currents



IA for a website? or IA for a web presence?



How people access websites (which devices) will become increasingly significant



Devices
When doing you’re IA planning you aren't thinking about one website any
more. At a minimum you’re building two variants, but quite possibly three
or even four....

"According to a recent release from Park Associates, worldwide sales of smart
TVs and connected Blu-ray players, consoles, and digital video players will
grow from 95 million (2010) to more than 360 million (2015)."



http://www.parksassociates.com/blog/article/pr-jan4-2011


Mobile & Other devices
It's important to make some early decisions around mobile and other devices
because it dictates how you will approach your IA.

There are different opinions about how you should approach these websites,
but broadly your options fall in to:

1. Separate domains (.mobi)
2. Sub-directories (/mobile)
3. Sub-domains (mobile.)
4. Single URL Progressively Enhanced Responsive Websites
(SUPER Websites)



Different form factors, same location.

Directline.com



Seperate websites vs one responsive website
However even within Google there isn't much consensus on what is the right
way to do it, as some Googlers prefer Single URL progressively enhanced
responsive websites...see Mike West's Google Developer Day
presentation, “what is the best way to build a mobile site?”

https://mkw.st/p/gdd11-berlin-modern-web-apps/#13

But the current published webmaster guidelines are all about having a
separate mobile site :

www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-
guide.pdf

More on that debate here: http://goo.gl/bLz81



How does the way you intend to build your mobile
website affect your IA decisions?
• It changes your thinking from two entirely separate websites and IA
projects, to one project that needs to fulfil multiple criteria, so you need
to balance the content presented with the linking and navigation
priorities.

source: http://www.thismanslife.co.uk/projects/lab/responsivewireframes/#mobile
• This doesn't supersede traditional organisational content hierarchies, but
it helps work out what should go in each separate version of the
website, or whether you should have one common denominator
crawlable version, and how the navigation might be setup on both
variants.


SUPER Sites
• What a Single URL progressively enhanced responsive website (SUPER
Website) encourages you to do is heavily streamline the content and links.

• This has a couple of benefits for SEO consistency over the
mobile.website.com or website.com/mobile/ approaches:

– It encourages developers to build the templates much more efficiently
and to offload all the main images into CSS, JS into libraries and make
better use of sprites etc. This makes the website much faster.

– Reduces SEO headaches managing multiple sites, user agent
redirects, link aggregation and duplicate content.



Keyphrase research to decide target content.
Google Keyword tool mobile with full browser vs desktop keyphrase research.

(Smartphones & Ipads)

Looking for both similarities and differences
- Similarities become your common denominators.
- Differences need factoring into the IA carefully.



Social
• Social disrupts standard IA thinking around links and navigation. Because
using some of these services encourages accessing of content off-site.



• You may not really think this is an IA consideration, but I think it is,
because at this point you are deciding where you want the content
categorised and where we want it linked to?

• Social has extended the boundaries of your website onto other platforms.
Or if you think about it in another way, other platforms such as Google+
have become extensions of your website.



Authorship tags
• The trouble is the search platforms don't give us the tools we'd really like
in order to control our own IA effectively, whilst also helping them achieve
their goals.

Google+

• Google knows about author pages on your website, but instead chooses to
link from the results page to Google+



Publisher (direct connect) brand pages



UGC - Reviews data
Designing an effective framework for user generated content in the IA is also
critical. For a number of reasons:

1. The reviews themselves can be a valuable dynamic contribution to the
websites content bringing in direct traffic and contributing to the unique
in page content.



2. The quantitative data gathered from those reviews can be presented in a
way that seriously bolsters click through rates from results pages.

Increase CTR by 2%-15%



• Social broadens the width of your IA considerations beyond the
boundaries of ‘your website’.

• Device shifting (desktop,tablet,mobile) means you need to make more
choices and do more content, navigation and wireframe planning early on.

• IA takes time, but underpins everything else. Don’t rush it.


Information architecture (IA), considering the impact of social, user generated content and mobile

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

More from Guava UK

More from Guava UK (8)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Information architecture (IA), considering the impact of social, user generated content and mobile