Some pitfalls

In our experience of working with organisations, all too often their content development strategy is inward looking. Now this isn’t a problem, if the brief is for an internal resource - but in that case we’re probably talking about an intranet, rather than a website.

Organisation structure as website structure

Typically they’ll poll their internal departments asking what the site needs to be and/or do, in order to satisfy the needs of their external users. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that question, you’ll certainly get some helpful detail out of it. The problem most often encountered, is that if you take that feedback and try to represent it literally, you end up with a structure for your website that’s based on the internal structure of your organisation - a structure that’s likely to be entirely opaque to your average external user. It may be accurate, but how is a user to know that the information they are looking for is managed by Department A, or Working-group B or Committee C?

The example we often use to illustrate this problem is this: You’re an employee of a large organisation consisting of many dosen departments. You’ve got some expenses you need to claim back and you’ve been told there’s an expenses form you need to download from the website, fill in and return. Where do you look for it? Is it a Finance issue? Or Accounts? Or possibly Human Resources? Departments might have their own procedures for claiming expenses, so it could be your own department’s responsibility. Any of those options might be a reasonable assumption, so where should that user start looking? Ultimately, it’s not important to them who looks after the form, they just know that they NEED it.

A lack of focus

Secondarily, in polling departments, they’ll often ask questions about what each department needs in order to be accurately represented through the website. The problem here is that if you ask any given department about how important their department is within their organisation, they probably won’t say theirs is the most important, but they’ll likely rank themselves in the top three. It’s human nature to be protective of the things your passionate about, and as a result, most people will say “my department needs to be somewhere on the homepage, because users need to know how to find us.” Once more, if you were to try to represent all that literally, your website will end up being a confusing mash of mixed messages and conflicting calls to action.

In one extreme case of a national charity we worked with, these miss-steps resulted in possibly the most compromised, confused website structure we’ve yet seen. The home page included not one, but three duplicated instances of primary level navigation (by which we mean the first series of pages linking off the homepage, with the pages linking off them being referred to as secondaries, and so on… ), each slightly different to the others. There were no less than four different search boxes, each delivering results for different departmental areas of content. And most confusingly, there was a raft of information designed to cater for internal users which duplicated their organisation intranet, which had no relevance to the majority of visitors to the website.

Choice paralysis

Another common issue is driven by the laudable desire to be really, really, really helpful. The administrator of the website wants to make sure that, no matter who you are or what you’ve come to the site to find, that goal is never more than a click or two away. It’s a good aim, but one expression of that desire is to dump all of those options onto the homepage, allowing users to pick their way through and find the one option they need.

Interestingly, this approach actually works against the ultimate goal. It results in something we call choice paralysis, you can also call it “decision fatigue” or “overchoice”, but the principle is the same. Studies have shown that, when asked to make a choice between a given number of like items, a threshold is reached where-by more choice ceases to be helpful and actually reduces the likelihood that an individual will choose anything at all.

In the context of structuring a website, presenting a user with too many options is likely to result in them making no choice at all, save one; to navigate away from the site and find what they are looking for else-where.

For many years it’s been the case that developers of websites have sought to reduce the number of clicks needed to get to any one piece of content, a tendency driven largely by historically limited bandwidth. Pages took a long time to download, and so you’d try to present a wide profile of options at any one point to keep your site’s maximum click-depth relatively shallow. Click-minimisation was therefor a functionally-driven necessity.

In the UK today, the average connection speed to the internet is now exponentially faster compared to 10 years ago, yet click-minimisation tendencies still define how we think about structuring sites. Click-minimisation is not a bad thing, we should always seek to eliminate redundant pages and clicks that don’t deliver significant content, but there are other approaches which can now be used which limit the number of options presented to a user, guiding them through the site. These might result in more limited profile of options for a user to evaluate, leading to a potentially higher click-depth - but minimising choice paralysis in the process. If a user doesn’t know what they are looking for, it’s often better to present them with a series of ever-narrowing choices - each leading them closer and closer to their end-goal, rather than have all of those options available simultaneously at a higher level.

There’s one caveat here, and that’s mobile access. Bandwidth for mobile users is still relatively slow, and as a result click-minimisation strategies are still entirely relevant. If a sufficiently large number of your users are accessing your site from a phone or tablet, presenting a wide profile of navigation options might be the right solution. Not wishing to add more complexity, it’s also worth factoring for screen-size. If a user is accessing your site through a device with a diminutive screen, your wider navigation structure might run off their screen, obscuring their view of the breadth of options available to them.

Ultimately…

This kind of confusion is a product of a mismatch of a site’s target audience. It’s the result of assuming the needs and priorities of the target audience, are the same as the needs and priorities of the people commissioning the website.

These are just a few of the things you might want to consider when structuring your website’s content, but the solution is likely to be specific to you, and will be based as much on the way you feel about the matter as anything else.