iMarc.net Redesign: Part 3, Information Architecture
by Dave Tufts - April 18, 2007 / 4:34pm View more articles
iMarc is redesigning our website. These articles chronicle the process from inception to launch.
« Previous Article - Part 2, The Team
After organizing a team, the first task we undertook in our redesign process was to simplify the information architecture (IA). We did this yesterday.
As stated in the Part 1, going from the 2003 to 2005 versions of our site, we trimmed out 3/4th the pages. In this redesign, we plan on cutting out even more.
Annoyances With Current IA
Most of us are happy with the current IA, but noted a couple annoyances. Annoyances aren't really bugs or major problems, just things we don't like.
- Team is the only page of importance that is not in the global navigation. Because the IA is otherwise flat, getting to the team pages is confusing.
- Services, in the major navigation, is a useless page. The bulleted list of services would fit just as well on the About Us page.
- News, in the minor navigation, is also useless. Before we built our blog, we had news. Now we have news and news with comments (aka, the blog). There's no need for both, as evident by the lack of news being posted.
Updating the IA
We had a meeting and decided to remove Services, port the News content into our blog then remove the News page, and move Team to the global navigation. As always, we recorded the thought process on our WIKI. View IA notes from our WIKI
.
View Sitemaps - 2005 version vs. (proposed) 2007 version.
Compare the sitemaps and IA of the two sites. We're simplifying things, making the architecture flatter, and removing the dynamic News tool.
I'm not sure why it's so difficult to convince clients to remove features. Doing it ourselves was the easiest and most logical thing any of us did yesterday.
2005 Information Architecture
- Major navigation: Portfolio, Our Process, Services, About Us
- Minor navigation: Contact Us, News, Communique, Client Support (in footer)
- Not in either global navigation: Team
2007 Information Architecture (proposed)
- Major navigation: Portfolio, Our Process, About Us, Communique
- Minor navigation: Contact Us, Team, Client Support
Simpler. Better. Hopefully.
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8 Comments
If you did it this way, the home page most likely would have a call out space to communique anyways, so it really doesn't have to stick out on the nav.
Anyways, this is just a thought and I hope I am not stepping on toes here....
In my experience, suggesting the removal of a feature inevitably leads to the sentence "[name] from [department] needs [feature] to [track/post/review] [esoteric] content, so we absolutely must have it."
It's easy here, when no one's job is directly tied to a feature on the site.
We were thinking of moving Team to the minor nav (still, defaulting to Nils). Two clicks to get to an employee's page.
Your idea is really interesting and accomplishes the same thing we want - two clicks to get to an employee's page.
On a side note, in our meeting yesterday, we brought up the RAKA portfolio as an example of niceness.
For example, our team Polaroids currently fit in 800x600, but we're adding a couple more people. As we planned, average monitors now handle 1024px so we just get wider. In a couple years, we'll add 3 or 4 more people, just as monitors get to 1280.
seriously... good point - we're just getting into visual design issues internally. That will be written about soon.
1280 people? Good luck managing that team...
I'm actually quite attached to the portfolio page. It is highly influential in the work I conduct with my colleagues (see Exhibit N, Exhibit K-1, and Exhibit K-2).