Dancing about Information Architecure

December 18, 2011 7:26 PM

Best practice advice for overhauling the Information Architecture of a large website. For various reasons, we are looking to drastically overhaul the IA of a large (many 1000s of pages) site, to reflect a change in purpose. I'm interested in practical considerations and best practice ways to ensure the transition is as seamless as possible for users, search engines and wotnot.

For example, it would be lovely if we 301 redirected our important pages to pages on the new site to prevent linkrot - but that will create a huge, probably unmanageable list of redirects going forward, so we're looking for resources, tips and advice from others that might have faced such issues before that we can scour for general pitfall avoidance, and overall painfulnesslessness.

posted by Sparx to Technology (4 answers total)

Best answer: The most important factor learned from my experiences so far is to get as much buy-in as possible from your users. Make them feel like they're part of the process the whole way through - as many of them as possible, and as thoroughly as possible. They're going to get very irritated when things change - it'll feel like somebody rearranged their houses and now they can't find anything, no matter how terrible the site was before. If they feel like they contributed their knowledge and expertise to the new project, that they own it, they'll feel a little better. This can involve giant group brainstorming meetings, interviewing dozens of key people, testing ideas on people in hallways, recruiting advocates in the community to defend your decisions to their friends, making prototypes to show small groups of people and listening to them, and legitimate user testing as you go along. Most untrained people's ideas won't actually be helpful, and you'll get a million conflicting ideas, but that's ok, you're learning from them and tipping the balance from "ow stop messing with things" to "cautiously supportive of useful change". Also change things gradually if you can - have both sites available for a while if possible, for example, so people can get used to the new ideas before being forced over to them, or change one section at a time, or first change the logo and then change the category names and then change the homepage photo. No matter how well you do, they're going to be mad at first when things look different and feel almost disrespected, but if you do things right, they'll learn to appreciate the improvements and overcome the discomfort of having to learn a new system.

For redirects, you might be able to get a "good enough" solution by redirecting a section's sub-pages to the new section (like redirecting /widgets/green, /widgets/red, and /doohickies/ to the new section at /gadgets/) and making sure the new site's search feature is robust. Also look at your site's analytics to figure out what the top-visited pages are and make sure those pages redirect to something sensible. And maybe survey your users to find out what they have bookmarked, if you can.

Some useful stuff to consider: A List Apart on information architecture and user testing, The Page Paradigm, "Why wasn't I consulted?"
posted by dreamyshade at 11:03 PM on December 18, 2011 [1 favorite]

I'm not seeing the maintenance pain of the redirects. Once you set them up, presumably using mod_rewrite, then they are established. You real risk is that you undergo a third wave of changes before inbound links have evolved to the new scheme. In that case you might use your web stats program to prioritize the ones that must be maintained.
posted by dgran at 9:08 AM on December 19, 2011

IA changes so much from site to site that it's hard to speak in generalities (among a few other things, I do IA for a living).

I agree that user buy-in is important, and that users should be involved in every step of the process (not the least because, when there are disagreements over IA decisions, you'll need to be able to point to the evidence behind your reasoning).

I start every IA change with an open card sort, which I soon follow up with a closed card sort. I try to include at least 20 test subject for each test.

dgran pretty much covered my thoughts on page forwarding.
posted by coolguymichael at 10:12 AM on December 19, 2011 [1 favorite]

Is governance an issue? When you have that many pages you often have multiple ways of managing content, usually for different stakeholders, some of which are probably not the "official" way. Any strategy for going forward should take content management, approval and sign off into account. This doesn't need to be baked into your CMS, but having formalized controls over this can prevent your revised IA from ballooning back outwards after your reorganization.
posted by dobie at 12:19 PM on December 19, 2011