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Creating an Effective Information Architecture Fit to the Audience’s Existing Mental Models

THE SOLUTION

Innovating to Adapt to Changes in Audience Behavior

Since users were not getting to the appropriate content at the level of success that we (and they) desired, we knew we needed to evaluate the site’s navigation structure, and also understand if we had grouped, named, and categorized the site’s content to match the new patterns of use our audience was exhibiting.

Our Primary Goal:
Uncover the natural mental models used by our audience to optimally label, categorize, and order the content that exists on our site. In other words, match our site’s information architecture and navigation patterns to the expectations of our users.

Outcome/Measure of Success:
Higher task completions and engagement measures across highly-sought, core-task-related site content.

TEAM RESEARCH ACTIVITIES

Bringing Forward Legacy Research as a Team

Before we initiated user research on the information architecture, our team cooperated to distill insights from a massive set of past research. We did this together over a few white board sessions in which we broke off into groups to derive relevant findings that should be integrated into the efforts of the current project.

I facilitated the group to then create a synthesis of this information. We packaged these findings up, and rolled them into the research proposals we’d create for a third-party research partner’s deep dive into user behavior.

AUDIENCE AND USER RESEARCH

Building a Confluence of Research to Guide the Way

Months went by, and the results were in. Major problems were detected in the ways that people found content on our site. Some of the audience’s top tasks weren’t represented well within the nav structure, and some desired content was missing information scent from the site’s category labels.

For instance, the word “Insurance” was missing from our financial help content category, as we learned that the production teams before us had not accounted for fast navigation to the insurance coverage information on the site. We also learned that new top user tasks, like understanding side effects, needed to be elevated to the top level of the navigation. Insights like this allowed us to develop a list of requirements for fixing the site’s navigation and labeling, but there was another huge caveat we needed to account for…

ORGANIZING AND LABELING CONTENT

Matching our Information Architecture to Audience Mental Models

We proposed an open card sort to our third-party researchers, and the findings they came back with were stunning. The audience did not, in fact, group the content in the same way that our organization did. For example, the audience did not think of support information as “Patient Support”, but instead grouped this content into two entirely distinct categories, “Product Support” and “Living-with-Cancer Support”. This was a massive paradigm shift in how our organization thought about this content.

What complicated matters more was that the audience was using different terms to identify the content. We realized that many in our audience were novices in the world of pharmaceuticals, and the language on our site did not match their day-to-day lexicon. We quickly updated the grouping and the naming of the pages on the site to match the terms and structures that the users would intuitively understand.

Our team made the changes necessary to reflect this new audience-driven mental model, and armed with these new insights, we set out to adapt the site to match the minds of our users.

COMPETITIVE BENCHMARKING

Creating a Competitor Analysis to Map Possibilities

To further hone our design direction, we decided to complete a team analysis workshop evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of competitor navigation affordances. After collecting and red-lining all relevant patterns across our competitors’ sites, I facilitated discussions with our production team and stakeholders to carry through what we thought was strong, and to leave behind patterns we judged as not quite right for our audience.

In a way, this exercise felt like a scavenger hunt for valuable patterns that could work for our audience in our product’s specific context. It also gave our teams a sense of certainty; that we hadn’t strayed to far from the path others had taken, and that we had forged ahead with a strategy that took into account the strengths of what had already been built.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

Building a Rationale with our most Impactful Findings and Insights

The legacy user research, literacy recommendations, top desired content, user task completion studies, card sorts, and competitor analysis had been building a picture of how to improve the site’s information architecture for maximum impact. The synthesis of this information allowed me to build new wireframes for the site’s navigation, and I made sure to pair the proposed updates with the research that supported those changes (represented by the red text below). We knew that we needed to build a strong, research-backed rationale if we were going to change such a fundamental element of the site.

THE RESULT

Bringing Clarity and Efficiency to the User Journey

A Structural and Experience Win
Refactoring the site’s content categories and their labeling ultimately improved the audience’s user experience. We saw user task completion rates rise, as well as provided enhancements to the site’s SEO rankings and improved representation of the site’s content within Google’s AI Overview functionality.

Optimized for Mobile
A design overhaul to the structure, planning, and documentation of the site’s menu allowed us to create new navigational functionality that was streamlined and easy to use on mobile devices, which we learned accounted for 80% of our site traffic. Content categories were now sensible, appropriate, easy to understand, matched user expectations, and could be easily navigated by patients and caregivers in the environments where they had been using the site.

Standardized and Documented
New user interface elements needed to be created to refactor the site to fit the audience’s new patterns of behavior and mental models. Interface elements, their states, and edge cases were extensibly codified in the design system with full documentation for future teams to understand and improve upon when the time is right.

REFLECTIONS

Product fit isn’t a static.
It changes over time as our audiences become familiar with our products. The market changes, and the audience’s needs for information evolves with their adaptive behaviors. Sometimes what was built just a few years ago is no longer appropriate. What happens when a product was built for a top user task that is no longer in demand?

This is why continued audience research is essential. We can no longer rely on one-and-done research explorations in a marketplace that’s quickly disrupted at diminishing intervals. As product designers, we must always strive to create flexible, well documented products that mutate to fit the emerging challenges and changing needs of an existing audience.

When we strive for extensibility and modularity, we build flexible products that can inexpensively adapt and continue to drive revenue in an ever-changing marketplace or problem space. Good, responsible product design isn’t just strategic, it’s future-proof.

Learnings and Takeaways

1. An audience’s top desired content can change without warning, and go unnoticed if not constantly monitored.

2. Audiences often have different terminology and categorizations of our products’ content than our internal organizations do, often in unexpected and surprising ways.

3. Production teams often treat users with kid gloves where they don’t need to, while simultaneously using terminology that’s way above the users’ heads.

4. What was true yesterday might not be true today, and most likely isn’t.

5. Every organization suffers from bias and groupthink, and must constantly interact with the audience to understand their natural mental models and lexicon. Resonance requires relationship.

6. Good product design is adaptive from the start, and doesn’t rely on band-aid solutions to adapt.