When users cannot locate what they’re after, they often blame the overall product when the real issue is with the information architecture (IA). Properly labeling and organizing everything on a Web site can result in users easily finishing a task rather than getting frustrated and leaving.
For example, I once spent close to 12 minutes searching for a simple product-return policy, which was a rather frustrating experience that made me realize usability does have tangible impacts. I clicked through Customer Service, then Help Center, and Support, growing more and more frustrated as each page failed to deliver what I needed. When I finally found the return policy buried under Legal Information, I muttered, “Why would they hide this there?”
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That user session cost the company much more than my 12 minutes. There were serious errors in how they had structured the information, causing the company to lose revenue, increase its support costs, and lose customers’ trust every single day.
Even though information architecture plays a crucial role, as Figure 1 shows, many UX designers still miss its importance..
Figure 1—Structuring an information architecture
The True Cost of Navigation Failures
In auditing information architectures for successful retailers and rising SaaS businesses, I have found that whenever users run into navigation issues, this hurts the most important metrics that executives typically monitor. Although we can quickly see and measure the effects of marketing efforts, most companies do not fully understand the ties between marketing and sales.
When Ecommerce Navigation Falls Apart
For example, look at the 2019 restructuring of Wayfair’s navigation. Before the redesign, the categories in their product section matched the different rooms of a house—for example, Living Room, Bedroom, and Kitchen & Dining. Users had difficulties because they did not look at items for each room specifically. Plus, people looking for storage services had to explore several room-based sections to get what they wanted.
After changing their site’s information architecture to align with users’ goals, Wayfair saw an increase of 23% on category page views and a 15% rise in conversions. They made no dramatic changes in appearance or function. Information was simply presented in a form that users easily recognized.
The navigation system for an outdoor-gear company showed product brands, which was exceptionally good for those who loved one brand, but difficult for those who search by product. For example, a person organizing a camping trip might struggle because the tents, sleeping bags, and items for outdoor cooking were split between various brands within the store. When they switched to groupings such as Camping, Hiking, and Water Sports, they noticed a 31% increase in users buying from different categories and a 28% decrease in the use of the site-search function.
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The Incoming Support Ticket Avalanche
Customer-support information often shows where an information architecture is not working well. When users fail to find the answers they need, they might opt to call or write email messages to Support. For a business-to-business (B2B) software company, I observed that most tickets from the previous year had been from people asking about information they couldn’t find on the site.
What caused the trouble was the organization of the Help center around the company’s departments instead of how people actually use the product. Documents on payment were near technical documents, while guidance on setting up the asset was separate from the information people need at the same time, to solve the problems they’re encountering. With a new page structure that was based on user journeys, support tickets dropped by 43% within just four months.
Looking at Atlassian can help us understand this idea. Users creating Jira tickets often looked through their company’s documentation. As a result of adapting the information architecture for users, Help desk requests went down by 35% and employee output grew in various parts of the company.
Measuring What Matters: IA Metrics That Connect to Revenue
To fix problems, we need to measure them. But usability methods might not show the business effects of information-architecture concerns. Therefore, I’ve built a system that shows the link between how users behave and the results their actions achieve for the business’s bottom line.
The First-Click Moment Defines the Outcome
Research indicates that, when users take the right steps, their success rate in completing a task is 87% higher. In contrast, users with insufficient skills achieve a success rate of only 44–46%. Depending on the main navigation options, newcomers might accomplish what they intend or choose to leave the Web site. In my last study of a Web site, just 52% of the users knew how to start typical tasks such as updating their contact information or looking at their statements. Once the main navigation was updated to use customer terms instead of internal language, 78% of people found what they wanted on their very first click and 34% more people successfully completed their tasks.
Navigation Path Analysis: Following the Breadcrumbs
Whenever customers must click too much, it leads to frustration and more customers give up. Users who must navigate more than three steps to the main content leave the Web site at higher rates than those who can easily get the same information.
Path optimization works very efficiently on the Spotify app. Their initial design hid the way to podcasts, requiring that users browse for several pages before finding them. People had to follow the path Home → Browse → Podcasts → Categories. Once they added podcasts to the main menu, as shown in Figures 2 and 3, both podcast listening and user retention in that area grew by a huge margin.
Figure 2—The path to Podcasts Figure 3—The path to Categories
Site Search as an IA Diagnostic Tool
When users are searching for content to which they should easily be able to navigate, it is a sign of poor navigation. I call this search desperation. The user chooses search over struggling to navigate.
When I looked at site-search queries for one client, I found that 34% of people were looking for content that appeared on the home page after easy navigation. Users were looking for the contact page, pricing data, and customer login, which were all present as big links on the primary menu. Users knew where the links were, but they were uncertain that the link titles would lead to the relevant information.
After holding card-sorting sessions with real customers, we changed the navigation terms to match those that they used. The new labels were Services instead of Solutions, Help & Support instead of Resources, and Customer Login instead of Portal. The number of people searching for these terms dropped by 58%, which suggests that they were now relying on the Web site’s navigation instead.
Building an IA That Drives Business Results
To work well, an information architecture must provide links to the things users need that also correspond to the goals of the business. Start by seeing how users put information together inside their head. When interacting with Web sites, users leverage their industry knowledge, what they see on other Web sites, and common Web-design practices. Trying to break these mental models would cause tension, but making use of them makes user experiences seem natural.
Having 20–30 users in a card-sorting session shows how they instinctively group data. Additional interviews can reveal the logic behind the groupings, making the site easy to navigate without any training. Through card sorting, I have found that users arrange features according to how they fit into their workflow—not by type of feature. In contrast to Data Management, Analytics, and Reporting, users opted for Patient Intake, Treatment Planning, and Outcome Tracking. As a result of this new structure, 41% more teams adopted features from the platform.
There is no need to give the same weight to every piece of content within a structure of information. It is important to review performance using business metrics when you’re conducting a content audit—such as for pages that help reach conversions, reduce the need for support, or increase the users’ happiness. Successful posts occupy the top positions, while the posts that were not doing as well were fixed or removed. We had placed certification courses, which brought in 70% of revenues, exactly three levels down in the navigation hierarchy, while the home page was full of low-value free content. Giving priority to our valuable content led to a 52% increase in enrollments in the company’s certification program.
The best information architectures aim to help users meet their needs before satisfying the needs of the organization. Most users come to Web sites for specific reasons, not to see how an organization is structured. Conducting journey mapping and task analyses can show what information you expect users to use during each phase of their work. A company that makes project-management software launched their EvaluationsHub, shown in Figure 4, with information on pricing, features, and security all together, so prospects did not need to look for that information separately. Because all related information was now together, their sales cycle dropped by an average of 18 days.
Figure 4—The EvaluationsHub
Many changes to an information architecture could break pre-existing user habits. Therefore, it is a good idea to define a process and monitor progress in key areas, step by step. During every phase of the process, it is important to measure the baseline and apply the new approach, then assess its results. With this approach, it becomes clear what benefits the information architecture is bringing and which results require attention. Since taxonomy and information architecture must remain consistent, implementation calls for cooperation between content teams and engineers to ensure that they manage both issues properly. Meeting regularly to check the information architecture makes it more apparent when changes elsewhere would impact existing structures, preventing harm to a well-planned structure of information.
Demonstrate the value of information architecture by connecting changes to the user experience to the outcomes that matter to those making business decisions. Check to see how much of the total revenue is coming from the new navigation approach and how much from the earlier approach. When ecommerce businesses make their sites easier to navigate, they can measure increased sales for different products, and B2B brands can follow up with higher lead-generation statistics. A consulting firm had a 28% increase in qualified leads after it redesigned its service Web pages to reflect the needs of different customer industries instead of referring to their own services. The structure made it easier for buyers to locate the correct options, reducing the delay from becoming aware of a topic to raising an inquiry.
Making operations more efficient usually provides the quickest and most persuasive reason for spending money on information architecture. Find out how much money you would save by having fewer Help desk tickets, faster training of employees, and better control of content. Good organization of online resources lets support staff spend their time on difficult problems instead of answering questions about details that are very hard to find. Once information architects create a well-defined taxonomy and rules, this makes it easier for an organization to deal with its content and prevents irrelevant or erroneous content from building up and wasting users’ search time.
Conclusion: The Invisible Foundation of Digital Success
It is possible to easily identify how helpful an effective information architecture can be to business metrics. Businesses that regularly work to improve their site’s information architecture see more user purchases, reduced customer-service costs, and greater user satisfaction.
Users’ wasting time searching instead of navigating is a common occurrence online. The result is reduced revenues, added expenses, and a lessening of trust among customers. Nevertheless, such situations can bring new opportunities as well.
If an information architecture fits both users’ mental models and business goals, this can give the business an edge that leads to steady growth. Once you’ve analyzed the costs of a poor navigation system and improved its design, you can be certain that a good information architecture can help improve business metrics. The real question is: will the business put a proper system in place for these benefits to appear?
Henry is an SEO Content Writer and Researcher with 5 years of experience. He focuses on writing content that brings enlightenment to UX designers, content designers, and product managers. He has worked as a Senior Content and UX writer at Brave Achievers, a company that is dedicated to mentoring emerging product designers and equipping them with solid tutoring. He has also freelanced for pangea.a, creating articles on UX design for their platform. While he writes about other things from time to time, he dedicates a large portion of his time to writing about everything UX. Read More
