Good Information Architecture Increases Online Sales

Information Architecture can be applied to resolve breakdowns in site design and navigation structure. The role of good Information Architecture is to make the Website work not in the technical sense, but from a functional, organized, conceptual perspective.

(Article found via InfoDesign.)

This article makes the point that organizations should use their site’s information architecture as a critical tool in acheiving their major organizational goals (sales, in this example). While that sounds obvious it is easy to drift away from that kind of objective if you don’t keep it firmly in mind during the design process.

At ASHA, we recently redesigned and restructured our web site. One of our goals was to strongly enhance the value of being a member and to ensure that members and prospective members could easily see the wealth of information they could recieve on the web site. To that end, we grouped all the member-only content into a single section with a drop-down menu that allows them to quickly see all the major content areas. Again, it seems an obvious approach but it is one we have not really taken before when the users’ perception of member value on the web site was not kept front and center during the design process. Without that focus it would have been very easy to compromise in other areas that would have diluted or fragmented the member-only content on our site.

This article by Gerry McGovern goes into a bit more detail on the Jupiter personalization report: Why personalization hasn’t worked. (Thanks to James Robertson for the link.)

Not surprisingly, the Jupiter report finds that personalized websites are four times more expensive to run. It also finds that personalized websites are twice as likely to attract visitors who will never pay for anything. Worse still, it finds that 25 percent of consumers actually avoid personalized websites because they fear that their personal information will be abused.

I contacted Jupiter about buying the report and they said it will be available for sale in about 8 weeks (I assume they are giving their subscribers a 2-month exclusive). It will show up on this site when it becomes available to the general, non-subscribing, public.

This is interesting: Report slams Web personalization | CNET News.com.

The main point of the Jupiter report, according to the article, is that personalization is so expensive in terms of technology and human capital that it rarely pays off for organizations that implement it. The report recommends improving navigation and search as a better investment than personalization. Makes sense to me.