Company A has acquired Company B, C, and D. How do we organize their sites, for multiple products with different audiences, while making it easy to find relevant product information and quickly understand how the products work together?
For example, Company A offers residential relocation services. Company B offers relocation services for businesses. Company C offers relocation management software. Company D offers fine art and antique moving services.
What I recommend to clients is formalizing user goals before making rebranding decisions.
People from Company A, B, C, and D are going to bring different perspectives to information architecture decisions based on their:
- day-to-day responsibilities
- previous experiences making IA decisions, positive or negative
- perception of the areas with the highest potential for company growth
- professional goals
Many people’s first impulse is to discuss the products.
How Company A plans and delivers items.
How company B coordinates B2B moves, the types of businesses.
The data powering Company C’s software, the types of users, pricing tiers.
Insurance, identity confirmation, country regulations, employee training for handling fine art for Company D.
These conversations are useful for context gathering, but create an unnecessary us against them environment in the context of the website’s future. You’re with Company A. I’m with Company D. Product discussions keep us aware of this distinction at all times.
Instead, I recommend turning outwards and focusing your attention on user actions.
What does the user of your product get from buying from you?
Why is the user visiting the homepage? What about the contact form? And the pricing page?
Come up with as many user goals for interacting with different areas of the product. Even better if Company D’s folks are writing user goals for Company A, Company A for Company B, and so on.
Having “new” folks come up with user goals helps them get familiarized with the product and it builds empathy for users and employees of the company alike. Amazingly, this serves as a beautiful user research session to unpack biases or currently-unmet user needs.
“Oh, we thought that would be done automatically. We may want to clarify that to users.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize we offer customs, tax, and documentation assistance.”
“It wasn’t clear to me that step was mandatory to schedule a pickup.”
Focusing on user goals highlights opportunities for consolidation and removal across your content. Different areas of different products can help users reach their goals.
Which brings me to the next step: defining different ways for the user to meet their goals.
Define different ways for the user to meet their goals considering format, audience, and information receptiveness
Consider format preferences (a map might work better for locations, but a text field may work better if a service is only offered in <5 locations), audiences (busyness, goals, language), and willingness to interact with company content (someone transporting a luxury item will be more receptive to longer content like PDF brochures, but a moving contractor looking for the login portal will be less patient).
Group content on the homepage and navigation by user goal, and the conversation becomes about ways to delight and provide additional value through the acquisitions, rather than which product of which company does what.
Next, consider labels. I don’t like putting people in boxes, but I swear it’s for a noble purpose here.
Put users into categories
What are different types of groups a user may belong to for a healthcare training provider?
- Location (by country, city, district)
- Clinical discipline (nursing, surgery, pharmacy)
- Clinical specialty (dermatology, ethics, pathology)
- Phase (needs assessment, pre-briefing, facilitation, debriefing)
- Role (educator, administrator, researcher)
- Institution (academic, commercial, non-profit)
For patients of healthcare providers, groups may include:
- Insurance type
- Age group
- Risk level
These categories (known as taxonomy) can help guide users and quickly orient them. By thinking through possible categorizations, and their overlap (what would a pathology surgery clinician working for a commercial vendor in New York look for and find?), teams can make the digital experience so intuitive that the user doesn’t have to “think” much.
Users should understand options at a glance while being able to get granular, so the categories shouldn’t serve as rigid boxes, rather quicker, more elegant paths to eureka.
Test with a small group of users
Once you have initial low-fidelity designs of key pages/interactions, please, please, please test them with a small user group.
- Do labels match user language?
- Do groupings match users’ mental models?
- Does content hierarchy reflect user goals?
- Is the amount of information provided appropriate for the user’s current step?
Finally, and this is easy to miss: think of content horizontally, not vertically.
Think horizontally, not vertically
What do I mean by this?
I’ve been on many design review meetings where the focus was on the single page we were looking at, and stakeholders wanted to know why X element wasn’t included or why Y was so low on the page.
The thinking goes: if a content component is deprioritized, users will have a difficult time finding it, and get frustrated.
- Vertical content – Content on a single page/interface helping the user reach their goal.
- Horizontal content – Content component used strategically and constantly across pages/interfaces (think: visiting hours being available in nav, footer, location pages, event pages, contact pages, etc.)
Horizontal content improves content discoverability by offering multiple opportunities for the user to find what they’re looking for.
If you’re a content or design professional who enjoys work-related books, I highly recommend Donna Spencer’s book Presenting Design Work. One of the most valuable lessons I took from the book was presenting findings and recommendations in the context of “a person doing a thing” rather than prototype X or page Y. We’re taught to think vertically when it comes to content, so it’s not easy to remember to take a step back and consider the entire ecosystem, but it is important to do as not to harm user wayfinding.
If you’re a stakeholder in website and product decisions, you can also help guide users by asking questions related to the different ways the user may be looking for information and how the design may be able to accommodate them, not just in a single “important” page, but across touchpoints.
Okay, final final thing: A common point of tension between stakeholders is the fate of the content. People have ideas, fears, and dreams about what will become of the content. I unpacked the feelings aspect of redesign in here: How to manage stakeholder feelings in content decisions for website redesigns. TL;DR: People can be reluctant to make content decisions for all sorts of reasons. Every reason is inherently valid and worth listening to, understanding, and iterating upon as needed.
Key takeaways
To organize content for multiple products with different audiences, while still making it easy to discover how the products work together:
- Start with user goals
- Identify commonalities across products
- Identify opportunities for consolidation and removal across content
- Define different ways for the user to meet their goals considering format, audience, and information receptiveness
- Put users into categories
- Test with a small group of users
- Provide multiple information pathways to improve discoverability
- Be prepared for content discussions to get heated
