“We’ve invested thousands of dollars in our website, but people keep complaining about it.”
This situation is particularly frustrating for companies that have a strong visual brand presence and adhere to the highest engineering coding standards on their site.
It’s difficult not to obsess over what you’re doing wrong.
I get it.
Well, I don’t get it get it: that type of investment isn’t justified for my website (yet?), so I’ve built my own with basic functionalities.
But it feels like I’ve personally experienced it because I’ve heard it so many times.
When people reach out to Little Language Models for information architecture support, they’ve already identified that bad IA = bad UX = business challenges.
But there’s a world out of there of people I talk to every day, in person and in Slack rooms, who have a problem, but aren’t sure what can be done about it.
So, what is the problem? Why are people complaining about your org’s fast, beautiful, responsive, and secure site?
The website isn’t structured for clarity.
- Different teams use different terms for the same thing (mktg – product – customer service)
- Different teams use different writing styles for the same thing (mktg – product – customer service)
- The same feature is referenced differently across platforms (website – app – docs – support)
- Content doesn’t follow readability guidelines regarding length, plainness, reading level, and information density
- Navigation content groupings aren’t intuitive
- Most searches return no results
When a website isn’t structured for clarity, users have a hard time locating information. → When users can’t find what they’re looking for, they get frustrated → Frustrated users complain.
Structuring for clarity looks like this:
- Conversations with users
- Conversations with stakeholders
- Analytics review
- Creating findable, clear, relevant, and timely content
- Content testing with users
- Iterating
For an example of findable, clear, relevant, and timely content, take a look at this sign at a coffeeshop in Tulln, Austria, that I visited a few weekends ago. Do you think it worked? ????
