A Better Understanding of the “What” and “Who” of IA

A main takeaway from Donna’s presentation was how much work goes into the creation of successful information architecture. As mentioned more than a few times in our IA Summit blog posts, the process of IA planning can be more involved than actual project implementation.

IA is a Theory

There are few “right” or “wrong” answers when it comes to IA. Each project and audience has its own specific context and needs to be addressed by the IA team, which can be found through insights from user research and other IA exercises. Both quantitative and qualitative insights can be of value, as long as all projects are viewed through the filter of the end user.

People Think in Topics – Not Format

Identifying pertinent topic areas is an important aspect of designing navigation or other IA components. It will be valuable to arrange information based upon the user’s expected needs, allowing for a greater ease of flow through a website or other structure. Likewise, it is important to remember page body is a valuable aspect of navigation and site structure, while breadcrumbs serve as a great navigational tool.

Categories equal Concepts

Across the many interesting and insightful presentations given at the 2012 IA Summit in New Orleans, a particular concept continually arose – context.

What is Context?

Context encompasses the situation-altering details surrounding an event, or to paraphrase Emily Wengert of HUGE in Brooklyn: At the coffee shop, cream and sugar are found together, while in the dictionary and at the grocery store, they are not – the relationship between the two differs based on the context of the situation.

Approaching user engagements from the perspective of context will generate better insights into the actual needs of the user (as related to different user situations), and can be crucial to multi-platform engagement success.

Forgetting Context Leads to Embarrassing Engagements

Design with user context in mind.

Some deficits in contextual thinking are obvious in hindsight:

• Tweeting links not suited for mobile devices (data shows most Twitter users do so through smartphones)
• Having small (font-wise) or lengthy text on outdoor billboards (difficult to read from a distance or at 70mph)
• Placing QR codes at the bottom of a transit billboard (instead of eye level)

Designing based on user context will lend to the creation of content and information architecture that is adaptable to meet user needs and expectations.

Likewise, predicting user expectations will result in a higher likelihood of delighted and engaged users (aka. loyal customers).

Good User Engagement Requires Proper Planning

Understanding structural capabilities, content requirements, & interface platform capabilities are key to designing for good user engagement.

Often, designing with the perspective of user content requires a planning process that the same or equal to implementation in terms of complexity and phase length.

These efforts will likely include, but may not be limited to: consumer research, platform selection/testing, and content planning. Combined, these aspects craft the all-important user experience.

Often times, the central tenants of successful planning focus of three more general, yet mutually integral, components:

Structural Capabilities

Every media format is to a certain degree limited to a set of straightforward capabilities. For print, these aspects include color versus black-and-white, quarter-page versus full-page, etc. For digital, similar ad size specs are employed; however, in the case of more robust intranet or external website creation, considerations such as content management system come into play. In all cases, structural constraints will be to a certain degree influenced by overarching resource considerations, rather it be budget or the manpower for long-term upkeep and maintenance.

Content Requirements

No matter the communication goal, a specific type and format will be required for the successful transfer of ideas and calls-to-action. First and foremost, planning must assess the all-important “What do we need to say?” and “Who do we need to say it to?” considerations. Once these aspects are clearly defined and articulated, limitations and capabilities must be weighed to determine ultimate content type (text, image, video, audio) and presentation. To revisit the idea of outdoor (which can be very similar to a mobile-based headline), vivid conciseness will be of absolute importance. In regard to a robust intranet or website, effective content must usually be complex and approachable, while at the same time as updateable as possible.

Interface Design Capabilities

Ultimately, structural capabilities and content requirements must culminate into the most effective interface design possible. The way in which information is structured and presented for by-user absorption and action will often dictate ultimate failure or success. Successful user interfaces have the ability to effectively articulate messages “here and now”, while remaining inherently responsive to changing requirements, whether dictated by evolving communication goals, user behaviors, or other resource/asset considerations.

As a result of these three vital, yet inherently unique, components, proper planning is multi-departmental by nature. The typical team may include strategy, media, programming, and design experts, as well as client service liaisons and analytics experts. This “all hands on deck” approach may represent a substantial front-end investment for effective project kick-off and implementation; however, the ultimate goal and effect of successful information architecture is undeniable – short-term impact and long-term agility.

In the end, any communications plan should focus on the ever-important considerations of “when, why, where, and how”; however, due attention to the multi-faceted “context” (the connective tissue of “when, why, where, and how”) should always be an utmost priority.

Back to the top »

Held on a scenic levee overlooking the Mississippi River, the annual event raises money to benefit OHS’ pediatrics and nursing education, as well as Elmwood Fitness Center’s sports teams. Warm and blue skied, it was the perfect day to get out and be healthy, all while supporting an important local cause.

Search engines have always espoused the value of the user experience. For years, Matt Cutts and other engineers at Google have been encouraging webmasters to “write for people, not for search engines“. This call-to-action is just as relevant today as Google plans to penalize low-quality websites and content farms benefiting from over-optimized pages.

Information Architecture (IA) & SEO are inherently connected (image provided by flickr user cannedtuna)

With the help of human “quality raters”, Google is starting to take user experience queues into consideration. Qualitative traits like ease of navigation, trustworthiness, and consistency are becoming meaningful and important ranking factors.

To appease search engines (and users) that evaluate the user experience, web designers and search engine marketers need to make sure that content follows these principles of good web design:

1. Easy to read
2. Easy to navigate
3. Easy to find (before and after arriving)
4. Consistent layout / design / labeling
5. Quick to download

In today’s blog, I will focus on how these principles affect a website’s information architecture (IA) and search engine optimization (SEO).

Making Easy-To-Read Content

As you review your site’s content assets, ask yourself some questions to gauge how search-engine friendly it is:

• Is it well written?
• Is it easy to scan?
• Are you using the language of your customers?
• Does the content make sense within a search listing?

While writing your keyword-focused content, make sure visitors can quickly read and understand it to encourage positive engagement. If users see language that they are comfortable with (i.e. keywords from their search), they feel validated and more likely to complete a successful visit.

Back to the top »

Making Your Site Easy to Navigate

The information architecture and website navigation should play a strong role in a website’s search engine optimization strategy. Users should be able to figure out where they are quickly and whether they can find the information they’re looking for. Because users rely on first impressions, the landing page needs to match what their intended query implies.

“Orientation” in Half a Second

When a user lands on a webpage through a search engine, they will attempt to “orient” themselves to determine a page’s usefulness. Breadcrumbs, contextual links, and other helpful navigational queues will help validate the visit and encourage greater rates of conversion.

Ideally, the orientation process should happen within half a second. If it takes longer to learn how to use your website, they are likely to abandon due to frustration.

Designing the Navigation

One way to make your site easy to navigate is to make sure the navigation is prioritized according to how the user sees your brand or product, and how it applies to them. Regardless of the type of website (e-commerce, informational, news or blog site), make sure information architecture matches the user’s search patterns.

Making links as plain and obvious as possible can also help make a site easy to navigate. If a link doesn’t look like a link, users may find themselves confused and unable to find their way around. Once they leave, they will likely go back to the search results and hit the competitors’ site, and only a small percentage of visitors will return after abandonment.

To make sure users can easily find the right content, make sure navigation items have the following characteristics:

• Clickable
• Scannable
• Distinguishable from body type

Making the navigation obvious and guiding users through your site allows your website to encourage more conversions, increase engagement, and retain more users for longer visits.

Back to the top »

Architecting Easy-to-Find Content (Before and After Arrival)

Website navigation strongly impacts search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

It is important to ensure that content is easy to read and navigate; however, the value of these qualities will be lost if content isn’t also easy to find. How to you implement smart information architecture, influencing visitors both before and after arrival? Here are some recommendations.

Promote Content Properly

To get the most out of your content, make sure it’s being promoted in all the proper channels, and also make sure the on-page content is marked up in a way that will satisfy a user’s visit quickly.

Make sure you’ve covered your “content discovery” basics by doing the following:

• Indexing the right content in search engines, optimized for verticals like “image” and “video”
• Submission to relevant, niche directories
• Submission of local listings for third party citations
• Promotion through press releases, news websites, and blogs

Ensuring visitors can find content after they’ve arrived at the site is important as well. The main reason customers will abandon a website is because of navigation difficulties. Once they’ve left, there’s an extremely low chance of winning that visitor back; while retargeting advertising may be one reasonably successful approach, it’s more cost-effective to ensure visits are efficient and valuable.

By making your navigation and information architecture reflective of what the user needs, you can increase the odds of retaining that user and producing a successful visit

Back to the top »

Consistent Layout, Design, and Labeling

With perceived trust being considered as a ranking factor, consistent layout and navigation becomes important to SEO. Consistency helps users feel confident in a website, as they can reliably find their way around and understand the content more quickly. It also contributes to a coherent and meaningful experience that helps strengthen the brand.

Consistency in design also helps strengthen a website’s rate of conversion. When users can reliably find their way around, visitors are more likely to complete their goals as visits become more efficient and less confused.

Strong Labeling of Items

Labeling (i.e. the words used to connote navigation items and product lines) should be consistent to how the user approaches your niche. By using the same language (i.e. keywords similar to those used to find the site), visitors can feel validated and more confident in a transactional experience.

Back to the top »

Quick to Download

While a site’s download speed is considered a ranking factor, there is not a great amount of perceived weight associated with it. That said, a site’s download speed is important to a user’s experience, and if they cannot find what they want quickly, the website is regarded as “slow”. Slow sites do not gain confidence from users, and hinder a user’s prospective transaction.

Download speed is easily tracked within Google Webmaster Tools, a free and easy-to-setup web application that provides a number of helpful alerts, including server errors, search engine click-through rates, Sitemap management, and more. Use this tool to make sure you are successfully monitoring download speeds or potential problems.

Focus On The User

A well-constructed information architecture should result in a site that effectively guides more users to complete their intended goals, as well as ranks highly in search engines. Because the architecture of a site affects the internal linking structure and prioritization of content, it heavily impacts a site’s SEO. To save time and money, it’s important that site owners get it right from the start.

Back to the top »

The wetlands in and around southern Louisiana have traditionally provided those who live here with food, livelihoods, and protection by reducing storm surges from hurricanes. Knowing the importance of Louisiana’s natural resources upon our local and national economy, and the impact a major storm has upon our livelihoods and those in the rest of America, I was excited to be able to help protect and preserve Lake Field for the people who use it and the plants and animals who live there.

On the chilly Saturday morning of March 10, 2012, a team from Mudbug donned rubber boots and met in Lockport, ready to try and do some good. After meeting with Joseph Dantin, the BTNEP Public Involvement Coordinator, we got in boats to take us to a camp on Lake Fields, which would be our base of operations. After divvying up the sections of the lake that needed to be cleaned, and outfitting ourselves with safety equipment, we separated into small teams and headed to different parts of the lake.

I was partnered with Joseph, and we began our cleanup around the northern area of Lake Fields. We rode along the lake shore, a tricky task due to inconsistent water depths, hidden logs, and the plethora of non-native and aggressive hyacinth plants clogging our path, as well as our boat’s motor. When we would spot debris, Joe would drive our boat as close to the debris as possible, and I would either reach out for the debris or jump from the boat and walk along the more dense marsh grasses to collect the beached trash. To make this task trickier, much of the debris consisted of “floats” from crab traps – repurposed 2 liter bottles that are tied to crab traps in order to mark their underwater location. Abandoned by their owners, these floats have since tied themselves to plants, logs, and other debris in the area, making their extraction very difficult.

From surveying the lake shore, we found numerous bottles, buckets, freezers, a kiddy pool, and literally, someone’s front door. These items were also filled and covered with mud and water making them very heavy to move. Many of these items were banked on higher land as a result of flooding from past storms. That being said, a large portion of the items we collected were there because of human negligence. We found a large number of old tires and abandoned boats buried in the mud and hyacinth plants. Due to this improper disposal, the lake was transforming into a dumping ground, creating an unsafe environment for the animals who live there, as well as water hazards for those who use this area recreationally.

At the end of the day, we removed 5.5 tons of trash, over 100 tires, and 14 derelict vessels from the lake. Throughout it all, we were rewarded with delicious chicken-salad sandwiches, many new friends, and a healthy appreciation for our wetlands and what we need to to do protect and preserve them.

More photos of the day’s events are available at Flickr.

To learn more about Mudbug and our volunteerism, please visit our Good Deeds page.

To volunteer with BTNEP, please visit their website.

Attendees managed social media implementation for companies in many different industries, including automobile, restaurant, retail, and education. Due to the variety of industries and expertise levels represented, insightful conversations developed, shedding light on the evolving standards and practices in the social media realm. See more below on topics covered during the conference.

What do you want to achieve?

Before starting social media, it is important to determine your goals in order to develop a social media strategy. Your goals may include:

Once goals have been established, a strategy can be developed to target your specific audience.

What your social media kit should include

Social media is not a single arena; it is a combination of many different platforms, with varying audiences. A social media kit includes different platforms including blogs, social conversation sites, social profiles, business profiles, search tools, social bookmarking sites, photo sharing sites, and video hosting sites. You may or may not include platforms from each category, as it will be very important to determine which platforms are right for your business. A kit will also include tools to manage the different social media platforms, including automating and mobile blogging tools.

Writing for social media

Content writing for social media is very different from writing content for your website, especially since you may have a text limit, such as a tweet which only allows 140 characters. A few key items to remember when writing for social media are:

Realistic required time commitment

While there are many tools available to help you manage multiple social media platforms, it is important to remember that social media never turns off. People will have the ability to comment, tweet, and post about your company 24/7, so a significant amount of time is required to not only post messages but also monitor responses. This allotment will vary greatly, depending on your company’s goals and the variety of platforms used.

Measuring return on investment

Social media is still a young media outlet, and consistent standards for measuring return on investment have not been established. The metrics for measuring the return on investment will correspond directly with your social media goals. Metrics may include increased site traffic, comments, inbound links, page views, or subscribers.

Managing your online reputation

One of the biggest concerns that companies have when considering social media, is how will they control their brand name. This is a valid concern and is one of the key components of a social media strategy. There is always the risk of negative comments, but the goal is to turn the negatives into a positive for your company. Handle the situation correctly and you many not only save a relationship with a customer, but you may also gain new customers. When managing brand reputation, it is important to consider:

There are many different monitoring tools available that can help streamline brand management efforts. There are both free and subscription based tools that you can use. Tool selection will be based on your goals, number of platforms, and number of followers/mentions.

Once you dig through a thousand icons for the ten or so that you need for a project, you need to fiddle with the sizing of them, and then clutter up your HTML with a bunch of <img> elements. While there’s nothing hard, or really time consuming about this, I’ve always found it a bit more involved than it needed to be, and things only get worse when you need to resize the icons. Maybe half way into a project you realize those icons all need to be bigger, or smaller, or you need them at multiple sizes. Do we really need three separate files just for three sizes of an icon? What if after all that, the client wants to change the color scheme of the site, and the icons no longer match? Suddenly you can find yourself recreating dozens, if not hundreds, of assets for something that seems like a simple change.

Whether you’re a designer, a developer, or even a client getting a website made, what you really want are assets that are scalable, so they can be as flexible as the website is, and adapt based on user or client feedback. What we need is a single icon that can grow and change size at a moment’s notice, and ideally, change color as well.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are one approach to this problem, but for all the buzz worthiness, the pitfalls out weigh the awesomeness. Vector graphics are infinitely scalable (yay!), but there’s nothing magical we can do to change the color on the fly, and browser support is iffy at best.

There is another solution that’s rapidly been gaining in popularity that addresses all of these issues, and it’s called Icon Fonts. With an Icon Font, you have a single file where instead of a bunch of letters making up the font, you have icons instead. You might type the letter “B” but you’ll get a bicycle instead. After all, as far as the computer’s concerned, a B is just as hard to draw as a bicycle.

Once we treat icons as letters, the advantages and possibilities start to become apparent. Just like letters, they can be any size you need them to be, or any color, or accept any fancy CSS3 text effect property so you can even add back some of the pizzaz if you don’t want a flat color, or be positioned in any way. Because all the icons are in one file, it can be compressed more and load faster, which is especially great on mobile devices. And of course, just like text, these Icon Fonts work in every browser, even ol’ Internet Explorer.

As awesome as all that is, my favorite aspect of Icon Fonts is the scalability. In the desktop computing world, despite the growing size of screens, screen resolution has been roughly the same for well over a decade. But in the mobile world, screen sizes and their resolutions are all over the place. When using non-scalable images, this can be a headache as one phone might display something nice and crisp, yet another phone has to scale it up, so it looks blurry. This is especially important on high resolution screens, such as the Retina Display found in the iPhone 4/4S and the new iPad 3. Traditionally, you’d need to make higher resolution files to compensate for this, but with Icon Fonts, they’ll just scale up to be as big and sharp as they need to be.

All that said, there are some drawbacks of course. Just like with text, Internet Explorer isn’t great at how smoothly it shows Icon Fonts, so you need a little more consideration to get it looking great, and if you need it really small, there might not be anything you can do to make it look good. Screen readers for the visually-impaired also have trouble looking at an Icon Font and seeing the icon instead of its base letter — we see a bicycle, but the screen reader sees a B. There are ways around that, but hey, that’s another show blog post.

With all these new mobile devices, and their bespoke screens and resolutions, we need everything to be scalable, so they can adapt for their displays. Text has always been scalable, and now Icon Fonts let our fonts become scalable as well. The more scalable, the fewer assets we have, so development is faster, updating is faster, performance is better, and appearance is sharper and prettier across hundreds of devices.

Along with Cafe Reconcile’s Dave Emond and James Zelaya, I had the opportunity to play judge for three marketing presentations.

When faced with a selection of inspired recommendations, how do you pick a #1? To help guide our decision, we employed a set of basic, yet always important criteria:

(1) Creativity: Emphasis was placed on the achievement of unique concepts and attention-catching appeal.
(2) Applicability: Pertinence to both promotional goals, as well as identified market audiences, was key.
(3) Feasibility: Considerations for available budget and management resources were important components.
(4) Synergy: Recommendations were observed for overarching alignment and cross-channel interplay.
(5) Presentation: Beyond the ideas, energy and enthusiasm drove the suggestions home.

At the end of the day, while there was only one winner, all of the teams shared great suggestions for the positioning and promotion of the non-profit’s new catering service. To learn more about CUNA’s visit to Cafe Reconcile, read the March 9th blog entry at http://reconcileneworleans.org/whats-new.

With the increased attention on these channels, marketers can leverage third-party properties through on-page semantic markup and off-page directory optimization. These off-page and on-page tactics are simple to implement, provide additional detail for search engines for “rich snippets”, and improve the authority and reputation of businesses online.

How Local Listings Work: N.A.P. (Name, Address, Phone Number)

Google, Bing, and Yahoo! provide local listing information by aggregating data from all related listings and connecting relevant data points. This is usually performed whenever a search implies local intent, such as “Plumber in New Orleans” or “Restaurants Near Downtown”. Search engines use the parameters of name, address, and phone number to connect listings to one another, allowing them to collect all the information about a business scattered across the Web. This aggregation allows search engines to pick out the most relevant and best-reviewed businesses or brands for any given query.

The Birth of Schemas and the Rise of Microdata

Back in June, Google, Bing, and Yahoo! partnered together to support a new microdata format aimed at increasing the amount of semantic data available on the Web. This initiative, known as Schema.org, provides additional context to people, places, and things by identifying details in a way that search engines can understand. Schemas (and other microformats such as RDFa, hCards, and vCards), allow search engines to quickly and easily identify and retrieve information like birth dates, given names, affiliated organizations, job titles, associated colleagues, and more.

For local search, microdata can provide valuable context to plain text, and also strengthen a business’ authority or reputation online by making connections more explicit. By implementing on-page Schemas and off-page reputation management, local businesses can take advantage of the growing share of local searches occurring on the major search engines to drive more potential customers to their websites.

Schemas can be helpful in a number of different implementations:

• Product information on an e-commerce shop
• Category pages for blogs or news websites
• Databases or lists of people, places, or things
• Local and niche web directories
• Organizations with multiple locations

Connect Schemas To Your Local Business Listing

The semantic nature of Schemas allow marketers to connect local business listings and third-party citations. These connections, however, require consistency across all listings. By ensuring third-party information matches the on-page Schemas, search engines will aggregate all relevant citations about the business, improving the reputation and visibility in local search.

Google Places Pages: Google’s Favorite Local Listings

Google has placed increased emphasis on local business listings – particularly its own product, Google Places to cater to the growing share of local and mobile searches. Whenever a query features local intent (e.g. “Web Design in New Orleans”), Google Places pages will often snare the space above the fold, leaving traditional results below.

Though Google Places listings are fairly simple, there are a few key things to keep in mind when filling out the listing. Most importantly, make sure the name, address, and phone number is consistent across all other local business directories your brand may already be featured in. This helps Google and other search engines connect related listings to increase the authority of a single Places page. Tools like Yext.com and WhiteSpark can help make sure directories and social media profiles that feed information into Google Places all match.

Beyond consistent Name, Address, and Phone, listings should take full advantage of all standard fields, as well as custom fields, which allow for more creativity. Filling in “Additional Details” with the type of language customers use when searching – “hotels near downtown”; “happy hour specials” – allows the Places page to capture long tail searches. One caveat to this rule: Google tends to see geographic modifiers in the “Additional Details” fields as bad practice, and in some cases will penalize the listing for doing so.

Tying It All Together

By using Schemas and optimizing Google Places, marketers can leverage valuable properties and strengthen on-page and off-page ranking factors. Though the two tactics represent two different subsets within SEO – on-site semantic markup and off-site directory and social media management – they provide context to one another and make a business’ citations and listings more meaningful. With consistent information in business listings and structured on-site semantic markup, search marketers can given stronger signals and indicators to search engines for a user’s locally-oriented query.