You'll have to do the thinking for both of us
By Trey Reeme on February 27, 2006
When we launched the new usecreditunion.org a few months back, I wrote a member poll question for the initial launch. It included an option meant to trick the poll respondent. I asked, “What do you like most about our new website?”
A whopping 34% of respondents selected “There’s more information.” However, there wasn’t any substantial amount of new information on the new site than on the old one. (That is, aside from having the content available En Espa?ħol along with a couple of short news articles about phishing and the new website itself.)
How can that be?!
The results
The poll received 140 votes (we only allowed each IP address to vote once to discourage repeat voting), and respondents could choose to answer “What do you like most about our new website?” with one of the following:
- It’s more modern (51 votes – 36%)
- It’s better organized (34 votes – 24%)
- There’s more information (47 votes – 34%)
- I recognize the faces and places (8 votes – 6%)
But if there wasn’t significantly more information, why did users think there was? Part of the answer lies in Information Architecture (IA), concisely defined on Wikipedia as the art and science of structuring knowledge (technically data) and defining user interactions.
I watched Casablanca last night for the umpteenth time. Remember the scene where Ilsa pleads to Rick, “You’ll have to do the thinking for both of us.” That’s a great way to sum up what an Information Architect does; well-designed IA makes a user not have to think about what he’s doing on a website.
A great site is intuitive enough for users to go correctly with their instincts about where information will reside before a link is clicked. That’s why the USE site’s users thought there was more information – it’s organized more intuitively. We did the thinking for them when we rebuilt the site. (Just try the Wayback Machine for a before-and-after view of the site.)
On another subject …
Matt just showed me the latest feature of our Content Management System (used by our clients to make changes to their sites) – versioning! Holy moly! Now a page’s content can be restored to earlier versions after changes are made. That’s huge.
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