What is Information Architecture?

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Information architecture (IA) is a term used to describe how content or information is organised and arranged. This can relate to a website, a retail store or an app. And you could even consider the way a library is sorted to be IA. 

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For the purposes of this we will be focussed on websites. IA is fundamentally important to the success of your website. It determines how your users will access the information and the success of their user experience (UX) whilst on your website. And ultimately if you can keep users on your website long enough to complete their task.

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IA can be broken down into 3 main areas to consider when building great user experience:

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• Navigation: How people make their way through information (website content)
• Labels: How information is named and represented.
• Search: How people will look for information (keywords, categories)

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When put like this it does seem pretty straightforward. Maybe even simple? But these tasks need to be straightforward for your users. Putting thought, time and research in at the front of your design and build can mean an intuitive website is built. But at any point in your websites life cycle it can be of value to test and review. IA is the structure that sits in behind and allows the design to tell the story and the content to be found in an easy way.

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Why is Information Architecture important to web design? 🏗️

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If you’ve ever tried to use something and thought, “where am I supposed to go next?” or “this doesn’t make any sense,” you are encountering an issue with an information ‍architecture.

The Information Architecture Institute

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The way in which your users will use your website depends largely on how the information is presented and organised. By following through the tasks that you expect your users to undertake you can better understand the user experience. If the user can easily flow from point to point, finding what they need in a quick and efficient (and ideally intuitive manner) they are far more likely to stick around. And return when they need to.

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The opposite is definitely true also. If users find your website difficult to follow, hard to navigate and get lost or confused. They will not stick around to find out more. They will move on, and swiftly, to your competition. Frustrated, and disengaged. You will find it difficult to win them back.

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What does good information architecture look like for my users? 👀

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By providing a simple, clear and straightforward path users can stay focussed on their task, removing overwhelm and confusion. How often do you disappear ‘down a rabbit hole’ when on the internet? Confusing paths or overwhelming options may mean users move off on tangents, and become less likely to complete their initial task. Ultimately the best user experience is one that delivers the right information at the right time. Not too slow and not too complicated. 

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Always keep in mind that a great IA is:

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• Navigation: Always think straightforward, simple and intuitive.  Keep the navigation menu clean, clear and brief. Content and information where it’s expected to be. No point putting dog collars under dog food.
• Labels: Consider how pages, content and information is named. This needs to be direct and simple to understand. If you want people to find your store label the page ‘location’ or ‘find us’ or even ‘find our store’.
• Search: Most of your users will use search as a last resort. They will try to navigate their way through your website before resorting to a search option. Considering carefully the keywords for information that support the search tool. If they have already failed to find the information through your navigation, don’t let them down now.

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With all of these lined up in behind great web design, which is clear, bright and attractive. Along with language which appeals to your user.  You are providing a UX that will entice, engage and ultimately keep them on your website and converting.

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What does great information architecture look like for my organization?

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Great IA goes beyond simply being about your user experience. Your organization can benefit hugely with testing, research and insights put into your website IA. 

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With an IA that creates an easy navigable and engaging website your users are less likely to move off to your competitors. You’ve worked hard to get them to your website, through marketing and SEO. Delivering what your user expects and making it easy to find, means they will complete their task, and are far more likely to return. 

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By finding what they need quickly, and intuitively, users are more likely to be converted and generate leads or sales. Delivering and answering questions can also reduce the need for support. If you can, your organization's website should answer your users questions, before they complete. This means they are less likely to need to email and /or call for support, reducing overheads and time lag before conversion.

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Your organization's reputation is so important, your website may be your only interaction with users. If they have an easy user experience, their questions answered, and are able to complete what they need simply they leave with a great impression of your organization. They are more likely to return and their overall takeaway is that your organization is trustworthy, organised and easy to deal with. The opposite is quite possible with poor IA and design. You get but one chance to grab their attention and keep them. Do it badly and you may never get them back.

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Creating great information architecture 👷🏻

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User research with OptimalSort

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Of course the best website IA is based on your users experience. And there is no better way to get a full understanding of your users than by conducting research. At any point in your website's life cycle it can be beneficial to undertake research such as card sorting. At the beginning stages of your website build is best, but your website should be evolving as your organization does, therefore any time there are shifts in what you do or offer is a great time to revisit your UX and how best to deliver this. OptimalSort tests users on how they intuitively would like to see information sorted on your website. Building IA based on data, rather than assumptions, will mean that content and information can be sorted in a way that truly delivers a simple and intuitive experience.

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Maintaining your website with Treejack

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With a great IA, based on card sorting user research, your website content needs to be maintained. Tree testing allows you to see where your users are getting lost in your website navigation. And also how they expect to look for key information. The Treejack tool provides real user insights on how your website navigation is working, how it can work better, and ultimately how to fix paths that don’t work. Providing hard data to inform an intuitive IA.

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Wrap Up 🌮

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So, information architecture is fundamental to your website and how it operates. Want to learn more about information architecture? Take a look at our article, or download 'The Actionable IA Guide'.

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Supporting your website with user research can mean you build and design a intuitive website that simply rocks! 

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Learn more about card sorting with our 101 guide. And more on tree testing. 

UI and UX are two terms that are often used interchangeably and confused for one another, but what do they actually mean? And is there a crossover between them?

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These two terms have only grown in use in recent years, thanks largely to the exploding technology sector. This is great news. For organizations, effectively harnessing UX and UI enables them to build products and services that people will actually want to use – and continue using. For users, they’ll have access to products designed for them. 

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What is UX? 🤳🎯

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User experience (UX as it’s commonly called) refers to the experience that a person has with a product or service. 

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We can determine whether a user experience is good or bad based on how easy (or difficult) it is for users to interact with the various elements of a product or service. Is the sign-up flow easy to use? Does the CTA button on the homepage encourage users to click? UX design exists to answer questions like these – and here’s how.

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At the core of UX design is user research, which you can use to understand customer pain points and actually build products designed for the people using them. Typically, user research involves the use of a number of different research methods designed to answer specific questions. Card sorting, for example, can show you how people think the information on your website should be arranged.

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Designer and information architect Peter Morville came up with the user experience honeycomb, which demonstrates the various components of UX design.

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Don Norman of Nielsen Norman Group defines UX as “[encompassing] all aspects of the end-users interaction with the company, its services, and its products”.

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If this seems broad, that’s because it is. UX actually extends beyond just the digital products of an organization and can be used for areas like retail, customer service and more. In fact, there’s actually a growing movement to replace UX with customer experience (CX), as a way of encompassing all of these disparate elements.

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What is UI? 🪄📲

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User interface (UI), in the most stripped-back definition, is the interface by which a user and a computer system communicate with one another. This includes the touchscreen on your smartphone, the screen on your laptop, your mouse and keyboard and countless other mechanisms.

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With this in mind, user interface design is focused on the elements that users will see on these interfaces, such as buttons, text and images. UI design is all about layout, look and feel. The objective of UI design is to visually guide users through an interface so they can complete their task. In a nutshell, you don’t want a user to think too hard about what they’re doing.

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UI has its origins in the 1980s, when Xerox developed the very first graphical user interface (GUI). Instead of needing to interact with a computer through a programming language, people could now use icons, menus and buttons. The rest, as they say, is history. Apple came along with the Macintosh computer in 1984 (bringing with it the first point and click mouse), and now we’re all carrying smartphones with touch screens that even a baby can operate.

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Like UX, UI has grown significantly – going far beyond what you’ll see on a computer screen. Those involved in the field of UI design today will work as much on the interfaces of computer programs and apps as they will on the user interfaces of cars, wearable devices and technologies in the home. If current trends continue, UI design is likely to become an even bigger field in the years ahead.

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What’s the difference between UX and UI? 👀

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UX and UI are both essential components of a product or service. You can’t have one without the other, and, as we’ve explored, neglecting one could have serious consequences for your product’s success.

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The difference between UX and UI is that UX is focused on the experience of using something and UI is focused on the look and feel of the interface. 

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“User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) are some of the most confused and misused terms in our field. A UI without UX is like a painter slapping paint onto a canvas without thought; while UX without UI is like the frame of a sculpture with no paper mache on it. A great product experience starts with UX followed by UI. Both are essential for the product’s success”. - Rahul Varshney, co-creator of Foster.fm

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The difference between UX and UI is that UX is focused on the experience of using something and UI is focused on the look and feel of the interface. 

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Or, if you’d prefer a statement from venerable Nielsen Norman Group: “It’s important to distinguish the total user experience from the UI, even though the UI is obviously an extremely important part of the design. As an example, consider a website with movie reviews. Even if the UI for finding a film is perfect, the UX will be poor for a user who wants information about a small independent release if the underlying database only contains movies from the major studios”.

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With this in mind, let’s now take a look at the people behind UX and UI. What do the roles look like in these fields? And, more importantly, what do they involve?

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UX and UI jobs guide 📱🧑🏻💻

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• Visual designer: This role works with other design roles in the organization (brand, marketing, etc) to ensure designs match brand guidelines. Visual designers also work with UX designers to verify that designs meet accessibility and usability requirements.
• UX strategist: At the core, a UX strategist should act as a champion of good UX. That is to say, work to ensure the principles of usability and human-centered design are well understood and utilized. They should also assume some of the responsibility of product-market fit, and work with product managers and the ‘business’ side of the organization to mesh business requirements with user requirements.
• UX designer: The most common UX profession, UX designers should have a strong understanding of the principles of UX design as well as some research ability. Essentially a jack of all trades, the UX designer will float between all stages of the UX lifecycle, helping out with usability tests, putting together prototypes and working with other areas of the organization.
• Service designer: The service designer looks at the entire end-to-end process and works with other designers, pulling them when required to liaise on visual designs and UI work. In a smaller organization, the responsibilities of this role will typically be absorbed by other roles, but eventually, there comes a time for the service designer. 

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Wrap up 🎬

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UX and UI as terms are only going to continue to grow, especially as technology and technology companies continue to proliferate across the globe. If you want to make sure that the user experience and user interfaces of your product or service are fit for the people using them, there’s no better place to start than with user research using powerful tools.

As humans, we have a unique talent: our brains are built to spot patterns and fill in the blanks. It’s why we see shapes in clouds, faces in everyday objects, and structure in random visual noise. This ability to combine individual elements into a meaningful whole underpins the Gestalt principles of visual perception, a cornerstone concept in psychology and design.
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For UX designers, user researchers, and web teams, understanding these principles is essential. They reveal how people naturally group information, interpret visual relationships, and navigate interfaces. With a clearer view of how users perceive and process what they see, you can design more intuitive, human-centered experiences that support better decision-making and reduce friction across your product.

What are the Gestalt Principles?

All the way back in the 1920s, a group of German psychologists (Wolfgang Köhler, Max Wertheimer and Kurt Koffka) wanted to better understand how humans perceive the world around them. They were interested in learning more about how the human brain makes sense of chaos.
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These “gestalt psychologists” found that humans tend to group different elements together, identify patterns and find order in disorder. Interestingly, the psychologists found that humans don’t do this randomly – there are a number of principles that our brains use.
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At the time, the growing field of design began to use the gestalt psychology principles in order to create designs that are more than the sum of their parts. The hidden arrow between the E and the X in the FedEx logo is just one example of this.

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Understanding the Gestalt Principles

What happens when someone first sees the logo of your organization? How do they experience seeing the design for the first time? Gestalt psychology has a powerful role to play in how we perceive objects. If you want to create products and services that resonate with the people you intend to serve, understanding the gestalt principles is a good place to start – and it’s not that difficult.
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With a solid understanding of these principles, you’ll be able to better direct people to what you want them to see, know which elements to use and when, and build better human experiences. 
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Here are the gestalt pricinples that we’ll be covering:
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• Similarity
• Figure/Ground
• Proximity
• Closure
• Common region
• Symmetry and order
• Continuity
• Common fate

Similarity

Principle: The gestalt principle of similarity states that when things appear to share some visual characteristics, they are assumed to be related in some way and we group them. These things don’t need to be identical, they just need to share a visible trait such as shape, size or color.

Look down from a high-rise building at a parking lot and you’ll immediately start grouping cars that are the same color. This is the principle of similarity and it’s a useful tool for UX designers.
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How to use this principle: You can use color in your products and services to indicate items with common functionality, for example in CTA buttons or links. On the other hand, you can use shape to indicate grouping.

Figure/Ground

Principle: Our brains instinctively distinguish between objects in the foreground and objects in the background. 

Usually, we will interpret the larger area of an image as the background and the smaller part of the image as the foreground. Whenever someone first opens your mobile app or lands on your website, the figure/ground gestalt principle shows them what they should be focusing on.
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How to use this principle: Use figure/ground to guide users to what you want them to see. This is particularly useful when you have something active that you need them to take action on, for example, a sign-up form or a search bar. In the case of the sign-up form, having the rest of the screen fade into the background can show users that the form is currently what they should be focusing on.

Proximity

Principle: Things close together appear to be more related than things that are further apart.

The gestalt principle of proximity is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal, and can easily override other factors like color and shape. Mechanisms of perception (like proximity) compete with one another, and it’s important to understand which mechanisms you can use to accomplish your goals.
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How to use this principle: You can use the gestalt law of proximity to get your users to identify the organization or structure that you want them to see without using borders. A good example of this would be grouping items on an online shopping website.

Closure

Principle: When we look at a complex arrangement of individual elements, we first try and identify a single, recognizable pattern.

The law of closure allows us to look at an image with missing parts, fill in the gaps and recognize the complete image so we can understand the pattern. This law is commonly used in logo design, where our brains fill in the gaps to understand the complete image.
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How to use this principle: You can use closure to create delight (as in the example above), but it’s important to recognize that closure can also be used to mislead and to harm. As Andy Rutledge explains, even when closure works, it could be telling you a lie. It’s your job as a UXer to be aware of this.

Common region

Principle: When objects are located within the same closed region, we perceive them as being grouped together.

Common region is closely related to proximity and is an excellent tool for separating groups of objects, even if they’re close in proximity, size, color or shape.
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How to use this principle: Use visible borders or barriers in your designs to create a sense of separation between different groups of objects.  

Symmetry and order

Principle: Our brains tend to group together objects that are symmetrical with each other.

In German, the law of symmetry and order is known as prägnanz, which translates to “good figure”.
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How to use this principle: Your designs should be balanced and complete, or you risk having users spend time trying to perceive a larger overall picture.

Focal point

Principle: What stands out visually will capture a user’s attention first.

Focal points are areas of interest or difference within a composition. You can create a focal point by giving it more weight than other elements.
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How to use this principle: Consider the focal point principle when you need to draw a user’s attention to an element on your page. For example, a call to action button or a sign-up button.

Continuity

Principle: Elements arranged on a line or curve are perceived as more related than elements not on the same line or curve.

Once our eye begins to follow something, it will continue in that direction until it encounters another element. A good example of the continuity principle is a line with an arrow at the end. It indicates that we should follow the line to see where the arrow is pointing.
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The continuity principle isn’t all about physical attributes such as lines and arrows. Continuity can also come from the logical groupings of items, for example in a field. When collecting information about a user’s location, for example, all geographical information should be arranged together.

How to use this principle: Consider the continuity principle both in terms of physical attributes and logical attributes – especially when designing forms.

Common fate

Principle: We perceive elements moving in the same direction as more related than elements that are moving in different directions or stationary.

We use the principle of common fate every day of our lives. In fact, we as humans are wired to recognize contrasting movement over any other visual cue, whether it’s color, size, contrast or tone. Consider driving down the highway. The cars moving in the same direction as you are background noise, but when a car enters your lane from a side street you tend to immediately notice and respond.
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How to use this principle: This principle is key in motion design, with functional animation using common fate to guide our eye.

Validating Gestalt Principles Through UX Research

Building a solid understanding of the Gestalt principles helps you design clearer, more intuitive experiences. Whether you're creating a new website or refining a mobile sign-up flow, applying these principles can be the difference between a design that guides users naturally and one that misleads. With Optimal's user research and insights platform, you can validate whether your layouts and interactions actually support the perceptual patterns users rely on.

Picture this scenario: You're in your local coffee shop and hear a new song. You want to listen to it when you get back to the office. How do you obtain it? If you’re one of the 232 million Spotify users, you’ll simply open the app, search for the song and add it to your playlist. Within seconds, you’ll have the song ready to play whenever and wherever you want.

This new norm of music streaming wasn’t always the status quo. In the early days of the internet, the process of finding music was easy but nowhere nearly as easy as it is now. You’d often still be able to find any song you wanted, but you would need to purchase it individually or as part of an album, download it to your computer and then sync it across to a portable music player like the iPod.

Spotify is a prime example of successful human-centered design. The music service directly addresses the primary pain points with accessing music and building music collections by allowing users to pay a monthly fee and immediately gain access to a significant catalog of the world’s music.

It’s also far from the only example. Take HelloFresh, for example. Founded by Dominik Richter, Thomas Griesel and Jessica Nilsson in 2011, this company delivers a box of ingredients and recipes to your door each week, meaning there’s no need for grocery shopping or thinking about what to cook. It’s a service that addresses a fairly common problem: People struggle to find the time to go out and buy groceries and also create tasty, healthy meals, so the founders addressed both issues.

Both HelloFresh and Spotify are solutions to real user problems. They weren’t born as a result of people sitting in a black box and trying to come up with new products or services. This is the core of human-centered design – identifying something that people have trouble with and then building an appropriate answer.

The origins of human-centered design

But, someone is likely to ask, what’s even the point of human-centered design? Shouldn’t all products and services be designed for the people using them? Well, yes.

Interestingly, while terms like human-centered design and design thinking have become much more popular in recent years, they’re not entirely new methods of design. Designers have been doing this same work for decades, just under a different name: design. Just take one look at some of the products put together by famed industrial designer Dieter Rams (who famously influenced ex-Apple design lead Jony Ive). You can’t look at the product below and say it was designed without the end user in mind.

Why did human-centered design even gain traction as a term? David Howell (a UX designer from Australia) explains that designers often follow Parkinson’s Law, where “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. He notes that designers could always do more (more user research, more ideation, more testing, etc), and that by wrapping everything under a single umbrella (like human-centered design) designers can “speak to their counterparts in business as a process and elevate their standing, getting the coveted seat at the table”.

Human-centered design, for all intents and purposes, is really just a way for designers to package up the important principles intrinsic to good design and sell them to those who may not be sympathetic to exactly why they’re important. At a broader level, the same thinking can be applied to UX as a whole. Good user experience should naturally fall under design, but occasionally a different way of looking at something is necessary to drive the necessary progress.

So human-centered design can really just be thought of as a vehicle to sell the importance of a user-first approach to organizations – that’s useful, but how exactly are you supposed to start? How do you sell something that’s both easily understandable but at the same time quite nebulous? Well, you sell it in the same way you’d sell user research.

How to sell human-centered design

Focus on the product

In the simplest terms, a product designed and built based on user input is going to perform better than one that was assembled based on internal organizational thinking.

When utilized in the right way, taking a human-centered approach to product design leads to products that resonate much more effectively with people. We looked at Spotify at the beginning of this article for a company that’s continuously adopted this practice, but there are countless others. AirBnB, Uber, Pinterest and more all jump to mind. Google and LinkedIn, meanwhile, serve as good examples of the ‘old guard’ that are starting to invest more in the user experience.

Understand the cost-benefit

In 2013, Microsoft was set to unveil the latest version of its Xbox video game console. Up until that point, the company had found significant success in the videogame market. Past versions of the Xbox console had largely performed very well both critically and commercially. With the newest version, however, the company quickly ran into problems.

The new ‘Xbox One’ was announced with several features that attracted scorn from both the target market and the gaming press. The console would, for example, tie both physical and digital purchases to users’ accounts, meaning they wouldn’t be able to sell them on (a popular practice). The console would also need to remain connected to the internet to check these game licenses, likely leading to significant problems for those without reliable internet access. Lastly, Microsoft also stated that users would have to keep an included camera system plugged in at all times otherwise the console wouldn’t function. This led to privacy advocates arguing that the camera system’s data could be used for things like targeted advertising and user surveillance.

Needless to say, after seeing the response from the press and the console’s target market, Microsoft backtracked and eventually released the Xbox One without the always-on requirement, game licensing system or camera connection requirement.

Think of the costs Microsoft likely incurred having to roll back every one of these decisions so late into the product’s development. If you’re able to identify an issue in the research or prototype phase, it’s going to be significantly cheaper to fix here as opposed to 3 years into development with a release on the horizon.

Wrap-up

As the Spotify founders discovered back in back in 2008, taking a human-centered approach to product design can lead to revolutionary products and experiences. It’s not surprising. After all, how can you be expected to build something that people want to use without understanding said people?

Co-design is a powerful way to improve design processes in two ways: speed and quality. When your work environment allows and encourages people to work remotely in a temporary or permanent way – as we do at Optimal Workshop – we need to get creative if we want to find ways to include everyone.

After a research project, my marketing team was looking at redesigning our Enterprise landing page. We wanted to speed up our experimentation and determined that collaboration was the best approach. Ideation exercises require more than just a team of designers –  we needed to involve the right people with the right knowledge. To generate more diverse, creative and insightful outputs, we invited different personalities as well as different roles. Our team was comprised of a mix of sales, customer success, marketing, developers and designers. All located in different locations around the world, including the United States, New Zealand, France and Ireland.

To make this global session happen, we used Mural, a digital workspace for visual collaboration. It’s a great way to explore ideas in a collaborative space from anywhere with an internet connection and a laptop.

What is a co-design?

A co-design is a fast-paced workshop that generates abundant and diverse ideas beyond what just one individual can produce.

What does it involve?

A clear plan

Define the problem you want to solve, articulate user needs and any pain points you’ve identified. It’s also important to explain why this problem is something worth investigating. This preparation work will help to cut back on inefficient conversations and ensure your team and stakeholders are aligned on goals, opportunities and problem statements.

HMW (How Might We)

HMW questions are a way to frame the challenge you are trying to solve using short, compelling questions to spark creative thinking and discover solutions.

Divergence

Diverging is a quantitative process where you create as many ideas as possible by answering the HMW questions. Each member then presents their ideas while the rest of the team writes their feedback on Post Its in two ways: ‘I like’ – what you like about the solutions and ‘I wonder’ – how you might improve the solutions.

Convergence

Converging is a qualitative process. Once everyone has presented their ideas and looked over the feedback, it’s time to consolidate the best designs into one solution. After presenting their solutions, team members vote on their favorite ideas or the most compelling features by placing stickers on the ones they like. Commonly, each person should have 3 stickers.

What do you want at the end of the co-design?

Once you’ve passed through the divergent and convergent stages for your HMW questions, you’ll hopefully have some key areas of impact to focus on that are worth prototyping in the form of a wireframe or a higher fidelity design. Using this process, you should be able to develop a design that incorporates input from all disciplines and departments.

Tips for running a co-design:

Plan ahead

• 8 people max per workshop
• Prior to creating a calendar invite, ask who would be interested to participate via a message or in person. Allow teams to choose who will represent their team.
• Have your low-fidelity sketching supplies ready: Post-its, markers, blank sheets etc

Setting the context and explaining the rules

• Write a description within the calendar invite to give some context prior to the meeting. e.g “What we are working on?”, What will we do with the output?” and “What if I am busy and can't come?”.
• Send reminders the day before to make sure people are registered to the software you might use, specify if they need to bring anything specific(laptop, tablet, etc).
• Adding a "What’s coming" section to the agenda helps people to stay on track.
• Set a clear presentation to encourage creativity – inspire your team!

A timer

• A mechanism for tracking time down to the minute is crucial for keeping track of the work achieved.
• Schedule a good amount of time for feedback and voting.
• Allow a 5 to 10 min break time.
• Involve a second facilitator to help with time tracking.

How we ran a remote-friendly co-design

What worked well?

True effort  and planning

The classic paper/post-it system isn’t suitable for remote workers. Despite video conferencing, it is still hard to hear everyone or read a whiteboard. I wanted a tool that would allow me to include everyone the same way, and allow easy follow up on the achievements. This system needed to work even for people who couldn’t attend or had to leave halfway through the meeting.

Feedback received:

• "It takes real effort to get these up and running and the use of other software to make use of the time of everyone" 
• "I can’t imagine doing workshops in any other way in the future"

Communication with remote workers

Avoid questions like “please vote if you are okay to come in early” which makes remote workers feel bad.

Feedback received:

• "Remote workers feel like they’re a burden in meetings, but you made us feel super included"

What could have been done differently?

Time and people management

Handling time and people is tricky, you can easily run out of time and be forced to rush through the last steps of your meeting. Don’t hesitate to ask for help facilitating the co-design.

Feedback received:

• "More time to give feedback to everyone's ideas would have been nice"

Remote organization

Find a way to be as inclusive as possible, like finding a remote solution for snacks and drinks.

Feedback received:

• "Consider snacks for overseas people or let us know that we should get something to be included in that"

Tips for running a remote-friendly co-design:

A well-chosen space and time

Involving people from multiple countries or time zones requires preparation and consideration.  Don't be afraid to ask people to arrive earlier than their standard working hours.

Collaborative tools

• Use inclusive tools during meetings that allow everyone to follow the work being done. Also making sure that the tool makes it easy for people to come back and review the work later if they can’t attend the meeting.
• Set up a Mural board that will replace your slide presentation. Everything should live in same place including Context, HMW, dedicated places to upload images etc.
• Make sure everyone knows how to use all of the tools needed. It might help to start with a small exercise to help everyone get familiar with it. If there’s not enough time for it, set that exercise prior to the meeting (maybe as part of your reminder).

Manage noises

Depending on the number of participants, background music can prevent remote workers from hearing and understanding conversations.

• Avoid background music.
• Manage people and time to avoid banter and chit chat where possible..

Be inclusive

Make sure everyone feels like they’re part of a team rather than a burden for being remote. Allow time for questions, repetition and clarification.

• Avoid questions that make remote workers feel bad like “please vote if you are okay to come in early”.
• Allow time for questions, repetition and clarification.
• If you plan some snacks and drinks, either include it in your workshop budget or let the remote workers know they can bring their own food (depending on timezone).

Note: We recently updated this post after receiving some feedback from our community.

There’s a long-held myth in the world of web design that search solves all problems. That, instead of needing to build out useful navigation that makes sense, you only need navigation that’s ‘good enough’ as people will just tend to use search anyway.

This isn’t actually true.

Back in 1997, Jakob Nielsen ran a series of usability studies and found that over 50 percent of users were “search-dominant”. Basically, these people would go straight for the search button on a website without paying much attention to the navigation. This was a by-product of the time. The internet was really just starting to grow, and search was the best way to cut through much of the chaff of early websites.

But times have changed. In this article, we’re going to take another look at the search versus navigation argument through the fresh perspective of another year, and then dive into some of the ways you can improve your own website’s navigation

Search versus navigation: No easy answers

As we saw in the example from Jakob Nielsen, users were largely search-dominant at one point, but this was over 20 years ago. A lot has changed since then, especially in the way that people seek information.

In 2003, Katz & Byrne found that most users preferred navigation over search, although this depended on "the layout of the home page and the site’s information structure". Gerry McGovern found something similar, with his team running task tests with a technical audience. The result? 70 percent started the task by clicking on a link, and 30 percent started with search. He noted that people use navigation first because it’s both easier and faster to click on a link than to use the search box.

Interestingly, even Jakob Nielsen acknowledged in 1997 that, despite the obvious tendency for users to head straight for a search button, navigation was still key: “Despite the primacy of search, web design still needs to [be] grounded in a strong sense of structure and navigation support: all pages must make it clear where they fit in the larger scheme of the site”. He noted that there were a couple of primary reasons behind this thinking. Firstly, web design still needed to account for those people who didn’t use search, and secondly, users who arrive on a page still need structure in order to understand how the page fits into the rest of the website.

Of course, if the navigation in place is poorly organized or doesn’t accurately reflect the content of the website, you’re likely going to see an uptick in search usage or just lose users entirely. In other words, if the navigation isn’t up to standard, people will be pushed away from using links. In Gerry McGovern’s article, he states that: “Clear menus and links are the foundations upon which all great websites are built”.

Other research supports the view that while in-website search is still a popular option for many users, the navigation cannot be an afterthought. An article from Kissmetrics points out that, in a survey of over 100 survey respondents, over half preferred to use navigation over search. Interestingly, 47 percent of respondents said they preferred to filter down to specific product details rather than use search functionality on the website.

Much of how people use websites comes down to the purpose of the site itself. With retail websites, for example, you’ll likely have a large subset of users who know exactly what they’re looking for and will subsequently use the search function to quickly find their item. Using the example of a website that sells books, a user looking for a particular book is far more likely to use the search functionality than go through pages of titles.

There’s really no easy answer to the question of search versus navigation – but there also shouldn’t be. In 2019, website design needs to account for different user journeys and information-seeking approaches. You need to account for the search user and the navigation user – as well as the different ways they’re likely to use these 2 approaches together.

Understanding levels

For many designers, the idea of a website with multiple, deep levels may run counter to the idea of a website that’s easy to navigate – but this isn’t the case. It’s true that broad-and-shallow architecture makes it easier for users to find content, but a significant portion of Google’s visits are via a mobile device – meaning there’s real value in migrating to a narrow-and-deep architecture. If you’re wondering how to go about this, a closed card sort is the most relevant testing approach.

The key thing to keep in mind here is that there’s nothing wrong with having multiple levels, even multiple deep levels, as long as the navigation (supplemental and contextual) is suitable.

Two ways to improve your website's navigation

Include a proper footer

The website footer is an often overlooked part of a website’s design, thought of as merely an afterthought to drop at the bottom of the page. Despite just how underrated they are, footers are an essential part of a usable, accessible website. For people scanning your website, a footer is a great place to showcase other interesting pages, and it’s also a useful way to point people to pages they may not know they’re looking for.

Run a tree test

If you’re looking to improve an existing website, you should start by looking at your information architecture (IA). Your IA informs the navigation on your website, so if you want to address navigation issues, it's best to start there. As for actually fixing your IA, it's best to start with a tree testing tool like Treejack, which can identify bottlenecks and other issues. Then, you can use a card sorting tool to brainstorm possible fixes and then run the tests again to measure any improvements.

Keep in mind that tree testing works best the more you do it. You should test, make changes, test again and keep repeating the cycle for best results.

If you’re interested in diving into more navigation resources, Nielsen Norman Group has a great section here.