How Information Architecture Improves the User Experience: Clearing Out Your Junk Drawers
// By Althea Fung //
We all have that miscellaneous drawer somewhere in our houses. Mine is filled with instruction manuals, incense and lighters, a sewing kit, leftover screws from Ikea furniture, and my label maker. While the junk drawer seems like a great way to store small, useful household items, in many cases, it’s an ineffective solution to poor organization and hoarding.
The same thing happens with websites. It can be hard to figure out a designated home for a lone pharmacy technician training program that doesn’t fall under GME, CME, or CNE. So we create junk drawers on our websites, filled with hard-to-categorize “other stuff.” This junk drawer makes it hard for users to find information easily and complete tasks effectively.
Jillian Penrod, MPH, MSLIS, founder of Infotistas
“It’s very important for a health information site to be organized because, for the user, it’s often an urgent or immediate health need,” says Jillian Penrod, MPH, MSLIS, founder of Infotistas, a Philadelphia-based information strategy firm focused on consumer health.
“Health information sites should be seen and handled like emergency rooms because that’s really what it is for some users,” she says. “In that way, how can we apply some considerations like effectiveness and urgency to get the users the information they need.”
Figuring out what stays and what goes — or where it goes — on a hospital website is a major task in site redesigns. How can a site visitor find the right information in as few clicks as possible? “[Patients] don’t have time to fritter around,” says Penrod.
Addressing issues of disorganization, or sorting the junk drawer, means applying an information architecture (IA). IA is the practice of deciding how to arrange the pieces of something to be understandable. A subset of user experience (UX) design, IA focuses on organizing and structuring content effectively to help the user find information and complete a task. IA also informs the content strategy.
To Whom Are You Talking?
To sketch out an information architecture blueprint, Penrod recommends starting with the user.
She says, “You need to start by answering the question, ‘Who is your site for? Patients, staff, or both?’” The answer should lead the site redesign. Penrod notes that if you’re catering to two audiences, there should be two clearly defined sections, one for patients and one for practitioners.
Once you’ve identified who your users are, she then recommends going to users to understand their needs, pain points, and even level of understanding. “There is really no substitute for doing research with your users,” she says.
“We can discuss user experience,” she says. “We can project and say, ‘I feel,’ ‘They should know this,’ ‘They won’t know this,’ but until you take a sample and research and find out what your desired and preferred users know, what they don’t know, and what they’re comfortable with, you’re just guessing.”
When doing this research, it is OK to go offline, querying patients in waiting rooms to learn about their preferences.
Don’t Forget Health Literacy
User research should include evaluating health literacy level. Health literacy is the degree to which an individual has the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions. It depends on many factors and can overwhelm even those with advanced literacy skills.
Penrod points out that speaking in plain English doesn’t just mean staying away from 16-letter medical terms; it also means avoiding the urge to create new terms for services and sections that are not familiar to users. For example, if an organization is now offering acupuncture and massage therapy as complementary services to traditional medical services, call those services a name already in the lexicon like alternative medicine or holistic health.
After determining the best language to use, Penrod says the next step is to map conditions, treatments, and services to one another.
Mapping Strategy Connects Content
“For example, a systemic disease like diabetes can manifest into gum disease, nephropathy, neuropathy. So if someone looks up a page on neuropathy and doesn’t see mapping to a page on diabetes, then it’s a disservice to the user,” she says.
When you begin mapping, she notes, you must map diseases to their symptoms and comorbidities bidirectionally so a user who goes to a page on diabetes will see links to pages on gum disease, neuropathy, and massage therapy. That same user could go to the massage therapy page and see a link referencing diabetes.
She adds that when mapping, it is important to incorporate a tagging taxonomy that incorporates plain-English terms and medical terms, so experts and patients can search throughout the site and receive the same results.
From the taxonomy and tagging system, organizations can then determine the navigation. She recommends, when it comes to navigation, avoid the urge to create unique titles or use terms that a website visitor may not understand. Choose terms that will get them to a topic with as few click-throughs as possible.
Penrod also recommends looking at what competitors are doing to inform how an organization should approach navigation, design, and information architecture. A competitive analysis can help determine what works on other sites as a baseline for functional expectations and blend it with user experience data.
A Place for Everything?
While focusing on taxonomy and tagging will help to put things in their place and avoid the junk drawer organization method, Penrod says it is also important to decide whether or not every piece of content your organization creates should actually go on the site.
“That’s one of the big aha moments my clients have during a site redesign. They think, ‘Oh, we have to put everything in here.’ But you really don’t have to think that way,” she says.
By curating your content, she explains, you’re sharing the best information to your users across your channels. For example, your diabetes conditions and treatment page can go in the endocrinology section of your main site while a patient story about a young girl with type 1 diabetes who had islet cell transplantation can go on your blog. The conditions page serves to tell about the way you treat the disease and goes with like pages. The patient story tells users about how one patient fared receiving that treatment and goes with other stories. In both cases, proper tagging should bring users to the associated pages.
Penrod says it’s also important to think of social media as a companion to your site, and the information shared there should not be duplicated onto your main site. So if your organization shares photos of newborns, those photos should live on your social media page, not in three or four different places on your website.
Think Mobile First
Penrod says it’s also essential to think about the mobile experience. According to Statista, an online statistics and market research portal, 52.4 percent of global web traffic originated from mobile devices in the third quarter of 2018.
“We shoot for a mobile-first user experiences to ensure the highest user experience. If you have a mega menu, someone on a phone or a tablet will close it and go somewhere else. If you look at a menu and have 600 menu items, you’ll go somewhere else. Then your organization loses a potential patient,” she says.
While getting rid of the mega menu or the drop-down menu doesn’t guarantee a better navigational experience, it will help organizations focus on what is most important to the user, she says. Limiting the number of choices for your website visitor forces organizations to strategically organize information.
Althea A. Fung is a digital content strategist and healthcare journalist. She is a senior editor at NewYork-Presbyterian.