UsabilityOne regularly tests websites where the information architecture reflects a business structure and overuses internal terminology. This can be detrimental to the usability of your web site. When confronted with a business structure and terminology only relevant to your organisation’s staff, users are often left quite lost. Sometimes this is deliberate, but more often, this is accidental.
To provide an analogy, say you are meeting a friend in their office of a large organisation you have not visited before. You walk into the building and in the main foyer there is no reception, but you come across the following directory map.
Not knowing the department where your friend works or what product they work on, means this directory is quite useless to you. This is what it is like when users are confronted with websites where some of the information architecture and terminology is intrinsic to staff in the organisation but irrelevant to external parties. This may be more suitable for an intranet, but not so a web site for the general public.
At the extreme, some sites we have usability tested incorporate internal organisational structures in the top level navigation of their website. More common, we come across web sites that use language which is used on a daily basis internally in the organisation. The problem is when this language is accidently reflected on the website making it difficult for users to understand the terminology on your web site.
Some pointers to ensure that the structure and terminology of your business doesn’t adversely affect the usability of your web site include:
- Putting yourself in the shoes of your customer. Simply considering how a user may think is an important first step. Think about your web site structure in terms of the user’s tasks they are attempting to achieve.
- Listening to your customer, hearing the language they use in everyday language. This may be through a phone conversation, in a contact centre, in a shopfront, or even on the street. This can give great insight into language your users may be more familiar with. This language could be vastly different to the language used internal to your organisation.
- Have the architecture and terminology reviewed by an external party. With external reviews, the reviewer won’t be familiar with the structures and terminology of the organisation and thus in a better position to find potential issues and make appropriate recommendations (coming at it from a “fresh” perspective).
- Usability testing. Putting your end users/customers in front of your web site would be the most effective method of determining whether the information architecture and language is working on your site.
