One of the key objectives of our website redevelopment project is to move away from a departmental site structure and develop a structure that is based on task or topic.
In this post, we’re going to explain what our current navigation structure looks like, the impact this has on our users and look at what a topic based navigation structure may look like.
Our current navigation structure
The University’s current website structure is mostly based on our internal structure. This means that the majority of sections on our website are named after a department and contain content that relates to the responsibility of that department.
Here are a couple of examples:
An Admissions section containing information relating to student applications.
A Estates Management and Development section containing information ranging from hiring a car to building works on campus.
Why is this a problem?
In our recent staff survey about the website, you told us that you found it difficult to find what you’re looking for on the website. From our research and testing, this is mainly due to our departmental site structure.
The main problems with a departmental site structure are:
- Departments add content to the website in silos. This results in confusion for the user as similar content may appear in multiple locations (search for ‘car parking’ for an example of this).
- If you’re not aware of which department is responsible for the service you’re looking for, our departmental navigation structure is completely useless. Our complex organisation structure also makes it difficult for external users to find content on our website. Would prospective undergraduate students really think to look in our Admissions department for information relating to studying with us?
- Organisation restructures break our website. We often get asked to change the name of a section of the website based on an organisational restructure. This is often accompanied with swathes of content being moved from one section to another to reflect a change in responsibilities. Changing the name of sections based on a team name change breaks our URLs and results in broken links to those pages. This is all done without any regard for the end user.
What will a task based structure look like?
Our navigation structure will be based around our users’ needs and goals. The names of our sections would not reflect the names of our departments but the tasks our users are looking to complete and the topics they want to learn about.
Content will not be contained within departmental silos and logical topics will be grouped together, even if they span multiple teams or departments.
Taking our earlier examples, let’s look at how we can turn our department pages into topic based pages:
Information currently contained within our Admissions section relating to the application process is moved into a section named Applying to study with us.
Information currently contained within our Estates Management and Development section relating to information on our campus is moved to a section named Information about our campus.
The names of the sections will be informed by identifying our users’ top tasks and researching the language they are using to look for this service.
Benefits of a topic based navigation structure:
- Content will not be added to the website in departmental silos. Related content will be grouped together, reducing the number of areas a user has to look in to find everything they’re looking for.
- By following the language that our users are using, content will be easier to find through our website navigation structure and through external search engines.
- If a department changes name, or there is an organisational restructure, the website structure won’t change and the user won’t be negatively impacted.
- We can optimise key user journeys with a view to improving user experience and key conversion goals.
Next steps
We have already started to identify our most important user journeys and research our users’ top tasks. We’ll jump into this in more detail in a future blog post and share some of our initial findings. We’ll then start workshopping our new structure and working with departments on the practical implementation of this.
If you have any questions about this approach, please don’t hesitate to speak to us by emailing website@yorksj.ac.uk