2.3.2 Key considerations and decision processes 

Matching consumer needs to your website. This section describes key considerations and decision process when planning information architecture.

Introduction

How easily content can be found on an intranet can directly impact an organization's overall productivity. Organizations recognize the importance of information architecture as both the primary prerequisite for designing and developing a new content management system and as the means to organize information in a way that is readily accessible to customers or employees.

One example is a call center that responds to customers by using an intranet portal to maintain contracts and to give information. For this call center, the range of time that is required for an agent to find the corresponding information and to fulfill the required steps ranges from under two minutes to four and a half minutes. Thus, if 80 attempts per day are made to find information and each requires two minutes more than necessary, this call center loses 160 minutes or 2.5 hours in productivity. Even without considering the costs that result from lost productivity, the customer satisfaction will decrease. When users cannot obtain the information that they need the organization has a dissatisfied customer or, worse, a lost customer. The effort to win back these customers is significant.

In addition to content accessibility, design flexibility becomes a key success factor for the information architecture of a website. One task is to conduct workshops with business stakeholders, including corporate communications and process area representatives. Given that the website will evolve as more business users provide input and, more importantly, contribute content, the site architecture can be expected to evolve as well. It is critical that the site framework be developed with flexibility for modification as a key goal.

When planning the information architecture, key considerations include:

• Understanding the goals of the site
• Understanding your audience
• Considering objectives and key success factors
• Finding a highly effective application
• Defining use case scenarios
• Planning the site framework and site areas
• Defining category taxonomy
• Defining content type hierarchy
• Defining metadata, keywords, and categories
• Determining the components of the website
• Using workflow and syndication

These considerations translate to tasks that you perform and they guide you in the website design and decision process.

Understanding the goals

When designing an information architecture, you first need to understand the business and user goals as well as the audience to whom the information is directed. Before you can look at structures, individual applications, or design aspects, you must define the business goals and the user goals.

Web content management projects should be driven by defined business objectives and the primary project goal needs to accomplish those requirements. When the project starts, the business objective is often exposed to discussion as more users provide input, because content providers have a better understanding of the information that the website provides. However, this understanding can mislead content providers into believing that they also have a better understanding of the business needs. You need clear communication from the business constituency to monitor the motivation of the core team and the joint content provider. Unfortunately, web content management projects often are delayed because of misconceptions between the core team, the content providers, and the users.

Before starting a website project, everyone involved should understand the defined business goals and the user goals of the project. The challenge is to involve content owners in the definition and to remain focused on the essentials. The user goals should be related to the users of your site (internal or external) and the experience that you want them to achieve when visiting the site.

These two sets of objectives, that is the business goals and user goals, must be weighed against what is achievable in terms of budget, scope, and other limitations. When the organization understands both goals, there is a much higher chance that the content management project will be successful.

In our example of the River Bend Coffee and Tea Company (River Bend), the business goals and users goals are clearly defined after two studies were conducted and the core team completed a conceptual review. The sample findings of these tasks are outlined in the following sections.

Understanding your audience

First, you need to understand the demographics of the audience and why they visit the site. What are the business goals of the site and does this match the audience view of the business? Users do not have the same tolerance with web information that they have for printed or broadcasted information. If you cannot meet your audience's needs, you rarely get a second chance, especially when facing an external audience. In many cases, even employees will reject an information source that is ineffective.

As stated in the beginning of this section, the only reason to share information through a website is to make it available to users. The usability of a website is an essential aspect, good usability ensures the audience can use the site to meet their goals. Usability can is achieved by meeting the needs and expectations of the target audience.

As a recommended best practice, it is important to involve users during the process of designing the information architecture. By doing so you help to confirm the usability of the website and, in turn, to confirm an effective underlying information architecture. In many projects only content owners with a deep knowledge of the content are involved in the design process. While content owners know the content very well, it is important to involve the target audience to validate that the navigation structure is intuitive.

A good approach to understanding the target audience is to gather information about them. The more information that you can gather, the closer you can get to finding gaps in the understanding. At times, you might need to classify the audience into groups with individual needs in order to better understand the needs. You might also need to consider cultural, geographic, age, or technical differences. Some audiences need individualism to have a positive website experience. What a specific user might consider appropriate and inviting can be different from other users. Often experiences from other web sites can influence the users of your website.

A good web content management product offers the flexibility to set user expectations. By using traffic analysis, you can better understand the interests and proceedings of users.

A website that is built based on an organization's good understanding of the audience offers content that interests the user in a way that is intuitive and convenient.

In the case of River Bend the company conducted a workshop that captured the needs of the user community through a survey of their user customer base. Several key items came out of this survey:

• Information was all generic and not well organized.
• The existing site was hard to navigate.
• Specific information on the site was hard to search.

Another common mistake that occurs in projects such as these is that either the questions or the answers are left to be too vague. Obviously, this leads to assumptions being made that may or may not be correct. For example, in the previous example, the results of "the existing site was too hard to navigate" is ambiguous. It leads to other questions, such as what specifically was "hard" about the navigation? Consider for example the following additional questions:

• Were the menus too long?
• Was there too much scrolling?
• Was the resolution too poor to read?

Upon doing a follow-up survey, the previous points were then further defined so that they were useful:

• Organization
• When navigating the site, it is easy to loose where you are
• The grouping of content (teas versus coffees) was not clear
• "I didn't feel that the site was specific to my needs"
• Other sites offer recommendations and recipe ideas
• Navigation
• The menus were sometimes 4 or 5 levels deep, too hard to keep track of
• Some content was too lengthy, a lot of scrolling needed
• Search
• There was no intuitive way to search for specific coffees

Considering objectives and key success factors

For your web content management project to be a success, consider and define the key success factors that will determine whether the website is meeting the objectives. Additionally you also must understand how to measure your key success factors. Keep in mind that higher website traffic is not necessarily an indication of a good website. For example, repeat visits can only be counted as a success indicator if the visits lead to a positive user experience or, in the case of a commercial website, to increased business.

Numerous mechanisms are available to measure the success of a website including simple feedback forms, analysis of complex statistics, and custom-defined measuring criteria.

Objectives and key success indicators might include the following examples:

• Avoid underestimating the role of the information architecture.
• Make a distinction between the business goals and the user goals.
• Understand the business goals and the user goals.
• Organize information in categories and levels.
• Ensure that the information architecture provides the following features:
• Intuitive navigation
• Consistent structure
• User friendly navigation, for both the first-time visitor and the frequent user, in a structure that serves the wide scope of all the content
• Provide flexibility in the design as the information architecture evolves.

The site framework should also be flexible and easy to modify:

• Ensure clear communication to those involved with the project. Involve content owners in the defining process but remain focused on the essentials.
• Get feedback from different groups of users from everyday content creators through site managers to occasional end users.
• Ensure varied groups and users review the content and site, avoid having a single user or department review as their perspective may be skewed.
• Appoint an overall lead for the project to ensure decisions get made and the project moves forward.
• Ensure that the content is easy to find.
• Ensure good knowledge of the audience's website experience.
• Make a distinction between different types of users.
• Set a realistic time frame.

In our example of the River Bend, a workshop was conducted with the key business stakeholders. They defined business objectives based on the feedback from their customer user community and the current state of the business. The following key items, among others, resulted from that workshop:

• Increase customer satisfaction with the site.
• Based on individual user profile, provide recommendations of other items they might be interested in purchasing.
• Present targeted sales and promotional campaigns on the website in order to drive more revenue.

Finding the 'key' application

One way to drive use of the website is to identify at least one key application or feature that users want or need to use frequently and make it available only on the website. Most often an application or a particular type of information can be easily identified. Then, you can make this application easily accessible within the information architecture.

In our example of the River Bend, after the survey of the customer end user community was completed and the output from the line of business stakeholders was reviewed, the core project team conducted a review session to agree on the overall project plan.

First they decided on the 'key' application. In our example, there were two. The first application was defined as being the recommendation component. It constantly makes new recommendations of teas and coffees that the user has not yet tried but has a high probability of liking based on their buying and viewing trends. The second application was the campaign portion of the site where targeted promotions were presented based on user profile information.

After you determine the business goals and define the audience for your website, start thinking about how visitors will use your site and how the design can ensure high usability. User Centered Design (UCD) ensures that the objectives of users are taken into account when designing the site. A characteristic of a UCD approach places the user at the center of all design decisions when building a website. UCD also includes design in the manner of structure and information architecture.

One common complaint from users may be that they cannot find what they need on the intranet. This does not mean necessarily that the site is designed poorly, but that the spectrum of users is comprised of linear and non-linear thinkers. A linear approach, a non-linear approach, and a combination of these two approaches are equally valid. To accommodate the broadest community of users, IBM recommends that you develop three discrete design directions, focusing on page layout and navigation. Then present the design directions to a focus group that is comprised of a cross-section of users. The users will provide feedback regarding specific direction about how you should design the site and the content that you should highlight. A facilitator, which can be a qualified person within the content owners, should be engaged to conduct the session, and the session should be scripted with specific questions to ask the group.

A website with a high score in terms of usability includes the following characteristics:

• Information is easy to find.
• The site is simple to use.
• Pages open quickly.
• Creating and maintaining content is a painless process.
• The site is adaptable to changes.
• The site must be secure (where applicable), stable, and scalable for both the content and the user population.

As discussed in the section above, Understanding your audience, you might need to classify the audience into groups with individual needs. You can divide these groups of users at least into two subgroups:

• First-time users
• Experienced, repeat users

In addition, include a second involved target group when it comes to UCD. Consider the following experts who will work with the web content management system:

• Content authors (such as content creators and approvers)
• Site developers and site administrators

The success of a web content management project also depends on the usability for the every day editor's work. Their environment should be intuitive and consistently structured as well.

Defining use case scenarios

We have discussed the process of defining the audience's expectations at a website. The next step is to define how users access the information. A first approach is to define a number of key use case scenarios that represent the way that you expect users to interact with the website. Define these use case scenarios from a user prospective in order to deliver an authentic scenario. They must include information about the involved context.
The amount of detail that each user needs depends on the specific objectives of the website and the additional requirements that you identify during the project.

The goal is to identify and build a picture of common tasks that users want to complete and how you anticipate the user completing these tasks. This iterative process starts with research about the audience, continues into the high-level design of the site, and is followed by a more detailed level of design that includes the structure.

In our example of the River Bend, there were five use case scenarios:

1. Persona: Content Author
   Description: An internal River Bend non-technical employee who needs to quickly and securely search relevant content libraries to his specific group role and create and submit for approval content based on a predefined UI template.
2. Persona: Content Approver
   Description: An internal River Bend non-technical employee who needs to quickly and securely get immediate notifications when new content is waiting for approval and be able to view, modify, delete, or approve content for immediate publishing to the website.
3. Persona: Customer User: Guest
   Description: An anonymous Internet user who initially spends a short time on the site but who needs to quickly gain an understanding of the company vision and what makes River Bend unique to its customers.
4. Persona: Customer User: Coffee: Big Bean Level
   Description: A self registered River Bend Internet customer who is a frequent visitor and buyer of River Bend coffees and teas. This user expects to be made aware of new and ongoing promotions, expects to get recommendations of other products, services, and recipes, expects to quickly search for whatever the user needs to find on the site, and expects to navigate to a destination in the site within two to three clicks. This user has a level of Big Bean, which implies that this user gets an automatic 15% discount based on buying patterns.
5. Persona: Customer User: Tea: Tea Leaf Level
   Description: A self registered River Bend Internet customer who is a frequent visitor and buyer of River Bend coffees and teas. This user wants to be made aware of new and ongoing promotions, expects to get recommendations of other products, services and recipes, expects to quickly search for whatever they need to find on the site, and expects to navigate to a specific destination in the site within two to three clicks.

This users has a level of Tea Leaf, which implies that this user gets an automatic 5% discount based on buying pattern

Planning the site framework and site areas

As described earlier in this wiki, the site framework is the site map of a website. Site navigation (through navigator components) can be generated from the site framework. As an example of how to plan the site framework and site areas, we use the sample case of the virtual River Bend website.

The information architecture analysis consists of two parts:

• A top-down approach investigates the content to be displayed on the site, plus the needs of the audience that is accessing the site. This approach helps to formulate the scope of the site and supports our understanding of how the overall site will be structured.
• A bottom-up assessment is performed, which starts from the most basic level of the website, the content page. This process determines which metadata, including categories and keywords, to use to profile documents.

The goal of this analysis is to determine the structure of the site and, consequently, the navigation of the site. During this process, the following core facets of the information architecture are developed:

• Site framework
• Category hierarchy
• Authoring template type hierarchy

Site framework

There are two ways to organize the content on a website, hierarchical and cross linking.

Hierarchical organization

Hierarchical organization of content is represented in the following figure. Each piece of content has a physical location at a level in the site. Because content is usually accessed from a single entry point (for example, the home page), hierarchical organization of content is particularly well suited to websites.

Hierarchically structured content works best if you have well organized content that can be easily sorted into different levels on your site. Most visitors to a website understand the concept of hierarchies, such as chapters in a book. Therefore, this is a common navigational aid. It provides at a glance an idea of the site's structure. This type of content organization may be better suited to a less technical audience.

The following figure illustrates the hierarchical organization of content.

Cross-linking

Cross-linking content is illustrated in the following figure. With cross linking, any page can be linked to any other page on the site, regardless of its location within a hierarchy. This type of content organization works well in web sites that enclose many hierarchal levels and allows content that is located on a deeper level within the website to be presented at a higher level.

Cross-linked content is well suited to a more experienced user and is intuitive to use only if the linking follows a content context that the audience easily understands. Frequently, only the Back button of the browser allows the user to revisit pages.

The following figure illustrates cross-linking of content.



In traditional, flat HTML websites, the site framework is an artificial concept based on links between pages. In IBM Web Content Manager, the site framework is defined first, and the links between the pages are generated dynamically. The different sections of a website are defined in site areas, and content is grouped under different site areas.

Navigators are based on the site framework. By clicking a navigator, a user can access all content in a specific area. Menus display lists of content that can be located in any area of the site. Menus usually show content grouped by category, although menus can use a variety of search criteria, including site framework and content type.

Defining category taxonomy

The next stage is to create a hierarchical classification system that is used when displaying content. Category taxonomy is simply the classification of content into categories. Once created the taxonomy is used to apply a set of standard categories to content. The taxonomy defines the category attributes that can be assigned to content located anywhere in the site. By referencing different pages of content assigned the same category, content from different locations can be grouped together for display and access.

A category usually refers to the general subject matter of the content or its attributes, for example news or even the product type black tea .

When creating a taxonomy of categories, the main goal is to make it easy for content to be appropriately categorized so website users and search engines can find specific content. An added benefit is that an organization can begin to apply standard practices around the classification of content inside the organization.

The number of levels to create

If you find that you have so many documents covering various topics that when searching for a document based on a category, an exhaustive list is returned, it is time to think about creating new categories. You might want to assign a category to do the following tasks:

• Make it easier and more effective to find the information for which you are looking.
• Enable more effective searching on content (either within the site or by search engines).

Two main standards groups are doing work in the area of categorization:

• The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative includes specifications of the terms to be used when creating metadata. You can find information at: http://dublincore.org
• The World Wide web Consortium's Resource Description Framework (RDF) provides recommendations about the way to represent resources on the web. You can find information at: http://www.w3.org

The initiatives of these two organizations provide companies with the ability to standardize the metadata tags that they used on their site. These initiatives provide standards for terminology to be used in category taxonomy. However, they provide little assistance in the creation of the taxonomy itself.

Creating a category taxonomy

Categories are grouped within a taxonomy. Categories are organized into parent and child entries within a taxonomy. When building a hierarchy of taxonomies and categories, it is important to consider how a menu will use your categories in a search, because menus search both upwards and downwards within groups of categories, as follows:

• If you base a menu on a top-level category, all content profiled with categories belonging to that top-level category and their children appears in the menu.
• If you base a menu on a parent-level category, all content profiled with the parent level category, its children, or its parents appear in the menu.
• If you base a menu on a child-level category, all content profiled with the child category or its parents is returned by the menu.

We recommend that, in most cases, you use only child-level categories to profile content to allow more control over what displays in menus.

Taxonomies cannot be used in Web Content Manager menu searches. If you want a menu to return results based on content that is profiled with any category in taxonomy, create a single, top-level category and base the menu on the top-level category. For our fictitious website for the River Bend Coffee and Tea Company, we organized the content by the five sections Products, Company, Locations, News and Contact, as shown in the following figure. Our reference implementation site structure reflects this organization.


The secondary site areas allow the user to specify an item to search on in this area. The secondary area for Products includes coffee or tea . The separation is obvious, and users can comprehend intuitively and exactly what they can expect to find here.

Defining content type hierarchy

With IBM Web Content Manager, content is created using authoring templates. These templates are forms that structure content and can be grouped into different content types.

When it comes to defining the required document types, it is common to hear content owners requesting a content type for every purpose. For example, the sales team wants a content type for products, human resources want a content types for career information, and marketing sees a need for a content type for news and company information. From a technical perspective, these requirements can be achieved using fewer authoring templates because they are essentially quite similar.

Instead of creating a new template for every content type on the website, templates can differ by page design, such as page layout, page style, and components. Then, you can apply these templates to the many content types that you create so that the content purpose is separated from its layout, making content and presentation flexible. Proper construction of the site ensures maximum reuse, flexibility, and performance.

Formulating ideas about other components to be used in the website, such as graphics, menus, navigators, and so on, is also helpful. You can find details on designing the website and implementing it in the "Building the sample site" section.

Defining metadata, keywords, and categories

When content is created, it is crucial that you provide descriptive information for that content so that it can be categorized and searched. Descriptive information is called metadata, as defined by the W3C (http://www.w3.org/Metadata/) . Metadata is machine understandable information for the web. Metadata includes labelling, cataloging, and descriptive information that is structured in such a way that allows web pages to be properly searched and processed. Metadata is often keywords about the content of digital material in the form of labels that are only visible in the HTML code that builds the web page. The metadata will often come from the keywords or categories that a user associates with the content.

In our example, we plan to generate metadata for WCM pages by specifying standard metadata fields. The search supports the metadata fields that are described in the following table.

Name	The title of the content item
Description	A description of the content item
Author	the authors of the content item
Keywords	Keywords that are associated with the content item
Subject	Taxonomy and category information associated with the content item

The metadata is created automatically for each web page. Refer to the search methods detailed in the "Search" section of this wiki.

Determining the components of the web site

Again we use our example site, the River Bend, to explain the components used. The following figure shows an overview of the site, with key components annotated.



The River Bend website is built using five components:

1. The company logo is used as the head banner.
2. At River Bend, search can be executed from two areas. The first is a basic text search of user-specific content from the banner area. The second, more detailed search performs an advanced search of content text as well as metadata tags.
3. The personalized greeting is displayed to the customer and, in this example, also indicates their status level.
4. Based on the page design, this is where the dynamically changing campaign and recommendations are displayed. In our example, in the interest of conserving real estate on the page, the team decided to write some Java script that refreshes the area every three seconds with a combination of campaign and recommendation centric content.
5. The content area displays the current, selected content.

The chosen navigation shows all top levels of the River Bend site which makes it easy for users to navigate the site. The navigator expands downward and can be used to support further site areas.

Using workflow and syndication

One of the advantages of using a IBM Web Content Manager is to dispense the content creation process over different locations or within different security levels. With multiple locations (servers) in a typical IBM Web Content Manager environment, it is necessary to have a mechanism that can synchronize content between the multiple locations. In addition, a typical requirement has the content pass through a formal approval process before it can be viewed on the website. IBM Web Content
Manager provides two complementary capabilities for these issues: workflow and syndication.

Creating a workflow

Workflows can be used within IBM Web Content Manager to review, approve and authorize content published to the website. Normally at least two stages, Draft and Published are needed for a workflow.

A recommended workflow contains the stages Draft, Approval, Published, and Archived. As the content passes through each stage the change is logged in the content history which makes traceability easier. IBM Web Content Manager offers various options to configure more dedicated workflows to serve further needs including custom workflow actions which allow integration with external workflow or process systems.

Often the dynamics of a site require other workflow options such as a quick publish, no approval workflow. This workflow, available only to certain authorized users, allows content to be quickly pushed through to the publish stage without having to go through a multi-step approval process. This can be useful for quickly making changes to existing content or publishing time critical new content.

Important: The process of content creation is often underestimated. The technology is simple, but the planning is where the real work begins. There is a significant risk in underestimating the value of the workflow process. Workflow ensures content quality and that published content meets the organizations policies and requirements.

Using syndication

Syndication is the method used by an IBM Web Content Manager location to exchange (replicate) data from one IBM Web Content Manager library to another. Syndication is not involved in the process of approving content. Syndication is only responsible for replication of IBM Web Content Manager assets across multiple locations.

When creating a syndication process, IBM Web Content Manager allows you two choices for the granularity of items to be syndicated:

• All Items
  When configured with this setting, all elements of the IBM Web Content Manager location are replicated to the other location, including draft and expired content. Typically, authoring and development locations need access to all types of content for testing purposes. This setting is common when syndicating between distributed authoring locations or between an authoring location and a development location.
• All Live Items
  As opposed to the All Items setting, this option replicates only live content. Live content is defined as content that has been approved via workflow (live) but that is not yet past its expiration date. Typically, a production location only receives live data, so this setting is common when syndicating from authoring to staging or staging to production.

Tip: Syndication always syndicates copies of your technical assets (for example, presentation templates, authoring templates, library components, and so forth). By default, there is no setting to stop this syndication. You can configure IBM Web Content Manager to workflow these items.