You Are Where?

Organize your site’s content so visitors know where they are at all times.

By Diane Burley
Monday, March 2, 2009

Years ago I worked on designing interactive kiosks for the World Financial Center (WFC) in New York and London’s Canary Wharf. The goal of the kiosks was to supply different types of information to the people who used them—anticipating their needs as they entered the complex, no matter where they entered. In the middle of a site redesign right now, I realized the tenants I learned in creating a navigation system for a physical space are applicable to designing a digital space as well.

At a large complex like Manhattan’s WFC, there is a mix of retail, office, recreational and amenities. And for each of these different destinations there are different types of seekers: The harried individual trying to locate a given office; the couple looking for a romantic restaurant; a parent with a child needing a restroom; a couple of friends wanting to spend the day shopping.

Getting Your Bearings

Each of these individuals is searching for something—in some cases they know exactly what and need the fastest way there, while for others, search is about serendipity. For each, getting their bearings at the point of entry is absolutely essential. Which is why when you arrive at a large shopping mall there is a huge map in front of you that says, “You Are Here.”

Now consider the virtual space. When readers come in through the front door, the “you are where” is obvious. There’s usually a tagline, a welcoming statement, an obvious navigation. In fact, the front page is less about headlines than it is about being a table of contents. Then along came Google to drop readers deep into the bowels of our sites. Will those readers know where they are? If they are in a hurry to find the most relevant information, is there a clear path to take them there? If they are a serendipitous seeker, what clues are you providing to let them know that yours is a site packed with treasures of information?

Recent studies by IDC and Forrester show that people look for information on a site in one of two ways: The search box and link-navigation. For those who gravitate to the search box, which, in the physical world, would be analogous to asking a person for directions, the results are dismal: Search is “unusable” more than 85 percent of the time, with IDC saying that 22 percent of the time search yields nothing at all. This shouldn’t be surprising, since most users are not library scientists or semantics experts.

That brings us to the other half of information seekers—the serendipitous searchers or link navigators. Link navigators are similar to curious browsers. Time may or may not be important to them, and they may not have a specific destination in mind. They are motivated to find what is interesting to them be it topics, entities (the people, places or organizations) and, to some degree, headlines. When you are dropped onto a page from Google, is there anything that greets your reader and says “you are here?” Probably not, since most sites were built more like a house than an apartment complex where there is only one door that has a welcome mat. Instead, we need to think of every page as a port and guide visitors through the site with relevant links to the rich content assets.

Relevant links are not limited to <Next Article>. They should be a series of links to similar stories, people or organizations mentioned in the article, topics related to the subject. When a search engine result brings a person to your site, this is your best chance to convert them to a regular reader. As the old saw goes, you have one shot at making a great impression.

Further, as one publisher shared with me, it’s important to make sure that on every page you know that you are welcomed as a reader, as an information provider or even as an advertiser. Do you have a way to easily establish this on every page?

Organizing information in a way that appeals to both types of searchers (and according to researchers, the groups are evenly split) is the Holy Grail for most information providers. In a way, seeking a better way to offer search is exactly what your readers are looking for —finding the best way to find.

Diane Burley has been putting media companies on the Web since 1995. She is an online media specialist for Nstein Technologies, CEO & founder of PureContemporary.com and author of the blog, SiliconValet.blogspot.com.