Software Magazine - Incremental Changes for Maximum Impact: Redesigning Large-Scale Web Sites

Problem: You have a large and complex Web-based information system that has grown to unmanageable proportions. Your customers and end-users are complaining and reports from the call center are unanimous: No one can find what they’re looking for.

Bigger problem: Your budget. You can’t afford or cost-justify a full redesign. It could take a year or more to implement—and cost millions. And you have no guarantee that the new site will solve your usability problems without introducing new ones.

A full redesign also risks alienating users who, for better or for worse, have become accustomed to the current site, warts and all. A full redesign, however brilliant, may simply be seen as an inconvenience to your users.

Large-scale Web sites have a habit of growing even larger over time—and usability issues with information architecture (IA) and navigation usually grow along with them. It’s easy to understand how this happens: new business requirements and changing needs contribute to a multitude of patches and fixes; pages and sections are added by well-intentioned development teams to satisfy different stakeholders within your organization. This often results in an overall information structure that is no longer logical or usable by the end users.

To make matters worse, the relative lack of documentation on site architecture makes getting a handle on the overall redesign effort pretty challenging. Even when functional requirements are generated for new features or “sitelets,” the overall site can (and usually does) lack that high-level view of documentation.

The good news: Almost any large site can be significantly improved by adding a select number of “layers” of new pages. These new layers serve to direct users to the information they’re looking for, enabling them to parse the large amounts of information on your site. The key is to really analyze the role of the top-level pages—and to direct the redesign to ensure the new pages address the main usability issues. By adding a few layers of Web pages (as opposed to targeting specific sections), you create the feeling of a new site without the time and expense of a complete overhaul.

Whether your site is constructed to handle the needs of market or scientific research, financial information, customer relationship management or inventory management, it could be a candidate for the following Four-Step methodology:

Step 1: Ascertain the nature of the user interface (UI) problem. Collect and review all the user-based research you have on hand. Go back as far as two years to get a statistically significant volume of information. Focus on identifying the main issues users are having with the site. Some important sources of information from which to cull this data are shown below. (See Figure 1: “Key Inputs to an IA Redesign.”)

Figure 1: Key Inputs to an IA Redesign

Call-Center Reports. Review call-center log, summary reports or talk to the call center staff.

Web-based Logs and Reports. Assess where users are going (and where they’re not going) from your logs. Pay particular attention to feedback to the Webmaster: This will tell you where users are getting frustrated, and can help you pinpoint specific problems.
Customer/User Research. Any focus groups, usability tests, or attitudinal research will be a good base for judging what customers want, where problems lie—and what needs to change on your site.
Direct Feedback. Even if you haven’t collected formal research, sometimes talking to a small number of clients or users will help you focus on the major UI issues.

Step 2: Distill the key lessons from each input, and find the common threads between the inputs. Are there major usability issues you can tackle in a short-range redesign effort? Some findings may be for the longer term. Two of the more common usability problems that are best addressed in a short-term redesign effort are:

Unclear navigational structure. Are users having trouble simply finding the information they need? Are you making it unduly hard foryour users to “discover” the information they need to accomplish their task?
Heavy use of jargon or “organization speak” that may be familiar to you, but not necessarily to your users. You may not be able to eliminate jargon throughout your site – but by reducing it at the uppermost layers, you can improve the usability of your entire site.

Step 3: Using your Web reports, analyze where the highest-traffic pages are. What are they? How many levels down is it necessary to go to get to these pages? You need to assess how many “usability layers” will be needed to address your problem.

At this point you are ready to consider introducing top-level layers to help remove the usability barriers from your users as follows:

Layer One: Your home page and site utilities (example: search).
Layer Two: The main content pages accessible from your home page. These pages are generally the main focus of your site.
Layer Three: The subsidiary (or detail) pages that come off of your Layer Two (main content) pages.

Step 4: This is a good point at which to consider cleaning up these top two or three layers of information on your site—find the sweet spot.

Finding the sweet spot in a redesign. No matter how large a site is, improvements in the top two or three layers accessed by the users can significantly impact a site’s usability. (See Figure 2, “Sweet Spot for IA Redesign: The Top Three Layers.”) I’ve worked with sites containing thousands of pages whose usability was improved drastically—as evidenced by increased usage and reduced problem calls—by adding three layers of new pages. Adding these layers involved the design of only a few dozen pages or templates, rather than hundreds of pages.

Figure 2: Sweet Spot for IA Redesign: The Top Three Layers

Issues inevitably arise in doing a partial redesign. The most critical ones that need to be addressed are inconsistencies between the older and the newer pages with:

Global navigation (top-level or left-hand navigation). Navigation at the top page layers obviously needs to feel coordinated with the existing page navigation. One way of addressing this is by implementing “bread crumb” navigation trails for the lower-level pages.
Look and feel. This is actually (surprisingly) less of a problem than it sounds, mostly because users are generally focused on their tasks and more concerned with the thinking part of the navigation than with the visual ornaments.

Luckily, both of these issues can be properly addressed by building a small prototype to test the proposed incremental redesign and gain feedback from actual users. The prototype can be constructed to simply point to the existing site (navigation back to the prototype pages is an open-ended issue). One or two days of usability testing will help you weed out any miscalculations in the redesign. The testing will also suggest additional ways of solving the navigation and visual presentation issues, if they do exist.

Redesigning the top two or three levels of information is not the right tactic for every large site. And it won’t solve every problem on a site. But it can help point users to where they need to go on your site—which is at least half the (usability) battle.

Meryl Enerson is president and founder of Enervision Media, specialists in usability research, interface design and information architecture. The company’s clients have included Fidelity Investments, United Airlines, AT&T, McKinsey & Co., Citibank, UPS Prodigy and The New York Botanical Garden. Meryl was formerly a vice president and creative director in Citibank’s user interface development group. She can be reached at meryl@enervisionmedia.com.