One of the most impactful features of your higher ed website’s design is your information architecture. Information architecture (IA) refers to how you label and organize information to make it easy to find. IA includes both your sitemap and your navigation elements. Done well, good IA is nearly invisible, allowing site visitors to focus on your content. It’s the difference between a seamless user experience where visitors find what they’re looking for without thinking twice or a frustrating, confusing experience full of endless clicking and scanning.
Building and maintaining intuitive IA isn’t easy, especially for a college or university website with numerous audiences. The good news is that you don’t need a full website redesign to strengthen your information architecture. You can improve your site structure, navigation labels and pathways to priority content incrementally with some careful planning and the right diagnostic tools.
Check out our last post on incremental improvements to higher education websites, where we talk about the power of making strategic changes over time.
Understanding your institution’s information architecture challenges
To improve your IA, you first need to know what you currently have on your site and what problem you’re trying to solve. If you can’t get a clear snapshot from your Content Management System (CMS), consider a site crawler such as ScreamingFrog that can not only list URLs and show you folder structure, it can list 404s and flag common content issues that affect IA, such as pages with very little content, duplicate content, and missing or duplicate headings.
To make improvements that will have the greatest impact on prospective student engagement, focus your analysis on what your primary audience most wants to know and do. For example, a prospective student will want to know:
- Do you have the major or program I’m interested in?
- How much will my degree cost?
- Should I visit? When?
- How do I apply?
- How do I get in touch with a question?
Keep these kinds of questions in mind as you review your menus and site structure.
Meaningful assessment methods
For the most insight, combine quantitative data, such as Google Analytics reports, heatmaps, or tree tests, with qualitative data, such as user interviews or expert reviews. Quantitative analysis will show you where you have a problem and give you ways to measure whether changes are successful. Qualitative analysis will add critical context and point toward solutions.
For site analytics, start with views and engagement time. Are the top pages what you expect? Are visitors spending time with the right content? If not, it may indicate that important content is hard to find. Review landing pages and paths to and from critical content. Where do visitors start their journey? How do they get to marketing-critical content? What do they do next? This is where you can see if visitors are moving closer to key conversions or if they are running in circles.
Beyond analytics, the most effective quantitative methods to diagnose problems are:
- Tree testing
- Search log analysis
- Heatmaps
A tree test asks participants to find information given only a “tree” or hierarchical menu. It can tell you if your menus and navigation labels are clear and effective or confusing. A search log analysis reviews the search terms visitors use on your site. While internal audiences tend to rely on search heavily, if you see enrollment-focused terms in your search log, it’s a sign that something important is hard to find. Heatmaps are most effective once you’ve narrowed your focus to a particular page or section to optimize, as they give you page-specific data on what visitors are clicking on and what they’re missing.
All this data can give you a strong sense of your biggest IA challenges, but adding qualitative information is invaluable. If you can, talk to prospective or newly admitted students, as well as the staff members they call when they can’t find something on the website. Ask them about their experience using your website, what was helpful, and what was hard to find. When you need a fresh perspective on what’s working and what’s not, getting an expert’s review can give you clear and actionable insights.
Check out Carnegie’s user experience assessments that include reviewing pathways to marketing-critical information.
Low-effort, high-impact improvements to your college or university’s website structure
If you’re not undertaking a website redesign, you’ll want to narrow your focus. Start with low-effort, high-impact changes that can give you some quick wins.
Choose clear navigation labels
Review the link labels in your header, footer, and menus. They should be specific enough that students know what content to expect. “The [University/College Mascot] Way” doesn’t work as well as “About.” Ensure labels use plain language and terms that are familiar to prospective and incoming students. Avoid using acronyms and higher ed jargon without proper context and explanation. For example, a link that says “Pay My Bill” is easier to understand than “Office of the Bursar.” This is a great place to lean on any interviews you’ve conducted with students and staff to ensure you’re using words students and their families recognize.
Mind your menu length
There is no magic number for how many items should be in your header, your footer, or a given menu. That said, when there are too many, it’s overwhelming. Best practice comes down to how your menu is designed. For example, UNMC’s mega menu with subcategories can hold more links than Belmont’s faceted style or UMass Boston’s dropdowns. In general, aim for no more than seven links within a list, but favor clear, intuitive categories over a specific number of links.
Emphasize your calls to action
Review the placement of your calls to action and make the language as clear and specific as possible. “Find your program” is a more effective call to action than “Learn more.” The most important action that you want your visitors to take should be visible at page load without scrolling. For example, a persistent button or link in your header to “Visit” or “Apply” makes these pages easy to find.
Information architecture best practices for higher education websites
1. Focus on your audience
This one bears repeating. So many colleges and universities organize their website based on their internal structure. The more you can focus on how your audience thinks, the better off you’ll be. A great way to achieve that is to ask your audience to organize your content themselves with a card sort. Moderated or unmoderated, a card sort asks participants how they would group a set of pages or a set of topics. The results may surprise you.
2. Choose an organizational scheme
Your visitors will have an easier time making sense of your navigation if there’s logic to how links are grouped and organized. For example, grouping information into familiar topics like Academics, Admissions, and Student Life. Long lists benefit from items that are in alphabetical order. The most common organization schemes for higher ed websites are:
- Topic: This is the most common way to organize primary navigation.
- Alphabetical: You see this often for program listings.
- Location: When a college or university has multiple campuses, it’s helpful to list the locations together in one place.
- Task: Placing a few important calls to action together, such as Request Info and Visit, brings more attention to them.
- Audience: Within admissions content, giving a separate page to transfer students or returning students may be helpful when details differ significantly from content for first-year applicants.
3. Create clear pathways, but don’t worry too much about the number of clicks
We hear it time and again on projects, a stakeholder is concerned that information is more than three clicks from the homepage. While you don’t want to bury important information deeply within your site, your focus should be on the logic of clicks, not the number. Adhering to a number of clicks causes more problems than it solves. It’s such a persistent idea that we dedicated an entire blog post to the myth of the three clicks rule.
4. Get to know your content
Significant IA changes require careful content review. If you want to clean up a section of your site, you’ll need to review the content to know what pages to move, merge, or archive. Here are a few content considerations to keep in mind when changing your IA:
- Quality is better than quantity, so merge thin, low-content pages into longer, more comprehensive ones
- Rather than deleting an outdated or merged page, set up a redirect
- Review your in-page links to ensure they still point to the right destination
Partner with Carnegie to improve your IA
If you’re looking to make steady, incremental improvements to your website, Carnegie’s website development team can help. Whether you want to change your site structure, improve your content, alter your navigation, or enhance other aspects of your site, we can help. Want to learn more about partnering with Carnegie? Start a conversation.