There are many different components that go into a website’s structure and it can be overwhelming to try to manage without getting lost in the weeds. Whether you are developing a new site from scratch or reassessing your current site architecture, here are some trends that should be taken into consideration:
Design
As stated in Amanda’s recent blog on design:
“Today’s websites have graduated from flashy and complex to clean and simple. What once impressed web audiences — animated text, dancing GIFs and page-hit counters — no longer does the trick. Users want simplicity. They want to find what they’re looking for fast — preferably on a mobile device. Designers have had to adapt to create a seamless user experience.”
Simply put, web designs are getting simpler to help users find what they want fast.
The first step in this process is long scroll pages. These pages highlight consolidated content in easily digestible sections. How does this impact a site’s structure? More content on individual pages means we must build a site with less pagination and content groupings that address content on a broader scale.
User Experience
User experience and design often go hand-in-hand; this is true of long scroll pages as well. While in the mid-90s the average user may not have had the tendency to scroll the modern web user expects this as common practice.
When studying the speed at which users can consume content it has been found that users can read content nearly 10% faster and are able to find information they are looking for over 27% faster when the site uses a scrolling design in comparison to paging [1]. Additionally, a study measuring the impact of long scroll design on website conversion rates found that even on a site 20 times longer than the control site the call to action conversion rate was 30% greater [2]. This allows us to infer that it is not having an item above the fold, which increases our conversion rates. Instead, it is more about giving the user the CTA at a point where the content on the page has convinced them to complete the action.
For site architecture, this again further justifies moving away from a strategy that relies on a wealth of pages to communicate content. Information architects must consider how content will be consolidated into concise content groupings.
Search Trends
Over the last several years we have seen the terms in which students find their program of choice continue to change. The large trends, however, are remaining relatively consistent. In a 2011 study, Google released the education buyer’s journey, which highlighted several key components of how students find their institution of choice.
Most significantly for the development of an information architecture, this study revealed that 9 out of 10 users do not know which school they want to attend at the onset of their search & as a result 83% of searches begin with a non-branded keyword [3]. Users are focusing on more specific searches such as “MBA Canada” [4].
Information architects can address this search trend with the isolation of specific program information. Additionally, once users have landed on the program information additional branded information can be served through other components within the site’s structure to cement the institution into a prospective student’s consideration set.
Mobile
While I have, on average, seen mobile traffic to institutional sites of roughly 14% it is a trend that continues to grow. To provide perspective, from Q4 2011 through Q4 2012 higher education saw the fifth highest increase in mobile site traffic with a 156% increase over that time period [5].
With more mobile traffic information architects must be aware of the impact on user experience on mobile devices. Even if a site is responsive and reads well on a mobile device, a site which relies heavily on pagination will have a poor mobile experience due to the variable load times to navigate between multiple pages on variable network connections. When it comes to mobile, sites are better off with fewer pages with more content on each page.
