Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Full-day Seminar, 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
How to Design a Task-Based Information Architecture: Essential Tips for Creating a Fast and Convenient Website
Gerry McGovern, author of the best-selling book, Content is Critical
Is your web site verging on chaos? Do people have trouble finding things? Are your site's content developers refusing to add the proper metadata?
Once staff realize how ‘easy’ it is to put a document on a company web site or intranet, they want to do it a lot. Then you find that you have hundreds or thousands of pages, completely without organization or structure. What can you do?
To help web managers, designers and information architects solve these types of problems, we went to Gerry McGovern, a world-renowned expert in content management and author of two top-selling books, Content Critical and The Web Style Guide. Gerry has spent the last ten years consulting exclusively on issues pertaining to information architecture and content management systems to some of the world’s leading organizations.
Information architecture problems aren’t just happening to you. It’s happening at companies everywhere. For example:
- The intranet of a large transit company had gone out of control. In fact, there were almost 500 separate intranets. Nobody could find anything and senior management got worried that the intranet was wasting time, not saving it. A project was undertaken to create a single information architecture for the intranet. 90 percent of staff said they were happier with the new architecture—finally they could find stuff!
- A major software company had a support website with 100,000 pages. It got rid of 60,000 of them and didn’t get a single inquiry about where these pages went. And the slimmed down site was, of course, much easier to manage and much easier to find your way around.
- An educational company reduced it classification in half and more than doubled its sales.
- A major technology company has identified the key tasks its staff wish to complete on its intranet. Year on year it seeks to improve task completion rates.
The Web is moving beyond pure experimentation and innovation. Websites which used to be run as a series of projects are now being managed as a set of professional processes. The best websites no longer focus on the quantity of pages that are published. The motto now is: Quality, not quantity.
Gerry believes that simplicity, consistency and familiarity are the keys to designing a quality website. People aren’t at your site to ‘enjoy’ themselves, and they certainly aren’t there to learn how your ‘innovative’ navigation or search works. They’re there to get some work done—to complete a task. Customers are most happy when they get in and out of your website in the fastest possible time.
In his extensive work, Gerry has found that when you think of your website as a publication, instead of a technical medium, it makes it easier to prioritize your design effort. Since the principle thing most people do on your site is read, designing for easy reading becomes the highest priority.
To learn what it takes to bring the chaos to order, Gerry has put together an information-packed full-day seminar. Over this day:
- You will get a solid grounding in task-based information architecture design, delivered in a non-technical manner. You will learn why a standards-based approach is the best way to design an information architecture. You will learn why it's easier and cheaper to manage, and why, more importantly, it's what the user really wants.
- You will learn how to focus on task completion on your website. You will see good and poor examples of task completion on websites, and you will learn about the critical importance of link writing in successful task completion.
- You will learn why the best websites are actually getting smaller—why the focus is now on quality not quantity. Gerry will show you techniques that allow you slim down your website and beef up your results.
- You will learn why ‘carewords’ are the foundation of great information architecture design. You will learn why people distill the things they want to do on your website into a small number of words. If you identify these words and use them in your architecture and content, you will significantly increase task completion. Gerry will show you a very simple but highly effective technique for identifying these carewords.
- You will learn why understanding how people read is a window into how they think when they’re on your website. If you make your website readable—in the broadest sense—you make your website navigable, and Gerry will show you how. He’ll also give you exclusive results about a radical, ground-breaking study that has discovered the best color for text on a screen.
Who Should Attend
This seminar is perfect for people who have responsibility for large web sites, including producers, communications managers, marketing managers, and IT managers. It’s for people who want a step change for their website—to bring it to the next level of success. Whether you’re involved with an intranet or public website, a government, university or commercial website, this seminar will deliver to you solid, practical advise that you can implement next week.
In addition to hearing about these practical techniques from Gerry, you will receive a detailed seminar notes booklet, containing 150 slides filled with research, stats, quotes, and graphic examples for everything Gerry will talk about.
If you want to bring your website to the next level of success, this seminar is the perfect choice.
UI10 Seminar Recommendations: If you're interested in Gerry's full-day seminar, you may also want to attend Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg's seminar on Persuasion Architecture or Kim Goodwin's seminar on Persona Development.