Summary
I proposed, up-sold and then delivered a new information architecture and content strategy
These are slides from my proposal deck
I suggested a proven content strategy process
Proposal
I divided the work into packages, each with a test phase to prove that the changes were adding value before we moved on to the next step
My stakeholders needed an outline plan which they could take to their stakeholders to show the scope of the work and the expected value it would deliver
The business readily approved my proposal and so we moved to the discovery phase
Content audit
I used a site crawler to map the live site
Working with Cunard’s Head of Content, I removed any obviously redundant pages and pruned the rest down from over 200 to a final set of 85
These were captured in a spreadsheet from where they could be printed onto file cards for physical sorts, or uploaded to an online card sorting tool for remote sessions in Cunard’s overseas offices
What I did wasn’t strictly a card sort, which is normally a quantitative technique requiring 30-50 participants.
I used the cards as a mechanic for a more qualitative approach.
I wanted to understand the participants’ thoughts as they grouped the cards, so I let them work through the cards uninterrupted and then ended the session with a review of their decisions
I ran 12 sessions with a total of 18 participants.
The sample set was a mix of members of the Cunard sales and digital teams, and Cunard customers.
Card sort
I allowed participants to add their own cards. I felt that there were pages which could be merged and possibly also gaps in the content tree. I wanted to test these hypotheses by allowing participants to modify the card deck
I worked with Cunard’s web team to create a new sitemap combining the best of the ideas from the sort sessions.
As described above, we weren’t following a traditional card sort protocol and so our interpretation of my analysis was subjective rather than statistical.
With that in mind, I used a tree test to validate our proposals.
A tree test is a task-based process where participants are shown a model of a site’s navigation and asked where they expect to see certain content types.
I created two trees - one with the new map and one with the existing one as a control.
Tree testing
As can be seen in my slide above, the results where a mixed bag.
In most areas the new structure outperformed the old one, but there were some tasks where the old site won.
