Brick-and-Mortar versus Online Information Organizing

Posted by Jyll Stuart on May 31, 2011 in Information Architecture | 2 comments

I started working with a new client a couple of weeks ago with the objective of leveraging a combination of conventional and social marketing to increase sales in a particular niche market. I know… it’s a vague description, but we’re keeping things under wraps for now. The problem we ran into is the vast amount of information that exists on a current site that is somewhat related to our project. How do we extract the data we need and organize it in a meaningful manner? Would you organize the new site in a manner similar to their brick-and-mortar store? The current site is organized in that fashion…

Diving deeper, I learned the methodology behind their store front organization and it makes sense knowing their foot traffic customers. However, none of these folks would ever use the current site or the proposed new site – they’re in the wrong demographic! So, the information architecture has to be totally different to succeed! I devised a visual aid to help them diagram their store and place different customers within that diagram. Then, we made a copy of that and repeated the same exercise as an online customer.

In walking the client through visualizing the web site and the store front through different customers’ eyes; it made sense to them. What works well in the store may not work online. We didn’t use any fancy tools to arrive at this conclusion; just pen and paper and some common sense. If you’re experiencing challenges in how to organize your web site, contact us as we may be able to help.