Use caseRedesign a website
Build the new site around the tasks visitors come to complete and the words they use for them, prune the content they never need before migration, and keep the structure from drifting back toward the org chart.
Left alone, a site's structure mirrors the company's departments, one section per team, and a redesign repeats the pattern unless something outside the building pushes back.
Visitors describe what they come to the site to do, from checking an order to comparing plans to finding a phone number, and how often, which gives the redesign its list of candidate tasks.
Asked where they would click or what they would search for, visitors supply their own terms for it, which often differ from the internal names on today's menus and become candidate labels for navigation.
Participants look at the proposed navigation for the home page and each section, and video insights keep the reactions a transcript misses when a menu is named after a department, which the web team can play to department heads asking for their own section.
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GrowwMigration is the easiest moment to drop content, since every page moved is a page someone must maintain, so the pruning decisions come before the build.
Every reason for visiting is grouped into a task, and tasks are ranked by how many participants raised each and how often they do it, so navigation and page space follow the tasks at the top.
Visitors describe where the current site slows them down, such as a form that times out or a price hidden three clicks deep, so the redesign fixes those problems and keeps the parts people rely on.
Pages that serve no top task become candidates to merge or retire, and pages that serve one badly go on a rewrite list, so content owners settle what moves to the new site before migration starts.
A website redesign moves through several stages of research. Discovery, through interviews, surveys and analytics, finds who visits and what they come to do, and top-task analysis ranks those tasks so the design serves the most important ones well. A content audit then lists every page against the tasks, marking what to keep, rewrite, merge or retire before migration. Information architecture research, such as card sorting and tree testing, checks that the proposed structure and labels match how visitors think. A frequent failure is organizing content around the company's departments, which research at each stage helps prevent. Usability testing then carries the work into design, as visitors attempt the top tasks on prototypes and later on the finished site, and each hesitation, misread label or abandoned task marks a part of the design to change before launch.
The search team knows which phrases bring people to the site, and rarely what they wanted on arrival. Transcripts of visitors describing what they searched and hoped to find let content match each landing page to the intent behind a phrase.
Some calls to customer service start with a task the website failed. A list of recent callers brings in customers who tried the site first, and they explain where they gave up, so the redesign fixes the tasks that become calls.
A corporate site also serves job seekers, investors and journalists, audiences a customer study never reaches. The brief can add each as a group of its own, so the new structure makes room for their tasks without burying customers'.