Coming from a small town myself, I understand how difficult it must be to manage a website with the limited resources available. However, it is crucial now more than ever in this fast-paced digital world to have a well-structured and user friendly website.
Information is king and as town such as New Hartford expands, building a strong digital foundation is just as important as a physical one. In this blog, I explore the current Town of New Hartford’s Site and reimagine what it could look like with a new lens. But first, we must discuss the importance of Information Architecture.
What is Information Architecture?
“A website’s (or intranet’s) information architecture has two main components: 1. identification and definition of site content and functionality
2. the underlying organization, structure and nomenclature that define the relationships between a site’s content/functionality”
– Jen Cardello
IA is the practice of structure, organizing and labeling content in a way that makes it easy to navigate and understand. In New Hartford’s case, the goal is to restructure the town’s site in order to better reflect the crucial needs of its residents. Asking questions such as: “What kind of information are our residents most interested in?” help in gaining a better understanding of the audience.
IA vs Sitemap vs Navigation
Let’s talk about the differences between Information Architecture, Sitemaps, and Navigation. While the three concepts may seem to be intertwined with one another, they do have their distinct differences.
According to Bjorn Amherd, “The information architecture (IA) defines the overarching structure and relationship between all areas of a site (or multiple sites) and informs the sitemap; the sitemap lists all the (labelled) pages in entirety and shows hierarchy, structure and often page goals and content/functionality that happens to be on that particular page; and finally, the navigation guides users via links to all areas of a website.”
In this project, I took some time to really visualize (from a user’s perspective) about how the organization of a town site may serve someone as smoothly as possible.
Exploring New Hartford’s Site Map
As we take our first look into the town of New Hartford’s current sitemap, we see that the current state does include a multitude of helpful resources such as having Agendas/Minutes for Town Meetings, applying for various licenses, and much more. The primary issue is that the current map lacked organization and optimized hierarchy, making it much harder for the user to navigate to find exactly what they are looking for. For example, underneath the Government tab lives over 50 different subpages! The overall website also needs a large review since I also found outdated links from 10 years and beyond still living on the site.
Other elements that I thought could also be improved was a lack of consistency and formatting when clicking through the website overall as well as essential pages being buried too deep within menus. With a revised Information Architecture, many of these issues noticed could reach dramatic improvements.
Reworking the layout
Feeling a bit overwhelmed at the massive amount of pages and links that needed to be reorganized. I pulled out my Digital drawing board on Miro and began to rework the site map! In order to incorporate the large amount of content, I decided to include 6 main categories into the Header Navigation which included: How do I?, Government, Business & Development, Services, Contact Us, About Us, and Community & Events.
Additionally, my new proposed sitemap restructures the Footer Navigation to include: Quick Links, Government, Resident Services, Business & Development, Stay Connected, and Legal & Accessibility. One of the major improvements that I implemented was organizing the government tab further into three separate sub-pages: Departments, Board & Commissions and Elected Officials. Dividing these three made it a lot easier on the eyes in terms of compartmentalizing the information that was available rather than the prior case of everything underneath the Government tab.
Another interesting change that I made was altering the “Find it Fast” tab to an “How Do I” tab. The reasoning for this is simple. As a user, I found myself asking How do I find something much more important and intuitive than finding something fast. If a user was unsure about what to find, how would they ever find it fast? Therefore, the question of How do I? brought about three more action subsections which apply to the New Hartford population the most: Pay For, Apply For and Find.
Reflections
Reimagining New Hartford’s website was a fun and rewarding experience. Compartmentalizing the various pages felt oddly satisfying and helped me think of other sites such as my personal portfolio site that could be improved as well. IA is truly a crucial step to the design process that simply cannot be ignored. Without it, even a visually-appealing website can fail the user. It’s understandable that most towns do not have a designated designer to combat a lot of the filtering issues such as outdated articles and announcements. However, if funding is available, content management can prove to be an excellent investment that could be outsourced periodically.
View the whole board in more detail below!
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