You know your IA isn’t working when…
– posted September 10th, 2006 by Brian Donohue No comments
Getting the information architecture working well for a site is a difficult thing to do. There’s no doubt about it. But when your site is only 30 or 40 pages, you’d think the IA wouldn’t be too tough. Take a look at the home page of Farmleigh House, and you can see that even very small sites struggle with the basics.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before — pasted into the top of the lovely big image on the home page is basically a big, makeshift Help textbox.
“For details of this summer’s cultural programme click on Cultural Events and then on Summer 2006.”
In other words, “We know most of your are looking for one thing, and we know that you probably can’t find it on your own, so here’s what you need to do to find that information”.
It’s not all that unusual, actually. Frequently we have to put up links on the homepage for pages that we know our users struggle to find. What’s particularly interesting about Farmleigh’s approach is that instead of just providing you with a link to the page, they force you to go through their faulty navigation to get there. Why not just give me the link?
If you can see it (the contrast of light grey on white is really inexcusably poor), they have provided a direct link immediately beneath the Summer 2006 schedule for the opening times. How very odd then to have these two different strategies right next to one another.
Well, at least they’ve noticed that people care mostly care about two simple things, and tried to circumvent (sort of) their faulty IA to help us out.
As a side note, I’d love to see the web metrics for how many visitors actually click on the welcome message. Does anyone?
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Categories Design, Site reviews
