As part of Code for Chicago, I am the Content Designer for a new website for the Cannabis Equity Illinois Coalition (CEIC). CEIC is a young organization that has grown rapidly over a few years. This is reflected in their current website by an overstuffed navigation menu. As CEIC launched new initiatives, each one got its own top-level page. This structure worked fine when they only had a few pages, but now that they have over a dozen it has become untenable.
Our first approach to creating a meaningful navigation hierarchy was to perform a card sorting workshop with CEIC to see how they grouped the content. This proved helpful at coming up with some top-level categories. However, as any good designer will tell you, sometimes the hardest part of design isn’t solving the problem, it’s making sure you are solving the right problem. The categories from the card sort solved a problem, but later research revealed other problems that totally shifted our approach.
Our design team conducted a series of interviews with members of CEIC (staff, volunteers, partners) to get a broader view of the organization beyond what was currently on the website. We analyzed the interviews through structured note-taking, transcript coding, and affinity diagramming. We then distilled our insights into 12 key findings.
These findings pointed to subtle distinctions between content areas that were previously lumped together and exposed the need for entirely new content. The research report also gave us and CEIC a shared understanding of issues and priorities we could reference for future decisions. Designing a suitable information architecture was almost trivial once I was able to articulate the decisions in terms of the research findings.
With the overall site structure established, I then shifted my attention to individual pages. The main deliverables here were templates that explained the purpose and ideal specifications for various pieces of content. These content templates help our UX designers produce lo-fi wireframes, give content writers clear guidelines, and help the client remember user context. Our team is still working on building the CEIC website, but we’re now certain we’re building a website that actually meets the user and business needs.