Integrating New Section Into Established Site
I led the Small Business Administration (SBA) through a major addition to its flagship site.
When the U.S./Canada/Mexico agreement went into effect, the SBA needed to expand the content on its site to help business owners navigate this transition. We needed to create a hub of the most important content, and organize it in a way that made sense to business owners. I conducted a content audit, did domain research, facilitated workshops and card sorts, and led the integration of the new content.
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Date: Nov 2019–Jan 2020
Client: Small Business Administration
Role: Content Strategy Lead
Methods: Card sorting, facilitation, 2x2 prioritization
Domain research to understand broad concepts
One of the main challenges during this project was not having access to subject matter experts in SBA; the content team’s liaison at SBA wanted to keep tight control over the process. That made it difficult to understand the information and what would be most relevant for business owners. To mitigate this, I did a rapid audit of international-related content on the site, created a running list of topics, conducted desk research to further understand the domain, and conducted two card sorts to explore users’ mental models.
As I worked through a content audit and domain research, I kept a running list of topics for card sorting.
Results from one of the two card sorts I was able to do. In better circumstances I would have tested with at least 30 participants, but the timeline and political constraints ruled this out.
Snapshot of a rapid content audit of the existing website. I needed to understand how this content would collapse into a new, dedicated section.
Aligning on topics and their relevance to our audience
Having established a universe of topics related to international sales, we needed to get the team on the the same page, and begin forming a vision of how the content would fit into the new site. I facilitated a workshop to create a shared understanding of:
how those topics should be organized,
which are most important for small business owners to understand (from SBA’s point of view), and
which topics business owners are most curious about.
I kicked off the workshop by having participants review existing information about international sales, and add other topics.
As a group we organized the topics into groups and assigned labels to groups.
To establish the priority topics, I facilitated card placement on a 2x2 grid of content relevance and business owner interest.
Defining pages and where they live on the site
The workshop helped us establish groups of topics, and their relative importance to the audience. We knew the international sales section live within SBA’s Small Business Guide, but we didn’t know how. I proposed several approaches to integrate the new section. Once the client and developers agreed on an approach, we created a site map to document the structure. We also created a prototype on our staging site so our client and SMEs could see how it would all work.
I sketched three scenarios to demonstrate to our developers and client how the new section could be added to the Business Guide.
We developed a site map to show the organization of the content within the new section.
I worked with our developer and content strategist to create a prototype of the new section within the existing menu.
The team has a clear path forward as I roll off the project
I completed this work as I was transitioning to another project. My goal was to leave the content team in a good position to build out the pages and launch. Through close stakeholder collaboration and clear communication, I was able to set the team up for success.