The process of creating a website’s look and feel begins long before any designs are made. The first step is to make a complete list of everything that will be featured on the website. Site mapping describes this action. Before beginning the visual design process, developing the ux sitemap and information architecture is crucial. UX sitemaps and information architecture are methods of outlining the structure of a website or digital product’s data and content.
If you search online, you will find there are two types of sitemaps. One is for UX designers, and the type is for digital marketers. Let’s understand first what each means.
What is A UX Sitemap?
A UX sitemap is a diagram of your website’s or app’s different pages. Its main purpose is to show how the given pages (URLs) or site elements are related to each other. The UX sitemap is an important part of building websites. It helps you improve your website’s navigation and ensure you don’t miss any important aspects of your website’s architecture. This gives your users a better experience. It also lets website owners see how people use and move around on their sites. A UX sitemap is an essential planning tool for UX designers, particularly at the start of the UX design process.
A sitemap shows the names and sometimes the purposes of all the pages on a website. It’s just a chart (or map) of the whole website. A sitemap is a list of all of the pages on a single website. It doesn’t tell you anything about the links between pages or the pages on other sites that a website takes you to.
Visual sitemaps and XML sitemaps are the two primary varieties of sitemaps. The latter is what search engines use to crawl and index a website so that it may be found via a search. Visual sitemaps are frequently utilized in the early stages of the process in order to map out what material will be included, what templates need to be built, and where the gaps are.
Read Also: Compose A Concrete UX Research Strategy With 5 Steps
Why are Visual Sitemaps Important?
Visual sitemaps are essential because they are the initial step in creating or redesigning a website. You can organize and create wireframes, visual mock-ups, and interactive prototypes with their help.
Clients should provide honest input regarding the ux sitemap because it influences the final output. When assessing a sitemap, think about whether or not it lists all of the pages. Does the way the page is put together make sense? Does the ux sitemap’s content meet the needs of both your users and your business? The visual sitemap and client feedback can save a lot of time and trouble in the long run by ensuring the project starts off on the right track.
Benefits of UX Sitemap in Design Process
The following points below discuss in detail how sitemaps help in the design process,
Identifying Importance of Page and Content
With a sitemap, your team can decide which pages and content are most important. By showing your team how all of your site’s content looks, it’s easier to talk about how user flow and website goals fit together. And while doing that, you can get rid of anything that could confuse or distract your customers. Your website will work better if you make it clear what its purpose is.
Filtering Duplicate Content
You prevent creating redundant stuff. Duplicate content wastes time and money and hurts SEO. It’s a pain to update content that’s spread out across your site in different places. By making the site’s structure easier to understand, your whole team will have less to do.
Makes Your Site User-friendly
Content that is well-organized makes your site user-friendly. The end user is the most important thing to remember when designing your website. If your site is hard to use, people won’t stay long enough to fill out your contact form or buy something.
Search Engine Friendliness
It makes your site better for search engines. Even though planning sitemaps aren’t usually thought of as an SEO tool, it does affect how Google will structure the sitemap it reads from your website. If your sitemap has a cleaner layout, it will be easier for Google to search and index it. This makes web pages rank higher on search engines faster and can help your SEO.
Proper Budget Plan
Planning all of the site’s pages, their structure, and what layout or functionality elements they’ll use helps a project stay on budget by making it easier to talk about and, if necessary, set priorities.
5 Steps for Creating an Effective Sitemap
- Figure out what information you want to give users and what role the strategy of your website should play. For example, if you have an online store, the main goal of your site is probably to sell your products.
- Start with the homepage and then figure out which pages the user will go straight to from there. These things belong in the second group. Pages like “About Us,” “Contact,” “Features,” and “Services,” for example, are usually in the second category. If you have a tool with numerous features, and each one has its own sub-page, you already have a third category page.
- Make a list of all the parent and child pages that will make it easy for users to move around. Think about how to set up the architecture of the page so that it flows as naturally as possible. Emphasize adding distinct labels in the form of page titles and ensuring that the main page, second-level, third-level, and so on pages make sense together.
- Put it through a series of tests to ensure you’ve chosen the best solution. Prepare various scenarios to assist your team in visualizing and selecting the ideal site structure for your users. Creating different scenarios is an important part of planning your site’s design as a whole because it lets you make a structure that will give your site’s users the best experience.
- Show your fellow employees at the company what you’ve done. They could be marketers, web designers, content writers, development teams, and so on. It would be smart to have people from different parts of the company help with this. You need to know about different viewpoints to put them together and talk about them.
How Do You Create A Sitemap Using Information Architecture?
The great thing about ux sitemaps is that anyone can create them regardless of design skills. Only two types of elements are required: blocks and connecting lines. Creating a ux sitemap necessitates a few key characteristics.
- A homepage. It is a fundamental component located at the top.
- Items. Items may represent sections (content tiers) or nodes (individual pages). Every element on the map must have a reference number (according to the element hierarchy) and a label (typically the page title). Verify that the item labels have meaning. The labels should accurately describe the section or node.
Guidelines for Creating UX Sitemaps
Web Design
You must invest in establishing a solid ux sitemap from the initial phase of the web design process through testing techniques such as card sorting. By establishing a site’s page hierarchy at an early stage, you have a greater chance of producing a product that users will find easy to navigate.
Review Pages
When intending to improve the user experience of an existing website, conducting a content audit is one of the first steps to take. Analyze the current content on your website and decide how it should be organized. Determine which pages the homepage links to first. Sitemaps should be used to organize information, not to convey the site’s message, so you should do this.
Classify The Information
The further a page is located on your homepage, the more difficult it will be for visitors to locate it. Therefore, you should always create a page hierarchy based on importance.
Align with User Mental Models
Jakob’s Law says that most of a user’s time is spent on other sites that have set patterns. So, your website shouldn’t look very different or have a very different layout than a competitor’s website in your category.
For example, if you’re making a website for a business, it’s best to include an “About us” page and make it a top-level navigation option since most visitors expect to see this information.
Complete Task
The more steps a user has to take to finish a task (like buying a product on a website), the more likely it is that they will leave the site without finishing the task.
The 3-click rule is an unsanctioned web design rule that states that any page on your website should only require three clicks to access. Use a sitemap to determine which steps are required and which are unnecessary, and combine steps where possible.
Maintain Sitemap
A sitemap ensures that all project participants are on the same page. Therefore, it should be preserved in a location where project associates can access it and make modifications.
Sitemap Should be Modified
A sitemap shouldn’t be a piece of design that stays the same. Instead, it should be a living document that changes as the structure of a website does. Every time something changes, the sitemap should be updated to show this.
Read Also: Sitemap Design Tool That Helps A User in Designing
Conclusion
Remember that ux sitemap is not a user journey, but it is helpful to align your sitemap with the user journey so that it follows a logical, user-centered path. The sitemap is meant to show how the pages or content are organized and how they fit together.
Sitemaps can be molded and shaped to meet the needs of your project, whether you need to display simple boxes or more detailed drawings to depict the content. Understand your audience and why you’re creating a visual sitemap; this will guide your strategy. Such as just listing on paper or developing visual sitemaps with extensive details.
You can easily create a visual ux sitemap in Word for small websites. Adversely, for large businesses with more content, a visual sitemap can ensure that nothing is missed in the design or duplicated (that you don’t want to copy), and it helps with content creation in the same way that an outline might.