Connecting content with engagement: the new Planet 4 Information Architecture
How content on our websites will get reorganised to enable people power
- This post is co-authored with Luca Tiralongo
The first prototype of Planet 4 was launched 3 years ago. The huge amount of work done since then left a few critical questions still unanswered: “is P4 content organised in the right way for our audiences to engage with Greenpeace?” or “are #tags and categories the right way to connect content about the same topic?”.
The answers to these questions are so critical that before shipping many new engagement features (e.g. Challenges) the P4 team decided to run extensive research to dig deeper and propose a new Information Architecture and Navigation for the Greenpeace network of websites.
These slides and the video below encapsulate the outcomes of this work, and the rest of the post gives an overview of how we arrived at this point and what’s next.
How we got here
Throughout 2020 and during the first quarter of 2021, we spent quite some time identifying who the P4 audience is, how they use the websites, what needs they have and if such needs are met. Card sorting exercises with the P4 community and with end users provided meaningful insights on how content could be organised.
The quantitative research (based on web analytics data) includes Audience, behaviour, acquisition, Navigation systems and Take Action pages analysis, as well as Global surveys on all P4 websites.
The qualitative research was carried out in a broader and heterogeneous way:
- a Navigation usability testing was carried out to assess how users navigate & find information on P4 websites
- interviews with staff and with campaign & engagement specialists were held to grasp how content creators and moderators use the sites and what they are missing out
- card sorting exercises with Greenpeace staff and with end users were run to understand how internal & external users group information
- An assessment of Greenpeace non-Planet 4 websites was completed (Structures + audit + interviews)
The proposal for a new site structure
The key concept behind the new approach is that Planet 4 content should be accessible through a hybrid approach between a hierarchical structure and a web-linked one. Changes in how #tags and categories interact between them and with the content, along with a reduction of the number of the page types will allow not only a behaviour more aligned with how Wordpress works, but also a simplification of the codebase itself.
The main categories
The new set of primary categories reflect the needs of our users when interacting with Greenpeace websites. Those should be considered as a general framework for the new site structure and content.
Whereas the current architecture is more focused around “Act” and “Explore”, the new categories allow a quicker and easier way to access organisational content and start the available engagement paths.
The community is working to define which content would fit into those main categories and pages according to the National / Regional Organisations' current & future content architecture, here’s the outcomes of the working Group #1.
The page types and page templates
The new structure will bring in a simplified approach to the Wordpress page types. The idea is to rely as much as possible on native Wordpress Page & Post types, while providing templates for the main pages in the backend.
This way, each new main category will be treated as a parent page, resulting in the removal of “Issue” (and their PHP-based relationship with Categories) and “Evergreen” page types, leaving only the Wordpress default page type available to editors.
#tag pages will also change and be treated as standalone entities (aka without a parent page) and Wordpress categories should be better used for main topics to improve SEO.
The #tags
Planet 4 should use #tags the same way most Social Media do. This means that #tags should not be hierarchical, but treated as standalone entities, be available at the bottom of Posts only to serve as content aggregators. Compared to the Categories (which encapsulate a broader concept), Tags should be strictly content-specific (e.g #Shell / #PlasticBan, etc.).
The navigation
To access all the content of the new information architecture we propose to expand the primary and secondary navigation menus beyond the current “Act” and “explore”. All wireframes are available in this Miro board, please feel free to comment and leave feedback!
The primary navigation bar will have the main categories as main entry points, with an instant access to the sub-categories via dropdown menus.
Topics and Campaign pages (former “Issues” and “Take action” pages) will also have a secondary navigation bar, providing access to additional items which help content consumption (sub-navigation menu) and clickable filters to easily pull out content related to a specific area.
The last newly introduced elements will be bottom-page navigation items, which will help users who scroll all the way through the end of the page to access related content.
Next steps and working groups
The community is getting self-organised in working groups to tackle the next steps and imagine how this new concept will come to life across Greenpeace websites globally.
While the working group #1 has already published the outcomes, there is still space to join the other work strands, so please shout to the Planet 4 team if you want to join!
Stay tuned for further info about the final designs, the testing and the implementation phases :)
