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This article continues on from Part 2: Components of an information architecture. You can read the previous articles in this series here: Part 1: What is an information architecture? and Part 2: Components of an information architecture.
In summary, Parts 1 and 2 introduces the information architecture concept for knowledge-management or document-management systems. It describes how an information architecture is positioned between context, content and your users. Detailing why a well-crafted architecture makes possible other improvements, such as automation, enhanced navigation. search, personalised content, and more. We also summarise the components that typically form information architecture, which include: user groups, global navigation structures, information structure & metadata, among others.
⚠️ Case study example: Using AI to highlight relevant content in a KMS
To demonstrate how an information architecture enables you to build a more effective KMS, here is a fictitious case study concerning Squared Circle Co.
ℹ️ Context
Squared Circle Co is a major retail company providing office supplies and furniture to customers across Australia. Squared Circle has recently launched a new KMS using Microsoft Sharepoint. The KMS is used by the in-house legal team, among others, to store documents, collaborate on projects, and to access information and workflow processes.
❗Problem
Squared Circle’s new KMS is large, unstructured and unwieldy. This makes it difficult for the legal team to find and access information, documents and workflows that are relevant to them.
When visiting the KMS’s homepage the legal team is presented with links to announcements for projects within the marketing team, documents relating to the sales team’s customers and other information unrelated to their daily work.
The lack of relevancy to the legal team has led to very low engagement with Squared Circle’s new KMS. This is evident in site and page analytics — which demonstrate that few legal team members have been using the new KMS since its launch.
❓New feature request
Squared Circle wants to improve the KMS’s homepage relevance and effectiveness for the legal team. Squared Circle has seen that SharePoint provides built-in web parts that can dynamically highlight content based on the user groups users belong to.
Squared Circle wishes to add this web part to their KMS’s homepage so that documents, information and workflows presented to the legal team are relevant to them.
Additionally, Squared Circle wants this web part to preference newer content over older content, and content marked as higher importance over other content.
📐 Creating information architecture
Microsoft has helpfully prepared a tutorial for adding highlighted content web parts to Sharepoint sites (see tutorial — Use the Highlighted Content web part and Advanced Highlighted Content web part). Squared Circle will follow this tutorial to adopt the new web part.
To begin, Squared Circle drafts an information architecture supporting the new web part by addressing the following questions:
1. What user groups are required or affected?
To highlight content relevant to the legal team, a user group comprising these team members must be created. The legal team can then be added as audience metadata to the relevant content
2. What information metadata is required?
Sharepoint captures date and time metadata for newly created or modified content by default. This metadata can be used to highlight recent content over older content within the web part.
Squared Circle wishes to highlight content that has higher ‘importance’ ratings — as determined by the legal team when creating or modifying content. This metadata can be stored within an additional column in the legal team’s Document and Site Pages Libraries. This column will be marked as required, ensuring that importance metadata is always provided when creating new documents or sites. Correctly implementing this ‘importance’ metadata requires deeper knowledge of Sharepoint’s capabilities including Managed Properties (see Microsoft tutorial on Managed Properties).
3. What local site structures & metadata are required?
Homepage site
Squared Circle updates their KMS homepage structure & metadata to reflect that the web part will be trialled on this page. They detail where the web part will be placed in the homepage’s layout.
The web part requires that the ‘audience targeting’ setting be switched on and a content source for audience targeting selected — Squared Circle selects ‘All content’ from the KMS as their content source.
Additionally, filters and sorting is applied to highlighted content within the web part settings. This filtering and sorting prioritises content recently created or modified and content that has higher ‘importance’ ratings (see Microsoft tutorial on Advanced Highlighted Content Web Part).
Legal team sites
Squared Circle also makes changes to the structure & metadata affecting all relevant legal team sites. This includes turning on ‘audience targeting’ settings for Document and Site Pages Libraries.
As the legal team uses many sub-sites within the KMS, Squared Circle automatically makes these changes using custom PowerShell scripts (see example 1 and example 2).
✅ Review
Squared Circle conducts a review soon after releasing the new web part. The release has been a resounding success! Site and page analytics demonstrate a marked improvement in engagement with the homepage and KMS generally amongst the legal team. This is supported by feedback sourced directly from the legal team. The legal team describes that the KMS is now easier to use and they are able to find the content they need faster than ever before.
Conclusion
We hope you’ve enjoyed this series’ deep-dive into information architecture practices. As always, we love hearing your questions, comments or feedback.
If you’ve enjoyed this series but are still daunted by the challenge of implementing your own information architecture please reach out to us at TILT Legal, we’d love to help you!