Digital hoarding is driving away users and killing conversionBy Christy Deines and Kate Wehner

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Digital hoarding: what are the symptoms?

Would you answer yes to any of the following?

Have people told you that your site is hard to use?

Have you ever gotten an email asking where something is on your site?

Do you manage a website for each unit in your organization?

Do you feel like you’re managing a landfill?

Are you spending all of your time updating a site instead of more important parts of your job?

Have you ever gotten into an argument about getting rid of stuff on your site?

Have you ever heard (or said) the phrase, “but we might need it someday!”?

Does the thought of managing your website make you anxious?

Does your website have an archive of press releases, meeting minutes, or past events?

Does your website display old photos that make you cringe?

Does your website feature students who graduated more than five years ago?

Does your website look the same as it did in 2006?

Are you often asked to add new pages to your website?

Do you have to bookmark pages on your website to find them later?

If you’ve answered yes to any of these, you might be a digital hoarder.

Ways digital hoarding is hurting both you and your users

Nobody can find you.

Your site is so big, or cluttered, that the amount of information is meaningless. Which Google hates.

The most important information is lost.

Without clear hierarchy and streamlined content, users can’t figure out what’s important and what’s trivial.

Users can’t complete tasks.

Need users to walk through steps in a process? How about find a form to fill out? Too much or distracting content gets in the way.

Conversion killer.

What role does your site play in recruiting students, or promoting events, research, or donations? Hoarded content will get in the way of accomplishing your goals.

People judge you.

Your site, whether you like it or not, is a reflection of the entire organization. How do you want your users to see you? Is that what’s happening on your site?

Management nightmare.

How many hundreds of PDFs do you have to keep track of? Are they up to date? What about staff profiles? News? Events?

Accessibility liability.

How much of your old content can be accessed by users with hearing or vision impairments? Are those old PDFs accessible?

The proof in the pudding

Protect IU website redesign:

Then1254 pages68.64% bounce rate

Now302 pages50.78% bounce rate

IU Bloomington website redesign:

Then76 pages11.1% of events led to the site’s goal conversion

Now54 pages21.05% of events lead to the site’s goal conversion

What are some of the challenges you face?It’s confession time.(No judgement!)

Treatment for the symptoms

Start with a thorough content audit.

Crawl your site and determine what’s redundant, outdated, or trivial. Then decide what to keep, edit, and delete.

Use the right platform (website, blog, social media) to deliver your content.

Not every platform is ideal for every piece of content.

Determine what is appropriate for the web, and what can be stored elsewhere.

Use other solutions for internal-facing information. Dropbox and Box are great.Intranets work. So do network drives.

You are not an expert in everything. And that’s okay.

Link to sites that are the subject matter experts on the issue. It’s what we call “content liability.”

Archive.

Always be on the lookout for things that can be archived. Put that archive in a place your users can’t find.

Put course information in a learning management system.

Course information isn’t managed well on the web, so put it in Canvas, Blackboard, or wherever your university recommends.

Don’t duplicate content.

Having the same, or similar information, on multiple pages, brings about a multitude of issues.

Use a content management system.

It helps with archiving and managing assets, and can alert you when content is stale or orphaned.

Thank you

Christy: cdeines@iu.edu

Kate: kmessing@iu.edu

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