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Have you looked at the weather.com site lately? It has just undergone a
significant redesign in response to information gathered by understanding
its users. The site is also one of the most visited sites on the Web, attracting
weather nuts as well as ordinary people who want to know if they should
carry an umbrella or dig out the snow shovel by tomorrow. Each day people
look at between 7 and 10 million page views on the weather site, infinitely
more than we would ever expect at a site featuring technical documentation.
Nonetheless, we have much to learn from the information architects of
weather.com.
Weather.com was featured in the December 2000 issue of Fast Company
(FC issue 41, page 186 or
http://www.fastcompany.com/online/41/weathering.html) in an article, "Weathering the Storm,"
by Chuck Salter. Salter reports that nearly 12 million people consult the site each day. Unlike other
dot coms, weather.com is growing rapidly and maintaining its profitability.
It's especially significant that we find a very tight integration at weather.com between
the technology experts responsible for the site performance and delivery and those
responsible for the site content. Too often our discussion with technical publications
staff points to problems between the Web owners and the content developers. The
publications staff develop a vision of the end-user accessing information on the Web
but find themselves unable to influence the delivery environment. The technologists
pursue presentations that are unlikely to support ease of access to the information that
end-users need. As a consequence, users don't stay, and they don't come back, unlike
the weather site.
Weather.com delivers over 300,000 pages of content, nearly a million pages if you
count all the weather maps. Yet, the site makes all this content accessible so that people
will keep coming back to find what they need. In the site's latest version, readers can
customize their view of the site, creating a My Weather home page that presents reports
for selected locations and six weather maps of their choice. In addition, access to additional
information, such as airline schedules, is simply a click away. Bill Hackos and I set up our
personal weather page just yesterday afternoon. Now we can track Denver and get
information about additional cities (for example, Paris for our younger son, Washington
DC for our older son).
In the site redesign, the information architects studied users: what they looked for, why
they visited, and why they returned (or didn't). David Davila, the site's information
architect, designed a hub and spoke model for the site's information. The users are at the
center (the hub) of the model, surrounded by information resources related to their previous
choices. The earlier site design used a more traditional hierarchical structure, one we
frequently see with technical documentation, arranged in seemingly never-ending tree
structures. Users were quickly lost in this model and found they had to shift to different
hierarchies to find unrelated information.
At the heart of the site's success is a relentless customer focus. That customer focus is what
is missing from so many high-tech companies. Publications organizations often are barred
from interacting with customers. Just as often, technical communicators lack the desire to
let customers lead the way. Following weather.com's example, we need to develop user
personas based on real in-depth information. We need to track, as weather.com does,
exactly what pages are visited every day (and which pages are not visited). We need to hold
focus groups, conduct site visits, and run surveys based on user visits to our Web sites.
We need to include links on every page that invite user feedback.
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