When I did my first IA of a big university website, one of the largest hurdles was trying to convince people that the information they were responsible for providing should not always go on their department website. This was most pertinent when applied to information for prospective students. Future students are not familiar with the university, often they find the terminology intimidating or just plain foreign. They have lots of questions but they do not know where to direct them. They want answers, fast. It was not always easy to convince people that their information was better-placed on a central site. It didn’t make sense to force them fo figure out who was responsible for what, because chances are they wouldn’t bother.

That was in 2002.

Today I find the same battles are still raging. I (and countless others) have written before about the need to separate site structure from organisation structure. The structure of an organisation should not be the primary key when trying to organise your information into groups that make logical sense. Your audience needs to use your website. Your audience doesn’t understand or even care about the structure of your organisation or how it ‘works’. They want information to enable them to complete certain processes or tasks. They want access to applications that will enable them to complete these processes and tasks. Sometimes different parts of a university look after information related to the same process or task. Separating this information does not do your audience any favours and will no doubt annoy them immensely. Arranging information according to who owns it or looks after it then seems absolutely ludicrous.

Well, it seems ludicrous to me but not to some. Of course, if YOU make sense of the information output of your organisation by who looks after which bit, arranging your website accordingly makes complete sense. Unfortunately that’s not how most of your audience makes sense of your information.

I’ve often wondered why some people can’t seem to see the bleeding obvious in this case, because if you spend two minutes thinking about it, it IS bleedingly obvious.

So why do they do it? Why do they fight tooth and nail to keep information in some place where it will never be found?

One big reason: ego. Websites have always had that wonderful ability to appear to be an extension of an individual or an organisation in an almost anthropomorphic manner. I’ve said it a million times and one more time won’t hurt: to the audience a website is not just an extension, it IS the organistion or the individual.

If you work on websites this is a pretty scary thought. Your work is incredibly public and is directly related back to you. If you’ve ever received some ‘feedback’ after you’ve sent a new site live or you’ve re-modelled or made-over an existing site you’ll know all about this. This feedback can get very personal and quite irrational. You learn to disassociate yourself from the site because you have to. You can care deeply about how it works and how it is progressing but you have to learn to turn this off sometimes. You need to be able to separate the constructive and deserved criticism from the personal and sometimes almost visceral reactions. You need to care about your site to make it better but not care so much that it becomes something that you would defend with your life, beyond what others would consider rational.

Those who find it difficult to see the needs of the audience and needs of the site as a whole are struggling to separate the site from themselves. The site is an extension of themselves and an indication of their hard work. If you try to convince them to move information or functionality to a part of the site that better suits the audience they take it as an attack on their department and themselves. It must be pretty painful to live like this.

Such an attitude is really a hindrance to creating a site that is user-friendly. If you can’t separate the site from yourself, and it is, as Auden says, an “extension of (your) powers to charm”, you don’t have much chance of seeing the site from the eyes of your users.

There are ways of managing this and managing, or manipulating, is very important in a devolved web environment like that presented to you in a university. But I’ll save that for later. This post is already over 700 words long, after all. Far too long for the web…