Sitemaps for scurrying mice?

This article is day 2 of a 31 day series. A mash-up of the Inktober 2022 prompt list and UX terminology. Read more about the challenge here.

Day 2 | Inktober prompt: Scurry | UX Term: Sitemap

If it’s on the internet, it must be true

It’s hard to hear the word scurry and not think of a mouse. They’re cuter than cockroaches and more nimble than say, an elephant. And what do mice love more than anything? Don’t say cheese.

Mice love to travel. It’s a fact.

Okay maybe not. I did a google search for “do mice love to travel?” and found this snippet from animals.mom.com:

Do mice travel a lot?

Mice aren’t usually heavy-duty travelers, but when they move around in search of food, they’re typically not alone. They stick to small stomping grounds, usually about 30 feet in diameter. They typically scurry around their chosen areas in search of food at night rather than braving daylight.

So while it doesn’t support my claims, it does reinforce my thoughts on the word scurry so let’s just move along.

If a mouse, let’s call him Fievel, I know, not a great mouse name, but it just came to me randomly from my imagination and not from an awesome movie that came out when I was a toddler. Let’s say that Fievel loved to travel, you know, scurry about, he would likely benefit from a map.

And the same is true for a website. See what I did there?

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a diagram that shows the pages of a website, including their hierarchy. It is the information architecture of the site, or sometimes called a content outline.

It’s a great tool for organizing information on a site, and for identifying any gaps, or duplication. Managing the content on a site can be difficult. Managing a site with multiple instances of pages within the same site is twice as difficult, not to mention confusing. All very important considerations when building out a site.

Why is it important to UX?

Having a sitemap allows designers to clearly see the relationships that exist between the pages on a site, and how a user might scurry about the site. Having this insight allows for informed decisions that elevate the user experience. It improves the ability to group information in a logical way, and reduce the amount of effort that a user must exert to accomplish their tasks.

Most users will never see the sitemap. In that sense it’s less of a tool for navigation but more of a tool for designers early on to determine where to place signage and guide users through the site instinctively. It also lends well to improved “scan-ability”. If you’re looking for cheese, and you see a page full of flowers, you don’t have to look at each flower, you know you can move your search elsewhere.

If we use a grocery store as an example, a mouse might be through the roof about getting lost in a grocery store. But as a human person, the actual desired user, you would be frustrated and likely leave if you walked in and found everything organized alphabetically, or by size, or if there were two cheese sections on opposite sides of the store, with different cheeses at each.

*** I understand that there are many stores that have cheese in different sections, like keeping sliced cheese for your sandwich in the deli, and shredded cheese for your enchiladas with the dairy section, but this is a work of fiction, so let’s suspend our disbelief temporarily and just enjoy the fun analogy.

How do you make one?

Now imagine you’re on a grocery store-themed game show, because those are a thing, so we can easily imagine that. But in this version, you are part of a two person team. First there’s you, the designer. The other half is your partner, the user. In this game, you’re kept apart. As the designer, you have one hour (standard time needed to develop a site right?) to outfit the store in a way that your partner, will be able to navigate around and pick up all the items on a list… that you can only guess at (these represent the tasks that users complete on a site).

What do you do?

If you do your job right, the user will stroll in and be able to grab anything on their list with ease because you’ve made it clear and logical. You could actually win this thing! It might look like this:

In the real world, this would translate to grocery aisles, on our website it translates to pages, sub pages, and sections.

Takeaway

Use creating a sitemap as one of your first steps in optimizing your site for the best possible user experience. Focus on the higher level elements and organize them logically. Refer back to the sitemap for any needed updates, and you’ll never have to worry about your users getting lost in the flower aisle when looking for cheese.