Products, services, and retainers don't fit one menu. Organizing a site around what visitors intend to do is what makes it searchable and connected.
As a record collector, I’ve been to a lot of record stores. Some are tiny little dumps, selling piles and piles of stuff you might find at a rummage sale, while others focus on highly-specific genres or imports. Some include CDs and cassettes, some sell t-shirts and books. They all have records of different shapes and sizes — 45s, box sets, compilations — but they all follow the same pattern: you go to a shelf, you flip through some things, you buy what you like.
If that was all, it would be easy to understand how to organize a record store. But, that’s not often all that a record store sells.
Some record stores sell coffee. I cannot grab a coffee off the shelf and buy it — I have to ask (and wait!) for it to be made. Other record stores offer spaces for concerts. In this sense, they are selling live music, which means you aren’t buying something off the shelf — you’re buying the right to share in some of that store’s time.
When we wander into the world of organizing and categorizing, we tend to assume that everything can fit into a single spot, and that the same model for one sale will match the next. That’s not how it works: products take a lot of different shapes, and often don’t have a shape at all. Sometimes we’re buying a permanent thing, and sometimes we’re buying something that won’t last forever, and sometimes we’re just buying a little bit of time.
So how do you organize this information in a way that makes sense? How do you sell space and time in a way that is searchable and connected?
Three different product shapes.
Top level navigation tells a story, whether we intend it or not. Beyond the main title of the page or site, top level navigation is often the first thing that a site visitor sees — it provides a quick four-to-seven term overview of what you offer.
This is easy if you are an organization that offers one or two kinds of things. A web design shop, for example, sells services — design, consulting, development — and so we know the site will be built to explain the different layers of services. A record label sells merchandise — vinyl albums, t-shirts, books and other media — so categorization needs to focus on how we differentiate those items.
But, what if your organization sells services and things? Over the past few years, we’ve worked with several organizations that sell a full suite of stuff. Usually, they are software companies that have expanded their offerings to the consulting around that software, but sometimes (like Blend ourselves!) they are services companies that are selling one-off packages with a set price.
Our instinct is to put all of it on one shelf. Our instinct is to line up like with like — the reflex is to put all of the services together, and all of the products, and all of the long-term service options. But while these offerings are all tied to categories and industries, they are not parallel. A record and a cup of coffee can share a store, but they can't share a rack — one is waiting for you, the other has to be made.
The things your organization sells have that same split. First, we have to look at the separation of fixed features and customized assembly:
- A software product is a fixed thing. It has a name, a defined set of capabilities, a price (or pricing model), and it’s sold in more or less the same form to everyone who buys it.
- Professional services are assembled per client out of a set of capabilities. What “advisory” or "implementation support" means changes with the organization buying it, the problem in front of them, and the outcome they're after.
- A subscription or retainer is a time-based service that mixes both fixed and assembled.
On one hand, we have a fixed single entity. On the other, we have a kind of cloud of potential. This presents an information architecture issue — we cannot use the same model to present each of these offerings. You cannot simply create a section that says “here’s everything we do” because there’s no parallel between a fixed product and that cloud of potential. In other words, this is not as much a navigation issue as it is a content modeling and intent issue, because all of these items belong in different places. They do not tie neatly to a single area.
Connection is based on intent.
If the shapes won’t line up, something else has to. That something is the buyer’s intent: behind every one of these purchases is a person, and that person wants to do something specific. They want to grab a thing and walk out with it, or they want to commission something built specifically for them, and those “wants” usually don’t perfectly follow your product line and they sure don’t care about your organizational chart. They are a common thread because every offering exists to be bought by someone who wants something.
As information architecture goes, this means we shy away from asking “What is this thing, and which category does it belong to?” and move more toward “What is a visitor trying to do when they come looking for it?” Just as flipping through bins and waiting on a coffee happen in two different modes, organizing to intent means the structure follows what the customer means to do.
