TL;DR

In the space of 9 months, I developed a new information architecture for aa.com, created a content strategy, worked with the development team to create a UI for the new CMS, and structured CMS templates for content on aa.com.

My Roles

Content Strategist

I had applied my skills to a redesign project for dcccd.edu (PDF), which led to my content strategy role at American. The organization wasn’t sure what they wanted as a content strategy, they just knew they needed one. It was up to me to discover how to create a content strategy, and decide the deliverables for it.

Information Architect & Designer

I was the IA on an Agile project team of international designers on several continents (Europe, N. and S. America, Asia) Our goal was to create page templates that met several criteria:

• Aligned with AA’s new digital branding (logo and homepage redesign)

• Suitable for all languages and cultures from Finnish to English to Mandarin

• Incorporated standard navigational, cross-promotional, and structural elements (sub navigation, breadcrumbs, etc.)

• Ensure it supports my content strategy (building the plane while flying!)

In addition to the template design, American was implementing a new content management system, and the user interface would necessarily need to reflect any elements of the content strategy I developed. I participated in that Agile team of developers in the US and offshore as the UI designer (one more build-plane-while-flying task).

A New Taxonomy

The definition of the problem developed into a diagram of the AA.com information architecture from a navigational perspective.

Analysis of analytics and reviews of customer service logs revealed to me that many informative pages were not being visited on the website – redeveloping and optimizing the search engine was out of scope for this effort.

I documented every page on the website (“evergreen content”, the non-booking path) that was accessible from navigation or in-page links, and diagrammed it (see diagram). I printed this out 10 feet tall for a presentation to the C-suite, and it was still difficult to read. This “bowl of spaghetti” was the current taxonomy, and seeing it in blue and white like this was something everyone could rally around: yes, this is a problem.

The metaphor

With the constraint of only 3 navigational tabs established in the agency redesign of the home page, I needed a 3-tier primary category distribution. I chose the human experience of travel as a basis, informed by customer service logs:

• Before travel: what does American offer, what deals are there, where do they fly, what can I take on board the plane?

• During travel: What kind of food is on this flight, how is the aircraft structured, does American offer WiFi?

• After travel: where do I pick up my bags, how do I contact lost and found, what does the airport layout look like so I can plan to make it to my connecting flight?

This taxonomy was far simpler, and accounted for a majority of the content on aa.com. It was theoretical, and would need to be verified through user testing in a later project.

My clever solution immediately hit a snag.

I learned while presenting this to the CMO that Aadvantage was a huge profit center for American, and not including it in the primary navigation was unacceptable. I would need to go back to the drawing board.

I was attached to my execution, so I hunted for a way “around” this request – not to deny it, but to find another way. I developed the idea of a “top drawer” for Aadvantage content that would be persistent in the navigation across the site, as well as provide new real estate dedicated to marketing and loyalty efforts.

Luckily, this solution was accepted!

Adaptive Content

I learned of adaptive content as a strategy from Karen McGrane’s Content Strategy For Mobile – this would enable the content to be parsed (nowadays they call it “atomized”), written, deployed in the CMS, and distributed across all of American’s touchpoints from the website to mobile apps, Apple watches, and airport and in-flight displays. Details of this strategy’s finer points are written in the complete documentation, and cover

• Content Challenges

• What is Adaptive Content?

• What Does Adaptive Content Actually Look Like?

• Adaptive Content: Sample CMS User Interface (UI)

• Planning the road to the new strategy: Content engineering

• Changing The Way People And Processes Work

• Needed Content Roles and Skills

Information Architecture & Design

In addition to the design work done for the top-drawer solution and the CMS UI, I enjoyed my participation in the international design team’s work. My contributions included (pp 32-40 in the documentation):

• New Navigation Elements

  • Back to top

  • Breadcrumbs

  • Persistent, consistent, left sub­‐navigation

  • In-­page navigation

  • Related content links

  • Tags

• New Content Elements

  • Highlights box

  • Internal callouts

  • External callouts

  • US Airways callouts

  • Pull quotes & Did You Know callouts (text element)

  • Icon for “Jump To aa.com US site” for international sites

  • Social buttons (for page-­specific sharing)

• Redesigns of

  • Booking module (in-­page)

  • Calendars

  • Charts

  • FAQs (in-page)

  • Hero imagery (directory pages & detail pages)

  • Ordered (ol) and unordered (ul) lists

  • Photo galleries

  • Seat maps (evergreen, not booking path, still in process)

  • Tables with yes/no values and tabular data

  • Video gallery

  • Video player at 16:9 (can hold a 4:3 video)

• Establishing the need for

  • Unified metadata standards

  • Strategic linking practices for SEO and information design