Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – Information Architecture

Problem

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) had many sub-brands that published educational books for K-12 grades. They decided to bring all of those brands under the primary HMH brand and website.

I was responsible for creating the new information architecture and wireframes for the new site.

Process

My team had a good understanding of the problem that we were trying to solve, but I needed to understand how to bring all of the sub-brands together with a user experience that allowed users to still find the products and services they desired.

I interviewed stakeholders from most of the sub-brands in order to understand their products, how they differed from other HMH and competitor’s offerings so that I could create a site architecture that was easy to search and purchase from.

Solution

I created a new navigational frame work that allowed site visitors to select their user type (teacher, assessment professional, parent, teen, child or reader) and then further refine their browsing by the content type they were looking for (product, content or community).

Challenge

One of the details of the redesign that caused the most discussion between team members and stakeholders was what to call the non-academic or student site visitors. HMH sold a lot of general interest fiction books in addition to their wide educational offering.

After many discussions with stakeholders and users, found randomly at local bookstores, I recommended “Readers” because it was inclusive of all of the people I talked with during my gorilla research at brick and mortar bookstores.

Validation

After the new site architecture was created, I met with stakeholders and educators to get their feedback on the structure. After synthesizing their feedback and sharing the insights, I made a final round of updates to the site architecture. I followed the same process for the wireframes by creating a clickable prototype so users could see the new experience in action.

Outcomes

HMH was able to consolidate 20+ sub-brands under their primary brand and only had one website to maintain. Their brand became a stronger presence in the market and their operational cost were reduced significantly.