Showing your organisational underpants

I learnt a good many things from proper old school consultant I used to work with. One of the things he taught me was how to steer a path through a politicised organisation.

Often where organisation politics manifest themselves is in the website and often this results in a poor user experience.

The website rigidly follows the organisation structure of the company. The top level navigation is based on the company divisions or profit and loss centres.

One of things I see time and time again in user testing is that users don't care about the organisation structure – they have a goal and and want to complete it. They don't know the organisations structure so often can't find what they are looking for – does that product brochure live in the Sales or Marketing section?

The company is "showing it's organisational underpants."

Customers don't want to see underpants and it's quite frankly embarrassing for an organisation to be flashing their underwear to the world. Don't base your website on the structure of your organisation.

Next time this problem comes up, tell the organisation to stop showing their underpants and that problem, will, hopefully go away.

Do you have any experiences with this problem? Leave a comment.