What is the best way to measure the ROI of an IA evaluation?

1 Define your goals

Before you start an IA evaluation, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with it. What are the main problems or challenges you want to solve with your IA? How do they relate to your business objectives and user needs? How will you measure the success of your IA evaluation? You need to define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals that will guide your evaluation process and help you calculate your ROI.

2 Choose your methods

When evaluating your IA, you can choose from various methods, such as card sorting, tree testing, or user testing. Card sorting can help you understand how users think about your information and create an intuitive IA. Tree testing can test the ease of locating what they need in your IA. User testing can evaluate how well your IA supports user goals, expectations, and behaviors. You can use one or more of these methods, depending on your scope and purpose. Additionally, you can use quantitative and qualitative data to complement your evaluation, like analytics, surveys, interviews, or feedback.

3 Calculate your costs

In order to measure the ROI of your IA evaluation, you need to be aware of the associated costs. These costs can be broken down into direct and indirect components, such as time, money, resources, and opportunity. Estimating or tracking the hours spent on planning, conducting, analyzing, and reporting your IA evaluation is essential. Additionally, you must consider any money spent on tools, software, platforms, or services used for the evaluation. It is also important to account for the number of people involved in the IA evaluation and their respective roles or skills. Lastly, you should factor in any other projects or tasks that were postponed or missed due to the IA evaluation. When all these costs have been estimated or tracked and added together, you will have a total cost for your IA evaluation.

4 Calculate your benefits

In order to measure the ROI of your IA evaluation, it's important to consider both tangible and intangible benefits. This includes assessing how much your IA evaluation increased revenue, reduced costs, improved user satisfaction, and provided valuable insights. To calculate the total benefit of your IA evaluation, you need to estimate or measure these benefits and add them up. Revenue can be increased through sales, conversions, subscriptions, or donations; savings can be achieved through reducing errors, complaints, or support requests; satisfaction can be improved through loyalty, retention, or referrals; and insights can be gained through ideas or recommendations for your IA or content strategy.

5 Compare your costs and benefits

The final step to measure the ROI of your IA evaluation is to compare your costs and benefits and see if your benefits outweigh your costs. You can use a simple formula to calculate your ROI percentage:

ROI = (Benefits - Costs) / Costs x 100

For example, if your IA evaluation cost you $10,000 and generated $15,000 in benefits, your ROI would be:

ROI = ($15,000 - $10,000) / $10,000 x 100

ROI = 50%

This means that for every dollar you spent on your IA evaluation, you gained $1.50 in return.

You can use this formula to compare different IA evaluation methods, scenarios, or outcomes and see which one gives you the best ROI. You can also use this formula to communicate the value of your IA evaluation to your stakeholders, clients, or managers and justify your decisions or recommendations.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?