Information Architecture with UI

Brief: Individual coursework to develop the information architecture for a website.

Chosen Domain: tourism website for the North Shore of Lake Superior for those living in the Minneapolis-St.Paul, Minnesota metropolitan area.

APPROACH

Domain Model:

To begin, I interviewed 3 domain experts: a young professional living downtown Minneapolis who enjoys a relaxing weekend trip up North with her husband in search of pour over coffee and artisan doughnuts; a teacher living in the suburbs of Minneapolis who enjoys the occasional outdoor adventure; and a retired man from the suburbs who is an outdoors enthusiast (he wants to be Bear Grylls). After my interviews I sat down with my notes and I began to form a domain model. As the model took shape I began to see the trends in my domain expert’s needs and expectation from a trip to the North Shore. People travel primarily to participate in activities and/or to attend events. Length of trip dictates the feasibility of some activities and the season ultimately would determine everything about the trip.

Card Sort:

Before developing a sitemap I created a list of pages I wanted the sitemap to capture. Next I entered this list  into a virtual card sort. The card sort was completed by 5 domain experts. Analysing the results, I discovered a few trends in taxonomy such as: arranging by activity, season, popular attractions, and length of stay.  From these findings I decided a topic based approach for main navigation would work best.

Sitemap:

With my card sort results and list of pages I had an idea of how I wanted to structure the site and I began to form my sitemap.  I focused on keeping the connections simple. Only highlighting the connections the help communicate structure. I worked on clear labelling that would be understandable to all users. For the main navigation I decided to keep it simple with three only three options: Plan Your Trip, Places to Visit, and Places to Eat/Drink.

Referring back to the main goal of the website, to help tourist plan a trip to the Minnesota North Shore with ease, creating findability was a key goal for the site.  With this in mind I decided that the website would have a hierarchical based sitemap that also supported personal exploration throughout the site with the use of tags. Tagging being a good way to help users navigate who are not sure what they are looking for or what is around, just like some of my potential tourists.

With these tags I decided to include a section for users to search for the two most important aspects, learned from my interviews, activities and accommodation. For this section users would be able to use faceted navigation to narrow down possibilities. For activities I included facets such as season, intensity of activities, and number of people and for accommodation check-in, check-out, number of people, and location. The results page included the faceted search as a sidebar for ease in editing the search criteria (see wireframes).

To test the sitemap I continued to focus on my goal of good findability and decided to test with an information architecture focused technique, tree testing. I asked two domain experts to complete the test. Both tree tests went well and I did find they had issues discerning the difference between activities and attractions as traveling to visit an attraction is an activities. From this insight I decided to combine the two for the sake of clarity. With this I felt confident in my labelling and navigation.

User Journey:

Wireframes:

Evaluation:

I decided to follow up with two in person think-aloud scenario tests. I chose to test with scenarios because they test usability and provides rich data for analysis.  I sat down for each evaluation with each person using a set of wireframes on my computer and a set of scenario questions.

The evaluation proved to me that my goal of focusing on findability worked well as the my participates were able to complete their scenarios with little to no prompting. Although using static wireframes proved to be a challenge. I would like to do additional tests with interactive wireframes to help gather additional data. Although I did see various areas in need of  improvement. For example both evaluatees wanted more information based on their accommodation. Moving forward I would expand the accommodation section allowing for the option to pick an accommodation and then discover additional nearby content from there. My first evaluation struggled finding the arrow on the events page. I would test that further adding pagination or a scrollbar. Faceted navigation also seemed to be key after my evaluation I would explore adding additional filter options throughout the site.

UI: