Dealing with ambiguity — an Information Architecture case study
I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is.
— Bernardo Bertolucci
Unit three of General Assembly’s UXDI Immersive bootcamp finally rolled around. The forewarned information architecture unit had descended upon us.
Overview
As an introduction to information architecture, I’ve been tasked to assess the desktop website for iloveny.com.
In order to accomplish my task I needed perform the following:
- Conduct a heuristic evaluation
- Create a sitemap
- Conduct one round of an open card sort
- Document a user flow
- Conduct one round of a closed card sort
- Create a final sitemap
Constraints
I had just under one week of time to get through this unit.
Persona
For the purposes of this unit, a persona was prepared for us in order to keep the target user in mind.
Heuristics
After becoming conditioned to focus on the user’s needs for so long, it was a bit jarring to come into heuristics and having to offer my own input regarding a site’s design based on my interpretations of the Abby Method’s best practices.
I didn’t notice anything glaringly wrong in my initial impressions of the ILoveNY website. The site featured a memorable black and white color palette accented by the iconic I ♥ NY red. I was even quite fond the category names given to the site’s primary navigation bar: ‘Places to go,’ ‘Things to do’, ‘Places to stay,’ there was a rhythm to it all.
Some of the minor usability problems stemmed from a lack of contrast on certain sub-header fonts and a potentially unfavorable viewing experience to those with red-green colorblindness, but upon further analysis, the site did include thorough accessibility functionality which can be tailored to suit the needs of almost anyone. Other issues centered mainly on a few small discrepancies in behavior between mobile and desktop viewports.
Sitemap
With heuristics out of the way, I went onto mapping out the existing site structure focusing on the primary and secondary navigation. A relatively straightforward task, I quickly arranged a map in Sketch.
Open Card Sort
Here is where things began to get a little tricky. On the ILoveNY website under the ‘Things to do’ and ‘Events’ navigation, there exists options with the same names (e.g. Nature, History, Food & Drink, Arts & Culture). At first glance I wrote them off as duplicate pages but upon deeper examination it turned out that they were in fact two different pages with different functionalities. Despite sharing similar appearances, the pages under ‘/things-to-do/’ lacked a timeframe which was what set them apart from the pages under ‘/events/’. This was a point I chose to ignore moving forward into the card sort as the purpose of the activity was primarily to see how users themselves would choose to categorize information.
The difficulty then became what to call an item with a duplicate name. Having two of the same named cards would definitely seem redundant and lead to confusion in participants. I was also very wary of simply adding the word ‘event’ to the end of every repeating navigation item under ‘events’ as that would lead the user into keyword matching similar terms and grouping them in the same category. With some word play I ended up with names like ‘nature excursions’ for nature(events).
Due to time constraints, we were only required to conduct a total of 10 card sorts between both open and closed card sorting activities. I was taken aback by the amount of variety in the responses from the open card sort. Everyone had a very unique take on how the secondary navigation items would be categorized. It became quite evident to me when entering the data analysis phase why the Nielsen Norman group recommends a minimum of 15 card sorts per round. Five individuals just had too much variation between them which made identifying patterns all the more tedious.
Analysis
Every participant had their own unique take on how the information was to be categorized. There were a couple of recurring patterns that I slowly identified across the card sorts. For example:
- Grouping of culture and history activities/events
- NY regions were often grouped in the same category
- Prevalence of an outdoors or nature category with activities and events associated with the outdoors
- Confusion over where to have the contact info or newsletter
- Tendency to see trip planning grouped with transportation as well as housing
From these patterns in the data I derived six categories to be tested in a round of closed card sorting. The new categories consist of:
- Location — targeted at the frequency in which regions of NY are grouped together
- Culture — To reflect the high number of activities/events associated with NY culture
- Outdoors — Based on the frequency of occurrence in the data.
- Events — To contain the nav items that don’t immediately fall under culture and outdoors
- Travel Planning — Aimed at containing everything related to the logistics of planning a trip
- More Info — A section to primarily handle certain common outliers
User Flow
This deliverable is intended to show the steps in which the persona would take on the site in order to accomplish their primary task. The user flow needed to be done with the existing site structure. My initial flows delved deep down into individual processes and decision. It took me a couple of iterations for me to see that the flow need only encompass a high level view of the process the user goes through.
Closed Card Sorting
Once I finally got my categories figured out from the open card sort, I needed to recruit participants for the closed card sort. Due to the lack of bodies and willing participants at the GA campus, I knew I needed to recruit elsewhere. Armed with a box of biscuits and chocolates, I went down to Rutgers University over President’s Day Weekend and found an empty classroom to settle down in. Clubs met on the weekends, so once I recruited one participant in the halls with the incentive of a free snack, snowball sampling naturally occurred and I was able to knock out the rest of my card sorts.
Analyzing the closed card sorts was much more straightforward than the previous open card sorts. Predefined categories made it easier to identify commonalities in the data.There were no participants who wanted to create a new category nor were there any who particularly struggled to categorize a specific page.
The sorting activity did shed light on a few areas of confusion. With a removal of the original ‘things to do’ primary nav item, most of those activities became split across ‘culture’ and ‘outdoors’. Some participants were confused as to what category something like ‘shopping’ would best fit under. ‘More Info’ proved to be a good category for catching certain outliers prevalent in the open card sort such as ‘contact info’ and ‘newsletter’. It took on a similar role as the original ‘Plan Your Trip’ category.
Revised Site Map
The revised site map was constructed based on the most common trends seen in the closed card sorting activity. By splitting apart ‘Things to do,’ and adding in another category, each individual category appears slightly shorter. The new categories now also seem remarkably close in size.
Reflection
How much have these changes really improved the experience of this site? The short amount of research done in this unit seem to have indicated that there is some favorability towards these newly defined categories albeit with a small sampling size.
There are definitely a few methods in the process I wished I could’ve done differently such as a better distinction between naming of duplicate events and activities prior to card sorting. Most of my data synthesis was done manually and there definitely exist more efficient techniques or software out there to facilitate the task.
Ultimately when it comes down to the actual usability of the revised site structure, there’s no way of determining whether or not it really is an improvement without conducting further testing and iteration.
