Understand Information Architecture (IA)
It was a pretty interesting day learning all about IA. IA is a detailed way to arrange all the parts of a product to make it easier for the user to understand. It will also help them find what they are looking for in an efficient manner.
Understanding Our Users
Before we start on our IA we need to make sure we understand what information our users might be looking for. We can then take all that information and write it out on note cards. Presenting these cards in a user test would help us ensure we build our product as users would see it organized.
Build & Test
With our note cards tested and organized we can build an efficient site blueprint! A spreadsheet is a great tool to build out the steps a user would go through with our product. Another user test would confirm if our site blueprint makes sense to them.
Our Assignment
In our assignment today we were given a list of information for a site blueprint. The goal was to build a site blueprint using this information as we saw fit. The twist to the assignment was this information was taken from an existing site!
I was very surprised how close my site blueprint was to the existing site! I can only assume the company had conducted a good amount of user research with their IA. The site has quite a range of products, but the web site still makes sense regardless. You can check out the existing site is at http://www.olddutchstore.com/
