IA | Research & Design Project – 2

Organization Scheme & Sitemap

The Current website for the Library of Allen has an Audience Specific classification Scheme that limits the user to a group and also loses the flexibility to include tasks that concern every user.

 Proposed Organizational Scheme:

After understanding the content, looking at our research findings and goals of our personas, we are proposing a hybrid of Topical and Task-based Ambiguous scheme for our global navigation.  Topical and Task-based hybrid scheme will not require users to identify a group (as Kids, Teens, or Adults) before choosing a task, and will give them the liberty to navigate the website based on their goals and task at hand.

User Testing New Information Architecture

After creating the initial information architecture and sitemap, we recruited 4 participants to run a Treejack Study. The purpose of this study was to understand if our proposed sitemap structure is successful in helping users perform their tasks with ease and accuracy and to assess if the labels are understandable and represent the category accurately. Complete study analysis can be found here)

User Testing Results: 

From this study we concluded:

• 5 out of 7 key tasks prove to be successful, Participants understood the labels and categorization and found their way easily to perform the task. The 2  that had issues were ‘Borrow’ and the subpages under ‘Services’ 
• 1 out of 4 participants was not able to locate the ‘Study Rooms’ link and 1 out of 4 found it with difficulty. We decided to remove the third tier links and moved it under services
• 2 out of 4 participants were not able to locate where to download audiobooks. We concluded that this was because of the title ‘Borrow’, we changed Borrow to Catalog.