Information Architecture

Jen Colby

Information Architecture

Site Critique

I’ve chosen to critique our IA Blog. In the following paper, I will describe who I envision the users of this site to be (1), relate the goals of the site as I see them (2), present an analysis of the existing site and its features (3), briefly describe my broad goals for the site redesign (4) and finally explain the specific features of my redesign (5), ending by summing up the project (6).

(1) Users:

The users of the IA Blog presumably arethe students enrolled in the class and the instructor. There is also the possibility that prospective students would visit the blog as a component of their search for classes to take in upcoming semesters; I suspect, however, that these students would mostly be interested in the syllabus and would cease their investigations after having given it a read-through.

We can thus assume an extremely web-literate user group as well as a group of repeat visitors. Our users can be expected to ‘learn’ the site – because they have to. They will return to the site on a regular basis even if it isn’t easy to use. The degree to which a particular user interacts with the site, however, will depend on his or her comfort level with the blog and its architecture.

(2) Goals of the site:

1. Facilitate out-of-class discussion, including

-Sharing general IA resources with one another

-Communicating with fellow students about our projects

-Allowing for further discussion of readings and lectures

1. Allow TA and instructor to share information and resources with the class in a way that allows for open discussion of said information and resources.
2. Provide a collaborative blogging format rather than a blog focused around one individual’s voice.

(3) Analysis of the existing site design:

The layout of the blog provides only one navigational pane; all links to resources and tasks are situated in the right column. My site redesign will focus on re-architecting this navigation column.

(3a) Problems with the existing navigation categories:

1. About: This page is empty and contains no information about the blog.

2. Archives: The archives can only be browsed by month from the main index,

which does not provide enough easily-accessible granularity for a semester-long course’s discussions. A system which allowed browsing off the index by month and day would be preferable.

3. Categories: At a glance, these seem to be well-chosen browsing categories. A

full-scale site redesign might discover that the posts are not well-sorted into these categories, or that entries in the categories tend to overlap; other problems might be discovered as well. However, an in-depth critique of the usability of these categories as a browsing system is outside the scope of this project; all that we will do here is to observe that the categories are in place and seem well-chosen.

4. Links: This category only contains one link – a link to the course website. The

category thus appears somewhat unnecessary.

5. Meta: The worst architecture of the site occurs in this category. The category

heading is vague and unclear, and the items grouped beneath it don’t seem to go together. “XFN” and “Valid XHTML” are not vital enough links to belong on an index page, and important functions such as writing a post or changing account settings are buried two layers away from the index in the “Admin” section. “Logout” also deserves a more prominent location and should be grouped with similar actions rather than stuck into a group of links. A link to WordPress in this section is unnecessary, since there is a link to WordPress at the bottom of the blog.

(3b) Other problems with the existing layout:

1. A large portion of the screen is taken up by a banner, which does identify the blog’s affiliation with UT through its color choice but also takes up a lot of valuable screen real estate without giving the site’s core demographic – repeat visitors – the functionality they need.

2. Posts are presented in full in the left half of the page and display in reverse chronological order, with the most recent posts being listed first. Presenting the posts in full makes it difficult for users to do a quick scan of the most recent posts to find the one(s) they are most interested in. The screen is also cluttered up with an excessive amount of non-navigable text – not good on an index, which serves as the jumping-off point for the rest of the site.

(4) Goals of the site redesign:

My redesign addresses the problems reviewed in (3), giving highest priority to the restructuring of the navigation system to eliminate the problems observed in (3a). The redesign creates direct links to important user actions and eliminates some of the extraneous links.

I also wanted to structure a site that de-emphasized large text posts. My goal was to rebuild the blog in such a way that the main page became an interactive portal rather than just a never-ending stream of text.

My goals for the navigational structure redesign required me to fetch and integrate the “Meta” category tasks into the index, in particular the functions of the “Site Admin” category. For this reason, I have included a marked-up printout of the “Site Admin” sub-page in this paper (titled “Dashboard” by the blog). Please consult this printout when reviewing Section (5g, 5h), as it may be helpful in understanding how I dealt with this portion of the ‘Meta’ subcategories.

(5) Features of the site redesign:

The redesign addresses the problems observed in section (3). My explanation of the redesign will point out new site features and explain what portions of section (3) they are intended to address.

(5a) New banner:

The site’s original banner has been cropped to free up screen space. The orange color that helps identify the site with UT has been retained. Some of the text has been linked to pages for the resources it describes (indicated in the “After” graphic as underlining). Addresses problems noted in (3b).

Also contains links (to the I385E course page and the SI home page) formerly found in the right-hand navigational bar.

(5b) New structure for posts:

In the new site, posts are truncated after reaching a certain character length. This allows users to skim the contents of the main page quickly without getting bogged down in full-text posts. Users interested in reading the rest of the post can do so by following the orange “Read More” link. I’ve broken the conventions for link/visited link colors in order to distinguish the “Read More” link from the category (“General Discussion”) and comments (“No comments”) links. I selected orange as the color for this to help pick up the color of the banner, which was not originally mirrored anywhere in the blog site. The shade of the link after being clicked will be the traditional “visited link” color that the rest of the links use.

Addresses problems noted in (3b).

(5c) New calendar element introduced for chronological browsing:

The calendar provides users with an increased level of granularity for initial browsing. Users can now find posts by month (via clicking on the month above the calendar) or day (by clicking on the date). Orange blocks indicate that at least one post was made on a given day, making it easier for users to immediately grasp which days were active and which inactive. Users can browse earlier months by clicking the “go earlier” link, which will direct them to an archives page containing past months’ calendars.

Addresses (3a)2.

(5d) Browsing categories retained:

(3a)3. observed that the browsing categories seem valid and valuable; they are therefore retained in the new design.

(5e) Arrangement of browsing navigation systems:

The calendar (5c) and categories (5d) are both designed specifically to facilitate browsing through the blog entries. As the only two site features with this specific purpose, they have been set apart from other navigational tools in the right column.

(5f) Search bar:

The search bar has been moved to the top of the screen, below the site banner, in order to make it more visible and separate it from the browsing navigation system structure explained in (5e).

(5g, h) Addressing the “Meta” structure problem:

In (3a)5., I observed several problems with the “Meta” category of the right navigation column. I stated that the subsections within this category didn’t make sense as a group and argued that some of the informational links did not belong on the main page. I tried to address these concerns in architecting the navigation rows (5g) and (5h) below the banner.

I’d like to review exactly what happened to each subcategory. Five items are listed under “Meta” on the original page: Admin, Logout, Valid XHTML, XFN, and WordPress. Valid XHTML and XFN have been relegated to the “Useful Links” section in the top bar. The WordPress link has been eliminated altogether as a redundant link. Logout has been moved into the top right corner of the navigation row (5g); I selected the rightmost position for this button because “logout” is conventionally located at the end of a list of account-related options in navigation bars.

The “Admin” section was a bit more complicated to deal with. Clicking on “Admin” brings up a page called the Dashboard (more unhelpful labeling at work) that contains a hodgepodge collection of useful and useless tasks and informational links. I marked through the irrelevant sections of the Dashboard in red and highlighted the relevant sections in green. Two types of information were eliminated – information irrelevant to the mission of the IA blog (the official WordPress blog) and information on the blog that is unlikely to be of interest to most users (the Akismet count of how many spam posts have been blocked and blog stats; both of these categories are displayed in the inset in the left bottom corner of the Dashboard printout).

Information retained was incorporated into the (5g, h) navigation rows.

“Write a post” was added to (5g) intact, while the label for tasks related to blogger profiles (previously “Update your profile or change your password”) was updated to a more succinct label (“manage your profile”) that covers all administrative actions related to user profiles. These two links, when combined with the “logout” option, form a row of actions related to the individual’s place within the blog.

(5h) at this point became a miscellaneous row; I had two other central, very useful functions that needed to be added to the main page but did not fit into any of the navigation groups I had already established. I chose to include these options below (5g), at a place in the page where they would be very visible to users. My goal in doing so was to place these items in such a way that they would be easy to find and use even though they did not have discrete groups to fit into. Neither setting should have been eliminated.Showing usersthe most recent comments posted allows everyone to keep on top of which discussions are the most active and facilitates better discussion. In addition, “useful links” is an essential category for the blog, as it allows outside resources to be gathered together in a central location for student use. Since both of these links were important but could not be categorized, the establishment of a high-profile location for them was key.

Notice that the Dashboard also includes a section listing “[Recent] Posts” in the “Latest Activity” section. Although I did tag this section in green to indicate its relevance to the blog, the main page automatically lists entries in reverse chronological order, making a separate sub-page with the same organizational scheme redundant.

(5i) Resolution of other problems in the initial critique:

The extraneous material noted in (3a)1 and (3a)4 was removed from the blog.

Conclusions:

As I hope I’ve shown, my central goal in critiquing and redesigning the website was to clarify its structure for a variety of tasks in order to facilitate the formation of an active online discussion of course content and related topics. In order to do so, I’ve taken apart the existing navigation column and replaced it with a more diverse navigational scheme that groups different tasks (browsing, searching, posting) into different navigational sub-schemes. I hope that this redesign has succeeded in improving the navigational structure of the site while retaining its most effective original design features.