Restructuring Information Architecture of National Geographic Expeditions Website
Overview
For this project, I, individually, poured my focus into rearranging the information architecture of the National Geographic Expeditions website. This website is great for those who travel frequently, giving people the more than average trip without being so touristy. Specifically, I was tasked with reorganizing the primary and secondary navigation of the site. The utility navigation remained the same. The information needs to be reorganized in a way that would make sense to the users so that they have no difficulty in finding what they need to find and accomplishing their goal on the site.
Problem Space
The problem discovered is that many users are confused by the layout of the site in terms of its content and functionality and this delays the amount of time it would take for them to accomplish what they need on the site. The goal is to have users accomplish what they need to on the site without it taking too much time or causing any frustration. In general, the goal is to eliminate user errors and obstacles in order to give the user the best experience possible while using this site.
Users/Audience
The audience we are solving for are users that like to travel to places that aren’t typically considered to be touristy. They like adventure and seeing more of the local culture rather than monuments, but wouldn’t mind seeing monuments as well. Ultimately, we are solving for users who travel frequently and want an easier, quicker way to book their trip. The persona being used for this research is Jayse. He is an Investment Advisor working in a large bank in Manhattan. He very much enjoys traveling and takes a trip as often as possible, but doesn’t want to just be a tourist. Additionally, he prefers to try new things as well as experience the local culture.
Scope and Constraints
The timeline for this project took place from November 5th, 2019 to November 12th, 2019. Because I only had a week to get stuff done, there was limited time to do card sorts. There were also limited users from being in the General Assembly community along with the lack of time. I was also unable to screen for users since the users in close parameters (at the GA NYC campus) didn’t visit the site. None of the users tested actually had visited the site before. In some ways, this is beneficial since there was no bias during the open and close card sorts. The biggest challenge I had to learn to overcome was analyzing the card sorts. I never thought I would have such difficulty working with qualitative data.
Roles and Responsibilities
The first thing I needed to do was to complete a heuristic analysis of the National Geographic Expeditions website as it currently stands. By doing this, I will be primed to recognize the things that aren’t meeting standards within the site. Afterwards, I constructed a site map of the original site to clearly see how the content and functionality is currently organized. At this point, I have gathered enough information to begin an open card sort. In this process, I interviewed 5 users and received great data from each of them. The analysis was tricky, since every user has a different mental model. However, after some time, I was able to put together a frequency chart as my analysis to show how much of each content label appeared under a certain category label. I used this information to make my categories for the closed card sort. The original headers (Destinations, Trip Types, Nat Geo Difference, Get Inspired, and Special Offers) were changed for testing to Locations, Travel Forum, Trip Types, Activities, and About Us. After collecting data from 5 different users, I analyzed it to find that the category label changes were an overall success with minor incongruencies. I created another frequency chart to outline the amount of times a content label was placed under a category label. This confirmation of data allowed me to create a revised site map with a new primary and secondary navigation. I finally made a user flow based on the persona, Jayse, that details the steps he would take in booking an expedition trip.
Outcomes and Next Steps
Ultimately, the reorganization of the navigation did very well. 5/5 of the users tested in the closed card sort did not have any difficulty understanding the context of the category labels. The next steps for this project would be to take the data collected in gathering the new site navigation and create a prototype of the site to do some usability testing. The rest of the design process would follow, including creating a usability test report and using that to make iterations on the high fidelity prototype that would eventually be presented to stakeholders. Overall, I learned that qualitative and quantitative information go hand in hand with each other. Although they are two different things and treated differently, they both require the same effort in analysis. It was such an obstacle for me to get out of thinking quantitatively — but I believe I overcame that successfully and am excited to take my new knowledge into my future projects.
