UXO720 - Week 5 - Information Architecture
This week focused on information architecture, which was relevant to some of my current work as I was recently involved in a database structure design at work. Looking at all the different areas in which information architecture covers, I had no idea that it also covered database design.
The focus for me this week has been to get a better understanding of the onboarding experience for our users of the MIV app. From there I wanted to explore a few areas for refining the site navigation, using a sitemap to explore the outline of the site, and conduct a card sorting activity to learn about how to organize and structure content.
Onboarding Experience
What are the three top level goals of our onboarding experience?
-
Inform about the impact on the environment business purchases have
-
Highlight the impact tracker
-
Show how their company can earn rewards
What are the barriers our users face?
-
Lack of knowledge of environmental issues or how purchasing decisions impact them
-
Creating an account to purchase
-
Lack of additional products to order, limited supply of product types
-
Time saving for online ordering, with automated supply refill
Ideas (Random)
- QR code on bottles to send you to re-order screen?
Focus Story:
- Focus on how the user can save money with impact orders
Objectives:
-
Highlight the impact focused nature of the platform
-
Show the user how to save money
Exploring the idea of helping users understand 1) the impact they can make and 2) the benefits in terms of cost savings.
As I was reviewing this onboarding flow I wanted to explore how other websites or apps handled their experiences. I found a user onboarding resource at ReallyGoodUX that breaks down how other companies handle these user flows.
ReallyGoodUX has a fantastic user onboarding section
Navigation
After exploring my user onboarding experience, I took a look at the site navigation and what potential types of navigation I could use.
-
Global
- Global is key for overall site navigation
-
Local
- In e-commerce local will be important for sub-sections of the website. Initially, I wouldn't anticipate much of this as they only have two products.
-
Inline
- This could be breadcrumbs, and would be useful for navigating from the product pages
-
Contextual
- At first, I don't think we'll need much in the way of contextual navigation since we are lacking many products. Typically we'd see this in the way of related products. It could be helpful if we do any type of blog type page so users could find related content.
-
Faceted
- This will be very important to our product. One of the primary features of e-commerce sites is to deal with this idea of being able to filter down results based on criteria. We can use this to filter by ingredients, ratings, amount of plastics reduced, etc.
-
Supplemental
- Site maps are very helpful for SEO purposes
My stack of cards for a card sorting activity to help categorize content for the navigation
Grouped content into different areas: ingredients, payment options, features, environmental impact
First draft of site navigation after card sorting
After this week’s activities I spent some time reviewing the onboarding experience for the MIV Impact Tracker and I concluded that I needed to continue to update and refine my user flow. I need to go back and l adapting the user registration process to help educate the user on how this platform was focused on environmental impact. This will be a large change but I think it will be helpful for optimizing the user onboarding experience.
Action Items
-
Update the user flow to account for educating users on environmental topics
-
Review updated flow with MIV and seek feedback
-
Update and create new wireframes to accommodate the new flow
References
Appcues.com. 2022. What is user onboarding?. [online] Available at: [Accessed 23 February 2022].
Reallygoodux.io. 2022. ReallyGoodUX | User onboarding. [online] Available at: [Accessed 23 February 2022].