Week 3 An Introduction to Information Architecture

The article I introduced is about information architecture. The link of this article is:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/information-architecture/

In fact, information architecture helps us take a look at the big picture -- the primary goal of your Website -- and achieve that goal by effectively organizing your site. So, how to organize the site? For organizing the information, the author points out that it will depend on variables such as your business goals, the size of your Website, its future growth and expansion plans, the audience(s) you target, and more. I totally agreed with the author's point. Depend on business goal, you know what the users search first, and decide the information at the top levels is related to what and the sub levels. So we should organize the content for different business goals. For the size of the website, if the site is big enough, you may have more categories to organize the website's content. The future growth and expansion plans also affect the organizing of the information, because we must plan for the change such as adding information under the information at the related top level, so those top levels may be provided. Also, the users that we target affect too. We should think from user's point of view, what they will search for in our website.

For the information provided in the website, the author points out that if the website's target user is end user, we should avoid using engineering or marketing jargon. It's possible that the target user don't understand the information after reading parts of it and so they can't find out what they need in the website.

And how to help the users find their way easily in our website? The answer is consistent and persistent navigation, along with helpful hints like creating homepage links through the logo. Keeping the navigation consistent and persistent let the users make use of it and don't feel confused easily. And the hints really help user in visual way.

Moreover, search system should be planned well in information architecture, because a vocabulary of kewords for the site is served as the dictionary for the search. So the keywords searched by user will be checked against in the keywords in the dictionary and the result will display. From my point of view, if users type a similar word(not correct in spelling), the search should let them get away with all kinds of similar spelling. So the users can get the exact match in search result. That mean it helps the users find out what they need.

To conclude, I learned how to organize a site. It indicates the reason that we need those ways, and then give some ways and examples to us for reference. After reading the article, I think information architecture is the science because it needs us to follow some ways and steps to organize the site. On the other hand, I think information architecture is the art because the organized work can come from some creative ideas, for example, we may produce some information architecture deliverables like storyboards and paper prototype. Hence, information architecture is such a big topic that interest me most.

Week 2 Using Scenarios and Personas to Understand Your Customers' Needs

Hi, everyone.Today, I want to introduce you about an article, called "Using Scenarios and Personas to Understand Your Customers' Needs".

The link is http://webmasterresources.suite101.com/article.cfm/user_experience_design

In the article, it points out that defining personas and creating scenarios can help the website team map the customer's needs to the website and the business requirements. So, the whole website design produced can satisfy the customers' needs.

When writing personas, one of the important things is to define one for each target group of audience. How to do it? Just concentrate on the primary target users we defined, then we can minimize the number of personas. For each persona, it can include:

1. Context - what the user wants to do in the site


2. Outcome - what the user wants to achieve in the site


3. Assumptions - what the user expects to do / have in the site
   

In my opinion, when there are so many personas to represent the users, it will only complicate the website development. Concentrating on the primary target users is a good idea to have a user-centered design, since those personas are representative enough.

When creating scenarios, we should focus on the activities the users might do first. Then, think about where the user might interact with our business, what services we can provide to them and what information they need to have. I think these processes are helpful, because the scenarios created can describe the user's interaction with the site if we follow those process to do. Hence, it helps to define the design's direction.

All in all, personas and scenarios are useful techniques to help us to understand our target users. They can provide us a clear picture of design direction and lead us to build a successful website.

Week 1 Usability and the Web: An Overview

Since our course is about the Web Usability Design, I chose an article, called “Usability and the Web: An Overview” and share it with you. Here is the link:

http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/202/301/netnotes/netnotes-h/notes61.htm

The first thing you may ask is that, “what is usability?”. It means the site is both useful and usable for the intended audience. Hence, in the audience’s point of view, a usable web interface should be accessible, appealing, consistent, clear, simple, navigable and forgiving. Also, the web site is useful, e.g. the users are able to find the information they need in informational sites. Then, the remaining question is, how to define the intended audience, i.e. target users?

It’s easy to define a web site target audience. For instance, a software company target audience is developers. However, we still don’t know something about user needs, characteristics and abilities. The article provides that user survey is the most common way to use for audience definition. The survey may collect any or all of the following information:

• user profile (demographic information, job or recreational preferences),
• surfing profile (how do they use the Web),
• site usage (likes, dislikes, task requirements), and
• level of technology (hardware, browser type, connection speed).

From the survey, we know the needs of them and these help us to determine how to structure our content, message, and design. But it may not result in a representative sample, may be those dissatisfied with current site. Then the article also provides other sources which can be supplemented with the survey. The informal way is to use “quick and dirty” tests to provide some fast results, we can find the acquaintances or colleagues. In informal way, the following sources may be used:

• customer lists (including marketing mailing lists or records of sales),
• related organizations or associations,
• e-mail discussion lists or newsgroups,
• conferences and events,
• temp agencies or focus group companies.

From this article, I learned that there is a close relationship between the usability and the web design. Since it’s the user to come to our site, it’s important to know their needs first and then we can have our design. So, it's useful that this article tells us how to define these target audience and find their needs.