DU User Journey Map Process
A broader customer journey map that represented the emotional journey of the DU.edu student users along the process.
View Behance Case StudyIn 2015-2017. The University of Denver embarked on redesigning DU.edu website. Our team worked with university marcom and administrative stakeholders to moderize and innovate the .edu domain.
Role: Sr. UX Designer
Team: 1 PM, 1 Sr. UX/IA (me), 1 CD, 2 Sr. Designers, 2 Devs
Timeline: Information Architecture completed over 8-10 weeks
Information Archtecture Process
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Challenge Definition > IA Theory > IA Analysis > Card Sorting > New IA > New Sitemap > Final Navigation User Interface > Key Take Aways
The website is like a space, it's like a building. It represents the University to the ouside worldm, and people here in Denver think about the campus as a beautiful physical space... our website needs to be the virtual space, the place, the inofrmation source, the image, the represenation of everything wonderful that the University is, just like our physical campus does."
- DU Steering Committee Member
Key Information Architecture (IA) Challenges
Information is essential to any business and universities hold their sitemap and page titles quick tightly. At the point of our involvement The Unversity of Denver had not updated their website in 7 year and their information architecture had not been updated for more than a 10 years.
Competitive Analysis.
Inoreder to bring DU.edu into the modern webworld we explore what the university space was pushing.
Information Architecture Theory.
Working with university administrators, faculty representatives, and the marketing department made the project a tricky balancing act. However the nice thing about working with instutions of higher learning is that they don't shy away from an opportunity to learn themselves. We helped by including information design theory to bring our clients up to speed and rationalized some of the IA decisions.
Information Scent Best Practices
Category and navigation labels should explicitly describe what users will find at their destination.
Faced with several navigation options, it's best if "informavores" can clearly identiry the trail (information scent) to the prey (information) and see that other trails are devoid of anything edible
Provide feedback about the current location.
Your user wants clear cut relationships of how it relates to the users task.
Don't use made-up words, institutional jargon, or your own slogans as navigation items.
Your user don't understand yet and you don't want to throw them off the scent before they have the change to find what they are looking for.
Use plain language for SEO and usability.
Search engine crawlers and accessable language tags will help improve your websites SEO and improve ratings and access due to consistency and clear communication.
Hypothesis Statement
By participating in a card sorting exercise we believe our information architecture during the redesigning will be truely informed by and useful to our users.
Information Architecture Analysis + Optimal Sort.
Working with university administrators, faculty representatives, and a small set of students we used optimal sort to card sort the current Information architecture to user test and formulate a new path forward.
Card Sorting
Using Optimal Sort we ran analysis on the card sorting user research
We ran dendrogram visualization as well to show how groups were applied.
Information Architecture Groupings
After doing Card sorting with a team of 20 participants we aligned on data driven grouping as a starting place for developing a User Interface navigation
Sitemap to Navigation Logic and Strategy
AI is not a sitemap but does lead to producting a sitemap and ultimately a user interface.
AI is not a sitemap but does lead to producting a sitemap and ultimately a user interface.
DU Site Map Final
The sitemap was then locked into and generated to help DU.edu restructure its content.
Site Map into Navigation Dev
AI is not a sitemap but does lead to producting a sitemap and ultimately a user interface.
Final DU Navigation UI
Desktop User Interface
Mobile User Interface
Go to DU.edu Website
Outcomes & Key Take Aways
Working with our team we recognized that the organization was only so flexible or able to make decision as a certain pace. This led us to very different outcomes then orginally anticipated.
1. AI and Navigation are never really finished just improved upon
2. UI Navigation is negotiated and has to be flexible enought to accomidate both users needs and institutional needs
3. Information architecture should be informed by data but not dominated by it.
Information architecture is not a luxury that only big projects get to concentrate on. The DU administration discussed and contemplated the navigation updates for a longer period of time than anticipated because changing it had such deep implications to their institution. Usability, user-center language, and clear logic are things we as a UX team wanted to infuse into the Navigation solution. Working with large groups of stakeholders means being willing to push and pull ideas. The reality is we worked very hard to get to a final solution but it is not etched in stone. A website is a living breathing entity that can and should be improved over time. Our solution for the DU navigation gave them enough room to implement new ideas but maintained a solid foundation for users to be success at navigating the website.
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