Elevating User Experience: Card Sorting and a Redesigned IA Diagram for Nightwood Theatre
Project Overview
The scope of the project included improving the organization, structure and information architecture of the current Nightwood Theater website. We brainstormed the list of features and contents relevant to the website and performed a card-sorting activity to understand how users perceive or understand the information. Some menus, for eg. About Nightwood, Artists, Community, and Contact, got a high unanimous number of coincidences, which is good. Furthermore, About Nightwood and Community had a high number of discrepancies. On the other hand, Community, Support, and On Stage were the most popular menus in our card-sorting activity.
The scope of the project included improving the organization, structure and information architecture of the current Nightwood Theater website. We brainstormed the list of features and contents relevant to the website and performed a card-sorting activity to understand how users perceive or understand the information. Some menus, for eg. About Nightwood, Artists, Community, and Contact, got a high unanimous number of coincidences, which is good. Furthermore, About Nightwood and Community had a high number of discrepancies. On the other hand, Community, Support, and On Stage were the most popular menus in our card-sorting activity.
Key business objectives
In brief, the primary objectives of Nightwood Theatre's website redesign project are to: accurately represent the theater's brand; increase ticket and season pass sales; cut support inquiries; highlight the theater's notable past; promote community engagement; encourage corporate sponsorships; and establish a central hub for all offerings.
In brief, the primary objectives of Nightwood Theatre's website redesign project are to: accurately represent the theater's brand; increase ticket and season pass sales; cut support inquiries; highlight the theater's notable past; promote community engagement; encourage corporate sponsorships; and establish a central hub for all offerings.
Tasks accomplished
1. We began by brainstorming a list of content and features relevant to Nightwood Theatre based on the client's brief and requirements.
2. We organized and refined the list of content and features to eliminate duplicates and ensure it aligns with the business and user objectives.
3. We conducted a card-sorting exercise with team members’ friends and family.
4. After collecting individual card sorting results, we analyzed and categorized content into piles to create meaningful categories.
My role
This was a group project, Bhoyasa, Dhanashree, Jorge and Macla were my team members. I was responsible for the brainstorming activity to list the relevant features and content, creating the cards and finding participants to perform the card sorting activity on the optimal workshop platform. Additionally, I was responsible for reviewing and analyzing the data and charts provided by the optimal workshop platform.
Final recommendations
We got 8 answers in total, with an average of 11 minutes spent to complete the task. Also, most of our participants were located in Canada (75%), and only a minority were in another country (Germany, 25%).
After reviewing the data provided by Optimal Workshop's dashboard, we can identify that from the 40 cards provided to participants, only 4 were located in more than one category: Testimonials, Educational Programs, The Team for Creative Collaborations and Integration of Social Media.
Those results show that, as designers, we should take into consideration that more than one card could be located in more than one category, as users tend to understand and look for the same information in two different ways. However, the rest of the cards were located in the other categories, getting higher results. To select the final structure, we have chosen the cards that got 50% or more on the Popular Placement Matrix by category.
Final Information Architecture diagram
The Information Architecture (IA) diagram that we created helps to organize, structure, and label content in an effective and sustainable way to help users find information and complete tasks. We arranged the categories and subsections logically and created three levels (Level 0, Level 1 and Level 2).
Level 0 refers to the homepage, the level 1 is the main categories consisting of ‘About Nightwood’, ‘On Stage’, ‘Artist’, ‘Show Pass’, ‘Community’, ‘Support’ and ‘Contact’. Level 2 is the subcategories. The level 2 subsections are groupings of common/similar findings and it has been arranged intuitively. The levels are identified the the colors on the IA diagram.
The result of the IA diagram is according to the results found on the card sorting and we renamed some categories based on the pile-ups that we made from the card sorting. For example, the category ‘Lawyer Show’ has been renamed to ‘Show Pass’ according to the different types of tickets we had on our card sorting such as seasonal, sales and special discounts, etc.
We also included the accessibility search feature in the support section so that users who have accessibility issues can also use the website effectively. And it is intuitive to find the accessibility feature in the support section.
Restructuring the information architecture of the website helped improve the website’s usability, making it easier for users to find what they are looking for, and increasing user engagement.
Thank you!
