Case Study: Information Architecture

While this IA project was for a master's class in user-centered design at Brandeis University, I used the project to flesh out my own concept for a website/app that could be used by people on medically restricted diets to learn more about food substitutions and how to cook great recipes with the substitutions. This project's research alone involved a lot of research with physicians, nutritionists, and dieticians. I also surveyed patients in my user testing. The initial IA is built for a limited amount for dietary restrictions, and ethics are strongly considered - patients are strongly advised to work with their own doctors prior to using any recipes. My ideation process stemmed from the fact that I have a medically restricted diet, and am a member of several very large online groups of similar people. In my years in these groups, the most common concerns focused on one question: "What am I going to eat now?" I started by highlighting the goals of "No Whey!" (NW). The overall goal was to provide a fun and easy user experience while educating patients on how to continue to enjoy food despite having dietary restrictions. The site will also serve as a resource hub, with recipes, shop finders, advice from dieticians, and chat features to create a community. I developed my timeline (July 2021-September 2022). The first phase included research, initial user testing, the development of information architecture, and content strategy. The second included structuring information environments, organization schemes, hierarchies, navigation and search, structured databases, metadata, thesauri, and faceted classification systems. The final phase included the UX design process - final research and strategy, user testing, prototyping, design and documentation, and usability testing to have a final design to hand off for back- and front-end development and implementation.

Phase 1 began with creating a mission and a vision statement, and identifying my target audiences. From that, I developed several loose personas, though I was beginning to get more useful patient-type information from interviewing medical professionals.

This informed my user research plan and business objectives, my metrics, research participant pool, stakeholders, and recruitment plan. I conducted a survey for initial user testing along with the interviews and made sure I had time on my timeline for this process as well as analysis and assessment of the results.

I then moved into architectural strategies and approaches, so I developed a site map, organization schemes, scalable polyhierarchies, and approaches to the development of my glossary/thesaurus construction. As part of this activity, I created word clouds to help guide my thesauri.

I then developed the site's navigation and search functionality based on the site's hierarchies. This was a guide for me to move on to content management and strategy. I developed a content template for all of the pages, keeping in mind SEO, easy searchability within the site, main keywords, secondary terms, headers, and tags.

Finally, I was able to design a rough wireframe for the homepage that included some meta tags to keep me on track. I also identified video content, links, and other resources to index in the site's database. I conducted some usability testing on the wireframes (both desktop and mobile app) before moving on to a rough high-fidelity prototype for my main usability testing.

Case Study: Information Architecture

Phase 1 began with creating a mission and a vision statement, and identifying my target audiences. From that, I developed several loose personas, though I was beginning to get more useful patient-type information from interviewing medical professionals.

I then moved into architectural strategies and approaches, so I developed a site map, organization schemes, scalable polyhierarchies, and approaches to the development of my glossary/thesaurus construction. As part of this activity, I created word clouds to help guide my thesauri.

I used content management and prioritizing lifecycle/workflow as guidance for analytics and inventory development.

I also designed the site's main graphic design assets in Illustrator, though images are mainly placeholders.

I hope to someday finalize this project and court sponsors and investors, but had to table the project for graduate studies.

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