Information Architecture

Introduction

Setting up the project and scenario

Imagined Scenario

The staff of the Moline Public Library in Moline, IL, reached out to NavX Design Studio to review and redesign their current website, molinelibrary.com. The site struggled with its information architecture (IA), meaning that the ways in which users must navigate do not effectively promote finding and understanding of information. The librarians needed their website to help users navigate an extensive amount of content and achieve their goals without becoming lost, confused, and/or frustrated.

Identified Painpoints

• Visually, the Global Navigation* is split between links on a menu at the top of the page, and a set of icons on the bottom of the page, above the footer.
• Most webpages accessed through the global navigation (Child Pages) feature inconsistent local navigation menus.
• Nearly all of the webpages that appear to be children of the global navigation pages are, in actuality, nested within a different, underlying location (called a subdirectory)
• The breadcrumb trails* do not always match the actual navigational path taken.
• Some of the body text and headings appear similar to hyperlinks* but are not interactive.
• The footer would benefit from cleanup and reorganization
• The cluttered and confusing local navigation causes undue cognitive strain on users and hinders their goals. Other issues will likely be identified as the project goes on (Rosenfeld et al., 2015).