Information Architecture Project <> INF 2170 H
Cameron, Cherry, Christina, Samarath
User Research, Card Sort Study, Tree Test Study
Optimal Workshop, Onpoint Content Auditor, Balsamiq, Google Forms
June - August, 2020
(10 weeks)
Food Banks Canada is a charitable organization founded in 1987 and one of the oldest food bank communities in Canada. The organization has been successful in raising donations through individual donors, corporate donations and many fundraising events with an annual revenue of 36 million dollars (2017). Their vision as an organization is to enable an effective food bank community that addresses the short term need for food and longer-term solutions to reduce hunger in Canada.
After a preliminary research and walkthrough over the website we found many defective navigational menus and redundant user experience elements. People who are in desperate need for help from food banks can have a serious impact because of the IA of the website potentially affecting the community network of food banks throughout Canada.
We strongly believe that having an effective information architecture with continuous analysis and feedback can improve the user experience needs of the website. This project can be critical during this unprecedented COVID - 19 global pandemic, impacting millions of residents living across Canada helping them with essential food supplies and access to more food banks.
For the analysis of the website I started with a content audit. I used OnPoint Suite’s content auditor tool to perform our research, the auditor scraped through 100 pages on the Food Banks Canada website to determine content experience, search engine optimization, media, and the website’s responsive readiness.
The Flesch-Kincaid scale measures reading ease on a scale from 0 – 100, where 60 – 70 is a recommended range.
In total, the audited pages contained 165 images, mostly in JPEG format, and 63 of those images had missing alt text. Basically, 38% of all images present on the website had no description and hence would not be described to users that require accessibility services.
We then represented the schematic diagram of the current IA of the website to understand the organizational, labelling and navigation system.
The complete organization system was assessed on two aspects: Does it support casual browsing, and does it support directed searching. The global navigation menu revealed an ambiguous organizational scheme which actually works well to facilitate associative learning.
Headings are used throughout the website to delineate content further into categories that are consistent with the labels that are used. However, there are some pages with missing H1 titles. This is consistent with the content auditor results.
The website makes proper use of a global navigation system. Instead of blending in with the rest of the content it stands out, with yellow border fills, making it easier to locate right away. There are navigational aids such as breadcrumbs present to assist users along their search for information.
To understand user impression and interactions with the website we used two research methods: Surveys and Usability tests.
Out of the 25 responses I collected, only 14 responded that the website provided relevant information users were looking for and a majority of users voted the website architecture an average score of 5 when asked about their web experience rating. The feedback echoed this with participants complaining about the overflow of information and cluttered interface.
Here's the complete survey link and some of our survey results below
The second method that we used to understand the users’ interaction with Food Bank Canada’s website was moderated remote usability testing. We followed Guerilla usability testing guidelines and the participants were asked to follow a think-aloud protocol. Three participants were selected to represent the website users to perform the tasks and complete the post-testing interview questions.
From the feedback received from the analysis we wanted to identify solutions for the improvement of the overall IA.
I conducted a card sort study to address the question of
“How might users expect labels and content to be grouped together on the Food banks Canada website?”.
The purpose of the card sort is to have participants sort cards that represent the navigation labels of Food Banks Canada’s website and categorize the card labels that make sense to them.
Results I received from our participants was wide spread, reflecting a lack of identifiable association between the labels for website users.
From a total of 36 cards, 14 were sorted into 4 different categories by the participants;
7 cards were sorted into 5 different categories; and 2 cards were sorted into 6 different categories. Additionally, 12 cards from all participants’ results were sorted into the “Not Sure” category.
Only the card “Research & Advocacy Resources” was placed unanimously and correctly by all our participants under the “Research & Advocacy” category, which suggests that the use of similar or highly associative words can help users make intuitive connection judgements and reduce mismatched anticipation during navigation.
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Before moving towards prototyping the changes ideated and sketched I conducted a tree test study to analyze how easily users can find information on our website and the places on the website where people lose track. I used these results to reiterate our global navigation, labelling and organizational system throughout the website.
I conducted the tree test analysis with 12 participants from diverse backgrounds with a common goal of making a contribution/donation to Food Banks Canada. Each participant was given 7 tasks with no time constraints and asked to locate the appropriate labels based on those tasks.
From our observations and analysis of both card sorting and tree testing we finalized on the final
schmematic IA for Food Banks Canada.
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We created a final medium fidelity clickable prototype from our ideation and usability testing.
From the clickable prototypes created we would be interested in conducing a usability test with a sample size of users. Due to the current COVID restrictions we had a difficult time with regards to user research and testing throughout the project. We would be glad to continue this iterative process once things go back to normal and use the feedback to make design changes further.
