Our team presented our slides earlier today and the coverage included:
- our products
- our target audience
- experience strategy (overall)
- functionality (brief summary)
- information structure + sitemap(the focal point)
- flowchart (user common tasks)
Information Structure (card sorting + site map)
As there was no report submission required, we could focus more on the information structure / site map (card sorting) and the flowchart.
During the weekends, we discussed and decided on using card sorting achieve our information structure. We felt that it was most appropriate as we are doing up an interactive website with much contents that needs to be organized.
We had a total of 30 items to be sorted and we made it an 'open sort', allowing users to label the categories as they deemed fit. We really wanted to see how 'users' sees them differently, from say, the designers of the system (us). Ethnography studies was took into consideration, but we felt that card sorting is something we have yet to try b4, thus, an additional 'excuse' to use execute it. heh.
We targetted 12 participants in total, 8 for a general card sorting exercise done @ optimalsort.com (http://park-a-lot.optimalsort.com/parkalot/userwelcome.php) but the online activity expired/closed on the 24th March 08. It was a free tool that we chanced upon when researching on information architecture and card sorting. It saved both the PAL team and the respondents some precious weekend time and allowing us to process the analysis quicker.
Personas card sorting
As for the other 4, we improvised the card sorting a little by targetting directly at the 2 personas profiles that we highlighted previously, mainly the convenience seekers and the price conscious. We had 2 personas for each category (total 4) and conducted a live card sorting activity with them.
We analysed all the 12 participants, and came up with mainly 7 categories for our site map:
- car park information
- booking info
- member's detail
- viewing of live info
- search
- faq
- statistical graphs and charts
This is the 1st draft from our findings and analysis. I forsee us finetuning it based on future research, such as paper prototyping and etc, or based on other factors and comments from users.
Comments and feedbacks
Some questioned was raised by Mr. Reddy with regards to the security of the transaction, the booking procedure (users supposed to key in credit info everytime they book etc) and the issues of the physical landscape, along with the potential troubles and problems that we might face, such as people exceeding his parking / booking period. We have gave some thoughts to them previously, and we will be very much finalised our proposed solution (the 3 possible implementations mentioned in earlier posts) We have to weigh the pros and cons and think thru the possible outcomes and things that can/might happen.
Next week will be crunch time, Phase 3b, which is very much the start of the 'technincal work' of our product. We have already done our paper prototype and we will get them evaluated this week, before proceeding with our website.
Deliverables next week are:
- concept generation
- low fidelity prototype (there's no way we can do up a high fidelity prototype without the expense of other modules! heh.)
- user evaluation: walk thru
till then.... :)
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