Grand River Blues Society

Context

Grand River Blues Society is an organization that aims to preserve the Blues genre through education, events, and a sense of membership. Our goal was to restructure their existing website to improve information architecture to provide a better user experience.

Card Sorting

The first step to the process was to conduct a card sort with participants. We opted for an open card sort. This allowed us to better understand where content should go according to our participants.

With the help from Optimal Workshop we were able to generate dendrograms and similarity matrices of our findings. We used the dendrograms and similarity matrices to view the clusters of cards that pair well and cards that don’t pair well. This told us which labels to use and what content pairs with these label to use in the restructuring.

Tree Testing

Using what we uncovered in the card sorts we were ready to move onto to the second step, tree testing. We recruited new participants and gave them a couple tasks related to information retrieval. Our goal was to evaluate our new information architecture and to uncover any usability issues. Our first tree test yielded a low success rate so we decided to we needed to redesign our tree test one final time. We found great success with our final tree test as it yielded a 70% success rate.

Wireframes

Using our card sorts and tree testing we got a good understanding on what the information architecture should look like so we began designing wireframes. It is imperative for a website to have a legible global navigation bar that ensures the user can find what they’re looking for so we did just that. To further improve a user’s information retrieval we decided it was crucial to design a search function in the navigation bar that provides the user with an option to filter results based on “relevance” and “date” . Furthermore, we designed slick search engine results page that displays the user’s’ results in a clean and concise manner.