DOMAIN MODEL

My chosen domain was Travel Destinations, as people can be indecisive and may need encouragement to have information at their request therefore I wanted to build an information architecture for the specific community.

Interviewing a broad range of travellers, helped me pin point areas I wasn’t familiar with or missed out as I got different approaches and managed to expand on my domain.

Interviewees made me think about the decision aspect of the travel destination. The fact that there are many factors and how they interlink with one another via attributes and entities.

A problem I had was with countries and regions, not knowing which one to indulge into. As this model can get complex and I could get lost in the process. After feedback I took the approach into regions as I could go into more detail having more options and show examples.

I broke down the subjects into concepts people can think about. I then joined the concepts and defined the relationships between them, so I implemented the Hub and Spoke structure (Brown, 2011), where one concept rules them all. Defining a single, central concept.

SITEMAP

I structured my sitemap by hierarchy and database, a navigational backbone that consists of boxes and arrows. The categories are hierarchical, enabling users to have a variety of options when choosing a destination.

To give more variety I made hotels and activities facets, to show examples and give information about travel destinations. I scoped some aspects out to go in more detail with other areas.

After my feedback, I had a dilemma with regions and countries, everyone saw continent/region as the same. Whereas I scoped it as i.e. Continent (Europe), Country (Turkey), Region (Marmara Region, Black Sea Region etc.) so I’ve changed some aspects so everyone’s on the same page.

As an improvement I would implement a login for users, who could save locations and make a bucket list of where they would like to go next. (D. Spencer, 2010) talks about focused entry points, having a basic structure then provide entry points for different users or tasks. A user may want to look up a location rather than choosing from popular destinations.

I conducted a card sorting to determine what should go together. From twelve participants 90% had sorted the categories the same way, creating multiple categories with a few in each, with the exception of the continent/region aspect. Which gave me the confidence I was going on the right path.

USER JOURNEY

This process enabled me to step back from the page, analysing the journey as a whole.

The inspiration for this particular user journey is from Caddick, R. & Cable, S. (2011). Where a goal is set, then steps to complete during the journey and at certain point making decisions and hopefully making it from start to finish.

The design aspect isn’t important as this is solely based on IA. I colour coded mine to help users navigate more efficiently. I’ve put my user journey into three different sections.

WIREFRAMES

In my global navigation I’ve used horizontal navigation (tabs), (Krug, 2014) they are self-evident, hard to miss and they’re slick. Also, users can jump back to the homepage during any process of their journey.

The tabs have a dropdown menu, which shows all the regions of the world categorised. This makes the layout easily visible, giving the users a sense of direction while navigating.

Part of my navigation shows breadcrumbs, for me this is the best way the user will know which page they are at, plus they can go back to any section as they are hyperlinked. (Krug, 2014), uses three principles for his breadcrumbs trail, which I’ve included too. One putting them at the top marginalises it, two using “>” between levels, visually suggests forward motion and the third, boldfacing the last item, indicating the current page.