Final Project

The spring IDIA 630.185 Information Architecture class has been asked by UB's webmaster, Kevin Hoffman, to provide assistance in his effort to develop new information architecture options for UB's website. His goal is to to take the next evolutionary step in UB's website improvement. He needs ideas that can be reasonably implemented in 12-18 months, not a revolutionary redesign using a totally different approach for the UB website. The focus of the work is for two primary audiences—area community college prospective undergrad students and prospective graduate students living in the US or overseas. For this work the class will be divided into four teams— two will work on the prospective undergrad audience and one will work on the prospective graduate level audience. One will work on the MyUB portal Teams will deliver selections from the total project to the UB webmaster. These will include the following for their assigned audience:

  • Information design (proposed content inventory & information model with recommended language)
  • Navigation design (wire diagrams with recommended language)
  • Sample prototyped pages (tested)

 

We will make these assumptions:

  • Other audiences (e.g., current students, faculty, facilities clients, etc.) will be addressed at some later time.
  • A link for the audience will be included on the home page (e.g., "prospective undergraduate students" or "prospective graduate students" or similar language
  • The global and secondary navigation of the entire website needs to be revised based on the needs of prospective graduate and undergraduate students

 

To support these teams, the UB Webmaster will do the following:

  • Make himself and the admissions director/team available for meetings and presentations with the teams, either in class or outside of class.
  • Provide each team with its own set of 5-10 research subjects from the community colleges and inquiries for graduate programs.

 

Audience members will be interviewed at the beginning of the semester (perhaps for an hour) and participate in testing (perhaps two-three hours total) during the semester. The research subjects can come to UB, but it will not be required. Teams can work by phone, online or go to their location, if necessary.

Although not required by the webmaster, the teams are responsible for a full set of information architecture deliverables which are constructed by the teams during the semester. These include:

  • Project Plan
  • Functional Specification

Project Plan—to document how the team will do its work during the semester. The project plan is a living document which is drafted at the beginning of the project, then revised as needed as the work progresses.

  • Tasks by deliverable with workflow/schedule outlining critical path(s)
  • Team member roles & responsibilities
  • Team communications process
  • Team issue management process
  • Documentation process and tools

 

Functional specification--to define the strategy, structure, nomenclature, information design, navigation, and interaction of the website

This report includes the following required elements:

  • Business Goals: priorities, needs, competitive issues, and stakeholders and decision makers
  • Audience Research: needs, persona profiles and related information
  • Website objectives
  • Scope description—describe what you have redesigned
  • Information design--wireframes for global nav landing pages, and for assigned audience segment section
  • Navigation design—annotated sitemap of global nav, secondary nav, and assigned audience segment section
  • Interaction design—user scenarios (these are powerfully persuasive, but include them only if you have time)
  • Summary of usability test results (2-3 users performing 3-4 tasks with wireframes)

 

This is the old list for the report:

  • Business Goals: priorities, needs, competitive issues, and stakeholders and decision makers
  • Audience Research: needs, persona profiles and related information
  • Website Research: known problems, usage data and technical requirements (4/13/05--include only if already completed)
  • Website objectives
  • Scope description—describe what you have redesigned
  • Functional/Feature specifications (deleted 4/13/05)
  • (ID) Conceptual model/map of the website (deleted 4/13/05)
  • (ID) Error handling rules/language for functions/features (deleted 4/13/05)
  • (IA) Organizational (categorization) and navigation schemes
  • (IA) Content inventory/map/model and content requirements
  • (IA) Recommended language, meta/taxonomy data and style guidelines (deleted 4/13/05)
  • Information design—wireframes for global nav landing pages, and for assigned audience segment section
  • Navigation design—sitemap of global nav, secondary nav, and assigned audience segment section
  • Interaction design—user scenarios