info_architecture.html

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    <meta name="Information Architecture" content="hard decisions">
    <meta name="Maria Moller" content="Maria Moller">

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        <h1>Information Achitecture</h1>
        
        <ul class="nav">
            <li><a href="info_architecture.html" class="selected">Home</a></li>
            <li><a href="personas.html">Personas & Scenarios</a></li>
            <li><a href="analysis.html">Competitive Analysis</a></li>
            <li><a href="redesign.html">Redesign</a></li>
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        <h2>Information Architecture Decisions</h2>
        <p>During this assignment we have experienced how challenging it can be to organize and categorize
        information in a way that pleases all the various user groups. We made our information architecture
        decisions by looking at the results from the competitive analysis and by trying to combine them with
        our impression of what is important for the University of Louisiana.</p>
        
        <p>None of the five university sites that we analyzed have 'athletics' in their top navigation,
        but Louisiana.edu has. Sports and the Ragin' Cajuns seems to be an important part of the UL Lafayette.
        We decided to include 'Athletics' in the top navigation in our redesign.</p>
        
        <p>Three of the five universities had news in their top navigation. We decided to use the index page
        to present news instead of having a separate link. The 'news of the day' is displayed and the users can
        click on 'older news' to view more. This will also give life to the website as the head news changes. 
        </p>
        
        <p>We found that 'prospective students', 'current students' and 'life at Louisiana' had a lot of overlapping
        information categories. We considered merging them, but decided not to. We wanted to keep 'Life at Louisiana'
        as a container of more general information. When it comes to the current students and prospective students both
        groups may be interested in financing and cost, but the information that they are after will likely differ. While
        current students want to know deadlines for tuitions, the prospective students may be more interested in cost
        estimation per year. Our conclusion was that even though current and prospective students want information about
        some of the same categories, the kind of information that they want are different.  Based on this we decided to
        include 'Life at Louisiana' in our more general top navigation bar, and to include 'prospective students' and
        'current students' in our more user specific menu.</p>
        
        <p>We decided not to include a separate link for parents. We found that the links that got high counts under
        'parents' already were included under 'Life at Louisiana' and 'prospective students'. We belive that parents
        of a prospective student will find what they are looking for under the 'prospective students' link. If they
        want general information about the university this can be found under 'Life at Louisiana'. The same applies to
        parents of current students. </p>
        
        <h2>Design Decisions</h2>
        
        <p>The most challenging design decisions concerned the website navigation. We wanted to somehow distinguish
        between a more general menu and a user specific menu. We decided to place the general menu on top as a horizontal
        navigation bar and the specified menu on the left hand side. </p>
        
        <p>Another issue was regarding how the subcategories under each top navigation link should be presented.
        One of our options was to make a new menu appear when the user clicks on a top navigation link. Since we
        already had two menus, we decided to make them drop down menus instead. This way all the menu choices are
        available at all times, also the secondary ones.</p>
        
        <p>We wanted to include the 'Walk of Honor' in our redesign as this seems have an important role at the
        University of Louisiana. We did this by using an images of the bricks in the heading of our website.
        </p>
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        <p class="footertext">&copy; 2012: Ingrid Taroy and Maria Moller</p>
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