Information Architecture
Identifying, distilling, and organizing the information and inputs of a system or tool — information architecture sits as one of the primary disciplines of any UX professional. Below are a few of the activities that exemplify my design process and output.
Qualitative: User Flows
In early 2013, in order to highlight to the business opportunities to simplify user experience in core areas of the Eventbrite product, I mapped out several detailed and comprehensive user journeys. These focus primarily on the actions and decision-points that a user is required to traverse in order to complete common tasks on the Eventbrite platform, such as finding events (consumers) or creating a new event (organizers). These flows also capture all of the various branches on that path, where a user could make a decision that takes them through sub-flows, usually representing optional actions or features in the product.
While user flows to this level of detail are difficult to maintain, creating these definitely aided me in starting conversations with key internal stakeholders. As a fringe benefit, the task required me to explore every corner of the product that these user journeys touch. This "fringe benefit" boosted my general knowledge of the platform significantly, which has since made me better at designing for other projects and made me a go-to person for people around the company who want to know how something works — and why!
Quantitative: User Behaviors
In late 2013 and early 2014, I performed several "deep dives" into the quantitative data around user behaviors. From previous journey mapping, my team and I had a fairly good understanding of the paths our users took through the product. Now, I sought to answer the questions "how many?" and "from where, to where?" To do this, I tapped into Google Analytics and Omniture data being collected across the site, looking specifically at page views, referral sources, entry and exit points, and next-page data. I then visualized this information into a chart that could be read at-a-glance or could be leaned-into to see greater detail about each major page or screen in the product.
This was very helpful in understanding critical insights that would shape how we thought about future development and brand work at Eventbrite. For instance, it revealed to us that the overwhelming majority of consumers (at the time) entered our site directly on the event listing, or that event organizers spend most of their time on two or three of our tools, and very little time anywhere else on the site. These strong qualitative signals would lead to highly-focused qualitative research across the entire team, to answer questions about why these behaviors existed. Did organizers only use those two tools, or were the other tools simply "set and forget" or easier to use?
Sitemap
Throughout my time at Eventbrite, I occasionally found it helpful to map out the high-level structure of the product. These system models are based usually on the explicit navigation and way-finding in the product interfaces. I did a few of these while at Eventbrite, sometimes just for documentation, but usually in order to improve some aspect of the navigation or wayfinding of the web product, as in the example from 2013, below: