Information Architecture - Completed over Tues 28th / Wed 29th

Right so it has been a while since I blogged about this so I figured I had better do so. As we decided to open up the site completely to all members of Wellington city rather than just have it Wellington city student based, a few changes needed to be made. Not only that there is also other things I hadn't yet filled in last blog such as the design or content. I needed to converse a lot more with the guys before I could do those parts as we are a team, it is not just me designing this website. So after speaking a lot more with the team and doing some research into other existing websites, here is the pretty much my final Information Architecture document for our group:

Information Architecture – Cheerino Website

1)      Goals of site:

·         To assist people with saving money by collating together various sales price information all together in one site.

·         To advertise sales prices or anything that is “money saving”  in New Zealand

 

2)      Audience:

·         People of Wellington

·         Could also be used by people from other cities if we decide to incorporate a region based search function.

 

3)      Use of the site:

·         Public – Can use the site to find out about deals/sales going on in their city so that they can save themselves time in having to look around for the best deal on items and to more importantly save money!

·         Businesses – Can use the site to advertise themselves and the sales/deals they have in their store/s. This will attract people to buying from them rather than elsewhere if the price is right.

 

4)      Scenario:

 

5)      Competitors:

1)      Themarket.co.nz

 

In finding this website we thought we might be in trouble as it appeared to be quite a lot like the website we were intending on creating. Upon further investigation we realised this wasn’t the case. We found that it was only showing sales of online shops that are not very well recognised, there is no user generated content. These online shops also have to pay this website to create listings. The search engine was also quite confusing and it didn’t return many results which posed the question, what was the point? With very little content the website is rendered somewhat useless, I also don’t like the shops it advertises as they are not recognisable so it leaves you feeling a little unsure of whether or not they can be trusted. On a positive note however it did contain a wide range of categories to search from.

 

2)      Simplesavings.co.nz

 

When we found this site soon after, we were kind of unsure as to what exactly the website was about, what sort of service it was trying to provide to public users. Eventually we came to the conclusion that it was a very complicated resource for trying to provide tips on how to save money and functions to help you keep a record of your savings. The layout was terrible, too much information was crammed into the homepage, this was visible not only by the amount of text you saw straight off, but also by the amount of scrolling you had to do in order to reach the bottom of the page.

 

3)      Trademe.co.nz

 

This is a popular New Zealand website, used for trading and selling new and second-hand goods between users. What is good about this website is its very wide range of categories for grouping user listings. It is clear and concise and structured in a very user-friendly way.

 

 

6)      Functions/Content:

After logging in users can upload videos or images of sales they wish to share with the public, each video will have a description including the place of sale, sale price and how long the sale is running. With this user generated content, the public can search and find sales that interest them, especially if they are after something specific.

 

 

 

7)      Structure:

The website will be a simple, categorical site. Video’s that are uploaded to the website are placed into a category that is relevant to the video content so that when a user searches though the category menu on the homepage  they can find the video content that applies to what they are searching for.

 

 

 

8)      Visual Design:

We want to stick to three main colours so as to keep a consistent theme throughout our site.

The colours we have chosen are black and two shades of green, one light and one dark. We decided on this colour choice as green is commonly associated with money and our site is dedicated to sales and saving people mullah. Green is also associated with New Zealand, “clean and green” and since our site is based for people living in New Zealand, it seemed appropriate.

Cheerino Navigation

I realised that we hadn't really documented our sites navigation clearly, we only really had basic sketches in our books on how we wanted the site structured and what linked to where. For this reason I thought it would be nice to revisit LovelyCharts and create a clear image of the site navigation etc. This would then make it not only clear for all of us on how things were going to work, but it would also give us something to present during the presentation process to help communicate our ideas.

Cheerino Navigation:

Monday 27 April - Class is back in session

Today 311 was back in session which is good as it meant our group could work together rather than separate like most of the holidays. Byron continued his focus on the coding side of things. Seems we can upload videos all good which is good to see, just need to refine the mobile upload of videos as there is still a bug. Tried to help him and give assistance where I could. The main thing of today though was to get the aesthetics down. Me and David showed Byron our ideas towards this layout which he liked so that was good. I also went away with Josh and Iafeta to go do some filming. Byron wanted some test videos so we went around the area and documented a few sales in some quick videos, Josh and Iafeta on camera duty and me the actor in the video. When we later finally got them downloaded to the computer they were pretty funny however they were also too short. They will do for now but if we have more time then I believe a reshoot will be in order.

Final Logo

Here is an image of our final logo as it appears on the website.

Holiday Meeting

Decided to have another meet today, this time though it was only me, david and josh. The other two couldn't make it. With some assistance from david and a little bit toward the end from josh, I completed the final logo for our website. I think it has turned out rather well and am quite pleased with the result. Changes made to it today were the following:

1) rearranged the placement of all the letters. The two e's creating the cheeries we given more space between the other letters. Beforehand it seemed too squished.

2) refined the stalks of the cheeries, getting rid of the squiggly lines. Made them straight and sharp to follow the rest of the logo.

3) After making these changes and loading it to the website it didn't stand out enough, it sort of blended in too much. To fix this I added a white stroke to it which I think is pretty effective.

4) Added some extra transparent space around the logo to give it the correct amount of space when loaded onto the site. Previously when loading on the site the stroke would be cut off at each end of the logo. Adding the transparent space around the logo fixed this.

5) Figured the logo by itself wasn't enough. It needed a catch phrase to "complete" it. After a quick brainstorm between us we made our choice and added it to the logo then added the completed logo to the website. It was a proud moment :)

Our ideas for a catch phrase: ( please do note these were mostly quite lame :p )

* "Saving you money."

* "Sales prices you don't want to miss!"

* "Here's something to be happy about"

* "Beat the recession, Cheerino's in session!"

* "Sales worth cheering about"  - This was our final pick.

* "Save yourself"

* "Something to cheer about"

* "Come on in, the prices are just right"

* "Savings at the lowest of prices"

After doing this me and David also brainstormed our ideas for layout of the website.

Friday 24th April - Holiday Meet

Today we had a big group meet to continue on with our working with the Cheerino website. Feka showed us the concepts he had made for our site logo and they were pretty good, he had some interesting ideas. In looking at them, me and David decided that there was none that would stand as our final but we agreed that there were aspects about 2 of them that we thought if combined could create our final. These 2 logos being the 2 above. What we liked about the top one was the text. Bold, clear and easy to read. The C was also quite nice. For the 2nd one, we liked the 2 e's combined to create cheeries. The only thing wrong with them was the colour choice, none of us liked the pink especially and either way it didn't fit in with our colour scheme we had now chosen, that being green and black.

So for the remainder of the meeting I tinkered around with these 2 logos in Illustrator to try and create our final, I came to the conclusion that the interesting C had to go as that combined with the 2 e's as cheeries was too much and out of the 2 interesting graphics, I thought the 2 e's were the most effective. I also then decided that I had to change the font type as it needed to be stronger so that it wasn't overpowered by the 2 e's. "Tahoma" was my final choice when also made bold.

My end result for the day was this:

Information Architecture

As I'm not the greatest when it comes to code, I delegated myself to working through the information architecture work. It came in real handy when I did it for the previous project in redeveloping the Mediazone website as it really puts things into perspective for you and you can get all your ideas down on paper so that when it comes to building the site, its pretty much as easy as reading off a piece of paper. There are a few things I am unsure about however such as design and the content we want on our website, but this is fine as it is early days yet. I'll have a talk with the other guys and get that stuff filled in as soon as I can.

Here is a short piece of what I have got so far:

Information Architecture – Cheerino Website

1)      Goals of site:

·         To assist students with saving money by collating together various sales price information all together in one site.

·         To advertise sales prices or anything that is “money saving”  in New Zealand

 

2)      Audience:

·         Students of Wellington

·         Could also be used by the public and people from other cities if we decide to incorporate a region based search function.

 

3)      Use of the site:

·         Students – Can use the site to find out about deals/sales going on in their city so that they can save themselves time in having to look around for the best deal on items and to more importantly save money!

·         Businesses – Can use the site to advertise themselves and the sales/deals they have in their store/s. This will attract people to buying from them rather than elsewhere if the price is right.