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.