Talk:Website purposes for IA

Introduction

My name is Gary and we're in the office hour with Gracie and Rita. We will be discussing the questions that Gracie sent about information architecture for Friends Of CNM website:

1. Should the developer finish the website features such as hierarchy or roadmaps before starting the requirements for the prototype?
2. Use blueprint Vs. from scratch.
3. The main things to consider before starting the prototype.

First, let's see what you have done so let’s take a look at all developments.

Developments: Requirements

“The ‘’Site’’ will be a site for individuals or organizations who want to partner in CNMCyber endeavor by either offering their services or support in contribution and grants.” this makes sense to me.

Developments: Design

D:esign I meant graphic design and UX design, what you wrote it's more of information Architecture. You kind of laid out what you are envisioning, that there should be some call to action, header section. This is not a design, design is more like a graphic or UX design.

Developments: Home page

We also need to write something here too, because FriendsOfCNM group was the former name of CNMCyber when it was still an initiative. Instead of writing somewhere there, I would say you'll need to update kind of that page too if you want to continue working on this. Because friends of CNM website is kind of the page that should describe the website and the purpose of the website should be here. We also need to change this Landing page. Everything on this page should go somewhere else. Do we have all these services or not or do we need all these domains and subdomains are the questions for information architecture.

Whatever you know right now a CNMCyber used to be at friendsofcnm .com and then we moved to cnmcyber.com. We may have to keep it for the purposes of search engine optimization because kind of Google will rank bigger sites higher.

I however don't see any development of the idea that we started creating, the idea that someone will come to the website friendsofcnm.com and we have these tentative personas which we need to call like and so on so forth and someone who is a potential volunteer, what this person needs to see, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to click do you want me to read and when I read, what would I do, where should I go? Did you think on this? To work on the website, you need to have some idea of the front page and to decide what should be on the front page you need to make… The website is a tool

You have to envision what this website should be like, what should be on the front page moreover what should be on the landing screen so let's open the Kenya Airways website “when adventurers make the best stories”, they decided that would attract. What we can say about the idea of the website is that they have flights and they want to sell them. The information infrastructure is to help book a flight on Kenya Airways, also another tab is guest support, it's a kind of client support so it will be the place where I can get the most updated information for the flights. I can also see loyalty programs so they want to keep me involved with them. I can learn about them by clicking About Us.

You can see they define what they want from their websites, they say for people who want to travel time use Kenya Airways want them to be able to book a flight then when they book the flight they can be able to check what the status is. We want them to be involved through our loyalty program. So they have the idea, they say for people who want to fly we want them to type where they want to fly it and to be able to book the flight. F or those who have already booked the flight can check the status of their flight.

They have a clear idea of what they want people to do. Potential passengers looking for information for booked flights that’s the first persona, the second persona is someone who wants to invest in them, and the third Persona is someone in their loyalty program.

This is the same idea with friendsofCNM, we need to decide who we are targeting and what we want these groups to do. For someone who wants to volunteer what would we offer and what do we need them to do? When someone wants to volunteer, do we need to give them some button or form or something? People will read and then what next? The same for employment provider and so on and so forth. Based on that we can think of what should be on the landing, the main. The home page is like the whole page it can have like several sections I mean kind of the landing screen or landing section, when the person opens the website what this person will see. Mostly it's the main menu

and what will be on the first page. It can be a character cell it can be several messages but I don't like Carson by the way, they're kind of jumping in I have no control. it's not user-friendly in my view.

1. Should the developer finish the website features before starting requirements for the prototype?

Hierarchy

From the Kenya Airways website, the hierarchy was ticket booking, this is kind of their main part right so the same then they created Asante, the loyalty program users and it has another completely another section right it's another menu and other pieces but you can jump back then they put okay corporate for investors and it has its own menu too. These three different sections of the website have separate menus and you can navigate to another one from which you are in. There are some websites that are really good and expensive like for instance basel.com this website they spent millions of dollars to develop this one website and they put many things you can do.

If you don't know for whom you are developing this website and what you want people to do, how you will build hierarchy.

Roadmaps

Roadmaps is basically what you intend. You want like to create someone who wants to volunteer, for instance, you would want this person to see on the front screen, should they scroll down? where will the button be? and so and so forth. You then need to create a roadmap. For instance, My name is Michael, I'm a retired IBM expert specialist searching for volunteering opportunities. I heard about CNMCyber I got there and clicked on partner got redirected to the friendsofsenam.com website and then what should this person see there?

2. Use blueprint Vs. from scratch? The main things to consider before starting the prototype

I don't know, like there are many different ways there are many tools. You can start with the description as you started or you can just draw it some people use just paper and pencil and you can sketch something easily also there are some professional tools you can use any content Management systems or the wiki and make a Wiki prototype. There is no single tool, tools are secondary, the purpose of these tools is the primary and you focus on the purpose, on the primary what the site should do.

We can use many different tools, for prototyping there are special tools, personally, I use Balsamiq lately people use Figma a lot, basically it gives you kind of a feeling of the website and you can host the website there too. Before Balsamiq, we used Axure RP, but this is kind of paid. There are many that are free, I like pencil projects. I decided for now, that to our clients what should be on the front page Wiki is enough, and Wiki is under control and you have seen what Erastus and Kevin did with cnmcyber.com. This looks like and feels like a website, but they didn't finish it, everything should be clickable and be able to go to a different page. I like Wiki because it's trackable you can see the history, and you can see who contributed what. Other fancier tools don't have versioning control at least I'm not aware of any. So you cannot see who did what but with the wiki yeah it has kind of some Version Control you can track and get back and see what happened. You can use this as the blueprint.

In a nutshell, the information architecture is things from the perspective of the business goals like what we want this person to do so let's say cnmcyber.com is our tool to attract volunteers right or make volunteers to join our team so how will they do it? should they do kind of a form sign a form or or something else.