A teacher's dilemma

In this project, we were in charge of structuring the information. IA is one area of design that does not get enough credit often due to its abstract nature. In the physical world, an architect designs spaces for people to navigate, and in a similar fashion in the virtual world, information architects design the spaces and how those spaces connect (or don't connect) for people to navigate and information to live.

The client offered online courses and needed insight into how her students would navigate from the various sections of the course site. Simple enough.

We could make a few assumptions at this stage and do a "walk through" of the course site ourselves, but how do we know what the students' understanding of the site is? Good IA is rooted in research and testing. So, we tested.

Lucky for us, we had direct access to a group of students. Our client offered some small benefits to the students for participating, and what we learned was that the students' taxonomy, or categorizing, differed from ours.

One specific problem lied in the misinterpretation of "assignments" and "tasks". Students were unsure what the difference was, and even the teacher, our client, used the terms interchangably. This problem lead to frustration and interrupted some students' flow in learning.

There were other improvements we were able to make regarding the structure of this educational site, many of which were made preemptively. In our discussion with our client, we discovered that she planned to offer additional services and hoped to expand her course offerings in the next year. Together, we developed an information architecture tailored to her current business with the capacity to expand.