Gallery Guide: Website Information Architecture
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE COURSE PROJECT FOR MASTER’S IN HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION DESIGN — 2022
For the Information Architecture course in my Master’s program, I was tasked with researching a domain of my choice and designing the information architecture for a website.
Because of my personal interest in art, I chose to research art galleries and the process of buying art. The site I designed, “Gallery Guide,” was aimed at emerging artists and novice art buyers who want to learn about art galleries and find galleries to visit. I imagined this site being produced by an association for art galleries, or even as a microsite produced by an institution such as the Tate Modern.
Discovery
To begin, I reviewed art gallery websites and interviewed four experts: one commercial gallery owner, one art collector, and two artists. I then created a domain model, a visual map of important concepts and links between them. Because I had to carefully consider what to include and exclude from the model, this artifact became a helpful documentation of the scope of the site I was planning to build. For example, I drew connections, it became clear that the relationship between artists, artwork and buyers is what defines galleries, which often manifests at an exhibition. This insight helped inform the initial structure of the sitemap, centered around exhibitions.
Defining and Testing the Structure
Once I sufficiently understood the domain of art galleries, I drafted a sitemap for my eventual website.
To determine the best way to organize my sitemap, I conducted a series of moderated card sorts and tree tests. Moderating allowed me to understand participants’ rationale and ask follow-up questions, and even helped identify entities that were missing on the domain model.
I first conducted a card sort with four novice art buyers, consisting of 23 cards. Based on learnings from this round, I then conducted an additional card sort, which had 35 cards, with two emerging artists. I chose open card sorts because this was a new website, without pre-established content categories.
Example of one participant’s open card sort response, using Optimal Sort
One key insight from the card sorts was that buyers separated “behind the scenes” activities from public-facing activities. This was the foundation for the first structural decision – to separate informational articles about how galleries work from pages for a specific gallery, exhibition or event.
Another insight was that artists and buyers need different kinds of information. This informed the second structural idea – to use a hybrid audience and topic-based navigational structure. I chose to evaluate this decision with tree testing. I ran a series of tree tests with two buyers and two artists, each consisting of 6-8 findability and discoverability tasks. Ultimately, I found that participants were more successfully able to locate information with the hybrid audience-topic navigation than the purely topic-based navigation. Additionally, tree testing helped me evaluate labels within the site map. For example, research participants were more comfortable thinking of themselves as “buyers” than “collectors.”
Mapping the Journey
As a way to illustrate and pressure test a key user journey imagined for the site, I then created a user journey map. The journey map shows four routes for a user to find an exhibition they like and save it: viewing their saved galleries, browsing galleries, browsing exhibitions, or searching. These different routes highlighted a variety of entry points for the user that I found to be important based on my research — such as exploratory browsing tasks that help users discover new artwork and galleries and direct search that enables a user to look up something that was recommended to them.
Visualizing the Site
The final step in this project was to bring the site to life through a series of wireframes. I chose to wireframe and test four pages that represent key steps in finding an exhibition, and that might be used in different ways by artists and buyers: Home, Search Results, Browse Exhibitions, and an Exhibition Page. I began by reviewing direct competitor sites such as GalleriesNow and Ocula as well as other sites / apps with similar structures such as Airbnb and IMDb, for design inspiration.
I then tested my initial wireframes with six users – three artists and three buyers – with remote, moderated usability tests. Moderating enabled me to ask follow-up questions to gain deeper insights into participants’ decisions. Testing revealed many interesting insights that I incorporated into the next iteration of the wireframes. For example, some participants mentioned the importance of images when browsing art in particular. The initial wireframes included a single image on each exhibition “card,” but participants said they would need to see more images to decide if they’re interested in an exhibition (especially if the first image didn’t resonate with them). Therefore, the updated wireframes for the Browse page (shown below, W3) include multiple images, in order to prevent wasted clicks between the browse page and individual exhibition pages.
Reflection
This project was fascinating to me because of how much it highlighted the difference between individual ways of thinking. As web users, we often take navigation for granted when we can easily find what we’re looking for. However, when defining information architecture from scratch, you realize how many different ways a site could be organized. For example, a buyer may want to browse art galleries by city when traveling, an investor may be interesting in specifically viewing works by emerging artists, or a photographer may want to find inspiration at exhibitions featuring other photographers.
On a different level, the categories we choose to make as designers can have broader consequences than mere findability on a website. For example, I had originally designed a way for users to browse exhibitions by artwork theme. But as became clear during my discussions with participants in testing sessions, the nature of art is that it is multi-dimensional. People felt that trying to force artworks into pre-defined categories would oversimplify them and water down their potential impact. In another example, even in the final wireframes, there is a finite list of mediums featured in the main navigation — that means artwork that neatly fits into those categories is given more prominence and promotion than pieces from other mediums.
These themes tie into my broader interest around how we define data, capture it and use it to represent the world in new ways.