Information Architecture for IXD project

One of my first encounters with Information Architecture, to be more exact is the first encounter I actually recognized that is my first official UX project from Kate Rutter’s UX Foundation class. The brief for this project is to create a tool on Amazon that enables faculties to efficiently collate items into kits and students to purchase full bundles of products and services necessary to conduct activities in their academic semester.

Inspired to build a feature extending from Amazon, I coined the working title Amazon Curator. And to my surprise (since I was inexperienced), the first set of data is from humans. Before studying UX design, I usually think about the data of the product such as functions, appearances, price,… but the beginning of the research data are personas to highlight the user’s needs and goals and their ideal user experience.

Data is a crucial part of every design workflow, and a part of design planning comes from thinking about what data goes into the different components that bring the product together.

For Amazon Curator, I had envisioned the primary dataset consisting of kit groups. Each package then provides a subset of product-related data and invited users. The amount of data expected to fit into the package is therefore immense. It was necessary particularly in the design of this product, to break down the metadata within each category. It was a basis for clarification as to which knowledge during their journey on the web would be important and vital to consumers.

Another information analysis exercise that I found so helpful is to discover the consequences in the design. Personally, it was difficult to perceive the negative implications of a growing concept critically, not in the way of downplaying a challenge, but identifying what could go wrong. In my design, I use hashtags as a way to categorize and discover different kits from different users. If the hashtags don’t have any guidelines or controls, they can target the wrong audiences, put children at risk, expose users to problematic categories like mental disorders, illegal drugs, violence,…  I found it incredibly useful to be more critical in design thinking and think more in-depth into the different facets that make up the user experience: the user, data (and metadata), processes, and systems. One can’t work without the other, and as a designer, it is important to using information architecture to create a good user experience.