Employer Project: Information Architecture solutions
As my final module for the Product Design Career Accelerator programme, I worked in a team of seven product designers to develop a proposed education hub* for a biotechnology company.
*Due to the sensitive nature of the NDA, I am unathorised to show imagery of any designs. This case study emphasises the process undergone by me and my team to successfully tackle a project brief for a real client.
Project scope
A biotechnology company commissioned the design of a new educational content 'hub' that will be integrated with the existing website's structure and design system. The primary goal was to create a dedicated section of the website to host all informational and educational material concerning their testing services.
The focus was on developing a space that is easily navigable and shows customers why their testing is important. The educational materials also support customers throughout the testing journey, from the collection of their samples to understanding their results. The primary focus was on information architecture and user experience (UX) for this new section, ensuring the final design adheres to the current website's existing design system.
Methodology
As a team, we started tackling this design challenge by conducting a competitor analysis. This provided a wealth of insights that needed organising and synthesising before ideation. To achieve this, we used affinity mapping to identify key themes and insights, which helped facilitate decision-making, promote team collaboration, and support problem-solving. We then created two empathy maps, to represent two distinct user groups: patients and clinicians. These empathy maps helped us to develop our problem statement and what the education hub sets out to achieve.
Problem statement:
Patients considering or using the company’s microbiome and pathology tests, and the clinicians who support them, lack a clear, centralised way to understand the purpose, process, results and next steps of testing. Because specialist diagnostics can feel technical, unfamiliar and difficult to interpret, users may struggle to judge whether testing is relevant, credible and useful at the point they need to make decisions.
There is an opportunity to design an educational hub that supports confidence across the testing journey by giving patients accessible guidance and clinicians evidence-based resources to help them explain, recommend and interpret the company’s services.
Ideation
Empathy Maps
To aid ideation, we created two Empathy Maps to capture the user experiences, behaviours, and emotions of each of our user groups. This helped ensure that user needs remained central to the design process.
User Flows
We then created four user flows to represent each user group and sub-user groups to identify how each user would approach the proposed education hub.
Low-fidelity to mid-fidelity design
Our team created grey-scale lo-fi designs to bring the information architecture to life. During team meetings and through collaboration exercises, these designs turned into mid-fidelity designs, the ones that would be used for our usability tests.
Usability testing
The script consisted of a general background mini-interview to see how much our participants knew about the subject. It then led to five tasks.
We organised our data (quotes) into a FigJam board, identifying areas for development to enhance our designs for our final submission to the client.
Information architecture
This image was our final map of the proposed education hub. We had a high-fidelity prototype of some key areas of the website that was presented to the client. Client feedback was very positive, demonstrating we had achieved the goal of creating an eductaion hub that worked for both patients and clinicians and provided them with a clear, centralised way to understand the purpose, process, results and next steps of testing
