With our hearts and minds full of data from all the research we conducted, we had to make sure our new product was easy to move through and things were where you'd expect.
Site Map + Features
Seeing as this is a civic project, we knew that there was probably a method to their madness that we should take into consideration. We created an site map for the existing product and a features list to ensure we included all relevant content.
Research proved users were getting overwhelmed and lost in the existing design's flow, so I simplified the hierarchy and filtering system, removing unnecessary complications.
Priorities:
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Clear hierarchy
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Ability to navigate easily
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Viewing options-grid, list, map, calendar
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Easy to use filtering and sorting
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Improved accessibility
User Journey + Flow
Utilizing our audit and feedback from our testing with the existing design we created a journey that touched the pain points we could work from.
The existing user flow was overly complicated and didn't always go where expected. You could get lost!
We created two flows that came together in a sensical way - One to browse and view events and one for navigating an account
Card Sorting
With NYC Parks offering such a robust catalog of activities and the current system being so clunky, I felt it was critical to get the categorization right before going in to design. I also knew that we shouldn't make these decisions ourselves and needed to get input from a larger community.
I conducted a hybrid open/closed card sorting exercise to have users sort event types into pre-determined buckets as well as creating their own.
I mapped the results to determine the common threads and where events needed to exist in more than one category.
This was immensely useful for structuring the filter system in a way that people expected.
