While writing the content is important, it's just as important to consider how the content is organised - this is information architecture.
"Information architecture focuses on organizing, structuring, and labeling content, and how it all fits together, so that users can easily find the information they need and complete tasks. If they can’t do that, they’ll simply give up and try out the competition."
Oliver Lindberg Information Architecture - Adobe Ideas
A good information architecture is based on user research - understand who you are catering to and involve users in the process as soon as you can.
To get started, put together a list of all content, prioritise it (done and done) and organise it into groups (to do). When conducting competitive analysis I listed out all the features/content I wanted to include in Hidden on post it notes and then prioritised them based on their importance to me. I later asked 3 interviewees to carry out the same card sorting exercise, prioritising them based on what's important to them.
It was interesting to see how we all arranged the features slightly differently. For example, Fiona (age 49) put 'collect souvenirs' as her lowest priority whereas Hazel (age 23) felt that this was something that interested her. Hazel also put the 'trip checklist' in the most important section as she said she would have found planning easier if she had a checklist of things to consider, whereas Ruby (age 20) has only ever travelled within Europe and therefore hasn't had to think about things like visas and injections so felt the 'trip checklist' was of least importance to her.
Now that I understand which features are considered necessary to each user and which would be a nice added extra, I need to look at organising this content into groups to think about platform structure.
The image on the left shows me categorising Hidden's content to get a basic understand of what features need to go on what pages, while the right shows my first sketch of a site map.
A digitalised version of my initial draw up. Four main screens - Trips, Explore, Destinations, Profile and different sections/features within those pages.
I then considered combining the Explore and Search to be accessed by the same page, similar to how it's done on Instagram. I also moved this page to the left to indicate it being the first screen visible on opening the app.
I resorted back to having the Explore and Search as separate pages as I found there was too much information trying to fit into one page. However they are linked together as they both can access the same posts/content. I also forgot to add the 'Sign In/Sign Up' page in previous site map versions. Again this may continue to change as I think more about the user interface and how that will be designed but for now this is what I'm working towards.
A user flow visualises how a user interacts with a product/completes a particular task and allows designers to see a product from a user’s point of view. I want to create a detailed user flow from the perspective of one of my user personas, which will be much easier to do now that I've looked at information architecture.