National Geographic Expeditions Information Architecture — a UX case study
Overview
This case study is focused on the information architecture of the National Geographic Expeditions website. The National Geographic Expeditions website is an online collection of trips all over the world. The aim of the site seems to be to inspire people to travel and provide myriad opportunities for travel to those people. First, I evaluated the existing structure of the website. Then, I explored possible ways of organizing the web pages. Finally, based on my findings, I recommend a sitemap revision to better meet users’ expectations.
Problem Space
My task was to assess the structure of the National Geographic Expeditions website.
Scope and Constraints
The time given for this project was one week and I was working alone.
Who is the User?
The users are professionals who travel often and are interested in learning about the culture of their travel destinations. More on the National Geographic Expeditions primary persona is detailed in the graphic below.
Methods
- Heuristic Evaluation: evaluated 4 pages on the website according to UX best practices
- User Flow: documented the user flow of a primary user finding a trip on the website
- Sitemap Creation: created a sitemap of the main pages on the website
- Open Card Sorting: had 5 participants complete open card sorting on the secondary-level web pages
- Closed Card Sorting: 6 participants completed closed card sorting on those same secondary-level web pages, but with predetermined categories
- Sitemap Revision: updated the original sitemap according to card sorting findings
Heuristic Evaluation
I did a heuristic evaluation of four pages on the National Geographic Expeditions website. (You can learn more about the heuristics used here.) The pages evaluated were the Homepage, the People & Culture page, a specific trip page (Madagascar Private Expedition), and the Lifelong Explorer Program page. These pages were chosen with the primary persona Jayse in mind.
As you will see in the table below which summarizes the results of my heuristic evaluation, most of the pages met usability best practices. However, the Homepage had a much greater amount of problems, particularly in regard to accessibility. Many text and button areas are too low in contrast to meet accessibility standards, and some of the language used is potentially confusing to users.
User Flow
The diagram to the left is the primary user flow for someone finding a trip on the National Geographic Expeditions website. This shows the possible steps a user could take via the existing site pages and navigation.
First Sitemap
Below is the initial sitemap I created based on the National Geographic Expeditions website. The boxes in purple would become the cards I used in my card sorting tasks. Note: I did not have a card for the ‘New Trips’ page. As I did not collect direct data on that page, any recommendations regarding that page and its placement in the sitemap are based on the data collected on the rest of the pages of the site.
Open Card Sorting
I conducted open card sorting with 5 participants to explore how users intuitively think about the pages. The context I gave to participants was that the cards were pages on a travel site, but I left the interpretation of individual card names up to the participants and let them sort the cards into their own categories. To synthesize the open card sort data, I created a similarity matrix. Each row or column represents a card or page. The colors correlate with the number of times cards were sorted into the same category, where darker green is a higher number, and lighter is a smaller number.
The participants created a variety of categories, and here are just a few:
- View All Destinations
- Who Are You?
- Education
- Activities
- Trip Types
- Kind of Trip
From the information gathered in these open sorting tasks, I then brainstormed potential category titles for the cards that would match the participants’ understanding and expectations of the pages and their content. In looking over the synthesized data, I created category names and also renamed several of the cards.
In my data, I saw that there were two very strong categories: Destinations and About Us. Not only were these two categories often created, but their contents were fairly consistent across different sorts.
For the remaining cards, the data in the similarity matrix was not always so clear, so in those cases of ambiguity, I referenced my notes to see what users said about the cards or how the users explained the reasoning behind categorization decisions.
One of the more consistent observations I had was that participants’ interpretation of the card names did not match the actual content on the web page. For example, participants expected that the Photography card/page would be a collection of photos that people had taken on different trips. However, contrary to users’ expectations, the Photography page on the Expeditions website is actually a collection of photography-centric trips.
Perhaps on the actual site, having the context of the Photography page be under the Trip Types section would be enough to inform users that this was a page for Photography trips, but since we did not do user testing of the actual site, this cannot be confirmed. Regardless, participants of the card sorting activity were unclear on this card and others, and so I learned that my card names had to be adjusted to better describe the content on the actual associated web page. So, for the Photography page, I renamed the card to Photography Practice Trips. For any of the other cards that were misleading, I did the same and renamed them accordingly.
As for my categories, the ones I came up with were as follows:
- About
- Destinations
- Traveler Types
- Activity-Based
- Special Trips
- Travel Blog
More on how these performed in the sorting is found in the next section.
Closed Card Sorting
As mentioned in the previous section, my categories were: About, Destinations, Traveler Types, Activity-Based, Special Trips, and Travel Blog. The categories Destinations, About, and Travel Blog I expected to be quite clear and distinct from the others, but Activity-Based, Special Trips, and Traveler Types I expected to have general trends, but maybe some overlap, as I predicted that these three categories would encompass those cards that did not show as distinct of categorization.
Similar to my expectations, the Destinations and About categories were fairly unambiguous and were almost identical across the 6 sorts.
As for the Travel Blog category, the expected cards Traveler Snapshots and Stories from Our Travels showed up there, along with additional cards, Unique Lodges of the World and Wall Street Journal Featured Tours. Participants explained that this category would contain “things I’d look at or click on when I don’t know where to go yet,” so this sounded like a solid Travel Inspiration category.
For the remaining categories of Traveler Types, Activity-Based, and Special Trips, participants had varied understandings of what each category should contain. I did another similarity matrix (shown above) on the cards in these ambiguous categories. Participants said things like:
- “There’s a lot of overlap”
- “I felt like some of these (cards) could go in either Activity-Based or Special Trips”
- “These (categories) were similar, but these (cards) are more general and these (cards) are more specific”
And 4/6 participants understood Traveler Types as the types of people traveling and 2 participants understood it as methods of travel.
This told me two things to consider when reworking the sitemap. One was that the naming of the categories was not as clear as I thought. The other thing I learned, and this is also reflected in the Closed Sort similarity matrix, is that the many trip type cards were understood as types of trips. While they were always sorted into either Traveler Types, Activity-Based, or Special Trips, there was a lot of variation in regard to which specific cards were sorted into which category.
This led me to conclude that the original organization on the National Geographic site, which had all of these trips under Trip Types, matched how participants thought about the trips. However, I still intended to group the trips in some way, so as not to overwhelm a user when they open the Trip Types menu, knowing that chunking large amounts of information can make it more cognitively digestible. So, again, I referenced my notes from my post-sort interviews to come up with some soft subcategories into which the trip types could be divided. More on these subcategories and the new sitemap is in the next section.
Sitemap Revision
As mentioned in the previous section, I found that Trip Types seemed to be an appropriate category to contain many of the pages on the website, so long as they still had some subcategories to be chunked into within the navigation menu. The final subcategories (to go within Trip Types) I came up with were:
- What Kind of Traveler Are You?
- Activities and Interests
- Special Transportation Trips
These were based on statements from participants like, “These are special ways to get to where you’re traveling” and “These have to do with who’s traveling, or who you’re traveling with.”
I also renamed most of the individual pages in the format: ‘________ Trips,’ to indicate that they were indeed types of trips. In general, I tried to maintain more descriptive page names. For example, Journeys I renamed to Affordable Trips, because while it is not prominently explained on the page, the Journeys trips are in fact intended to be a collection of the more financially accessible options. (continued below image)
Finally, since all of this analysis was done without a card for New Trips, I had to decide where this page would go in the new sitemap based on how users understood the cards that they actually did sort. What I learned from my 11 sorts was that users expect more general information to be near the top of pages or arrangements. Several participants even said (although I explained this was not something required or expected of them) that they placed certain cards toward the top of their sort because they seemed more general or less specific. Something that seemed like it could have a wider scope, encompasses multiple types of trips, like ‘New Trips,’ I expect would be understood as one of those more general things. So you will see in the updated sitemap that I have placed New Trips outside of any subcategories of the Types of Trips We Offer section and at the top.
Conclusion + Next Steps
After evaluating the National Geographic Expeditions website and the different ways its pages could potentially be organized, there are three main ways that the website could better serve its users needs:
- Explore ways to change the contrast of text on backgrounds on the Homepage to meet accessibility standards, especially for users who may have colorblindness
- Rename many of the pages under Trip Types to better describe the actual trips they represent
- Regroup the pages under Trip Types to better match the way users think of them (see updated sitemap)
Aside from these improvements, as seen in the heuristic evaluation and user flow, most pages generally behave as users would expect and the trip search process is fairly simple. However, these evaluations are not yet supported by actual user tests. Moving forward, in addition to the three aforementioned improvements, I would recommend to user test the National Geographic Expeditions website to learn more about how users actually interact with the site and assess what troubles they may have in navigating it.
