Overview

Introduction

Tilth Alliance is a local nonprofit organization providing a broad range of services that support sustainable, healthy, local food systems. Their service areas include resources for farmers, classes and programs for youth and adults on a range of topics, community events, a garden hotline, store, farm guide, and more.

I looked at the information architecture of the Tilth Alliance website to improve their content organization and navigation for users. This was a student project in SVC’s UXCP Information Architecture class. This project was completed over a 5-week period.

The Challenge

With the merge, Tilth Alliance provides a lot of services. Their home page navigation reflects the clunkiness of a merge. There are three main navigation menu. It’s hard to keep track of where you are, or what is important. How can users best explore the broad range of services that Tilth Alliance provides through an improved information architecture of the site’s content? More specifically, how can users easily find classes to sign up for?

The Solution

The solution was to simplify the Tilth global navigation and to reorganize the content to help users find what they are looking for more easily.

1. A simplified (one) global navigation menu that is fixed at the top of each page. 

2. Removing the left pane navigation menu and replacing it with a bread crumb navigation to help orient the user on subpages.

3. Re-organized content to best fit new and simplified categories.

Methods and Tools

1. Content Inventory and Analysis

2. Domain Modeling

3. Card Sorting (with OptimalSort by Optimal Workshop)

4. Revised site map

5. Site navigation re-design

Card Sorting

Research Question

Tilth Alliance provides a broad range of services, including resources for farmers, classes and programs for youth and adults on a range of topics, community events, a garden hotline, store, farm guide, and more. I wanted to test if the category words that Tilth currently uses would be ones that users would think of on their own. I chose an open-ended card sort to have the users write their own categories. In total, nine people attempted the card sort and six completed the assignment.

• How would users categorize or group the different kinds of information and services that Tilth Alliance provides?

• What kinds of words would they use to categorize this information?

Findings

1) Participants identified five main categories: 

• Farmer resources 

• Contact / General information 

• Connect (with Tilth and with community) 

• Education for children 

• Gardening resources 

2) There was some confusion about grouping certain items under farm resources, or under education and learning. I think this was because participants tried to create as few as categories as possible. This would also be an area to clearly differentiate opportunities for farmers, hobbyists, educators, etc.

Redesigned Navigation

1. A simplified (one) global navigation menu that is fixed at the top of each page. 

2. Removing the left pane navigation menu and replacing it with a bread crumb navigation to help orient the user on subpages.

3. Re-organized content to best fit new and simplified categories.