Improvement
After we designed the first version of the website, we found many problems:
1. The design of knowledge map which was not clear enough.
2. People have different degrees of interest in different topics, and they may be allowed to adjust that in their knowledge map. We thought about that how could we present the information in a more meaningful way.
3. The approach of recommendation may impede the user to explore more knowledge in the knowledge map, because our previous design was to recommend specific articles of core experts in the field as they explored in the map. However, they also need to have other way to access knowledge.
4. Users should have an option to set their privacy setting, which to decide whether open their profile to public.
5. Recommendation mechanism: Recommendation should base on the relevancy of knowledge as well as user's knowledge map, such as the weekly recommendation of authors that people followed.
New information structure
Contactual inquiry
We invited people to draw their knowledge map to have an understanding of people’s mental model of the map and we try to get some inspiration from that.
We can see that most people's mental maps of knowledge are tree-structured and they usually start to draw their map from the field they are interest in. What's interesting is that some people build their knowledge maps based on the intensity of interest and how long they know it. In this observation, we found that the knowledge map in people's mind is composed of connected knowledge and the shape of "knowledge" is can be a various of shapes.
Interface Design
Home page sketch: Zoe Yan
Storyboard
In the filed research, we found that people usually begin a social when they are in the the conference, so we try to design a function that can trigger a conversation before the event. And possibility of social relationship to help users to expend their knowledge map.
It may helpful to people to connect to people who they interested in. In the offline conference, the topic in the knowledge may trigger a wonderful conversation with others.
Knowledge Map design
author and people's profile
People can view who also signed up to events. After clicking the profile photo, people will link to other people's directly.
Then in the knowledge map, people can select “ show overlap” & “show different” to compare their knowledge map, they will know other's specialisation before the offline event.
Personal page & Weekly recommendation
OTHER PATH FOR INFORMATION EXPLORATION
We also designed other path for users to exploring information through the function of search, weekly recommendation. And that base on their searching history, knowledge map and the author they followed.
Tag library:
People can click the tag in the knowledge map to access the tag library directly. They can navigate the filed as well as read articles, they are interested in.
Privacy setting
We provide privacy setting to enable them to manage their knowledge map, collection and footprints, to decide whether to open their profile.
Design Limitation
1. Proper possibilities of offline events
We consider the form of AR tech (scan each other’s knowledge map ) and Cup classification (use cup cover to show interests for topics). But we chose to give it up because it may be a weapon for the system.
We consider the form of AR tech (scan each other’s knowledge map ) and Cup classification (use cup cover to show interests for topics). But we chose to give it up because it may be a weapon for the system.
2. Balance between innovation and conventional mindset
We consider that connecting content tag to author’s profile may not be natural, because it's not totally fit in people's mental model when exploring information.
reflection
Information Architecture process was one of the part we had ever done so far. Using new methods was very exciting but there was really nothing right or wrong about it. We spent many hours for the case study but it seemed there was no a perfect result. Nevertheless, we try to figure out how to build a knowledge map base on the social relationship, and I think it is a special as well as creative point to design a website.