Freshbooks is a web app that allows freelancers (like myself) to send invoices to clients, track expenses, and much more. I have been a customer of Freshbooks for over a year and one day I realized that I often find myself getting lost when I’m trying to find something in the app. I decided to put the information architecture to the test.
Full Disclosure: this project wasn’t commissioned by Freshbooks. I did this out of my own curiosity and also to show my information architecture testing ability. Overall I have to give the Freshbooks design team props because I have been a satisfied user for nearly two years.
Tools used:
- Optimal Workshop’s Treejack for testing
- Omnigraffle to create the sitemaps
- Microsoft Powerpoint for the report
The first thing I did was review the navigation structure and made a list of 10 possible problems with the information architecture. I narrowed the list down to 3 of what I felt like were the most problematic. Then I came up with scenarios for each that would put participants in the shoes of actual users.
Optimal Workshop provides an abundance of data that you can review after you run the test. I distilled the data down to the most important bits and produced a report to show my findings. I decided to focus on two primary data points: the user’s first click and whether or not the user was ultimately successful in the task.
In the end, I found that 2/3 of my hypothesis were verified. You can view the full report below or read it here.
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