 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
E-Marketplace Case
Study
Site Map
Spring 2001
Background
- Tool: Visio 2000
- Input: Functional Specifications documents; initial Page Flow Diagrams
- Primary Author: Anthony Hand, with Lija B.
Site Maps are an abstract representation of the content organization and, to a degree, the navigation of a site. For document access-oriented sites, such as online newspapers or product information sites, conventional hierarchical site map representations may work the best. For transactional sites such as E-Marketplace, where the site responds dynamically to each individual user's privileges and preferences, things get a bit more complicated.
We originally designed a series of page flow diagrams based directly on the primary and alternate scenarios expressed in the functional specifications documents. It took about 2 days to go through each use case, develop a visual vocabulary to represent types of pages and actions, and construct the page flow diagrams in a form that accurately communicated the possible interactions. However, our colleagues found it difficult to fully grasp the abstract nature of roughly a dozen page flow diagrams and how they all related to each other (and to be honest, we had difficulty, too!), so I made a single page representation of the site map in the more familiar hierarchical structure. This made everyone happy and served its purpose well for communicating the high level site structure.
As a result, I moved the page flow diagrams into the wireframe sets, which proved far more effective. I'll show you a page flow diagram in the next set of sample project documentation.
It's very important to develop a good page numbering system. I don't think that the one I came up with for this project was necessarily the best, but it served its purpose. Anyone on the project can refer to a unique page with its code, and everyone knows exactly which page that is. I think the suffix system I came up with for this project proved very useful for identifying page templates. (See the Wireframe Tracker for more info on the suffixes and samples of how they were used.)
Note that this site map diagram is fairly high level. Not every single page in the site is represented here. The page flow diagrams is where all of the unique pages were graphically documented.
Other Links in this Case Study