Table of Contents

Introduction 3
Overview

The Club

Members

Goals 4

User Experience 6
Audience

User Scenarios

Competitive Analysis

Content 19
Overview

Functional Requirements

Site Architecture 20
Overview

Global/Local Navigation Systems

Hierarchical Chart

Visual Design 22
Logo Designs

Layout Grids

Page Mockups
Introduction
The following document will serve as an information

architecture design layout for the RIT club “The Coffee

Club”. Intended users and groups that will visit this

website are defined and their characteristics or potential

problems that they bring will shape the function of this

website. In addition to our audience classifications this

document will analyze competing websites and RIT clubs

emphasis being placed on their design layout and structure.

Ultimately these two elements will shape our decision for

key design elements and site content which accounts for the

final sections of this document.

The Club
The Coffee Club was founded on the interest of a coffee
loving community wishing to join together in their zeal

for everything coffee. The club discusses everything from

brewed coffee to exotic cappuccinos and meets once a week

at the local RIT coffee stop Java Wally’s. Meetings are

always open to non members who wish to sit in and observe

better what the club is all about. Typically new recipes or

blends are brought in during meetings for everyone to taste

test and if members like it then these get posted to the club’s

website later. The club is active at RIT events to help further

the spread and appreciation for quality coffee products.

Club members are often seen running a booth or two at the

RIT hockey games selling coffee to warm up the fans. They

also are sponsor to another fellow RIT club, the RIT mini

baja team, in sponsoring their annual spring race called the

Coffee Cup.

Members
Ryan Heilmann

Richard Perez

Karyn Lewis
Greg Mitchell

Yun Kwak
Goals
The goals of our site are to create and further develop a

coffee appreciation community on RIT by pooling already

existing interest in current students and appealing to

others outside of RIT. The primary function of the website

will serve our exiting club members in that the site will

act as a general hub of information where the members

can centrally communicate to one another. We want our

members to be able to carry on discussion to members

as well as non members without a complicated login

process. There will be a section listing the club events and

news. Should a member miss a meeting or simply forget

the details of one these events, they could quickly get

informed.

The goals of our site are to create and further develop a

coffee appreciation community on RIT by pooling already

existing interest in current students and appealing to

others outside of RIT. The primary function of the website

will serve our exiting club members in that the site will

act as a general hub of information where the members

can centrally communicate to one another. We want our

members to be able to carry on discussion to members as

well as non members without a complicated login process.

Their will be a section listing the club events and news.

Should a member miss a meeting or simply forget the

details of one these events they could quickly get informed

via browsing this section of the website.

As with any college club we wish to appeal to RIT students

who are not yet members in hopes that one day they will be.
Having a website for The Coffee Club gets our name out

there to people who do not yet know we exists or maybe do

but wish to learn a little more. The website will have a page

catering to these users by giving them a greeting and a brief

synopsis of our club, easing them into the site. Hopefully

we would like these students to like what they see and wish

to become a member themselves. There will be a page

detailing to them our membership process and what they

need to accomplish to become one.

In general The Coffee Club’s goal is further enhance

people’s knowledge and appreciation for coffee. Thus there

is to be content that appeals to the coffee community as a

whole, not just those who are at RIT. This will be

In general The Coffee Club’s goal is further enhance

people’s knowledge and appreciation for coffee. Thus

there is to be content that appeals to the coffee community

as a whole, not just those who are at RIT. This will be

accomplished by including a page where people can view

and submit coffee related recipes of any variety without

having to be a club member to do so. An online forum

where people can register for an account for free then

post in a variety of different topics will be open to these

people as the forum will be open to everyone. This last

element adds the collaborative aspect between members,

non members, and the public that The Coffee Club is really
excited about.
User Experience
Audience
The intended audience for this website can be broken

down into four general categories. First and foremost our

audience will be for already existing members of our club.

These are the people who will be using the website for

administrative and organization needs that ordinary visitors

won’t. The second audience is for current RIT students

who are not yet members of The Coffee Club. These

students will visit the site to get basic information such as

club membership opportunities and club event dates. Third

is the small audience of prospective RIT students. These

are people who may be taking a look at RIT websites to

get a feel for the community and culture on our campus

before making the decision to apply to RIT. They will most

likely be looking at our site to gauge the quality of RIT’s

community or a club that they may wish to join if they were

to attend RIT. The fourth audience is that of the general

public. The Coffee Club is not exclusive to RIT students

and faculty only but wishes to server the coffee community

as a whole and the people of the general public are more

than welcome at the clubs website. Due to their possible

distance away from RIT these people generally won’t be

interested in our club events or membership opportunities.

The online coffee forum and recipe sections would likely

be places on our website these visitors would frequent.

 User Scenarios

#1 Name: Amy Ellison

Age: 19

Occupation: RIT Student

Residence: 153 Sol Heuman

Education: Photo major

Tech Skill: Advanced

Reason for Visiting: Current member trying to get

feedback on the flyer she just made for an upcoming group

event at RIT.

Task Scenario: Amy just spent all day making a flyer

to be printed out for distribution. The flyer is for an

upcoming “Taste of Rochester” event where the club will

be showcasing coffee from local RIT coffee houses. She

believes his design is good but wants to get the final OK

from the club president and maybe some other members.

So Amy opens up her browser and using her bookmark

loads up the club’s website. She’s forgotten the email

address of the president so she clicks on the “members”

section and finds a link to the president of the club. Amy

sends out a quick email to the president asking for feedback

and attaches a jpg of her flyer design. Amy then goes back

to the website and clicks on the “forum” section, logs in

with her user name, and starts a new discussion thread titled

“Taste of Rochester flyer design! Any good?!?!” and post

inside a picture of her flyer. Later she checks back to his

thread to see that several members and the president have

 posted responses to the thread and offer her their approval

of her design.

#2 Name: John Floyd

Age: 18

Occupation: RIT Freshman

Residence: NRH
Education: New Media Design & Imaging

Tech Skill: Advanced

Reason for Visiting: John is a student who loves coffee.

He enjoys a variety of flavors and trying different blends of

coffee. His roommate mentioned something to him about

the Coffee Club on campus; John was interested in finding

out more about the club.

Task Scenario: John is finding his new life at RIT to be

very exciting yet overwhelming at times. Balancing a part-

time job with a full schedule at school means he needs

to constantly be on the go. John has always had a love

for a good cup of coffee; it’s what keeps him going. John
realizes that the Coffee Club at RIT might be the niche he

was looking for. A place where he can find new recipes on

exciting coffees or enjoy a cup with other club member

and learn about upcoming events at RIT. John is interested

in hanging out at the club and making some new friends

that share his passion for coffee. He does a search on the

RIT homepage for the coffee club he heard about and the

search yields a link to The Coffee Club’s website. Upon

 first viewing the site John reads the welcome message and

believes this is the club for him. Intuitively he clicks on the

members section and finds a page detailing how to become

a member. Excited to join he learns that he must attend a

meeting in order to pay a member due and be added to the

club. Click on the calendar of events he finds out that their

next meeting is Monday at 8pm. He marks it down on a

post it note and leaves his dorm for a class.

#3 Name: Stacy Becker

Age: 17

Occupation: High school Student

Residence: Norfolk Virginia

Education: High School

Tech Skill: Some Computer Knowledge

Reason for Visiting: Was interested in applying to RIT

and is clicking around their website for info when she
stumbled upon links to all the RIT clubs. She clicks one

that sparks her interest that being the link for The Coffee

Club.

Task Scenario: She just clicked on a link for the club’s

website and is taking a look around to see what’s there.

She’s being doing this for an hour now on many other RIT

websites just trying to get a feel for RIT because she’s

interested in the school but never visited. Navigating

around the page she finds the section where it lists the

clubs upcoming events. Surprised to see so many for a

 coffee club she gets the impression that RIT must be a

really active community of people. A coffee drinker herself

she finds the recipe section and briefly views some of the

recipes. Later she clicks on the members section and is

surprised to see so many female members and thinks if

she were to attend RIT it would be a good place to meet

friends. Stacy finds the forum section but it seems to busy

at first glance and decides she doesn’t want to engage in

that part of the page. Having a better sense of what the club

is about and getting a peek into life at RIT she returns back

to browsing the web.

#4 Name: Josh Katcher

Age: 35

Occupation: Lawyer

Residence: Omaha Nebraska

Education: College

Tech Skill: Lacking

Reason for Visiting: Often stays up long ours for his job
and since has grown to love coffee. He drinks basic Folgers

and being a 6 cup a day drinker is looking for something

more tasteful yet with all the coffee buzz he needs.

Task Scenario: Josh does a basic web search for “coffee

recipes” and gets a list of results. He sifts through the first

4 or so, checking them out for a few minutes and to see

what the sites have to offer. A lot of the websites he goes

to are too complicated “all I want is a recipe darn it! Why is

 that so hard?”. About to give up he visits one last website

which happens to be for The Coffee Club. The simple

design and minimalist presentation put Josh at ease. The

clearly visible “recipes” link on the page makes sense to

him and he clicks on the link. What he finds next is a basic

page listing a good amount of recipes and all of them are

easily viewable without too much clicking. He finds this a

welcome relief from other websites where he was inundated

with pop-ups and advertisements. Josh finds a recipe that

suits his fancy and writes it down.

Competitive Analysis
To get a gauge of the competition already on the web today

a sampling of 5 websites that are similar in intent to The

Coffee Club’s website have been selected for review. Their

content, look, architecture, functionality, and usefulness

will be critiqued and their benefits or downfalls discussed.

From this review we hope to get a sense of what design

elements either worked or didn’t work for these websites

and take these in consideration for the design of our own
website.

#1
URL: http://www.coffee.co.uk/

This website is a British site that has multiple sections

dealing with coffee and various other caffeine related

material. Upon first visiting the site immediately the user

is struck with a very busy and distracting image that is
tiled across the entire website. The visual distraction that

the background creates makes it difficult to focus on the

text. In regards to the text it is actually the only content

on the page. Located on the left side of the page are about

20 or so links that send the user the various sections of the

site and in some cases to different websites entirely. There

is no form of local or global navigation so if the user is to

leave this site they must rely on the browser’s back button

to get themselves to the main page. Even though the title

of the page has the word club in it there does not seem to

be any form of a club in the sites content. The webmaster

did supply a link to his email address however the purpose

is unclear as to what a person should use the email address

for. The only image used other than the one for the

background is that of a small coffee cup that is placed next

to every one of the links. The coffee cups vary in color

and are either red, yellow, or blue. There isn’t any apparent

reason or connotation that the color suggests and they are

not ordered in some sort of patter so I can only assume their

selected color is random.

Look & Feel: 2

Content: 3
Architecture: 2
Functionality: 2
Usefulness: 3

Overall: 2.4
#2 URL: http://coffeeforums.com/

This website is host to an online forum for people who love

coffee. The main purpose of the site is to host an online

bulletin board where users can discuss a myriad of coffee

related topics. The topics are neatly broken down into sub

topics from which the user can easily navigate down to a

discussion thread of their liking. The site claims to have

over 2000 users and those users seems to distribute their

discussion somewhat well across many topics rather than
the majority of online posts being contained in a single

area. A global navigation bar exists at the top of the page

and allows you to go back to the root forum pages if you

become too lost deep inside another page. There are

metaphorical images used for the global navigation items

and most of them make sense as to what they are without

reading them. Although becoming too lost is difficult

thanks to the page using a bread crumb stile navigation

system where in you can easily navigate backward with out

using the browser’s back button. The colors used on the

site are a soft blend of whites, off whites, and tan colors that

coincide nicely with the overall coffee theme. The author

seems to have used a popular and widely available php

bulletin board source code to make the forum. This creates

a good structure and a familiar layout to those who’ve

visited other similar forums. There are advertisements

on this page but they are not obnoxious ones with flashing

colors and moving objects. Something that was nice about

them though was that they at least related to coffee and

weren’t trying to sell me say auto tires. It would have been

nice to be greeted with a welcome page easing the user

into the site and informing them about what they are about

to view. Currently when the user first loads up the page

they are greeted with lots to take in, links all over the page
and a lot of textual content. Also for the average computer

Joe this site may be confusing if they are unfamiliar with

online forums and haven’t read some of the documentation

on the site as to how one should use the website. All things

considered was very good at delivering what it advertised

with without a lot of confusion and filler.

Look & Feel: 7

Content: 8
Architecture: 7
Functionality: 8
Usefulness: 9
Overall: 7.8
#3 URL: http://www.rit.edu/~ritanime

This website is hosted by the RIT anime club. Since it is

an RIT club it draws upon some of the common design

elements found in many of RIT club’s websites. Located

right in the middle when the user visits the page is a

welcome message. Detailed in this message is a brief

synopsis of the club and any vital information they wish to

inform about. The text is easy to read due to it being black

text on a white background and no irregular fonts were

used. The color scheme works well on this site making

the text easily legible and easy on the eyes in general

thanks to the soft blues this site incorporates. Links to the

various sections of the club are listed at the top in a global

navigation menu that when link is clicked from it changes

the content that is displayed in the white box below. Most

everything a visitor could be looking for is contained here

and the site has a lot of useful content from news and events
 to a message board and photos. One detail that they forgot

to include is a description as to what their club is for. They

mention obviously in the name that it is an “anime” club but

is assumes the user understands what anime is. Overall the

website is very clean and precise it its design and content

layout. Nothing is there that doesn’t really need to be and

the website is accessible to many types of users.

Look & Feel: 8

Content: 9.5
Architecture: 9
Functionality: 8
Usefulness: 9

Overall: 8.7

#4 URL: http://www.Ineedcoffee.com

This site is designed for coffee connoisseurs specifically

looking for facts and information related to coffee. It

includes links to articles relating to seven different coffee-

related areas of interest. Each of the section pages are

sorted by sub-topic, title, or contributer and articles are

searchable by keywords. Thus, the site’s contents are user

friendly. The navigation is consistent between sections, but

the overall look and feel of the site is dull and uninteresting.

The colors are viewer friendly but boring, and the content

is very text heavy. The logo/graphic is actually a series of

ten different images that change from page to page, but

even though the variation adds interest, the site should

incorporate more icons or images of some sort to break up

the text. Alignment is consistent throughout but the use of

tables is too repetitive and uninteresting.

Look & Feel: 5

Content: 8
Architecture: 7
Functionality: 7
Usefulness: 6

Overall: 7.2
#5 URL: http://www.coffeegeek.com

This site has links to at least six different areas related to

coffee. Each section is consistently labled but very text-

heavy. Users can easily get lost in all of the information

provided to them. Each section also has a different grid

system for layout; some divide the content area into three
columns, others just two, and others span the entire width

of the site. The colors are nice but perhaps included too

much of a variety.

Look & Feel: 4

Content: 7
Architecture: 5
Functionality: 6
Usefulness: 6

Overall: 6
Content
Overview
The Coffee Club site content is primarily targeted towards

the members of the club as well as anyone interested in

joining The Coffee Club. The main sections of the site

content include: about the club information, news and

events, recipes, members, as well as a forum.

The home page contains a welcoming paragraph; this will

reveal the club’s background information, how the club

originated, and the goals and purpose of this club. The site
will have a section for the club’s news and events. This

page will be frequently updated, consisting of information

related to the club. Topics discussed in club meetings and

upcoming events related to the Coffee Club will be found

in this section of the site. The news and events section

will have an organized monthly calendar containing the

Coffee Club’s main activities and meetings. The recipes

page will consist of featured club recipes. The recipes

will be primarily for unique hot and cold coffee drinks

and desserts. The member section of our site will have a

listing of current members of the Coffee Club. Contact

information and a club photo will be posted for each

individual. The club forum will be a place for current

members to post and read each other’s ideas in club related

discussions.
Functional Requirements
There are several dynamic elements of the Coffee Club

website. The news and events calendar will be developed

in an organized table, each activity listed in the calendar

should be a link to open a small window displaying that

activities time, location and description. The forum section

of the Coffee Club will provide login functionality for

the current members of the club. Members will be able

to post and read each other’s comments and ideas related

to the club. Members listed on the site should also be
accompanied with a link to their email address for an

additional method of contacting that member. A pages

needs to present that lists all the coffee related recipes that

have been added to the website. Clicking on a particular

link for a recipe will open up a more detailed description of

the recipe.
Site Architecture
Overview
The website displays its content in one main section that is
located in the middle of the page. This is where the entire

site’s content appears when users click on a link and it is

where the welcome message resides when the user first

loads the page. On the upper left of the page is the site’s

main logo. This may alternate on certain pages based on its

content shrinking in size to allow for more space. Directly

to the right of the logo is the site’s main navigational

menu. On this menu are links for the various sections that

comprise the website.

Global/Local Navigational Systems

The main navigation system is a global menu bar that
is displayed on every page. Local navigation is either

minimal or nonexistent due to the global navigation

sufficiently fulfilling navigational needs. Located in the

global navigation bar are five top level sections, Home,

News, forum, recipes, and members. Each section serves

as a link itself and may contain a drop down menu which

has a set of sub links for additional content. Home has of

course the five main links as well as the content that speaks

about the site and its club. News talks about all the current

events along with upcoming ones. The forum section is an

The main navigation system is a global menu bar that

is displayed on every page. Local navigation is either

minimal or nonexistent due to the global navigation

sufficiently fulfilling navigational needs. Located in the

global navigation bar are five top level sections, Home,

News, forum, recipes, and members. Each section serves

as a link itself and may contain a drop down menu which

has a set of sub links for additional content. Home has of

course the five main links as well as the content that speaks

about the site and its club. News talks about all the current

events along with upcoming ones. The forum section is an

area where our users can come to talk and speak about the
club and its activities. The recipes section deals with coffee

being used in many different types of food and drinks.

They range from deserts, hot and cold drinks, and food

in general. The members section deals with how to get in

general contact with the club members. It also has a section

on where to apply for someone who would like to become a

member.
Hierarchical Blueprint
Visual Design
Logo Designs
 Layout Grids
Main page

RIT Logo
main navigation

Club Logo/Banner

copyright

Content page

Club Logo RIT Logo

main navigation (car ried over from home page)

section specific logo

section content

copyright
Page Mockups
Main page

home l news l forum l recipes l members

contact
apply

Copyright (c) 2004 RIT Coffee Club

Content page

home l news l forum l recipes l members

Text will go in this area

Copyright
Copyright(c)(c)
2004
2004RIT
RITCoffee
CoffeeClub
Club