Foundations of UX: Information Architecture

I. What is Information Architecture?

A. What is IA?
 the art and science of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities and
software to support usability and findability
 How you show your customers or users the content you have and what actions they can
perform
 Includes menus, items on the page, site structure, terminology & more
 Involves showing the above to visitors/users in the way they normally think about it
 Navigation structure must feel natural, content is logically grouped, searching/sorting/filtering
becomes easy – so that customers/users can focus on their task and not finding their way
around
 Having a clear information architecture that helps users easily complete their tasks, means
they'll find your site or product more usable. And so they'll be more likely to use it than one of
your competitors.
 On the other hand, if they can't find what they're looking for, or if you don't present information
the way they expect to see it shown, people will abandon your site and move on to someone
else's

B. Creating good information architecture

 The whole purpose of creating a good information architecture is to help users navigate your
site or product
 Include customers/users in design process through research, create solutions based on research
results and then do usability testing to make sure that your solution fits the customers/users’
needs
 Test the IA with reverse card sort before actually using the new navigation in your site

II. Research to determine IA

A. Why do IA research?
 You are not your users

B. Card sorting to determine IA

 designed specifically to reveal how they think about the concepts your site or product uses
 helps customers organize their thoughts and communicate what they want, in a way that we
can work with
 Steps
o Participants are given cards that they sort into groups while researchers watches and
listens. Each card indicates a task that customers can do on your site. Participants create
groups with similar tasks
o After sorting is done, ask participants to break groups with too many cards (10 or more)
into multiple groups.
o When done, participants name each group. help them organize their thoughts and
communicate what they want, in a way that we can work with
Foundations of UX: Information Architecture

o After we've done this same exercise with enough participants, we can compare the
groupings they made and the language they used to describe the groups in order to
come up with a set of categories that best fits the way our users think about the
information space. This set of categories becomes our information architecture.

III. Creating & running a card sort

A. Finding the information to use in card sort
 what are the key tasks that people will want to perform on your site. That could be activities
that they want to do, information they'll want to find, help that they'll need, products that
they'll search for, or, services that you offer that would benefit them
 Most often, you'll have an existing site or product that you're trying to improve. That makes
you job easier, because you can make a list of tasks by looking at the content and tasks that
the current product supports.
 Start narrowing things down by identifying a set of items that exist at a similar level
 As a guideline, it's good to end up working at a level of content that can give you around 30
to 100 cards. That probably involves starting from a list of about 200 items. For a big site,
that might mean choosing a level quite far up in the hierarchy. For a smaller site, that could
be individual items.
 For a really big site, you might have to run several different card sorts. One at the higher
level to find the overall architecture, then individual sorts which represents the participants
for each individual section of the architecture. That's especially true when different types of
people are likely to use different parts of the site.
 When you have a list of tasks, the next step is to work at how to properly phrase them for
the card sort exercise

B. Deciding what goes on the cards

 Take the list of items you've created (tasks) and make sure that every item is phrased either in
terms of the content, or in terms of the tasks that people can perform. But not both.
 It's important to phrase the tasks in users' terms. What I mean by that is that tasks should be
realistic and believable
 Try to keep each task as short as possible without being ambiguous
 Once you've got your file list, read it through and make sure you aren't inadvertantly guiding
people in a certain direction.
 The tasks should be representative of all the areas of your site or product. But the more tasks
you use, the harder the sort is for participants to perform, and the harder the analysis is for you.

C. Making the cards

 By hand
o Takes longer
o Penmanship might not be legible to participants
 Printed
o Print on labels and then stick onto index card
o Print on regular paper, cut out and then stick onto heavyweight paper
o Print on card stock designed for laser printers
Foundations of UX: Information Architecture

 Put reference numbers on cards

o this info is required for analysis
o sequential number starting from 1 to the number of cards you have
o don’t group similar tasks together so that they won’t have sequential numbers

D. Recruiting the participants

 Find people that are representative users of your website or products (likely users)
 15 participants should give sufficient data; if you have different users, you’ll need sufficient
number of participants in each group

E. Running the activity

 Do a trial run with friends or colleagues to check for mistakes, misconceptions, confusions
 Start with one-on-one sessions with one participant; sit and watch as one participant completes
the sorting; see the groups he/she makes and listen to justifications
 Analyse and see if you should do sorts with groups; conversations within groups can provide
insight but might be harder for you to keep track of
 When participants have doubts about where to place an item their comments and the
vocabularly they use can help you to work out what alternative arrangements might be feasible.
Similarly when they're very sure about an item, it can give you an increased confidence about its
placement
 the terminology they use and the reasons they give can be very valuable to you as you do your
analysis and create your information architecture.
 Let the participant(s) lay out the cards on the table & allow participants to get familiarized with
the content
 Participants group the cards; ask them to break up groups that have more than 10 cards into
smaller groups (this is to maintain sufficient differentiation in all the groups)
 Smaller groups may also be combined together (smaller groups don’t help in analysis)
 If participants feel really strongly that a certain card doesn't group well with any other cards
that's okay. However find out in detail why they feel that way then you'll know whether it was
because of the set of cards you used
 After grouping, participants should name the groups. Give them blank cards and a pen and get
to them to write the group names to encourage them to be unique and descriptive
 Ask the following questions if you need more info:
o What is the overall pattern?
 To understand the basis of the grouping
o Were there any groups difficult to create?
 Might identify items that don’t fit well together
 Why were they difficult to create?
o were any cards difficult to put into a group, and if so why
 This suggests items that might not be structurally related to each other
 record the numbers of all the cards in each group on the card the participant used to label the
group
 gather up all the card sort cards, shuffle them so they're in a random order, and leave them
ready for the next participant
Foundations of UX: Information Architecture

F. Recording participants’ answers

 Record the groupings and reference numbers used with the participant’s name as identifier
 If some of your participants created hierarchies of groups, say cut flowers and live flowers,
underneath the heading of flowers, just ignore the hierarchy for the moment.
 Make a separate group for each label that was written. Keep a note of the hierarchies the
participants created, though. That can be useful later in the process
 The sum of the numbers in the column should be the same as the sum of all the numbers from
one to the number of cards you have (formula = ((numbers of cards)x(number of cards+1))/2
 A spreadsheet full of group names each containing a set of card reference numbers. This is the
data you need for analysis

IV. Analyzing a paper card sort

A. From cards to knowledge
 It's really useful to have both views, with the data sorted by group name and also sorted by task
name.
o Sorting by group name lets you quickly tell how many groups each participant created,
and how large each group was.
o Sorting by task name lets you know how many groups or group names participants
placed each task into
 Now we have the data in a more compact format, it's time to rationalize those group names. It's
likely that several participants used similar names for groups, like maybe about us, or company
information, or even just the company name. If those groupings tend to contain similar cards,
it's fair to give them all the same name.
o This isn't necessarily the final name we'll give to this category. But it's a good way of
reducing the range of different group names to a common set.
 Choose the most frequently used label, or the one that best fits in a family of labels with other
that people have chosen. For instance if participants tended to give action-based labels choose
one that is verb-based. If instead participants tended to be descriptive choose a label that is
noun-based.
 Once you have your reduced set of catgory names it's time to work out how many particpants
used that category in their groupings.
 The process of working with your data and creating the standardized group names from
participant's names will make you very familiar with the types of groupings that participants
chose.

B. Eyeball analysis of your data