RE: Card sorting!!!

Buncha
Card sorting is awesome, there are many different levels of using card sorting and I have used some of the approaches over the last 20 years.
 
In the very early days, when I was working in the Utilities sector - we were working on a new system and we could not decide how to organise the menu items.  We simply identified some key personas (Different types of roles/people)  that were important to us, found some representative people within  the company (this was for an internal tool) and asked them to organise the cards.
 
We then placed the results on a large piece of paper and organised them into the most appropriate order based on our findings.
 
We then mocked up the results and went round the houses again with a paper prototype.
 
This was a very long time ago - but it worked really well for us.

It is an important point that experience and expertise can modify behaviour - but it depends on the regularity of use and this can be described and tested through personas.  If you really have experienced expert users and novices, then make this a distinguishing feature of your analysis.  
 
In some systems - the navigation is modified to provide the right level of navigation for the level of experience of the user.  Focus on the basics first though would be my advice.

A simple example would be this website for ink cartridges  
http://www.cheapinkjetsolutions.co.uk
 , it assumes very low expertise of users - although in the world there could be some expert users.  This site does not even have a search.  As it would take some expertise on the side of the user to know what to type in - in order to get reliable results
 
Alan
 

--- On Mon, 23/2/09, William Hudson <[email protected]> wrote:

From: William Hudson <[email protected]>
Subject: RE: Card sorting!!!
To: "User-Centred Design (Discussion)" <[email protected]>
Date: Monday, 23 February, 2009, 2:44 PM

Buncha -

There are a couple of points to consider:

- The first is that some sites rarely have any experienced users. For example,
I've used Travelocity quite a few times over the years, but never frequently
enough to be what I would call an expert user. In fact, some sites are updated
so often that even frequent users have a hard time gaining familiarity.

- The second point is that you can investigate and account for differences
between user communities. With SynCaps (our card sorting analysis software), you
can compare participant's results with what we refer to as an
'expert' set. We use this frequently to show anomalies between
users' sorts of a set of navigation items and the current organisation of a
website or intranet. You could do the same with a set of inexperienced
participants, comparing their results with an expert to show areas that may
cause some usability issues.

[short sales pitch] Both major versions of SynCaps support this. You can read
more about it and see some examples on our card sorting pages –
http://www.syntagm.co.uk/design/cardsortintro.shtml 

Also, we are running two workshops in the Spring. A half day at CHI 2009 in
Boston on April 6th (see
http://chi2009.org/Attending/AdvanceProgram/courseC120.htm) and a full day in
London - details below my signature.

Regards,

William Hudson
Syntagm Ltd
Design for Usability
UK 01235-522859
World +44-1235-522859
US Toll Free 1-866-SYNTAGM
mailto:[email protected]
http://www.syntagm.co.uk
skype:williamhudsonskype 

Syntagm is a limited company registered in England and Wales.
Registered number: 1895345. Registered office: 10 Oxford Road, Abingdon OX14
2DS.

Advances in Card Sorting - One Day Workshop
 - London, 21 April 2009
http://www.syntagm.co.uk/design/csadvances.shtml 


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Buncha Samruayruen [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: 22 February 2009 23:52
> To: UCD
> Subject: Card sorting!!!
> 
> ... different types of users who
> access a site must complicate the research, I would think. The way
> someone uses a site would change over time, so new users might sort
> categories differently than experienced users. What is your experience
> with that?


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