[Sigia-l] Determining Users' Mental Model to Drive Site Architecture?

[Todd R.Warfel]

On Wednesday, June 18, 2003, at 07:59 PM, Bollaert, Jodi wrote:
[...]
> I understand an open card sort might typically be a good way to go, 
> but my client is wary of that approach since it may totally negate 
> weeks of time they've spent deliberating over two potentially good 
> architectures.
[...]

Or it could validate their work. The fact is that if they've done a 
good job up to this point, then they have nothing to worry about. And 
honestly, if you're after the users' mental model, then an open card 
sort is one of the best ways to capture that.

You could do a closed card sort, but I'm not a big fan of those. One 
way to do this is to have boxes on the table labeled with the 
high-level categories. Ask users to put cards in the box they feel the 
item has the closest relationship to. This is more of a top down 
approach, and again, I'm not a big fan of this method.

[...]
> do users tend to think about their intranet more in terms of 
> products/divisions or tasks?
[...]

Depends on your audience. In general, our experience has shown that 
users tend to think more task based than product based on Intranets. 
But that's not always the case. An open card sort will tell you.

> Questions I would ask in the user interviews include:
>
> - What information do you typically look for?
> - Where would you expect to find this information?

Also consider:
- What do you want to do today?
- Why are you here?

Cheers!

Todd R. Warfel

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