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

[James Robertson]

At 10:56 PM 19/06/2003, Richard_Dalton at vanguard.com wrote:

>Jodi writes:
>[ ... ]
> > I'm looking for advice from my experienced IA colleagues on how to
>elicit
> > users' mental model of content organization to drive the site
>architecture
> > for an intranet.
>[ ... ]
>
>We are seeing a lot of success and value by using a variant of Adaptive
>Path's top-down approach (interviewing users, extracting their tasks,
>creating a "mental model diagram", slotting content against the tasks,
>then using that to inform the IA itself) - you can find out a lot more by
>looking at their site (www.adaptivepath.com)

Hi all,

Sorry for jumping so late into this thread, just catching
up my mail backlog as usual.

I'm also a great fan of user-driven information architecture,
rather than top-down approaches.

Something that might be of interest is the article I
released last week titled "Stakeholder interviews as a simple
form of knowledge mapping":
http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/cmb_interviews/index.html

Nothing particularly new or elaborate, but the list of
questions might be useful for those new to the area.

Cheers,
James

-------------------------------------------------
James Robertson
Step Two Designs Pty Ltd
http://www.steptwo.com.au/

Knowledge Management / Content Management / Intranets