[Sigia-l] Re: first principals (bias in cataloging & classification)

[Chris Shafer]

<quote>
And I suspect we'd discover that much like graphic design, ideas 
from one
potential solution can often be cross-fertilized with ideas from another
solution.
</quote>

We've done "UI Model Concepting" at the beginning of a number of 
our IA engagements - basically coming up with different high level 
approaches for organizing a site. For the recent Kodak.com redesign 
we started with one version that organized contents around products 
and product information, another that had everything revolve around 
life events, and another that was very much organized around key 
tasks that had been identified in the discovery period. We knew we 
were going to end up with a hybrid, but wanted to create purposefully 
skewed starting points in order to gauge where the weighting should 
be in the final design. If you look a the redesigned site - it is 
definitely a hybrid approach.

We represented the UI models as a series wireframe click-throughs.
The actual content categorization didn't change much between versions,
but what elements you chose to feature on the home page, and the 
relative weighting of content areas in the secondary pages did differ.
We did end up doing some user testing, but it was of limited value 
(the tests were set up for very granular task completion, and the 
wireframes weren't developed enough to support this)

Chris Shafer
www.clshafer.com