[Sigia-l] Card sorting? Why?

[Arsic, Antoinette]

I am about to do a card sorting exercise, and it will be my first. But
wouldn't it help in other areas like helping to define an ontology, by
getting the different meanings that people associate with different
terms and how they think about those concepts? I would think it would
help you to get to know who your audience is better, then once better
defined, you can build an architecture that is user-centered.  


 
Antoinette Arsic 
Sr. Information Systems Engineer
The MITRE Corporation
703-337-9016 (VOIP)
*703-983-5286 (new office number, was 883)
*443-567-2703 (new cell)
 

-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org] On
Behalf Of Stewart Dean
Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 8:57 AM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: [Sigia-l] Card sorting? Why?

I'm going to throw this out as I really need to check that I'm not
making
some dumb mistake here.

I've been an IA for a good few years now, have sat through
presentations on
card sorting and still don't get why you would want the users to sort
through a series of arbitrary terms.

I have been thinking about this for a while - why base the structure of
a
site upon words at all? It appears that it's usage and the areas of
information that are what we are organising, not the labels.  I see a
large
amount of what I do about providing context and taking elements out of
context and rearranging them feels to me as the opposite of what I do
when I
create the information architecture for a site.

In short I put card sorting in the same pile as focus groups - in that
it
adds noise to the solution rather than clarity.

There are other methods as well I question but let's start with card
sorting. What am I missing here?

Stewart Dean

User Experience Person


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