FW: [Sigia-l] My card sorting book is underway!

[Berry, Nicholas F]

Although I have no doubt that you can pick up a lot about users by
touching and smelling them, it doesn't do much for the credibility of
our profession not to have some kind of model for extracting the type of
information we're looking for.  Imagine trying to sell an expensive
IA/IR project to an exec against several other "good-idea" projects when
all you have for backup is touchy-feely stuff.  They call that
"anecdotal" and don't even count it as data, let alone basis for
organizing an information retrieval system.  


nick *

-----Original Message-----
From: Listera [mailto:listera at rcn.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2006 12:36 PM
To: SIGIA-L
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] My card sorting book is underway!

Fred Beecher:

> Card sorting won't be an anachronism until people stop using the Web 
> to find information, which I can't imagine ever happening.

Can you elaborate on why you're equating card sorting with info access?
 
> What techniques do we use to determine users' mental models when we're

> designing for rich applications that focus on manipulating something 
> other than "information."

On a muggy Tuesday afternoon I'd wager that nowhere in the
iPod/iTunes/iTMS chain card sorting was used in any critical/conceptual
way. :-)

I find the notion of structuring dynamic applications on the basis of
info categories a bit...anachronistic.

To put it bluntly, I start with the goal/task/flow at hand and reverse
engineer the process. In fact, the more transparent and invisible the
info/data structure the better the flow/application.

As to users' mental models, I find nothing better than observation and
engaging users in a free-flowing conversation to discover patterns and,
most importantly, insights into what they need/want beyond what they say
they need/want. I want to see/hear/smell the user. I want their
give-and-take, body motions, gestures, pauses. They tell me oceans more
than card sorts.

----
Ziya

Usability >  Simplify the Solution
Design >  Simplify the Problem


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