[Sigia-l] card sorting to group links, but priority?

[Jared M. Spool]

At 07:20 AM 1/18/2006, Eric Scheid wrote:
>Jared Spool mentions [1] in an article that Card Sorting [2] is an effective
>tool for forming groups of *links* on pages in order to emphasise
>information scent.

The guy talks trash, I tell ya! Complete and utter trash!

>My question then is: what techniques can we use to discover (and test?) the
>optimum order of these links within their groups?

In the first draft of the article, I actually said more about this. It got 
cut due to length issues. I meant to blog about it and the vortex sucked me 
in a different direction.

We've had good success on intranets with a rating system. Using the use 
cases/tasks associated with each link, we ask users to rate them on two scales:

1) Is this an activity that is important to your work?
2) Is this an activity that you do frequently?

(There are things that are frequent, but not very important, such as 
checking the lunch menu. There are things that are critically important 
when needed, but needed only once per year.)

We've done this with both binary scales (Circle the "F" or "I" if the use 
case/task is Frequent or Important) and Likert scales (1 is very 
infrequent/very unimportant, 5 is very frequent/very important) and not 
seen any real difference.

Your link order becomes a descending list of the combined scores.

Jared


Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering
4 Lookout Lane, Unit 4d, Middleton, MA 01949
978 777-9123   jspool at uie.com  http://www.uie.com
Blog: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks