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

[andrew at friendlymanual.com]

Quoting "Jared M. Spool" <jspool at uie.com>:

> This is why we measure frequency separately from importance. Popularity <>
> Importance. (Except in Hollywood.)

For those users who accessed the lunch menu every day, it was both frequent and
thence important, rather than innately important. You can become unpopular in a
hurry by ignoring what a majority of the end users want, regardless of how
dismissable and trivial it may seem. I've never made a single end user friend
by convincing them of what they want, but made many by asking them and
listening. Some of them have come back to offer me work. So this is enlightened
self-interest I guess - for me, it is also one of the rewards of the job.

I seem to work differently than you. I have found that importance is not
measurable: frequency and business relevance/effect are, and some of us weight
them and glob them together in a more or less scientific way to come up with a
relative importance ranking.

Adequately capturing this in the requirements specification is a BA function
rather than an IA one, but it soon becomes an IA issue. I believe that it is a
big issue for IAs working in Australian government: how involved do we become
in gathering and validating requirements?

Cheers, Andrew

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