[Sigia-l] Determining Users' Mental Model to Drive Site Architecture?

[Richard_Dalton at vanguard.com]

Jodi writes:
[ ... ]
> I'm looking for advice from my experienced IA colleagues on how to 
elicit
> users' mental model of content organization to drive the site 
architecture
> for an intranet.
[ ... ]

We are seeing a lot of success and value by using a variant of Adaptive 
Path's top-down approach (interviewing users, extracting their tasks, 
creating a "mental model diagram", slotting content against the tasks, 
then using that to inform the IA itself) - you can find out a lot more by 
looking at their site (www.adaptivepath.com)

 - Richard Dalton