[Sigia-l] card sorting by survey?

[Laura S. Quinn]

I'm currently working on the redesign of a medium sized intranet (about
2000 pages and docs) for a very large publishing company, and could use
some advice.

I've done some intial user interviews/ user testing, to get a sense for
what the users do, and how the intranet's currently being used.  I've
set a very high level direction for the redesign, and would like to move
on to a card sort to nail down navigation.  An open card sort (with
probably about 12- 15 users to get a resonable cross section of user
groups) seems important for the project - the current navigation is
crappy and the users seem to have substantially differing models of how
it should be organized.  

But my management is quite resistant - they're concerned about my time
and the logistics involved (in particular, there are enormous conference
room issues), and suggests  trying to collect similar data through some
kind of emailed task- perhaps an Excel spreadsheet with "cards" as a
list of fields, with directions that they should group them into columns
and label the groups (obviously, the clarity of the instructions would
be very important)?

This doesn't seem obviously horrific to me.  While I'd prefer to take a
traditional approach (primarily to hear the user's thought process), it
seens to me that the "survey" approach might be a lot better than
nothing.  I might also be able to set it up to automatically coallate
the data from the spreadsheets, potentially resulting in the ability to
collect data from a lot more people.

What do you think?  Had anyone tried this before?  Is it better than
nothing?  Are there difficulties I'm not seeing?

Thanks for your help!

Laura

Laura S. Quinn
Alder Consulting
Technology Consulting for Nonprofits
718-208-8172
www.alderconsulting.com