COAP:COAP-2170/week3
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COAP 2170 Week 3 program
In week three we will do two things:
- Wrap up week 1 and 2 (usability guidelines review and usability testing) through a review meeting
- Learn about designing an information architecture
Monday - Early design stages
Popular design and usability methods and techniques used in early design stages are:
- Focus group meetings
- Analysis of competitor's websites, e.g. with the tools seen so far
- Card sorting is a popular technique for planning the information architecture of a website. It may be used to figure out an initial proposal and also to test this proposal with potential users.
- Introductory videos
- See the card sorting article
- Card sorting activity (see also homework 3 below)
- Create cards by looking at a Webster website and writing down a meaningful "title" if the most important information pages.
- or get them cards for Webster.ch 2011 from here. Best bet is webster-ch-titles.pdf
- Imagine being a persona (e.g. a future webster student)
- Sort cards into piles (categories)
- Name categories
- Discuss and compare solutions
Alternatively you also can use an online tool, such as ConceptCodify.
Wednesday
- (1) Review meeting preparation
- Retrieve your hw1 + hw2 and look at it
- Also on the N: drive if needed
- (2) Review meeting
- Students will present highlights from homework 1 and 2 and engage in discussion.
- No preparation is needed for this (except doing homework 2 and turning it in before start of class)
Program: For each Webster website
- Home page and overall general impression
- Selected usability tests and results.
- Discussion of the tools used
- (3) Card sorting continued
- Start / continue / finish card sort
- Discuss precise homework requirements
Homework 3
(1) Complete the card sorting activity if needed
- If you missed class, please have a look at all the videos in the card sorting article
- (Optional) Print out the cards from http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/te/coap2170/data-files/webster-ch-titles.pdf (Wester 2011).Get the file from the N: drive.
- (Optional) Use an online tool.
There are two major steps (see above for details or read about card sorting)
- Create cards
- Sort cards into "piles". Usually this should be done with several subjects (like in usability testing), but for this project it is OK to do it yourself.
(2) Write a short report that includes:
- A short description of the domain (web site or part of the website for which you are doing the information architecture categories).
- A list of categories that you found (you decide about the number and whether you need subcategories or not)
- Describe each category with a few sentences
- You also could explain why these categories should be appropriate
- Short conclusion
Other issues:
- You can turn in group work. Make sure to put the name of each participant on top of the paper. Also, I expect group work to be "richer" than individual work. Of course, individually handed in homework also could start from common work started in class and then include an individual report/view of the results ...
- You can organize your report in any way you like. Just make sure that it looks like an interesting design document that could be used to redesign the information architecture.
- Do not think about the website design. I only want you to think about structuring information ...
Due: Wednesday, week 4 before class.
Reading
- Card sorting (Wiki article)
Also suggested:
- Bright Ideas for User Experience Designers. This free online booklet contains several chapters of interest. E.g. the chapters "7 myths about paper prototyping", "Card Games for Information Architects"
Software
- Tom Tullis list includes a list of software (last updated/checked Nov 2014). There are free tools for PC and Mac.
- Suggestion: ConceptCodify. Commercial tool, but currently free. Login is required.