COAP:COAP-2170/week3

COAP 2170

COAP:COAP-2170

COAP:COAP-2170/term project

COAP:COAP-2170/week1

COAP:COAP-2170/week2

COAP:COAP-2170/week3

COAP:COAP-2170/week4

COAP:COAP-2170/week5

COAP:COAP-2170/week6

COAP:COAP-2170/week7

COAP:COAP-2170/week8

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 methods 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 the most important information pages

or get them cards for Webster.ch 2011 from here. Best bet is webster-ch-titles.pdf

Scraped 2012 Webster web sites can be found here.

• Sort cards into piles (categories)
• Name categories
• Discuss and compare solutions

Wednesday

(1) Review meeting preparation

• Retrieve your hw1 + hw2 and look at it
• Also here

(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
• Print out the cards from http://tecfa.unige.ch/guides/te/coap2170/data-files/webster-ch-titles.pdf (to be confirmed, ask a classmate for the password)

(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 commonly found categories 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. All I want is that you think about how to structure information ...

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"