photo from agyorke102 on flickr
I blew at least one person's mind this week. And it was really easy.
Last week I mentioned that I should have done a card sorting activity when I realized people didn't agree on the arrangement we were using. Card sorting is a way to learn how users think information should be organized. Think of a stack of index cards that each have the name of one type of information. You ask users to arrange the cards into piles and then to give each pile a name. This gives you insight on what they think goes together and where they would put things, and essentially look for them.
I went back through my usability class notes while thinking about how to conduct this kind of research with the PMs. I got to the notes from the day we had a pair of guest speakers from a company called Design for Use. They did this activity with us where we categorized bands into genres of music using a software called OptimalSort. OptimalSort is perfect for what I needed to do because PMs can do the activity online in less than ten minutes (It's hard to get time with them). So I set up a test, wrote up an email explaining everything, and sent it out. So far only about a third of them have completed it, but I have had interested responses. I've been excited about this all week, which made the WikiText table formatting I have also been working on a little less miserable.
The best part was when my supervisor stopped my cube on Monday. I excitedly told him that I had had this idea of how to make sure that PMs could find all this information I am putting up for them. He didn't know what card sorting was, and even made a little remark that it sounded very 'librarian.' I explained that it was actually this cutting-edge usability thing that his User Experience Engineers were using, and gave him a little demo and a sample of the dendrograms and matrices it displays post testing data with. Like I said, his mind was blown.
Card sorting is also used by researchers who want to know how informants view constructs, so a rich history outside librarianship!! Glad to see you are pulling great tools out of your toolkit!
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