Thom Henkel's List: End User

• When all the necessary information had been collected from the various existing websites and domain experts, it was catalogued and listed on index cards in preparation for a card sorting exercise (see User- centered design for IT services: The usability toolbox, part 2). A card sorting exercise helps designers understand how users would group information in a particular domain. Each piece of information to be organized is put on an index card and participants are asked to sort the cards into groups that make sense to them. Determining the proper granularity for the large amount of information collected was difficult, and the evaluators ended up creating more than 100 cards for the card sort participants to sort.

• It was decided to do "group" card sorts both to get as much feedback as possible, as well as to allow the facilitators of the card sort the chance to observe the discussion and debate within the groups. There were five card sort groups of three people each, which included participants from many different levels and every unit in the IST/OCIO organization. As this was an "open" card sort (meaning the categories were not predefined), participants were given blank index cards on which to write the categories into which they would group the cards. The groups had an hour to an hour-and-a-half to complete the card sorts. Some groups finished the sorting relatively quickly, and some groups took longer because they had more debate about the categories. A key learning from this process was that having too many cards could be frustrating for participants, and that it may have been helpful for the evaluators to create fewer cards that were a little less granular so the groups could finish the exercise more quickly. 

    

   Watching five different groups allowed the evaluators to see common patterns in the way the participants viewed the information, and several of the groups came up with very innovative ways to intuitively organize the information.

• Card Sorting 

   Card sorting is a c

  ommon usability technique that is often used to discover users' mental model of an information space. A typical application is to get ideas for menu structures by asking users to sort cards with the command names: commands that get sorted together often should probably be in the same menu. A downside of the method is that users may not always have

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  mal models, and card sorting (or other similarity measures) is often used to assess the difference between the way novice and expert users understand a system.
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• not always have
• Before each user entered the lab, the cards were scattered around the desk in random order. The users were asked to sit down at a table and sort the cards into piles according to similarity. Users were encouraged not to produce too small or too large piles but they were not requested to place any specific number of cards in each pile. After a user had sorted the cards into piles of similar cards, the user was asked to group the piles into larger groups that seemed to belong together and to invent a name for each group. These names were written on Pos
• Before each user entered the lab, the cards were scattered around the desk in random order. The users were asked to sit down at a table and sort the cards into piles according to similarity. Users were encouraged not to produce too small or too large piles but they were not requested to place any specific number of cards in each pile. After a user had sorted the cards into piles of similar cards, the user was asked to group the piles into larger groups that seemed to belong together and to invent a name for each group. These names were written on Post-It notes and placed on the table next to the groups. The users typically completed the entire process in about 30 minutes, though some took about 40 minutes.

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