Tag Archives: taxonomy

WIAD Dallas event: big success

In case you were wondering where I have been for the early part of 2019, it’s been planning World Information Architecture Day in Dallas. After much hard work, planning and organizing, I can say that WIAD Dallas was a huge hit. I am very pleased with the outcome.

Jennifer Blatz UX Design WIAD Information Architecture Day
Not only did I organize WIAD Dallas, I also acted as the event’s emcee.

Planning and Organizing

Thankfully I did not pull this event together alone. I had a small group of volunteers and a co-organizer that helped me with the logistics. There are a lot of details that go in to organizing an event. And I am proud of myself for taking on such a challenge and surviving to tell the tale.

Lessons learned

I  worked on the planning committee for WIAD in Los Angeles in the past. I forgot how much work and event can be. Along the way this time, I did learn a few valuable lessons about process, organization, teamwork and myself.

Start early. Even though I got a lot of people interested in volunteering months in advance, it pays to get those people active in duties asap.

Share the duties. I took on too much for this event. I needed to delegate more of the responsibilities to the volunteers who where eager to actually pitch in.

Did I say start early? Get sponsorship locked down and payments submitted weeks, if not moths in advance. Secure the venue and give yourself time to check it out and make sure all is ok. Nail down the details of the meals as to not be worried about these details at the final hour.

Give the volunteers specific roles and tasks. If people are not responsible for a specific duty, they will not do it. That is why a lot of the small stuff fell on me to knock out for the event.

Relax. Everything will come together in the end. We got food ordered. We had a venue. We had a lot of RSVPs and a great turnout. Weather was great (last year we got hammered by rain.) And everyone seemed very pleased with the entire event. Well done you!

Jennifer Blatz UX design gets interviewed for ProjectUX podcast.
Jeff Whitfield of the Project UX Podcast interviews me to get my perspective on organizing WIAD.

Accomplishments

  • I survived!
  • I raised about the amount of sponsorship that had been raised the previous years. Last yeah all funds came from on source. This year we had support from over 10 companies, recruiters and community groups.
  • I secured 7 high-profile and reputable speakers that talked about a variety of topics and shared valuable insight. Our fabulous speakers covered several different topics from research, to empathy, to content to Slurpees! Yep Slurpees.
  • We doubled the attendance from the previous year.
  • We had some pretty cool sponsors like 7-Eleven donated breakfast and brought a ton of cool food and drinks.
  • We had fun swag and great raffle prizes to give away like a BigD ticket, plenty of Amazon gift cards and cool UX books.
  • People seemed pleased with the diversity of the speakers’ topics.
  • Overall, attendees were happy with the day.

Whew! So now that I’ve had a little time to recover and play catch up, I am finally sharing my experience with you. Thank you for all who helped me make WIAD a success. It truly does take a village, and I am lucky to have suck a cool UX village of support.

Check out the details of the WIAD Dallas on the website.

Listen to the Project UX Podcast where Jeff interviews most of the speakers and organizers.

speakers at WIAD Dallas
Speakers at WIAD included (left to right) Lana Gibbons, Ben Judy, LaBoria Willis, Brian Sullivan and Loretta Hudelot. Courtney Cox Wakefield and Jon Sandruck not pictured.

UX Deliverables: card sort

Jennifer Blatz UX design is using a card sort to organize the taxonomy of a virtual travel sheet.
Card sorting can be used for more things than just a website’s navigation. This card sort was done with Post-it notes in person with the user.

Cards sorts can make many forms. They can be low tech with index cards or Post-it notes. Or they can be a higher fidelity done on a website or with other card sorting software on the computer.

Jennifer Blatz UX design card sort of taxonomy and information architecture.
An online card sort can be performed with remote users.

 

If you have access to users in person, you can use a physical card sort. With this, you can use index cards or Post-it notes to have the user organize the items written on the card in to more general categories. If you do not have the opportunity to to meet the user in person, it’s ok to use a remote card sorting service or software (second image above) to do a card sort.

The major things that a card sort is used to accomplish is:

  • It is cheap and easy to do. Yes it takes a bit of time to create one card for each topic and make sure that all assets are covered. But once that is done, all you need to do is hand the cards to the user and have them organize them. Take a picture of the results with your phone or a digital camera and save for analysis.
  • It is user centric. It truly is from the viewpoint of the user since the user is the one organizing the cards in the best way they see fit.
  • It can be done in person or remotely. As shown in the images above, card sorting can be performed in a variety of ways.
  • It is a valuable and reputable source for gathering information. Car sorting and taxonomy have been used in a variety of ways for years. And if done correctly, it really works!
  • It can also help create labels and navigation titles. If you leave the card sorting open (without providing categories for the user to organize the cards) you can have the user not only group like items, but give them intuitive titles as well.
  • It provides insight in to the user’s thoughts. If you are able to talk with the user as they organize the cards, you get great insight as to WHY they are organizing the cards in certain ways. This helps you get sone context as the why and how the user is grouping like items.

Don’t be afraid to perform your own cart sorting exercise to help organization for your website or app. Feel free to leave comments and share your experience with your own card sort.

 

Card Sorting for the Enterprise Interface

 

Card sorting for enterprise software Jennifer Blatz UX Design
Card sorting is a process one can use to create an orderly system. It is being used here to organize a portion of medical enterprise software.

Card sorting can be used for much more than just organizing a website’s navigation. In fact, that is why information architecture is such a broad term. And one tool for helping people organizing and creating a structure is a card sort.

So what exactly is card sorting? According to the Wikipedia entry for card sorting: “Card sorting is a simple technique in user experience design where a group of subject experts or “users,” however inexperienced with design, are guided to generate a category tree or folksonomy. It is a useful approach for designing information architecture, workflows, menu structure, or web site navigation paths.”

Now that we know what it means, how do we use it? Or in other words, why do we use it? In my case, I wanted to test a few of the doctors who use my company’s enterprise software. We have a portion of the software that is Electronic Medical Records, aka EMR. I wanted to see how different participants thought the information should be structured in the patient’s EMR.

  • Should each entry be strictly entered chronologically?
  • And if that is the case, is the oldest entry first or newest entry first?
  • Should the most important information be surfaced to the top somehow?
  • Is there a way to create bundles of information or sub groups?
  • What does the user think the best way this information should be organized?

All of these questions could prompt hours and hours of discussion and speculation. So instead of endlessly talking about it, let’s get direct feedback from the users.

I know that many UX Designers use post-it notes on a wall to organize thoughts and create a taxonomy. However, what do you do if you don’t have a wall? And what if you do if your tester is not located in the same room as you? In other words, you need to perform the card sorting remotely.

I looked high and low for online and electronic resources to perform a card sort. I found that most of the online options were either too expensive or simply did not offer the functionality I was looking for. In the end, I settled on the free Mac program called XSort. This great little program (though visually very outdated) had the basic features I needed to perform a card sort. It allowed me to have more than 10 cards, it had the ability for the user to create subgroups within groups, and the cards would not automatically “snap” in to place like some services would. The users could place the cards wherever they wanted to on the screen.

So far, we have performed a few pilot tests with a handful of doctors to work out some bugs. The main lesson we are learning is that what the user is saying as he/she is going through the card sort is actually more valuable than the actual results. So instead of “throwing the test over the wall,” or in the online word, just sending out a card sort link and viewing the results, it is actually better to have the user talk you through their thought process. What is also valuable is that being able to moderate the card sort, and to answer technical or clarifying questions probably produces more accurate results. If a user is confused about a term or abbreviation, he or she might categorize that differently, and thus throwing off the card sort, than if the tester clearly understands the term. Finally one more valuable gem that I realized while performing cards sorts: Keep your mouth shut! Let the tester talk you through the awkward silences. If you must speak, ask probing and clarifying questions. But do your best to try not to suggest ANY way that a tester could group items. They tester will struggle at first. But that is OK. Just let them absorb all the cards and try to make sense out of them the best way that they can. You will get great user feedback if you actually let the user provide you that unbiased feedback.

The bottom line lesson here: Yes kids, card sorting can be used for more than just organizing navigation of a website. Try it out!