UX gym day 3
Today we were dealing with Information architecture. I say "dealing" because I personally find this topic incredibly interesting, but also extremely frustrating.
Interesting - because as a somewhat spontaneous person I LOVE organizing. There are certain things and processes in my work practice that I prefer to do in a naturally chaotic and rather messy flow - such as early stage planning and gathering ideas, and some I never let lose - such as filing or documentation.
Frustrating - because I find it quite difficult sometimes to rely on somebody else's system without knowing their background. (Except those cases where design thinking is so brilliant that the structure just speaks for itself).
The challenges of the day were:
- Identifying content type & creating a content model
- Sketching out a site map
- Identifying navigation tools
- Practicing open card sorting
using theguardian.com website as an example.
Identifying content type & creating a content model
Pretty straight forward task - all we needed to do was to identify and document elements on the web page. (I was working on the UK section)
Sketching out a site map
This was probably the most difficult task for me because I struggled to understand why theguardian.com designers structured it the way they did. Some categories of articles are displayed in the "UK" sub menu and some within the page content.
Interesting - because as a somewhat spontaneous person I LOVE organizing. There are certain things and processes in my work practice that I prefer to do in a naturally chaotic and rather messy flow - such as early stage planning and gathering ideas, and some I never let lose - such as filing or documentation.
Frustrating - because I find it quite difficult sometimes to rely on somebody else's system without knowing their background. (Except those cases where design thinking is so brilliant that the structure just speaks for itself).
The challenges of the day were:
- Identifying content type & creating a content model
- Sketching out a site map
- Identifying navigation tools
- Practicing open card sorting
using theguardian.com website as an example.
Identifying content type & creating a content model
Pretty straight forward task - all we needed to do was to identify and document elements on the web page. (I was working on the UK section)
Sketching out a site map
This was probably the most difficult task for me because I struggled to understand why theguardian.com designers structured it the way they did. Some categories of articles are displayed in the "UK" sub menu and some within the page content.
Identifying navigation tools
Practicing open card sorts
For this exercise we split into pairs and ran an open card sorting session with each other. The tester asked the participant to sort different articles into groups based on their titles. What I found particularly interesting about this task was how different the outcome was for different individuals performing the same task.
my sorting
Matt's sorting
In addition we also continued working on our app design from day 2 applying new knowledge (specifically sketching out a site map and identifying navigation for our apps).
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