INP 153: Designing for the User Experience I

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INP 153 Designing for the User Experience I

• Lecture 5 Performing the Card Sort

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The card sort

• When should you use a card sort?
• Whenever you are reorganizing a complex website
  or designing a complex website, you can use a
  card sort to construct and validate your
  organization system.

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What is a card sort

• As previously discussed, a card sort is a cheap
  and powerful tool for organizing content in an
  information system.
• All you need are note cards, time to prepare the
  note cards, and participants to perform the card
  sort.

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What is a card sort cont

• Your participants will organize the note cards
  you provide them with into categories that seem
  intuitive or appropriate.
• While they do this, you observe how they feel
  about the labels, how long it takes them to
  classify the individual cards, etc.
• At the end of the card sort, you conduct a brief
  exit interview.

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Two dimensions of card sort

• Expert vs. novice
• Open vs. closed

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Preparing the note cards

• Write down the most important web pages and a
  broad selection of typical content on separate
  note cards.
• Include the title of the page/content. Including
  the URL will help you access the page, but put it
  on the back of the card to avoid influencing the
  participant.

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Preparing the note cards cont

• Also prepare header cards, or a poster board that
  has the categories labeled on it.
• Now, all your participants have to do is place
  the note cards in the category!

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Useful equipment

• Pen/paper
• A worksheet with each card and codes for the
  categories if conducting more than one card sort.
• Stop watch.

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Learning from examples Case study

• I conducted two card sorts for the Undergraduate
  Library (UGL) at the University of Michigan one
  where I was the participant (expert, open) and
  one where a group of librarians were the
  participants (expert, partially-open).
• What purposes did these card sorts serve?

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While conducting the card sort

• The researcher conducting the card sort should
  take notes!
• Any problem cards/categories?
• With what are users showing the most
  confusion/discomfort ?

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While conducting the card sort cont

• The researcher should also encourage the
  participants to think aloud!
• At the beginning of any testing, always tell the
  participants that you are testing the design, not
  the participants abilities.

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Lets conduct a card sort

• Finding volunteers is always one of the greatest
  difficulties youll face when performing the card
  sort.
• Those of you who arent performing the card sort
  should be taking notes
• Where is the user struggling?
• Are there any content items or categories that
  seem particularly troublesome?

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At the end

• This would be the perfect time for an exit
  interview.
• In an exit interview, the researcher asks the
  participant(s) a set of pre-determined questions
  to find out more about how they felt about the
  categories, the labels on the page, and more
  generally, about the content.

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At the end cont

• As a class, lets think of some good questions
  that are appropriate for the exit interview for
  the last exercise!

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The value of the card sort

• Dont have to rely on the designers limited
  knowledge of the content the memory is
  externally stored on the cards, and are
  recalled by simply reading the cards!
• Can retested simply by having someone else
  perform the card sort!
• For generation and validation!

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Perspective What is the User Experience

• So far, this class has been mostly about
  Information Architecture.
• However, this class is called Designing for the
  User Experience, and the User Experience entails
  much more than Information Architecture.
• User Experience includes

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User experience

• Information Architecture
• Usability
• Accessibility
• Graphic design
• Content
• Persuasiveness
• Much more

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Usability

• What is Usability? Usability involves the
  successful completion of a task within a certain
  time. This is explored through user testing.
• Usable items should meet a criteria for user
  completion often 85 or 95.
• Hot spots are areas that users often fail at.
  Critical failures involve features that must be
  made more usable before the product is
  implemented.
• Benchmarks are timed tests at which the
  participant should finish a task
• Failure to meet the timed benchmark may indicate
  design flaws

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Accessibility

• Individuals with visual deficits (blindness,
  color deficiencies), motor deficits (including
  inability to use a mouse), and hearing problems
  use the web, too!
• Does your website accommodate them? (E.g., can
  screen readers read your code? Is your website
  keyboard-enabled? Does your video have subtitles
  for individuals who cannot hear the content? Etc.)

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Graphic Design

• You will have to work with individuals with art
  backgrounds.
• The non-aesthetic of Jakob Nielsen has turned off
  many web artists, who often equate the term
  usable with stale or boring.
• To dismiss front-end design as mere icing is
  to jeopardize the success of any site.
• Curt Cloninger, Fresh Styles for Web Designers,
  on the problem of down playing the aesthetic in
  favor of what he calls usability.

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Content web writing and web design

• The web uses many kinds of engineers HTML
  designers, programmers, database designers as
  well as editors and web writers to prepare and
  update content for the web.
• If you go on to study more about usability,
  information architecture, graphic arts or web
  writing, you need to have a background in HTML!

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Persuasion

• Computers can be used to persuade!
• E.g., GoArmy.com http//www.goarmy.com/

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Synthesizing a view of the user experience

• Interacting with other professionals will
  demonstrate the difficulty of synthesizing a view
  of the user experience

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Bringing it all together

• Design skills take time to develop. They are not
  easily communicated, and exploring on your own
  (as well as practicing on your own) are the best
  way to develop better skills.

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Websites

• Lets review these websites, and discuss what
  weve learned this semester about the user
  experience
• http//www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/
• http//www.solopixel.com/
• http//iconfactory.com/
• http//dictionary.reference.com/
• http//www.google.com/

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For next week

• User experience deliverable I and homework 4.
• Review this weeks readings.
• We will prepare for the mid-term.