The Situation: Sorting the current sitemap, of a large global intranet portal, into a new more intuitive information architecture, using open sorting, and tree sort validation, and testing.
Items are sorting into multiple categories, because we have a diverse user population (4 big and different areas of the business that do quite different work and have quite different needs, but some are the same).
The problem: There may be concern about whether users will get confused seeing items in more than one place. If in an open sort, an item equally sorts in 2 diverse categories, should we allow it to exist in more than one place?
So the best person to look to to answer this question is Donna Spencer the IA guru. My manager just approved the purchase of her book so I will read about it, just to make sure I have the necessary references to back my work up, but check this link out to see her answer to a question about content that falls in more than one place. Read that real quick before you read the rest of this mail.
I have considered the point that she mentions, that the content is overlapping in the case of one of the high level categories, however my professional opinion is that too many of the primary sorts for the content go in that category, with the items being sorted in others at half the rate, for us to consider deleting it as a top tab, so it stays.
With any top tab set, or chosen classification scheme, you run into lots of redundancies, i.e. the clients item would be under each of the top tabs by area of the business, so we repeat clients for each area of the business. Makes sense, but could also be considered a 'redundancy'.
I think the current strategy that I am working on, based on analysing an open sort of 195 items and use the end user terminology.for that, works fine.
I really don’t want to change what I did, which was to allow the item to exist in multiple places if it makes sense. The users really do sort the items in distinct buckets, but there are multiple schemes that we could have used (see also Donna Spencer's slides on organization schemes), the one we used is best supported by user generated terminology.
What I plan on doing about the problem:
We are already using the sort analysis spreadsheet and methodology to conduct the open sort, provided by Donna Spencer, the world’s most recognized IA specialist. I am happy that we are using a good scheme based on the days I spent analysing the work.
We will validate our IA recommendations with the target audiences of the stakeholders as each subset of content migrates. This gives the stakeholders a voice when it comes time to migrate their content, and gives them the opportunity to help identify their target audience when validating the content they care about.
This will hopefully alleviate some of the current pressure to question our current broader audience demographics at this early stage, when all we have is a skeleton of an IA before any content is migrated.
We will do this prior to migrating each subset of content, using treejack (to determine if that target audience can find it) and survey questions embedded in the treejack will determine what do they think about the multiple locations.
Question is... what would you do? I have asked Donna Spencer and my good friend from college Mathew Sanders... any other IA specialists, or user experience people that want to weigh in?
Items are sorting into multiple categories, because we have a diverse user population (4 big and different areas of the business that do quite different work and have quite different needs, but some are the same).
The problem: There may be concern about whether users will get confused seeing items in more than one place. If in an open sort, an item equally sorts in 2 diverse categories, should we allow it to exist in more than one place?
So the best person to look to to answer this question is Donna Spencer the IA guru. My manager just approved the purchase of her book so I will read about it, just to make sure I have the necessary references to back my work up, but check this link out to see her answer to a question about content that falls in more than one place. Read that real quick before you read the rest of this mail.
I have considered the point that she mentions, that the content is overlapping in the case of one of the high level categories, however my professional opinion is that too many of the primary sorts for the content go in that category, with the items being sorted in others at half the rate, for us to consider deleting it as a top tab, so it stays.
With any top tab set, or chosen classification scheme, you run into lots of redundancies, i.e. the clients item would be under each of the top tabs by area of the business, so we repeat clients for each area of the business. Makes sense, but could also be considered a 'redundancy'.
I think the current strategy that I am working on, based on analysing an open sort of 195 items and use the end user terminology.for that, works fine.
I really don’t want to change what I did, which was to allow the item to exist in multiple places if it makes sense. The users really do sort the items in distinct buckets, but there are multiple schemes that we could have used (see also Donna Spencer's slides on organization schemes), the one we used is best supported by user generated terminology.
What I plan on doing about the problem:
We are already using the sort analysis spreadsheet and methodology to conduct the open sort, provided by Donna Spencer, the world’s most recognized IA specialist. I am happy that we are using a good scheme based on the days I spent analysing the work.
We will validate our IA recommendations with the target audiences of the stakeholders as each subset of content migrates. This gives the stakeholders a voice when it comes time to migrate their content, and gives them the opportunity to help identify their target audience when validating the content they care about.
This will hopefully alleviate some of the current pressure to question our current broader audience demographics at this early stage, when all we have is a skeleton of an IA before any content is migrated.
We will do this prior to migrating each subset of content, using treejack (to determine if that target audience can find it) and survey questions embedded in the treejack will determine what do they think about the multiple locations.
Question is... what would you do? I have asked Donna Spencer and my good friend from college Mathew Sanders... any other IA specialists, or user experience people that want to weigh in?
