Engineering Te Ara
Card Sorting
The first New Zealand Encyclopedia from 1966, published in three volumes
Escape from Īnangahua
COP Outcome development and evaluation Card sorting is quick and cost effective way of creating models. Test subjects were given a deck of cards representing all the pages of content on the website. Then each user organised the cards into groups that seem logical to them and named them with appropriate titles. The design team used special software to analyse the results and built up some simple site structures. The exercise was repeated several times, using a mixture of school students and adults. The differences in mental models observed between the subjects were small enough to allow a single information architecture to be used.
Dr Phillips says card sorting will continue to be used as the site grows. Card sorting will be particularly important as the science-based sections are developed, as the expectations of the science writers and experts may well be different from those of students who come to the site with a lot less science knowledge.
Creating the prototype
Card sorting by itself didn't produce the architecture of the site, but it did give the team a good starting point. To test early ideas, the team produced some quick and very basic prototypes, no programming or content management systems were involved, just very basic HTML with a few hyperlinks, pictures and content samples, and tested on representative groups of users.
Usability testing has long been established in other areas of industrial design. No car manufacturer would think about sending a new model to the production line without extensive consumer testing of prototypes. Parts of movies are similarly tested on sample audiences. The Te Ara team had groups of students sit down and perform a series of tasks on the mockups. Then do the same tasks over and again as improvements were made. Succeeding iterations got easier to use as the kinks were ironed out.The team wanted to make sure that things were going to work from the students' perspective and catch anything tricky or confusing early on, rather than wait for later stages of development when the cost of making changes was higher because code would have to be changed and links upgraded and tested. This rapid prototyping allowed generations of design iterations to be tested in days. Once the team had a prototype that they were happy with, they moved into the interface/visual design and programming stages.
