Architecture Update and Card Sorting Workshop

We had an amazing card sorting workshop yesterday during our web advisory board meeting.

Card sorting is a simple technique in usability design where a group of "users" are guided to generate a category tree or find a way of grouping items into useful bins. It is great approach for designing work-flows, menu structures, or, in this case, Web site navigation paths.

We had an idea, walking to the meeting, about how our architecture might look but we wanted to open up the conversation to our advisory board. We were very happy with the results, and the fact that our board was able to help us come to some good decisions about the overall navigation of the site.

We started by having all content grouped together in unorganized piles on one wall and asks four different groups to organize them in "buckets" along another wall. We also got some feedback as far as renaming some bucket headings. All in all, it was a fun activity, and we all learned something about how users might categorize some of our Web content.

Here's how the exercise went:

Jane, Marjorie, and Karen discuss how they might organize things:

Sandy and Rosemary discuss how to group things too. We broke our board into four groups, and each group had to figure out how to group content together on the opposite wall:

Sue is posting some notes on the wall as Jane consults with Marjorie and Karen across the room:
Once time was up we discussed the choices, and determined if we needed to shift things around -- given audience needs and general organizational ideas:

Here are the results of the board's work:

This is the full architecture: Note that there are three ways to access Web content: through user type (think demographics), task (think quick links), or by subject (our card sorting exercise was based exclusively on the subject-based way of navigating). Click to see a larger image.