For anyone who has not already seen it, have a look at Ms Dewey, this is a young, attractive and rather sexy search engine – it is fully animated with results pulled in from Live.com. Read Phil Bradleys review for the nuts and bolts of the search function and usability. Ms. Dewey is played by actress Janina Gavankar.
Following the focus group we ran last week we have been using the results to prepare a preliminary draft information architecture for the site. Our client was disappointed with the turnout at the focus group. However, from our perspective it was a success; we were able to gain many insights into how the audience uses the site and what they really want when they visit the site. These nuggets are invaluable in adding meaning to the survey and interview research we have already completed. The interaction between participants gives a perspective that doesn’t come from speaking with individuals.
It takes the emphasis away from the “clever” information architecture and taxonomy ideas and puts it firmly on the content itself. There are some recent posts exploring this theme.
In his post on goal based retrieval, Joe Lamantia discusses common goals of information retrieval (e.g. reviewing summaries of items, understanding contexts and situations) and the different modes of retrieval or interaction that would meet these goals.
Maish Nichani has written about the idea of focussing on the users’ target content in his excellent post “Taming your target content”.
This approach is helping to define the vague content types mentioned by the audience e.g. “news”, “updates” to something more specific, with the surrounding context to add deeper meaning to a single piece of information.
Working as a consultant, one of the my favourite activities is running workshops and focus groups. Listening to people discussing thier work, their likes and dislikes and ideas is always fascinating.
Yesterday we ran a focus group for a client which involved a card sorting exercise. The objective was to obtain feedback from the organisation's members about their information expectations and use of the website. Before the exercise we had an in depth discussion about the current home page, talked about the navigation and content. When we came to the card sorting the participants were completely floored by four of the terms. "environment".... what does that mean? "property" ...huh??!!
Interestingly, these four words were smack bang in the middle of the main navigation that we had just looked at in detail. They had said the navigation made sense to them and they used it regularly, yet the words out of context meant absolutely nothing to them.
User-centered design - 1: Guesstimating - 0
