Continuing in the community led approach to the experience design, let’s get started taking a look at the information architecture.
A really useful exercise to help understand how people organise, understand and label/name information is to do a card sort. (Ref: A definitive guide to card sorting)
As we’re scattered all over the globe, we’ll have to settle for an online version. I’ve actually set up two versions of the card sort because I particularly want to understand differences between the way that ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ deal with drupal.org information.
If you identify as an ‘insider‘ (which might reflect either your expertise and/or closeness to the drupal community) and you want to participate, please go to this link and participate in the cardsorting exercise.
If you identify as an ‘outsider’ (particularly if you’re new to Drupal, but also if you don’t feel close to the community) and you’d like to paticipate, then your cardsorting exercise can be found here.
It should take you about 15-20 minutes to complete the exercise, so be sure to get yourself a nice cup of tea before you get started!
This is just an information gathering exercise – it’s not going to define the Information Architecture, just help give us the understanding we need to help shape it correctly. Don’t worry too much if there is information missing (we’re just using a sample of the entire site(s)) and don’t worry if you don’t understand what a card means, and feel free to leave copious comments as you go through the exercise – there is a space for you to do so.
As ever, I’ll let you know what interesting things we learn as they come to hand.
(Remember, you can also participate by submitting some wireframes!)
[…] Go to the author’s original blog: Drupal.org – Help Overhaul the Information Architecture … […]
This was pretty interesting to do. It might be even better if there was an easy way to clarify my intentions for the card (ie: just a link, or a full-fleshed content area). I guess if you’re just looking to group things, it could provide useful results.
That was fun! Great exercise, I hope a lot of people do it. It took me a minute to figure out that you grouped the items by dragging them ONTO each other.
That gets you thinking a bit. :-) Looking forward to the results.
Good work with everything so far!
PS: Small usability nitpick. Your comment box doesn’t use Javascript to remove the “Type your comment here.” text when I click in the box.
[…] thread here: http://www.disambiguity.com/drupalorg-help-overhaul-the-information-architecture-participate-in-our-… […]
[…] you’ve been following this project you’ll know that we’ve been doing an online card sort recently to help inform the information architecture for drupal.org. To date we have had more than […]