Information Architecture

Online Card Sorting Pros and Cons

Posted by Brian

Online card sorting applications increase the accessibility of running a card sort. They make it fast, cheap, and easy (depending on the scope and scale of the sort) to set up the sort, and to recruit participants. Also, the participants can complete the sort at their convenience. Another major time-saver of using an online tool is that the data is recorded as the participant performs the sort, rather than having to be compiled and manually entered afterwards.

Some drawbacks of using an online tool for card sorting (as with using any online tool to replicate any manual process) are that the tool can impose its own constraints on the process, and there is also always a chance that technical issues will frustrate the participant or cause the participant to abort the process altogether. Also, an online sort doesn’t provide any verbalized cues about the participant’s organizational rationale. Although this could be overcome by using a card sort tool such as  OptimalSort with a screensharing or conferencing tool to run a remote moderated sort.

The Future of IA

Posted by Brian

In a recent interview, Peter Morville made some salient points that addressed the importance of medium-independence for information architecture, incorporating information flows and feedback loops into information ecosystems, facilitating understanding, and developing information architectures that are based on a deeper awareness of culture and cognition.

Use context, organizational goals, user needs, and incorporating appropriate mental models and metaphors have always been an important part of information design. But when considering the future of wearables, ubicomp, and the Internet of Things, information architecture will become increasingly complex.

Information architectures will have to be much more scalable and flexible than in the past. Also, there will likely be both visible and invisible information architectures. Practitioners will still develop traditional information architectures that support users interacting with a visible interface. But they will also have to manage architectures that support users performing information-seeking tasks that don’t require a visible interface, and that also support devices interacting with other devices.

More and more, physical spaces are becoming information spaces. This will make it increasingly difficult to manage the movement of users and devices through these blended environments using traditional information architecture implementations.