Design Library

This week the TLT Web Site Redesign committee conducted card sorting sessions to get feedback that will enable user-centered design. Card sorting is a tried-and-tested technique for investigating how best to structure information on web sites so that users can easily find what they want. The process involves sorting a series of cards, each labeled with something the site might contain, into groups that make sense to the person sorting them. It is crucial that sites are designed to reflect the ways that users (rather than designers) think about the world. Card sorting provides a window into the minds of web site users.

So far, we have had several faculty, staff and students work together and the experience has been very successful, positive and enlightening. We will be doing a few more in the next week or so, but here's a look at what we saw:

card sort 1

card sort 2
And this is what we observed:

In one session there was a suggestion about differentiating by audience, but then shifted to categories. A discussion of categorizing into Resources vs Tools and the idea of providing costs and technical requirements for each of the available tools, resources, etc. (e.g. iTunes U, which is not “friendly to a screen reader”.) In the second session one participant saw things from the perspective of content vs content delivery vs content support. Then another participant said after taking everything in that she could see things separated by audience, which they followed through with all of the cards. It was observed that most of the topics targeted multiple audience combinations. How to handle that on the web was discussed (e.g. views by user role, multiple listings under user categories). After the audience breakdown began the emergence of categories such as policies, teaching strategies, how to (the term "training" was observed to be something only targeting staff) and then coming back to grouping into content creation + content distribution.

Participants were not familiar with some of the terms, and many terms did not seem to be intuitive. There was ambiguity, but in most cases one participant was familiar enough to explain it to the others:
- Multimedia Teaching "Objects"
- SCOLA
- TEACH Act
- TWT Certificate
- Blended Learning
- iStudy for Success
- Testing Center
- Tips for enhancing "inclusiveness"
- Turnitin
- video analysis software
- streaming services
- Technology Learning Assistants
- Collaborative Learning Spaces

Ultimately, one participant says she looks for things based on how she does use them, wants to use them, or could use them. She would continue by putting more things in multiple categories. Another participant, who was inclined to lump things into resources and tools, said he thinks it could get more into benefits for the user – not only what is it, but what can it do for me? Another participant would divide it into the stuff I would need to know for the class I'm currently teaching and the stuff I would need less often (e.g. policies). I would think of it as in what it is what I want to do, my task - I want all of my options for executing that task in one place.