Conducting Information Architecture Workshop

I am supposed to conduct an IA workshop in order to improve the IA of one of our mobile application and website. Does anyone know of any other techniques apart from just card sorting that can be helpful?

1 Like

You’re testing associations between objects. Card sorting is the go-to tool

But there are two card sorts: open and closed. I guess you know the difference.

Aside from that, I used Google Analytics to simplify a clients IA:

I went through the site, drew out the site map in excel, then went through the stats to see what branches were being clicked on.

Now, it could be that some useful pages were not being clicked on because they were hard to navigate to, so I cross checked all the search terms to see what was being searched for.

I was then able to see what pages a)were not clicked to and b)were not searched for and strike them from the IA.This simplified it lots.

Edit: the article you linked to is also interesting…

  • Card sorts give you taxonomy “what things should be called”
  • Card sorts give you groupings “what things belong together”
  • Card sorts do not test for mutual exclusivity “these things repeat themselves”
1 Like

I feel using just the card sorting techniques and using the analytics won’t help to improve your applications IA at a deeper level. So I came across something known as IA lenses card deck (https://medium.com/eightshapes-llc/information-architecture-lenses-8a3929a106dd) and thinking of giving it a try.

Hope this helps in solving the deeper underlying problems within the application.

1 Like

That doesn’t sound like just IA but general heuristics including IA.

Still interesting though.

2 Likes

It’d be helpful if you give us context more about that app and website.