Card Sorting
Card sorting empowers users to actively participate in shaping the development of information architecture. It serves as a valuable approach, considering that websites often prioritize design perspectives over user-centric principles. This tendency can lead to non-intuitive labels, subject groupings, and categories that fail to resonate with users. Card sorting, also known as web classification, involves categorizing web objects (e.g., documents) to facilitate users' information tasks and goals.
Robertson (2003) outlines a card sorting approach that addresses key questions to aid in modeling web classification systems:
- How do users prefer information grouped, by subject, task, business, customer grouping, or type?
- What are the most crucial items for the main menu?
- How many menu items should exist, and how deep should the hierarchy go?
- How do user needs vary across the organization?
Selected user groups or representatives are provided with index cards containing information like types of documents, organizational keywords, document titles, descriptions, and navigation labels. They are then tasked with:
- Grouping cards related to each other.
- Selecting cards that accurately represent specific topic areas.
- Organizing cards hierarchically, from high-level (broad) terms to low-level terms.
After the session, analysts compile the results into a spreadsheet to identify the most popular terms, descriptions, and relationships. If different groups are involved, the results are compared, and differences are analyzed.
Blueprints
Blueprints illustrate relationships between pages and content components, offering insights into organization, navigation, and labeling systems (Rosenfeld and Morville, 2002). While often referred to as "sitemaps" or "site structure diagrams," blueprints emphasize design by clearly showcasing information grouping and page linkages rather than serving as navigation aids on the website.
Wireframes
Wireframes, closely related to blueprints, serve as tools for web designers to outline the layout of web pages. They consist of page outlines with content "wires" demarcating different content or navigation areas through white space.
Wodtke (2002) defines wireframes as "basic outlines of individual pages, indicating page elements, their relationships, and relative importance." Wireframes are created for similar page groups identified during the blueprint (site map) stage of information architecture creation.
Wireframes are then transformed into physical site design page templates, traditionally crafted using standardized CSS (cascading style sheets). CSS enables uniform aesthetics across various sections of the site and offers control over style elements such as typography, background, borders, and margins. CSS provides numerous advantages, including faster page loading times, efficient development, reduced maintenance efforts, increased interoperability, and improved accessibility across different platforms.
Adapted from: Chaffey, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, F., 2012. Digital marketing: strategy, implementation, and practice (Vol. 5). Harlow: Pearson.