Week 51 @ KSU's UXD Program - Sitemaps

Being that I built a sitemap in the intro to UX Design class last year and had two entire courses on Information Architecture sense then, I wasn't too thrilled about this week. In fact, I thought it was going to be a "snooze-fest". Then, I was really disappointed to see that all of the articles were already ones I had read prior...

However, my mind changed as soon as I got into some of the articles. It was so great to go back and follow up on things that "I knew" but wasn't sure where I had heard them, such as the "Myth vs. Fact" of the "3 Clicks Rules" and the "7 +/- 2 Rule" in the Lynda.com video on Sitemaps and Navigations. I had been in several business meetings since I first heard that in my previous courses and didn't know exactly how to defend it, but I knew they were either myths or at least loosely based theories. Now I know how to defend them or use that information to my advantage for future designs.

My biggest "a-ha!" moment this week was getting back the results of my card sorting tests and asking my wife and step father why they organized the structure of the app the way they did. I knew setting up the test that explaining the test and app was key gathering good results, but wasn't exactly sure how far to go in details. Long story short, my description in the test didn't describe the application's abilities well enough and my wife said, "Oh I would have done that completely differently if I knew that." Although I didn't really figure out an answer to how to write card sorting tasks without giving too much information away, I did find out that it is a problem that I need to be cognisant of when running these tests in the future.