Information Architecture & Web Usability

Focus and Stakeholder Groups

A focus group is a moderated discussion that typically involves 5 to 10 participants.  Through a focus group, you can learn about users’ attitudes, beliefs, desires, and reactions to concepts. Focus groups allow you to discover users expectations and draw conclusions.

Develop User Personas

The purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of your key audience segments for reference. Personas help to focus decisions surrounding site components by adding a layer of real-world consideration to the conversation.

Card Sorting

Card sorting is a method used to help design or evaluate the information architecture of a site. In a card sorting session, participants organise topics into categories that make sense to them and they may also help you label these groups. To conduct a card sort, you can use actual cards, pieces of paper, or one of several online card-sorting software tools.

sitemaps

The sitemap lists all the (labelled) pages in entirety and shows hierarchy, structure and often page goals and content/functionality that happens to be on that particular page; and finally, the navigation guides users via links to all areas of a website.

Wireframing

A wireframe is a two-dimensional illustration of a page’s interface that specifically focuses on space allocation and prioritisation of content, functionalities available, and intended behaviors. For these reasons, wireframes typically do not include any styling, color, or graphics.

Organisation Schemes

Organisation schemes have to do with how you are going to categorise your content and the various ways you’ll create relationships between each piece. Most content can be categorised in multiple ways. Schemes can be broken down into Exact and Subjective.  Depending on the content, it’s conceivable that the site may combine schemes as opposed to treating them independently.

Organisation Structures

An organisational structure is how you define the relationships between pieces of content. Successful structures allow users to predict where they will find information on the site. It’s important to take into account user expectations and implement consistent methods of organising and displaying information so that users can extend their knowledge from familiar pages to unfamiliar ones.

Usability testing

Usability testing allows you to better understand the participants thoughts as they interact with the product and or retrospective probing when a session is complete. Captovate often uses usability testing software to capture insights in the prototyping stages.