Card-Sorting Exercise: Results: Part 1
[instructions] [link names] [results]
The inspiration for this test was taken from the methods described in:
Creating Web Site Designs Based on User Expectations and Feedback
Jeanette Fuccella and Jack Pizzolato, IBM Corporation
Purpose
To find out how our users group the information on our site into
cateogories. This test is not so much to find out the exact names people use to describe
things, but to find out if there are similarities in how our users mentally
group the information in ways that are meaningful to them.
The Test
The test was conducted between June 16 and July 7, 1999.
9 volunteers took the deck of 106 cards, representing link names on our site and sorted them
into categories of their own choosing. We took the card sets of each volunteer and laid them out
on a table, with similar groupings of cards piled together. Certain trends became apparent
at that point.
Summary of Trends
Here are some of the major categories that more than one person
came up with: (in no particular order)
- Thesis information
- links to items having to do with thesis preparation from all over our site,
style guides, our e-thesis collection, ordering MIT theses, etc.
- Information by Course
- links to subject info, e-reserves, etc., organized by MIT Course
- New materials & library news
- links to anything about new books, journals, databases, etc., and library news
- Ordering materials
- how to order materials, whether from doc services, interlibrary borrowing, theses, etc.
(whether it cost money or not) - anything to do with ordering things was group together
- Access policies for our library and other libraries
- all the links having to do with various outside groups using our libraries,
and our community using other libraries
- About the MIT Libraries
- people put all sorts of general info in a category like this, having
to do with policies, services, hours, locations, etc.
- Services
- many people used this word to describe links about library services and
library instruction
- Materials/Content/Collections
- these were some terms used to describe links about our collections and
physical items (including equipment) in the libraries
- Reference
- links that had to do with asking reference questions, virtual reference,
or reference desk hours were grouped here
- Databases
- people used this word to mean many different things, a much broader
definition of it than we usually think of (no clear trend other than this)
Note: No one used the term, "resources," to describe anything.
Here are some things people said should be easy to get to from any page
(perhaps in a navigation bar), or that should be on a top-level page:
Barton, Search, A-Z Index, Maps, Hours, FAQ, Site Map, Staff listings, Comments/Feedback
[web advisory group]
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