September 14, 2022
1 min read

Different ways to test information architecture

We all know that building a robust information architecture (IA) can make or break your product. And getting it right can rely on robust user research. Especially when it comes to creating human-centered, intuitive products that deliver outstanding user experiences.

But what are the best methods to test your information architecture? To make sure that your focus is on building an information architecture that is truly based on what your users want, and need.

What is user research? 🗣️🧑🏻💻

With all the will in the world, your product (or website or mobile app) may work perfectly and be as intuitive as possible. But, if it is only built on information from your internal organizational perspective, it may not measure up in the eyes of your user. Often, organizations make major design decisions without fully considering their users. User research (UX) backs up decisions with data, helping to make sure that design decisions are strategic decisions. 

Testing your information architecture can also help establish the structure for a better product from the ground up. And ultimately, the performance of your product. User experience research focuses your design on understanding your user expectations, behaviors, needs, and motivations. It is an essential part of creating, building, and maintaining great products. 

Taking the time to understand your users through research can be incredibly rewarding with the insights and data-backed information that can alter your product for the better. But what are the key user research methods for your information architecture? Let’s take a look.

Research methods for information architecture ⚒️

There is more than one way to test your IA. And testing with one method is good, but with more than one is even better. And, of course, the more often you test, especially when there are major additions or changes, you can tweak and update your IA to improve and delight your user’s experience.

Card Sorting 🃏

Card sorting is a user research method that allows you to discover how users understand and categorize information. It’s particularly useful when you are starting the planning process of your information architecture or at any stage you notice issues or are making changes. Putting the power into your users’ hands and asking how they would intuitively sort the information. In a card sort, participants sort cards containing different items into labeled groups. You can use the results of a card sort to figure out how to group and label the information in a way that makes the most sense to your audience. 

There are a number of techniques and methods that can be applied to a card sort. Take a look here if you’d like to know more.

Card sorting has many applications. It’s as useful for figuring out how content should be grouped on a website or in an app as it is for figuring out how to arrange the items in a retail store.You can also run a card sort in person, using physical cards, or remotely with online tools such as OptimalSort.

Tree Testing 🌲

Taking a look at your information architecture from the other side can also be valuable. Tree testing is a usability method for evaluating the findability of topics on a product. Testing is done on a simplified text version of your site structure without the influence of navigation aids and visual design.

Tree testing tells you how easily people can find information on your product and exactly where people get lost. Your users rely on your information architecture – how you label and organize your content – to get things done.

Tree testing can answer questions like:

  • Do my labels make sense to people?
  • Is my content grouped logically to people?
  • Can people find the information they want easily and quickly? If not, what’s stopping them?

Treejack is our tree testing tool and is designed to make it easy to test your information architecture. Running a tree test isn’t actually that difficult, especially if you’re using the right tool. You’ll  learn how to set useful objectives, how to build your tree, write your tasks, recruit participants, and measure results.

Combining information architecture research methods 🏗

If you are wanting a fully rounded view of your information architecture, it can be useful to combine your research methods.

Tree testing and card sorting, along with usability testing, can give you insights into your users and audience. How do they think? How do they find their way through your product? And how do they want to see things labeled, organized, and sorted? 

If you want to get fully into the comparison of tree testing and card sorting, take a look at our article here, which compares the options and explains which is best and when. 

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Affinity mapping - an introduction

User research is key to discovering the inner workings of your users’ minds – their emotional, organizational, informative needs and desires. These are all super important to creating a user experience that is intuitive and meeting your users’ needs in a way that means they feel loved, cared for and considered. All the deep understanding stuff that keeps them coming back!

Qualitative research allows you to collect verbatim data from participants that give insights into why they do or feel things. You can even get into whether ‘Dee’ understood how the website worked or why ‘Andrew’ would (or wouldn’t) revisit the app outside of testing.

Gathering these awesome insights is one step. Analyzing and organizing these is a skill and talent in its own right. And armed with the right tools or methods it can be immersive, interesting and a great way to get under the skin of your users. Let’s take a look at affinity mapping as a method of analyzing this data - as a tool it can help researchers visualize and easily group and theme data.

Affinity mapping is used outside of the UX world and can be done independently, however is a great analysis method to use collaboratively. For researchers, it can be a great tool to collaborate and engage the team and potentially stakeholders. Bringing people together to identify, discuss and resolve user experience issues. 

Here we’ll lay out what affinity mapping is, specifically why it’s useful for user research and set out key steps to get you underway. 

What is Affinity Mapping? 🗺️

By definition, affinity mapping is the process of collecting, organizing, and grouping qualitative data to create an affinity diagram.

Put simply it is a tool to group, map, sort and categorize information. A tool where you’ll look at the information and patterns of your qualitative user research and work to group these together to make sense of them. It helps you to find patterns, similar outcomes and insights that allow you to draw conclusions and collate results in a cohesive manner, then report to the wider team in a way that makes sense and provides a clear road to applicable and achievable outcomes.

What is an Affinity Diagram? 🖼️

An affinity diagram is what you have once you have gone through the affinity mapping process. It is the final ‘diagram’ of your grouping, sorting and categorizing. An ordered visual sorting of insights and information from your user research. And the place to filter or funnel observations and information into patterns and reach final outcomes. 

Allowing you to see where the key outtakes are and where there may need to be improvements, changes or updates. And from here a roadmap can be decided.

An affinity map using Reframer by Optimal Workshop

Essentially the mapping part is the process of creating the diagram, a visual sorting of insights and information from your user research. So how do you make affinity mapping work for you?

1. Start with a large space

This could be a table, desk, pinboard or even a whiteboard. Somewhere that you can stick, pin or attach your insights to in a collaborative space. Becoming more common recently is the use of shared digital and online whiteboard tools.  allowing people to access and participate remotely.

2. Record all notes

Write observations, thoughts, research insights on individual cards or sticky notes.

3. Look for patterns

As a group read, comment and write notes or observations. Stick each of the notes onto the board, desk or whiteboard. Add, and shuffle into groups as you go. You can keep adding or moving as you go.

4. Create a group/theme

This will start to make sense as more sticky notes are added to the map. Creating groups for similar observations or insights, or for each pattern or theme.

Create a group/theme using affinity mapping

5. Give each theme or group a name

As more notes are added there will be natural groups formed. Openly discuss if there are notes that are more difficult to categorize or themes to be decided. (We’ve outlined some ideas for UX research themes in another section below.)

6. Determine priorities

You’ve tidied everything into themes and groups, now what? How do you decide which of these are priorities for your organization? Discussion and voting can be the best way to decide what outcomes make the most sense and may have the biggest impact on your business.

7. Report on your findings

Pulling together and reporting on the findings through your affinity diagram process should be key to putting actionable outcomes in place.

How to define research themes 🔬

Commonly, user research is digested through thematic analysis. During thematic analysis, you aim to make sense of all the notes, observations, and discoveries you’ve documented across all your information sources, by creating themes to organize the information. 

Depending on your role and the type of research you conduct, the themes you create for your affinity diagram can vary. Here are some examples of affinity groups that you could form from your UX research:

  • User sentiment and facial expressions when completing certain tasks
  • Frequently used words or phrases when describing a product or experience
  • Suggestions for improving your product or experience

Wrap up 🌯

Qualitative user testing and the resulting observations can be some of the best insights you get into your users’ minds. Filtering, organizing and ordering these disparate and very individual observations can be tricky. Especially if done in silo.

So, draw a team together, bring in stakeholders from throughout your organization and work collaboratively to sort, organize and categorize through affinity mapping. This opens the doors to discussion, buy-in and ultimately a collective understanding of user research. Its importance and its role within the organization. And most importantly the real-world implications UX research and its insights have on organizational products and output.

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Dan Dixon and Stéphan Willemse: HCD is dead, long live HCD

There is strong backlash about the perceived failures of Human Centred Design (HCD) and its contribution to contemporary macro problems. There seems to be a straightforward connection: HCD and Design Thinking have been adopted by organizations and are increasingly part of product/experience development, especially in big tech. However the full picture is more complex, and HCD does have some issues.

Dan Dixon, UX and Design Research Director and Stéphan Willemse, Strategy Director/Head of Strategy, both from the Digital Arts Network, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, about the evolution and future of HCD.

In their talk, Dan and Stéphan cover the history of HCD, its use today, and its limitations, before presenting a Post HCD future. What could it be, and how should it be different? Dan and Stéphan help us to step outside of ourselves as we meet new problems with new ways of Design Thinking.

Dan Dixon and Stéphan Willemse bios

Dan is a long-term practitioner of human-centred experience design and has a wealth of experience in discovery and qual research. He’s worked in academic, agency and client-side roles in both the UK and NZ, covering diverse fields such as digital, product design, creative technology and game design. His history has blended a background in the digital industry with creative technology teaching and user experience research. He has taken pragmatic real-world knowledge into a higher education setting as well as bringing deeper research skills from academia into commercial design projects. In higher education, as well as talks and workshops, Dan has been teaching and sharing these skills for the last 16 years. 

Stéphan uses creativity, design and strategy to help organizations innovate towards positive, progressive futures. He works across innovation, experience design, emerging technologies, cultural intelligence and futures projects with clients including Starbucks, ANZ, Countdown, TradeMe and the public sector. He holds degrees in PPE, Development Studies, Education and an Executive MBA. However, he doesn’t like wearing a suit and his idea of the perfect board meeting is at a quiet surf break. He thinks ideas are powerful and that his young twins ask the best questions about the world we live in.

Contact Details:

Email: dan.dixon@digitalartsnetwork.com

Find Dan on LinkedIn  

HCD IS DEAD, LONG LIVE HCD 👑

Dan and Stéphan take us through the evolving landscape of Human Centred Design (HCD) and Design Thinking. Can HCD effectively respond to the challenges of the modern era, and can we get ahead of the unintended consequences of our design? They examine the inputs and processes of design, not just the output, to scrutinize the very essence of design practice.

A brief history of HCD

In the 1950s and 1960s, designers began exploring the application of scientific processes to design, aiming to transform it into a systematic problem-solving approach. Later in the 1960s, design thinkers in Scandinavia initiated the shift towards cooperative and participative design practices. Collaboration and engagement with diverse stakeholders became integral to design processes. Then, the 1970s and 1980s marked a shift in perspective, viewing design as a fundamentally distinct way of approaching problems. 

Moving into the late 1980s and 1990s, design thinking expanded to include user-centered design, and the idea of humans and technology becoming intertwined. Then the 2000s witnessed a surge in design thinking, where human-centered design started to make its mark.

Limitations of the “design process”

Dan and Stéphan discuss the “design squiggle”, a concept that portrays the messy and iterative nature of design, starting chaotically and gradually converging toward a solution. For 20 years, beginning in the early 90s, this was a popular way to explain how the design process feels. However, in the past 10 years or so, efforts to teach and pass down design processes have become common practice. Here enter concepts like the “double diamond” and “pattern problem”, which seek to be repeatable and process-driven. These neat processes, however, demand rigid adherence to specific design methods, which can ultimately stifle innovation. 

Issues with HCD and its evolution

The critique of such rigid design processes, which developed alongside HCD, highlights the need to acknowledge that humans are just one element in an intricate network of actors. By putting ourselves at the center of our design processes and efforts, we already limit our design. Design is just as much about the ecosystem surrounding any given problem as it is about the user. A limitation of HCD is that we humans are not actually at the center of anything except our own minds. So, how can we address this limitation?

Post-anthropocentric design starts to acknowledge that we are far less rational than we believe ourselves to be. It captures the idea that there are no clear divisions between ‘being human’ and everything else. This concept has become important as we adopt more and more technology into our lives, and we’re getting more enmeshed in it. 

Post-human design extends this further by removing ourselves from the center of design and empathizing with “things”, not just humans. This concept embraces the complexity of our world and emphasizes how we need to think about the problem just as much as we think about the solution. In other words, post-human design encourages us to “live” in our design problem(s) and consider multiple interventions.

Finally, Dan and Stéphan discuss the concept of Planetary design, which stresses that everything we create, and everything we do, has the possibility to impact everything else in the world. In fact, our designs do impact everything else, and we need to try and be aware of all possibilities.

Integrating new ways of thinking about design

To think beyond HCD and to foster innovation in design, we can begin by embracing emerging design practices and philosophies such as "life-centered design," "Society-centered design," and "Humanity-centered design." These emerging practices have toolsets that are readily available online and can be seamlessly integrated into your design approach, helping us to break away from traditional, often linear, methodologies. Or, taking a more proactive stance, we can craft our own unique design tools and frameworks. 

Why it matters 🎯

To illustrate how design processes can evolve to meet current and future challenges of our time, Dan and Stéphan present their concept of “Post human-centered design” (Post HCD). At its heart, it seeks to take what's great about HCD and build upon it, all while understanding its issues/limitations.

Dan and Stéphan put forward, as a starting point, some challenges for designers to consider as we move our practice to its next phase.

Suggested Post HCD principles:

  • Human to context: Moving from human-centered to a context-centred or context sensitive point of view.
  • Design Process to Design Behaviour: Not being beholden to design processes like the “double diamond”. Instead of thinking about designing for problems, we should design for behaviors instead. 
  • Problem-solutions to Interventions: Thinking more broadly about interventions in the problem space, rather than solutions to the problems
  • Linear to Dynamic: Understand ‘networks’ and complex systems.
  • Repeated to Reflexive: Challenging status quo processes and evolving with challenges that we’re trying to solve.

The talk wraps up by encouraging designers to incorporate some of this thinking into everyday practice. Some key takeaways are: 

  • Expand your web of context: Don’t just think about things having a center, think about networks.
  • Have empathy for “things”: Consider how you might then have empathy for all of those different things within that network, not just the human elements of the network.
  • Design practice is exploration and design exploration is our practice: Ensure that we're exploring both our practice as well as the design problem.
  • Make it different every time: Every time we design, try to make it different, don't just try and repeat the same loop over and over again.

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1 min read

Quantifying the value of User Research in 2024 

Think your company is truly user-centric? Think again. Our groundbreaking report on UX Research (UXR) in 2024 shatters common assumptions about our industry.

We've uncovered a startling gap between what companies say about user-centricity and what they actually do. Prepare to have your perceptions challenged as we reveal the true state of UXR integration and its untapped potential in today's business landscape.

The startling statistics 😅

Here's a striking finding: only 16% of organizations have fully embedded UXR into their processes and culture. This disconnect between intention and implementation underscores the challenges in demonstrating and maximizing the true value of user research.

What's inside the white paper 👀

In this comprehensive white paper, we explore:

  • How companies use and value UX research
  • Why it's hard to show how UX research helps businesses
  • Why having UX champions in the company matters
  • New ways to measure and show the worth of UX research
  • How to share UX findings with different people in the company
  • New trends changing how people see and use UX research

Stats sneak peek 🤖

- Only 16% of organizations have fully embedded UX Research (UXR) into their processes and culture. This highlights a significant gap between the perceived importance of user-centricity and its actual implementation in businesses.

- 56% of organizations aren't measuring the impact of UXR at all. This lack of measurement makes it difficult for UX researchers to demonstrate the value of their work to stakeholders.

- 68% of respondents believe that AI will have the greatest impact on the analysis and synthesis phase of UX research projects. This suggests that while AI is expected to play a significant role in UXR, it's seen more as a tool to augment human skills rather than replace researchers entirely.

The UX research crossroads 🛣️

As our field evolves with AI, automation, and democratized research, we face a critical juncture: how do we articulate and amplify the value of UXR in this rapidly changing landscape? We’d love to know what you think! So DM us in socials and let us know what you’re doing to bridge the gap.

Are you ready to unlock the full potential of UXR in your organization? 🔐

Download our white paper for invaluable insights and actionable strategies that will help you showcase and maximize the value of user research. In an era of digital transformation, understanding and leveraging UXR's true worth has never been more crucial.

Download the white paper

What's next?🔮

Keep an eye out for our upcoming blog series, where we'll delve deeper into key findings and strategies from the report. Together, we'll navigate the evolving UX landscape and elevate the value of user insights in driving business success and exceptional user experiences.

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