Big things are happening in 2024! 🎉

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We’re undergoing a huge transformation in 2024 to deliver more value for our customers with exciting new products like prototype testing, features like video recording, upgrading our survey tool, introducing AI, and improving how we support large organizations and multiple teams managing their accounts. These new products and features mean we need to update our pricing plans to continue innovating and providing top-tier UX research tools for our customers now and in the future.

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Say hello to our new pricing plans  👋🏽

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Starting July 22, 2024, we’ll be introducing new plans—Individual and Individual+—and updating our Team and Enterprise plans. We’ve reduced the price to join Optimal from $249 a month on the Pro plan to $129 on the new Individual plan. This reduction will help make our tools more accessible for people to do research and includes two months free on the individual annual plan, too.

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We’ll be discontinuing some of our current plans, including Starter, Pro, and Pay per Study, and letting customers know about the changes that will affect their account via email and in information on the plans page in the app.

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Prototype testing is just around the corner 🛣️ 🥳

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The newest edition to the Optimal platform  is  days away, and will be available to use on the Individual+, Team and Enterprise plans from early August.  Prototype testing will allow you to quickly test designs with users throughout the design process, to help inform decisions so you can build on with confidence.  You’ll be able to build your own prototype from scratch using images or screenshots or import a prototype directly from Figma. Keep an eye out in app for this new exciting addition.

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What is session replay?

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Session replay allows you to record participants completing a card sort without the need for plug-ins or integrations. This great new feature captures the participant's interactions and creates a recording for each participant completing the card sort that you can view in your own time. It’s a great way to identify where users may have struggled to categorize information to correlate with the insights you find in your data.  

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Watch the video 📹 👀

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How does session replay work?

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• Session replay interacts with a study and nothing else. It does not include audio or face recording in the first release, but we’re working on it for the future.
  
• There is no set-up or plug-in required; you control the use of screen replay in the card sort settings.  
  
• For enterprise customers, the account admin will be required to turn this feature on for teams to access.
  
• Session replay is currently only available on card sort, but it’s coming soon to other study types.

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Help article 🩼

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Guide to using session replay

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How do you activate session replay?

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To activate session replay, create a card sort or open an existing card sort that has not yet been launched. Click on ‘set up,’ then ‘settings’; here, you will see the option to turn on session replay for your card sort. This feature will be off by default, and you must turn it on for each card study.

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How do I view a session replay?

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To view a session replay of a card sort, go to Results > Participants > Select a participant > Session replay. 

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I can't see session replay in the card sort settings 👀

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If this is the case, you will need to reach out to your organization's account admin to ask for this to be activated at an organizational level. It’s really easy for session replay to be enabled or disabled by the organization admin just by navigating to Settings > Features > Session Replay, where it can be toggled on/off. 

As information professionals, we work with the “stuff” of information in our everyday work. We search for information, we spend time analyzing and synthesizing it, and we carefully create and structure it. Whether you elicit information from users and stakeholders, explore large data sets, design ‘journeys’ or interfaces, or create information architectures, understanding the information you are using and creating as information can help you do your work better.

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Kat King, Business Intelligence Analyst at the University of Michigan Library, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, about understanding exactly what information is, and where it is, in our work.

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In her talk, Kat uses simple examples to teach you to “see” the information around you and understand what makes something “information” in the context of working as a human to accomplish something.

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Kat King bio 🎤

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Kat King is an Information Architect interested in language, meaning, and the things we make. She currently works as a Business Intelligence Analyst for the University of Michigan Library.

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Contact Details:

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Email: Katalogofchaos@gmail.com

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Where is the information? 📍🗺️

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Information theory can be dense and jargon-filled, and discussions in academic texts can feel divorced from the practice of actually working with information. We’re all told that information architecture is much more than website navigation. So, what is it? IA has a reputation for being difficult to understand, and in her talk, Kat attempts to help us understand what it is, where the information is, and what is it that we’re doing when we use IA methods.

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Kat defines IA as “the practice of ensuring ontological alignment”. ‘Ontological’ relates to concepts, categories, properties, and relationships. ‘Alignment’ means arrangements into appropriate relative positions. Therefore, information architecture is “the practice of ensuring concepts, categories and their properties and relationships are arranged into appropriate relative positions.”

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To align information then, you need to begin by sorting it into concepts and categories, which is difficult because information can sometimes be “slippery and abstract”. Kat argues this is the real reason that IA is sometimes hard to wrap our heads around. So, getting to the heart of the question, what is information? 

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Kat defines information as “a patterned relationship between differences that reduces uncertainty”. The key word here is ‘differences’. The trick to understanding and taming information is to identify what is different about sets of information. The next trick is to identify consistencies between these differences.

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This can be a little confusing, so Kat uses the example of picking fruit. We tend to use color (the difference) to identify when fruit is ripe and sweet. We know for a fact that, at some point, the fruit will be at its sweetest and, while there is a scientific way of identifying this point, we have to use the information we have at our disposal instead i.e. the colour of the fruit. The skin of the fruit in this example is like an interface - allowing a flow of information from the fruit’s ripening process to our eyes.

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Information categories 🧺🧺🧺

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The relationship between the information described in the fruit example can be split into two categories. “Information 1” is a factual, objective description of when the fruit is ripe (i.e. the science of why the fruit is the color that it is right now), whereas our subjective observation, based on color, is “Information 2”.

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• Information 1: Matter and energy, and their properties and interactions i.e. the laws of physics and universal truth or rules

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Information 1 poses challenges for us because we have a narrow range of perception, attention, and aggregation, which means we, as humans, can’t possibly understand the laws of nature just by observing. We have evolved to be simple, efficient observers of what is important to us. In other words, we don’t need to understand everything in order to get things right. We see patterns and generalize. Going back to the fruit example – we only need to know the color of ripe fruit, not the exact chemistry of why it is ripe.

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• Information 2: This is Information 1 that is given meaning by humans. This is done via processing semantic information, or “differences and structures that create meaning for people”.

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We use semantic information by processing concepts, patterns, categories, mental models, and even language as inputs to form our understanding. As social animals, we tend to reinforce general ‘truths’ about things because we’re constantly cooperating using shared information. General ‘truths’ are good enough.

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Kat uses the following interaction to demonstrate the interplay of different information.

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• Person 1: If the raspberries look good, can you get some for me?
• Person 2: How can tell is they’re good?
• Person 1: Get the ones that are the most red.

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In this interaction, the different pieces of information can be broken down by category:

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• Semantic information = Words and concepts
• Information 1 = Meaningful signs
• Information 2 = Perceptible differences
• Real life information = Raspberries

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Using our ability to communicate and understand concepts (words “red”, “good”, and “raspberries”) helps us to understand Information 2 (processing the words and concepts to understand that a red berry is good”), which aligns with Information 1 (the evolutionary science and ongoing consistency of red/ripe berries being sweet) that helps us decide when processing all of this information.

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So, now that we understand a little more about information, how does this influence our roles as designers?

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Why it matters 👀

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Thanks to our individual lived experiences, people have many different inputs/concepts about things. However, Kat points out that we’re pretty good at navigating these different concepts/inputs.

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Take conversations, for example. Conversations are our way of getting a “live” alignment of information. If we’re not on the same page we can ask each other questions to ensure we’re communicating semantic information accurately. 

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When we start to think about technology and digital products, the interfaces that we design and code become the information that is being transmitted, rather than words in a conversation. The design and presentation become semantic information structures, helping someone to understand the information we’re putting forward. This highlights the importance of aligning the interface (structure and semantic information) and the users' ontology (concepts and categories). For the interface to work, IA practitioners and designers need to know what most people understand to be true when they interact with information, concepts, and categories. 

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We need to find some sort of stability that means that most users can understand what they need to do to achieve a goal or make a decision. To do this, we need to find common ground between the semantic information (that might vary between users) so that users can have successful Information 2 style interactions (i.e. absorbing and understanding the concepts presented by the interface).

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To wrap up, let’s remind ourselves that information architecture is “the practice of ensuring concepts, categories and their properties and relations are arranged into appropriate and relevant positions”. As IA practitioners and designers, it’s our job to ensure that concepts and categories are arranged in structures that can be understood by the nuance of shared human understanding and semantic information – not just in some physical diagram.

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We need to present stable, local structures that help to reduce uncertainty at the moment of interaction. If we don’t, the information flow breaks and we aren’t reducing uncertainty; instead, we create confusion and disappointing user interactions with our digital products. Making sure we present information correctly is important (and difficult!) for the success of our products – and for better or worse, it’s the work of information architecture! 

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At Optimal Workshop, we're dedicated to building the best user research platform to empower you with the tools to better understand your customers and create intuitive digital experiences. We're thrilled to announce some game-changing updates and new products that are on the horizon to help elevate the way you gather insights and keep customers at the heart of everything you do. 

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What’s new…

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Integration with Figma 🚀

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Last month, we joined forces with design powerhouse Figma to launch our integration. You can import images from Figma into Chalkmark (our click-testing tool) in just a few clicks, streamlining your workflows and getting insights to make decisions based on data not hunches and opinions.  

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What’s coming next…

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Session Replays 🧑‍💻

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With session replay you can focus on other tasks while Optimal Workshop automatically captures card sort sessions for you to watch in your own time.  Gain valuable insights into how participants engage and interpret a card sort without the hassle of running moderated sessions. The first iteration of session replays captures the study interactions, and will not include audio or face recording, but this is something we are exploring for future iterations. Session replays will be available in tree testing and click-testing later in 2024.  

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Reframer Transcripts 🔍

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Say goodbye to juggling note-taking and hello to more efficient ways of working with Transcripts! We're continuing to add more capability to Reframer, our qualitative research tool, to now include the importing of interview transcripts. Save time, reduce human errors and oversights by importing transcripts, tagging and analyzing observations all within Reframer. We’re committed to build on transcripts with video and audio transcription capability in the future,  we’ll keep you in the loop and when to expect those releases. 

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Prototype testing 🧪

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The team is fizzing to be working on a new Prototype testing product designed to expand your research methods and help test prototypes easily from the Optimal Workshop platform. Testing prototypes early and often is an important step in the design process, saving you time and money before you invest too heavily in the build. We are working with customers and on delivering the first iteration of this exciting new product. Stay tuned for Prototypes coming in the second quarter of 2024.   

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Workspaces 🎉

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Making Optimal Workshop easier for large organizations to manage teams and collaborate more effectively on projects is a big focus for 2024. Workspaces are the first step towards empowering organizations to better manage multiple teams with projects. Projects will allow greater flexibility on who can see what, encouraging working in the open and collaboration alongside the ability to make projects private. The privacy feature is available on Enterprise plans.

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Questions upgrade❓

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Our survey product Questions is in for a glow up in 2024 💅. The team are enjoying working with customers, collecting and reviewing feedback on how to improve Questions and will be sharing more on this in the coming months. 

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Help us build a better Optimal Workshop

We are looking for new customers to join our research panel to help influence product development. From time to time, you’ll be invited to join us for interviews or surveys, and you’ll be rewarded for your time with a thank-you gift.  If you’d like to join the team, email product@optimalworkshop.com

We’re excited to share some new features and product updates that we've rolled out lately and what’s coming up next.

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What's new…

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Speeding up task analysis in Treejack 🚤

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Customer feedback and research have shown that users analyse results in Treejack in a task-by-task manner. To better support this way of working, we’ve updated Treejack results to ensure the success and directness of each task are easier to compare with the new Task overview tab in Results.  This new visualisation is available in Results > Overview> Task overview section in Optimal Workshop.

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Aggregate path views 

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We have also introduced the aggregate paths view in the Paths tab (it used to only be visible via the compare tasks button). This allows users to more easily see what the popular paths are for each task and how much each successful path was used (or not). 

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Over the next few months, we’ll continue working through our results tabs to update them to a task-by-task view and highlight insights at a task level. 

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Improving the quality of participant recruitment

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We’re continuing work to improve the quality of participants recruited in Optimal Workshop. Our latest release involves eliminating all participants that rush through a Treejack study.  We’ve analysed years of participants to get a good idea of what ‘rushing’ means, and we can now identify these ‘speeders’ and remove them from our participant pools. We have also removed the limit in-app for replacement participants across all study types, and released updates to immediately eliminate poor quality participants from custom orders. 

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Help guide: How to replace study participants in-app

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What’s next:

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• Identifying participants that rush through other tools and remove from participant pools.
• Build more automated flagging and behaviours to eliminate other behaviours that indicate poor-quality participants.
• Continued monitoring and analysis to ensure high participant quality.

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Templates are here 🙌 

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We are excited to announce our first six project templates are now available. Templates have been created with industry experts to give you the confidence to quickly launch studies and back your results to make data-driven decisions.   These ready-made templates give you a headstart on your research by providing you with the right range of study types and when to use them. 

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Where will they live?

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Templates are accessible in the app from the Dashboard > Browse Templates. From the ‘templates menu’ select a template that matches your use case for example ‘I need to organise content into categories’ and get going faster than before. You can edit and customise the templates to suit your research goals. 

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More templates from our community

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This is just the beginning of our template journey and while we continue to build up our collection we’d love your input too. If there are templates that you regularly use and think the community could benefit from we’d love to hear from you. Email us at product@optimalworkshop.com.

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What’s coming up…

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Optimal Academy 🎓

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The Optimal Academy is due to launch in later this month.  The Academy will provide education that enables our customers to get started faster with our tools and elevate their knowledge of all things Information Architecture and UX. 

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The first courses available will be a series of Optimal Workshop tool-based lessons, including best practice study setup analysis and recruitment.  You can expect to see more exclusive content and courses from industry experts and institutions on a diverse range of topics continuing to drop in 2023 and 2024.

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Enterprise team features

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We’re committed to making things easier for our team customers, particularly on the administration side of our product. Our product team have begun discovery on improving our administration features, and have had a lot of great customer feedback to help shape up the opportunities. We are aiming to make improvements to this area of the product later this year.

In many ways, Information architecture (IA) is the backbone of a digital product or service. It is a conceptual structure for information, designed in a way that allows users to navigate and interact with it in a meaningful way. This is done by organizing, structuring, and labeling content that is intuitive for users. IA considers user needs and goals, as well as the relationships between different types of content, in order to create a user-centric design.

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An effective IA design approach leads to better user experiences as it ensures that information is presented in a logical and intuitive way. Essentially, good IA attempts to reduce the chance of a clunky, frustrating user experience by organizing information in a way that makes sense for the target user. 

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In this article, we’ll discuss the history of information architecture and how user research impacts its effectiveness. We’ll also discuss the roles of conceptual and structural design in user experience. And along the way, we’ll introduce Optimal Workshop’s IA tools, and how they can help you design exceptional IA.

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The Beginning of Information Architecture

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The world is full of information and humans have always had a knack for structuring and organizing it. Take libraries, for example. In ancient Egypt, workers in the Library of Alexandria created a catalog of 120 scrolls to order and describe the inventory. They needed to - estimates of the number of scrolls the library contained range between 40,000 and 400,000! Fast-forward to 1873, and Melvil Dewey came up with the Dewey Decimal System to further categorize and universalize much larger collections of books. Why come up with these solutions? To efficiently comb through, and navigate, masses of information.

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As computer technology started to rise more prominently in the 1950s and 1960s, we started organizing computer programs and system designs in a way that made them easier to navigate too. In fact, IBM first mentioned the term architecture in a computational context in 1959 [ref]. When the wonderful ‘worldwide web’ was born in the 1990s, digital information began to be displayed and interacted with on a much larger scale. And, like our librarians, the world decided that online order was desperately needed. This is where the foundations of information architecture as we know it today really started to take shape.

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In 1998, Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld wrote the book ‘Information Architecture for the World Wide Web’, which became Amazon’s best internet book that year. The authors integrated the ‘librarian’ approach to IA, where the main goal is to design a system where information is labeled for easy navigation and search. This focus on user-centric, logical design has become the backbone of user experience (UX) design today, and why Optimal Workshop’s Treejack tool, among other, exist for researching and designing great IA.

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Organizational Structures

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Information architecture is like the blueprint of your digital product - it’s a conceptual structure of how content is organized and arranged to create seamless interactions. But, no matter how much experience you have, or how much you trust your instincts, you will never truly get inside your end users' minds without performing user research. They will be the ones to tell you what information is relevant to them, how to structure it, and even how to label and categorize it.

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There are some best practices for organizing information. Start by ordering your content from most critical to least. Think like a web page. What will immediately engage a user, and what subsequent content will keep them engaged? This exercise helps to prioritize and order content. Next, think about how your information should be grouped or categorized. Content that is grouped intuitively helps users consume and navigate information on your website or digital product. Another useful exercise is to consider how different users might access your content. Mapping user journeys (often with entirely different users in mind), challenges how you design your organizational structures in a way that meets multiple users' needs.

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But, while those principles can get you started, user research is where designing modern, user-centric products really begins. In terms of information architecture and organizing content, card sorting is one of the most effective ways of designing conceptual structures. Card sorting, executed by Optimal Workshop’s OptimalSort tool, for example, involves asking people to arrange things like labels, articles, and products in a way that makes sense to them. People are different, and the benefit of this technique is that you can identify how information is most commonly organized. It also highlights potential ambiguity that you may need to address early on in the design of your IA.

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Conceptual and Structural Design

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The roles of conceptual and structural design in user experience are crucial in the development of effective information architecture and user experience (UX) design. Conceptual design involves the creation of a high-level, abstract representation of the overall structure of the information architecture, which helps designers to understand the content, functionality, and overall user experience. Generally, there are limited or no restrictions as to what shape the design can take. Structural design, on the other hand, involves the development of the actual information architecture, including the organization of content, navigation systems, and interaction design.

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Effective conceptual and structural design can significantly improve user experience by creating a clear and consistent design language. This allows your target users to easily understand and navigate through content, leading to better engagement and satisfaction. Essentially, well-structured IA can increase the accessibility of content, making it easier for users to find the information they are looking for, regardless of their level of experience with the website or digital product.

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Tools such as Optimal Workshop's Chalkmark tool can help designers to test and validate their conceptual and structural design decisions by enabling them to create and analyze user interactions with information architecture. This helps designers identify areas of the structure that are confusing or difficult to navigate, which can then be streamlined to create a more intuitive user experience.

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The Evolution of Information Architecture

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As we discussed earlier, modern information architecture is no longer limited to physical implementation, like libraries, but instead extends to digital platforms and software applications. With the rise of the internet and mobile devices, IA has become a critical aspect of UX design. The focus has shifted from organizing information in a static, hierarchical manner to creating dynamic and interactive information environments that adapt to the needs of individual users.

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One of the key changes in IA has been the shift towards a more user-centered design approach. This involves creating IA that is tailored to the needs and preferences of specific user groups, such as individuals with disabilities or users with different levels of technical expertise. This approach requires a deep understanding of user needs and behaviors, which is achieved through research and user testing. This research is increasingly done remotely and online using a suite of tools, like those provided by Optimal Workshop.

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Optimal Workshop's Reframer tool, for example, allows designers to collaborate and capture user insights and translate them into design solutions. This tool helps designers to identify patterns in user behavior and preferences, enabling them to create IA that is intuitive and easy to use.

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As technology continues to evolve, IA is likely to become even more integral to UX design. With the emergence of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, designers will need to create IA that is capable of adapting to these new interfaces and provide solid structures that lead to seamless user experiences.

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Conclusion

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Information architecture is an essential aspect of user experience design that involves organizing, structuring, and labeling digital content in a way that makes it easy for users to find and understand. Great IA leads to better user experiences by presenting information in intuitive and logical designs. This is why information architecture is crucial for website design.

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The history of IA as we know it today dates back to the 1950s and evolved with the rise of the internet. Now, we think of modern IA design as being user-centric, which involves in-depth research to understand users' needs and goals. Optimal Workshop's IA tools, such as Treejack, OptimalSort, and Chalkmark, can help designers create exceptional IA by testing and validating conceptual and structural designs. 

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Well-structured information architecture can significantly improve the accessibility of content, which leads to better engagement and user satisfaction. This will become increasingly important as users interact with technology through new mediums, like virtual and augmented reality. So, remember to set solid foundations by investing in IA design when you start your next project!