What is a prototype?
A prototype is a rough mock-up of your current approach to your project (be it for a website, an interactive, or something else).

It doesn’t have to be full of content. In fact, we often test with a mixture of guide content and lorem ipsum placeholder text, and it’s not unheard of to have a totally black and white prototype with boxes instead of images.

Why make a prototype?
Prototyping has some big advantages. It helps us plan how the screens will work functionally, as well as graphically.

By testing a protoype with users, we can quickly identify where we’re going right and where we’re going wrong, whilst there is still time to make changes. Wherever possible we test version one with users, make changes and then test version two. Often this rapid approach will be done between a morning and afternoon session, allowing us to take great strides in a single day’s work.

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As part of an information architecture (IA) project, we have been looking into different ways of usefully analysing the results of card sorts.

What is card sorting?
Card sorting is a quick and informative way of finding out how users group information. It is often the first step to developing a site IA.

Open or closed?
Open card sorting works by giving users an unsorted number of cards, each with a user goal written on, and asking the user to organise the cards into groups that make sense to them. They then name the groups themselves. Some users go through the cards in a very structured way; others start by throwing them across the table.

Quantitative or qualitative?
In a quantitative card sort, the facilitator (usually us) takes quite a back seat, allowing the testers (often in groups of four) to get on with it. Quantitative sorts are to get the number of results we need to analyse.

In a qualitative card sort the facilitator is more involved, asking for a running commentary on why the tester is grouping cards together and the thinking behind it. This helps us when we analyse the data and work on the IA as we have an idea of user thinking.

We usually use a combination of these two methods to get our results, often with a rough 50/50 split.

The cards and goals
The goals on cards should always be research-based. Card sorting is a research-based exercise, and it’s results are dependent on the quality of the goals used to sort.

On a recent Cogapp project, we conducted the following before undertaking card sorting:

• A heuristic site evaluation
• Review of existing research
• Stakeholder interviews which provided organisational goals
• User depth interviews which provided a number of user goals
• Strategy workshop to prioritise user goals and organisational goals

In this example, we held a strategy workshop with our client where we analysed the goals that had come out of the user research and prioritised the organisational need against the user need, shown below.
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