Information Architecture

[berndca]

I'm new to this project and there are still quite a number of things I do not understand about what we are trying to build. I'm wondering if you would be open to create a (very much simplified) Information Architecture for librecores.org. We could you the Wiki pages to document this work. The main focus should be on user research and analysis. A common mistake made by developers is to assume all users will view and navigate the website exactly like them. It is very important to involve the users in this discussion and solicit their feedback.

We would start of making an inventory. What should have a place on the website? The result is a list of items. These items do not have to match up with pages of the existing website.

Next we'll categorize the information. The main point here is to group items according to what users think belongs together. This is commonly done through card sorting. Each item from the information inventory is written on a separate index card and handed to a user to sort them. The result is recorded in a spreadsheet.

A next step could involve creating user personas. This goes beyond user stories for individual tasks and tries to capture the big picture of how and for what a group of users would use the site.

Based on this information we would proceed to designing the navigation and hierarchy. I would take this information and create some html pages representing "Wireframes". These are very coarse prototypes for navigation only. The wireframes are used for user testing. During testing the users will be ask to perform a number of tasks, e.g. "Please change the description of project XXX to YYY?". This will highlight where users are struggeling and help us improve the navigation.

Now it's time to dive into the details with labeling, taxonomies and metadata.

Finally we get down to data modelling. At this time we should have enough information to finalize the database schema for all models.

I realize this is a lot of work. However it can also save a lot of work by avoiding unnecessary changes. It is also worth mentioning that most of this work should be carried out be non regular users and not developers.

You can find an introduction to the subject at https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/information-architecture.html.

[imphil]

@berndca This is an effort I certainly would welcome and support. However, I don't have the resources at the moment to actively participate in it (at least in a significant way). Would you be willing to lead such an effort? I'm of course there to support.

[berndca]

@imphil I'm willing to contribute and help as much as possible from California. But this needs a lot of direct user interaction and most of the users are in Europe.

@wallento You are contributing a lot of ideas. Would you be interested in working on this? Could you help recruiting volunteers to perform user interviews and tests?