Phew!

But even so, it’s recognised that with only a small percentage of people contributing changes, that there could be improvements made to encourage people to edit. Many people are not even aware that Wikipedia *can* be edited. I don’t think that these problems with participation are only interface problems, I think it lies deeper in the culture of how newbie editors are integrated into the Wikipedia community, and the policy and procedure that people encounter when they start to become involved with Wikipedia.

In anycase, I couldn’t help but quickly mock up some wireframes that demonstrate some alternative ideas to the Wikimania article page.

Here is a quick screenshot of a current Wikipedia article page, followed by my wireframe, you can also download a more detailed PDF of the wireframes.

Wikipedia article page design, now & proposed changes…

The banner

One of the first things that Philippe asked me was: are you familiar with our [Wikimedia's] sites? And I replied — sure I use Wikipedia everyday. What completely slipped my mind was that there is actually a family of Wikimedia project websites, with Wikipedia being just one (albeit a very important one).

With this in mind I’ve added a Wikimedia family navigation at the banner of the page that joins the family of sites together and helps promote the range of Wikimedia projects. At this same level is a search field which ideally would be a entry point into a federated search of all Wikimedia project content with filters to help people narrow down results to exactly what they are looking for. (I would loooove to get my teeth into designing those pages!)

Quite a lot of navigation is condensed, opting for mega-menus to show pathways to different special pages on Wikipedia under headings Find Content, Contribute, and Tools.

Those famous tabs

The most contentious change is a move away from the all-familiar, even emblematic read/edit tabs that appear along the top of each page. Instead these have been moved to action boxes on the left side of the page where they are presented with additional context (because what does discuss really mean?) and where a local navigation for sections within the article would also be displayed.

Quick edits

Instead of navigating away to a brand new page (which for many people I image can be quite a shock) a lightbox allows for a quick edit of a section of content. Hopefully this lowers the barrier to editing by making it seem like they are essentially still on a familiar page – and eases people into the process of learning the wiki markup.

Download PDF (2 pages, 604 KB)

Related posts:

1. Wikimania 2009 and where have all the intellectuals gone?
2. Webpage Makeover for Les Mills Homepage

Serendipity at it’s best, I went to Wikimania last week. I had no idea it was being held in Buenos Aires this year, but as fortune has it, we’re both in the same city at the same time. Wikipedia is also at a stage of plateaued growth and entering stages of redesign to improve usability & participation, and also strategy development.

As an editor, I’m a Wikipedia novice, I’ve made only a handful of edits in the past few years, and to be honest, I felt like an outsider in an already well established community. However, serendipity working again, I got the chance to meet and talk over lunch and drinks with Philippe Beaudette, newly appointed facilitator of strategic planning at Wikimedia, and I’ve become interested in being more involved in this community, perhaps in areas of strategy, or design, or both.

Something that fascinates me is what appears to be collaboration happening at every level of the organisation. For instance, even in the development of a strategy, participation is open to anyone — anyone that is who can understand the bureaucracy required to be involved. It will be fascinating, hopefully to participate but even as an observer, to see how collaboration works at this level.

The quality of the talks at Wikimania was mixed. There were some great speakers and topics, and some not so great. This is the first international conference I’ve attended, and in New Zealand I’ve only been exposed to a limited number of speakers at local UPA events (which are generally very high quality) and some bigger name speakers like danah boyd and Lou Carbone (both who left lasting impressions) and perhaps I had unrealistic expectations.

Where have all the intellectuals gone?

I’ve been reading Jorge Luis Borges recently, and in a very difficult conversation with Philippe (difficult only because it was the first serious conversation I’d attempted in weeks) I mentioned I was impressed with his brevity, and how he can compress many ideas into a single page of text. Modern culture has us to believe that more is better, and it’s distressing to see our modern thinkers subscribing to this idea.

Some of the talks that I attended felt more like I was having an abstract dictated to me, with the talk ending just when it felt like it should be just starting. Others were great storytellers, and were entertaining, but I didn’t leave feeling like I’d learnt

This isn’t a criticism of Wikimania, but more about how it feels our general intellectual society is moving from seeking enlightenment, to at worst filling up time, to best providing entertainment. I long for a return to the style of Stephen J Gould, Douglas R. Hofstadter, and Borges who may not always be so easy to immediately comprehend, but with some time leave the reader better off.

Related posts:

1. Redesigning Wikipedia #1

Excluding their insurance product (which is quite interesting in itself because they allow you to extend your policy while you are away) World Nomads are interesting because although their core business is selling Travel Insurance, they are actively extending their how they can support their customers at different stages of their travel adventures.

¡Hola! Free language guides

First off, they produce a range of free iPhone/iPod Touch Language Guides. I’ve downloaded the Spanish Language guide, and a quick look though shows me that I’m definitely expect to be referring to this a number of times throughout my trip – and each time I do, I’ll be reminded of the great service that I’m getting from World Nomad.

Keep in touch with an adventure journal

Secondly, after purchasing the travel insurance, I was encouraged to sign up for a free online adventure journal – allowing me to join and focused network of travel bloggers.

Extending your customer customer experience

Most companies focus on a specific and stage of a customer journey – generally the purchase stage, World Nomad has gone the extra mile and are supporting people through the preperation (by learning a language) and also the actual experience of being on holiday (by both the language guide and also the adventure jounrals).

If you’re working with an organisation — pause for a moment — and think about what stage of your customer’s experience you and your competitors focus on the most, and then think about relevent ways that you can extend the ways you support people in their customer expereince.

Link Love
Twitter: Chris Nobel @WorldNomads
Main website: http://www.worldnomads.com
Language Guides: http://journals.worldnomads.com/language-guides/

p.s. Tower Travel Insurance #Fail
World Nomads wasn’t my first choice – I was going to go with Tower Travel Insurance – except I had a question about the policy and calling their 0800 number I spoke with a friendly representative who passed me onto a colleague to answer my question who — by the way they spoke to me — obviously wasn’t interested in talking to me. If that is how I’m treated as a prospective customer, I’d hate to think how I might be treated if I ever had to make a claim.

• Makeover one focuses on quick wins that can be made by applying best practice conventions while keeping development effort to a minimum.
• Makeover two looks at what is possible when content and functionality can be added or removed to the page.
• Makeover three is a blue sky ideation concept which may take extra effort to develop, but is likely to have the strongest positive impact on the webpage’s performance.

As a case study, I’ve just done a mini Webpage Makeover for the Les Mills homepage. It’s a ‘mini makeover’ because instead of doing the three total concepts only the first – quick wins with best practice conventions has been included.

You can download the full case study for the Les Mills Homepage Makeover here (PDF 1.7 MB) or click through for a quick summary and screenshots…

Current Homepage

Here is the current Les Mills New Zealand homepage, as captured 14th June 2009:

Structurally, it’s a very simple design. There is a header and footer navigation, a main hero promotional area, and areas for 5 smaller promotions. But there are some immediate areas that I see for improvement:

Too much noise

There are 6 promotions in total all calling for attention. Just like if there were six people all asking for your attention at once, it’s difficult to focus on a single message with so much happening at once.

All attention

$1 a day is certainly an attention grabbing message, but there is no follow up. To increase the chance of conversion, as well as gaining attention, interest must also be maintained long enough for desire to form, and people to eventually make an action.

No interest or desire

When people join a gym it’s not because they are actively wanting to spend money. It’s because they have a goal in mind. Some valid fitness related goals might be to build strength, loose weight, and to increase energy, but these goals, or other goals are not hinted at anywhere on this webpage.

No affordance in call to action

Any of the six promotions can be clicked to load another page, but there are no obvious affordances to show that these elements are in fact links.

Opportunities with makeover

There are opportunities here to decrease the bounce rate on this page, and in increasing organic referrals from search engines.

Makeover 1 – Quick Wins and Best Practices

Keep in mind the constraints of the first makeover – focusing on quick wins that can be made by applying best practice conventions while keeping development effort to a minimum. To help keep development effort at a minimum the following constraints are applied:

• no new functionality is added to this page, and content is only added if it’s omission is considered a breach of best practice and will not be difficult to source;
• changes that would globally affect the rest of the site (for example changes to the website navigation structure or the viewport width) are not changed.

Here is a screen shot of the redesign:

Changes to the Banner/Navigation area

• The ‘Paint splatter’ device moved from the banner to be the page background. In the banner it makes the navigation labels too difficult to read.
• More descriptive tag lines are used – “Unleash yourself” is expanded to Unleash yourself at Les Mills centers New Zealand wide, and “Experience Les Mills gyms online” switches to feature 4 key benefits of fitness – Build strength, Loose weight, etc.
• Club info and Contact info have a small label change and are moved to the top right of the banner – a convention of were contact details are often located on a webpage.

Changes to the Hero promotion

• Give the hero promotion prominence by visually separating it from the other promotions and placing at the top of the page.
• Give a more assertive call to action by starting the promotion with the action phrase “Join Les Mills today” and giving the call to action by displaying as a button that has more obvious affordances that it can be clicked.

Changes to body content

• Increase interest and desire by describing the benefits of joining Les Mills – explain the unique approach that Les Mills takes as well as how Les Mills can help with some common goals (Build strength, Loose weight etc).
• Structure and give context to the remaining promotions by explaining in more detail what they are. In this example headings are entered and content is provided introducing promotions for team training, personal training and careers.
• Promotions are given a common treatment of always including a call to action that has obvious affordances that show the button can be clicked.

You can download the case study for printing (PDF 1.7 MB) and you can find out more about the Webpage Makever service that I offer.

But most of all – I’d love to hear your feedback – please add a comment and share your thoughts!

Related posts:

1. How Would Oprah Redesign Your Homepage?
2. Redesigning Wikipedia #1

The bill arrived when I was away from home so I missed on the 10% early bird discount, and the next month my bill also included a late payment processing fee.

It was a nominal fee, but I’m quite stubborn when it comes to principles, so between arriving home from work and heading to the gym I called the Contact Energy contact centre expecting that it would be quite a simple matter to resolve.

15 minutes later I’d explained my situation to the customer service representative yet again (I’d made multiple calls over that six months querying when I’d receive my first bill and with each call I had to tell the same story from beginning to end) and I’d still failed to convince this person that given the circumstances I’d been unfairly charged. So while the contact center representative started telling me something that didn’t seem very relevant I lost all patience.

“okay, I’ve got to go now” and hung up.

In retrospect, that was pretty rude of me, but for me that point represented a six month build up of tension of making calls, never hearing back from Contact Energy, never knowing if my power was about to be disconnected, anxiety about what a 6 month power bill was going to be like, and that exact moment also feeling grumpy that I was going to be made late for the gym.

That phone call was the pivotal point in my relationship with Contact Energy. If that call had gone differently, and the $25 fee dismissed in the context of situation I most likely still be a Contact Energy customer today, and quite likely for the rest of my life.

But instead, I paid the fee and when Powershop opened it’s virtual doors to new customers I was one of the first in line to sign up as a customer.

Electricity is probably the most basic of commodities in the modern western world. Regardless of who you buy it from, there is no difference in the current that flows into your home, and the only real difference is the pricing plan that you’re charged – which is often minimal. And because it’s perceived to be a pain to switch power companies once you’re a customer you’ll often stick with them for life.

There’s a strong chance that I’m going to be an electricity consumer for another 50 years and without even factoring in increasing electricity usage, $97,275 is a quick and rough estimation of my remaining lifetime value as an electricity consumer.

What could have Contact Energy done to avoid this?

Recongise the life value of a customer

Firstly they don’t seem to have recognised the difference between immediate value (receiving a nominal extra $25 fee) and long-term benefits (at least $97,275 for the rest of my life). Strategically speaking because hunting around and switching power companies is a very unusual consumer behaviour, Contact Energy should really be doing their best not to loose customers switching to another company.

Give front line staff the tools they need to make practical decisions

I hung up on the contact centre representative because I was frustrated and angry. But I don’t think that the this person was being lazy, mean, or ignorant – they simply didn’t have the full picture of what was happening. They were speaking to me for the first time, and very likely had no easy access to the fact that I’d frequently called over the past 6 months and had previous frustrating calls. And the next time that I called, that person didn’t know anything about how rude and frustrated I’d been on the previous call.

Having this knowledge would have undoubtedly helped Contact Energy deal with me in a more appropriate way and keep me as a customer.

Remember me

With each call I made I had to start from the beginning and explain my story from the start. After not long it felt like I was a living broken record stuck on repeat and not making any progress. This moved from being just mildly annoying to frustrating to just plain exhausting.

There has been a lot of talk about customer relationship management (CRM) software in contact centers as being the golden bullet to long term loyalty, and in the same breath as being too complicated and expensive to implement.

I believe that there are a lot of smaller steps that can be made that still give a lot of value in helping contact center staff deal appropriately with customers.

For one, it’s common requirement for staff to categorise their call at the end in a call wrap where so that the organisation can have knowledge about why people are calling:

Instead of doing that, what if staff were asked to note what they think their caller felt at the end of the call?

Or what if staff we asked to record how they felt at the end of a call, and for a call where they ended feeling frustrated they were given some time to compose themselves before going straight into the next call?

In either case, this knowledge could be recored and used to help the next consultant adjust their approach when dealing next time that person calls, for instance by displaying a call history of that customer that gives an at-a-glance view of the duration of pervious calls, when they occurred, and how the consultant felt at the end of the call:

This isn’t a huge investment in technology, but it’s a quick way to give customer service staff important feedback about previous calls and armed with this knowledge, staff would be better prepared in dealing with this next call.

What is the worst experience you’ve had with contact centre service staff? What do you think would have changed the situation for the better? let me know by adding your comment!

• my local independent bookstore hasn’t had a title in stock 4 times in a row;
• I’ve had to order stock from clothing stores that haven’t had my size or colour;
• local music stores haven’t had CDs that I’ve been wanting to buy; and
• my optometrist hasn’t had contact lenses for my prescription in stock.

In each case, I’ve been given the option to order in what I’m looking for, but except for the clothes, I’ve declined this option, because if I can’t have the convenience of having it today, then I’m just going to find it, and order it online myself – it’s probably going to cost less, and I’ll be able to have the convenience of having it delivered directly to me, rather than having to make another trip to the store to pick up.

The good news traditional retailers is that for the time being they are surviving because:

• it’s convenient to be able to go into a store, pick something up, pay for it, and it’s yours;
• some people (notably Builders, Baby Boomers and the older Gen X) are still more uncomfortable with finding and buying products online (especially for clothing where people want to try a fit or feel of material);
• some people (Tweens & Teens) are blocked from buying online (by not having access to a credit card); and most importantly
• real-life shopping isn’t just about the the purchase, but for many shopping is a leisure, or social activity.

But times, they are a changing… Here’s why traditional stores might want to rethink their approach to retailing if they want to survive:

“Glorious explosion of subcultures”

Looking back at 1950’s high school there just a handful of popular youth subcultures: think jocks, preps and rebels.

Fast forward to today and there has been a glorious explosion of subcultures: Artsy, Band Gee, Barbie, Beatnic, Brainy, Cheerleader, Chola, Cholo, Cool Asian, Emo, Gangsta, Geek, Goth, Hardcore Kid, Hippy, Hipster, Jock, Loner, Metal Head, Nerd, Normy, Outcast, Plastic, Playa, Populars, Poseur, Posh, Prep, Punk, Queer, Quiet, Raver, Rock, Scenester, Skater, Slut, Stoner, Vamp, Wannabe, Weirdo, and Wigger (and that’s not intended in any way to be a definite list).

We’ve moved from more uniform world of cultures to one with much more diversity, and with each of these that we associate with there are unique differences in how we entertain and express ourselves.

As subcultures multiply, more niches around fashion and music will occur meaning that it will become less likely that traditional stores will be able stock all the products that people desire.

In addition, media such as music is increasingly becoming available for instant purchase and access online. Apple allows movies to be rented from it’s iTunes store, and devices like the Amazon Kindle continue to remove instant acquisition as a convenience allowed exclusively by physical retail stores.

Put simply: retail stores no longer have the monopoly on convenience.

Rise of the digital natives

People in Western nations who were born in the 90’s will soon form the next round of 20-somethings. These people are unique from previous generations because they have grown up immersed with the internet, cell phones, and iPods — they are the Digital natives.

Compare this to people born in previous generations — the pre-digitals. These people have grown up in a primarily physical world. When asked to describe of a collection of music, they will probably talk about a physical collection of CDs or records. When they think of going shopping, they will probably think of a trip to the mall or down their local high street.

Because Digital natives are equally familiar with digital and physical equivalents, when asked to describe a music collection they may be just as likely to talk about their iTunes library as they are a stack of CDs – they lack the exposure effect that has given physical equivalents an advantage with pre-digital generations.

As the population shifts towards having a larger group of Digital Natives we will see fewer people who are uncomfortable with the option of searching and buying products online.

Put simply: As we become more fluent with technology, physical stores loose the benefit of being the default paradigm of shopping.

More ways to pay

Until very recently, the main form of online payment was restricted to using a credit card, some groups of people don’t have access to credit cards (notably youth), and while some may find this hard to believe, there are many people who have simply preferred not to use credit cards (and given the fees in many countries – for good reason).

However, there are now various alternatives to the traditional credit card – many banks now issue debit cards – which allow funds from a cheque or savings account to be accessed through a credit card network, and it’s also possible to buy prepaid credit cards. Payments though a mobile phone are also being continuously explored, however as far as I know yet to be perfected.

Put simply: It will be less common for people not to have access to being able to make payments online.

A bleak future for retail?

I’ve painted a picture of a future where stores are less often going to have what we’re looking for (convenience is lost) and people don’t have second thoughts about finding and buying products online, and (except for their bank balance) don’t have barriers to purchasing online.

Traditional retailers are already struggling with the current recession, but I believe that this struggle has only intensified an already present trend, and that when the economy recovers the traditional retailers will continue to struggle — unless they adapt their current ways.

While I fear that traditional retailers who don’t adapt will not survive, I’m optimistic in general for those who are willing to change.

Subscribe to keep updated on the follow up post that looks at opportunities for bricks and mortar stores to thrive and survive the digital future.

Your thoughts

What are your thoughts on this post? Accurate prediction? Pointless hyperbole? Stating the obvious? I’d love to hear your thoughts, please add your comment and let me know.

Recently I’ve had some frustrations where people are not wanting to make the effort to obtain a benefit because it’s too hard – and none of their competitors are doing it anyway.

Call me an interaction designer naively stepping into some business boots, but I believe that if you’ve found something that improves the customer experience (by making something easier, or more enjoyable to do), and your competitors don’t have that something, then you’ve found a strategic advantage. If it’s difficult to build, then all the better because then it’s going to be harder for your competitors to catch up.

So, (in the theme of Margaret Cho’s mother [YouTube link]) to review:

• Number 1: Just because it’s hard to do, isn’t always a reason not to do – that attitude wouldn’t have taken Edmund Hillary very far and puts New Zealander’s can-do attitude to shame.
• Number 2: If you want to play leapfrog instead of catch up with your competitors, then loose the mindset of aligning yourself with competitors.
• Number 3: But don’t be different for differences sake – novelty alone isn’t a strategic advantage in the long run, but aspiring to have the best possible customer experience is a good place to be.

Have you been in this situation before? What are you throughts?

There are a range of images that are used as warnings. I’m interested at the process that was used in choosing these images, and how effective they are at helping smokers understand the risks of smoking, and ultimately quit smoking.

Warning: Potentially disturbing images after the jump…

Internal organ disease

Some images show internal organs affected by lung cancer, heart disease and stroke:

While these are common diseases caused by smoking I wonder how effective are these images?. They have a strong ‘gross’ factor, but because they are showing internal organs that most people will be unfamiliar with, how effective are they at helping the average layperson understand the risks they are taking with smoking?

Externally visible disease

Something easier to comprehend would be warnings that focus on externally visible disease, and some of the warnings do show the visible effects of gangrene and mouth cancer:

But these images showing such extreme stages of disease – how credible are they? I image that it would be hard for a young, relatively healthy smoker personally relate to these warnings because they are such a strong contrast to an average young smoker. And how many people actually know of someone who has had gangrene as a result of smoking?

If smokers can’t relate to these warnings then they will have failed because it allows smoking to continue to be perceived as an abstract risk rather than an actual risk.

Social fears

Heading in a better direction are two warnings that focus on social fears or bad breath, and impotence.

But again, the images used either abstract:

or demonstrate an edge case that is difficult to associate to:

The alternative?

Instead of focusing on long-term chronic or fatal results of smoking (which young smokers may have difficultly identifying with) I wonder if focusing on more superficial consequences like wrinkles would have a greater impact?

There have been plenty of studies on identical twins that show the cosmetic consequences of smoking. Perhaps graphic warnings that focused on this would be more tangible.

Finally instead of statements like “Smoking can make you impotent” perhaps more persuasive copy would help people relate and give the warning better credibility.

There are so many best practices that we have in marketing, it’s important that we apply these to problems in public health just as passionately as we do for ecommerce.

Links:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_perception
• http://www.moh.govt.nz/tobacco
  

Related posts:

1. 4 Thoughts On Patient Communication In Public Health

But Hoyts, your website is a truly awful mess. I really, really hate using it. And because of that, I don’t think I see as many movies as I otherwise would. If you’re frustrating me, you’ll be frustrating other people too, and because of that your website is limiting your revenue potential.  As a friend I’ve got some tips that I think might help…

1. Tone down on the advertising

Here’s a diagram of what your website looks like in a pretty typical browser window. Adverting is taking up 42% of screen space. Advertising can still be part of your web strategy and revenue, but remember, advertising isn’t your core business. Leisure is.

2. Get smart with defaults

When I visit your website, most of the time it’s because I want to see session times. But from the homepage I’ve got to specifically say I want to see session times, and then choose a cinema before I’m even close. And every time I click the page is reloading and I’m having to scroll past that huge banner ad at the top. If I wasn’t so trustful I’d almost think you’d designed the website to maximise advertising impressions instead of supporting your customers.

So, instead of making me ask to see session times, just assume that I do. And instead of asking me what cinema I want to see showtimes for, don’t make me ask, just show me relevant cinemas based on my location via an IP address lookup.

3. Match my mental model

At the moment I have to select a movie, and then I’m displayed show times for the next 7 days. But I want to see a movie tonight, and to see what options I have available, I have to click on each movie to check to see if it’s playing today. Right now, the Regent on Worscester Street is showing 42 movies. That’s a lot of clicks just to get an idea about what’s showing today. Makes me think you’re ingeniously trying to increase page views…

My suggestion is to make flip that model upside down and let people select a single day and show session times for movies showing on that day. You can even make a smart default and show movies for today by default.

4. Speed it up

A typical movie results page makes 95 HTTP requests, and makes downloads of over half a megabyte. Seriously, for a webpage, that’s huge. You need to take a look at your templates and remove unnecessary images, combine files where possible to decrease latency and compress text files using HTTP compression.

5. Give me more

Some people will know exactly what movie they want to see, others might be just wanting to kill some time and choose what’s on. Parents might be looking for a PG movie to take their kids, someone else might be looking for a movie they can see before their next lecture starts (or before the last bus leaves). At the moment you make me work to find what I’m looking for. Changing the information structure to match my mental model will help to start, but also give me a summary of what the movie is about and a quick jump into the trailer because I’m not a walking encyclopedia of movie names!

Redesign

Here’s a side-by-side view of the current website design, and a quick schematic diagram showing an alternate design:

At a glance, there are some major changes to the basic layout of the page.
Here’s what’s happened:

1. The advertising space has been minimised but because there is more room on the rest of the page, potentially the entire header could become a fixed element that is displayed regardless of scrolling on the page. This would ensure that the advertiser would have more exposure, even if page views decrease.
2. Local cinemas are aggregated into regional groups rather than individually, the most relevant group is displayed by default, and it’s assumed that people are looking for movies currently showing today which allows information to be shown immediately on the homepage without any clicks at all!
3. Each movie row shows a lot of extra detail. Along with the movie title, a short description and image is shown to give some context about the movie. The image also acts as a control to play a trailer for the movie. A star rating and movie rating adds another level of information about each movie.

• For each session, as well as showing the start time, the end time is also displayed, and the length of the movie is visually demonstrated. Sold out sessions can be given visibility which promotes urgency for people to reserve seats in a session time that is not sold out – a benefit to both the customer and to Hoyts.

These are only some quick changes that haven’t taken a lot of serious thought, but I think it’s a big improvement. Just imagine how great the Hoyts website could be if some considered thought went into understanding their customers and the things they want to do on the Hoyts website?

What do you think? Do you prefer the current design, or the ideas demonstrated in this schematic design – or do you like bits of both? Let me know in the comments below!

Props
See Magic Ink by Bret Victor (http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/) which explores ideas of context sensitive graphics, including an example of a cinema session time redesign.

Put your hands up who remembers their first card sort? Of course you do, because it probably went horribly wrong!

Because card sorting (like many user-centered design and research tools) is grounded in common sense, it’s hard to imagine what could possibly go wrong when asking people to sort a pile of cards into sensible groups.

But if you’ve ever run a card sort before, you’ll know that although the principles behind it are simple, it’s the thoughtful details in preparation, execution, and analysis that will make or break a card sort.

A real life example: My first card sort was for a website with about 1,000 pages. We enticed friends and family to come in for an evening with drinks and pizza and had teams of people sort a subset of content into groups. Each team came up with more or less the same result – which coincidentally closely matched the existing site structure.

Our management were relieved – we must already have the best structure, so there was no need to look at rearranging content. I left the exercise not convinced with this, but at the same time confused since “how could the cards lie?”

Unfortunately I didn’t have Donna’s book to help answer that question, but on reflection realised that the card labels I had used were introducing a strong bias in suggesting groups that matched the existing site.

You could learn by trial-and-error (like me), or piece together snippets of many useful (although sometimes contradictory) articles and posts on the internet (BTW some of the best are also written by Donna), but there is nothing that gives such a complete, and practical reference to every step of running a card sort than Card Sorting by Donna Spencer.

The book is divided into three main sections, covering preparation, execution, and analysis of a card sorting activity.

A nice touch is the two page FAQs before even the contents that gives quick answers to some common card sorting questions (like “should I let people put cards in more than one place?”) and send you deeper into the book for more in-depth information.

The best chapters were in the ‘preparation’ and ‘execution’ sections, which make up the bulk of the book. Donna writes with confidence and clarity, and also humility – several anecdotes of card sorts that haven’t run quite perfectly are provided, these serve as good learning devices by pointing out common mistakes, but also remind readers who may have had negative experiences with card sorting in the past to keep on persevering.

My tip for making the cards that isn’t included in the book: when you’re numbering the cards write the number on the back of the card instead of on the label with the card title. I have a deep set fear that the numbers may somehow influence the groups that people make.

The last chapters (which cover analysis of data collected from card sorting) are good at explaining a spreadsheet-based approach that Donna developed and uses, but start to get a little vague in explaining some other methods of analysis where the focus changes from practical advice to more of a summary of different methods that are available.

These other methods could have been expanded into much more detail (maybe Donna has a sequel planned – “Advanced Card Sorting” ;-), or perhaps could have just been included as an appendix. If you just stick with the spreadsheet method and ignore the other stuff you will probably be fine.

There are heaps of gems of useful advice and ideas in this book, and as I was reading I was happily agreeing to myself “wow, this is so great stuff” but at the same time some ideas aren’t always spelt out. My recommendation would be to read this book with your highlighter and marking bits that stand out, then after each card sort dive in again because some things will become clearer in retrospect (doesn’t everything?).

Recently I’ve been experimenting with using card sorting for goals outside of content organising, specifically for running requirements prioritisation workshops. I’m sure other people have found other uses of applying card sorting and I would have liked to have seen some discussion of this also included in the book.

Another area to might have been to walk people more specifically through examples of how analysing data, complemented with other research, had influenced specific content organisation decisions, but perhaps this was intentionally omitted because including this might have lead people to try and inappropriately apply these situations to their own projects.

But to wrap up (and slight repeat): This is a great book for someone tasked with organising content on a website who is either unfamiliar or unconfident with card sorting. Read this book and absorb it’s advice and you’ll avoid countless mistakes that people often face with card sorting!

For people who feel they are confident with card sorting (like me), you might also get some value it might help give clarity in discussing card sorting with your client or stakeholders, or in my case I’m glad to say it’s lead me to question ideas that I’d previously taken for granted, for example this book has helped challenge my opinion of team based card sorts.

Many successful card sorts to you!

You can buy Card Sorting from the publisher, Rosenfeld Media, in digital and print editions.

Update: Use the promo code MSANDERS to receive a 20% discount off Card Sorting, and all other products at www.rosenfeldmedia.com.

And of course you can buy a print edition from Amazon.