Notes

Rapid Empirical Clustering Approach

Hymes and Olson, 1997

"The most significant problem for the user is understanding how content is organised within the site. Without this understanding, navigation is effortful and exploratory..."

Outline of design approach:

Get user goals
Assess content
Make links

Getting user goals

Outline main project design goals
User group identify their personal requirements, recorded on index cards
User group identify associated tasks and how they would recognize support for them
Cards are 'clustered' according to common features; identify pages
Assessing content

Print out initial web pages and randomize in a stack
Users tag pages (post-it notes) with rating of utility, rating, attractiveness (1-5)
Users attach a one-sentence description of each page
Results begin to identify good and bad design patterns in web site
Sentences (composites) identified as titles for pages

Making links

Generate task-scenarios for web site
Users sort randomized web pages according to 'things-that-go-together' for scenario
Repeat with collections of pages to get hierarchy

 

 

 


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