Let the outsiders decide
Posted: March 22, 2013 Filed under: card sorting, User centred design, UX | Tags: prototype, simplify, user, user centred design, ux Leave a comment
You need to listen to your Outsiders, even if they wear denim vests
The battle for the human race is no longer just a fight between good and evil. Nowadays any web person worth their digital salt will tell you that there’s another battle that’s being waged to save the future of the world wide web.
The battle between the Outsiders and the Insiders.
Who are they?
The Insiders are a pretty big group, but they usually involve the following characters:
- staff
- angry hippos (both kinds)
- academics (they just love rubric)
- silo guardians
- heads of IT
- anyone with innovation in their job title
The Outsiders group is simpler to define. Anyone who uses your website.
Let battle commence
We’re currently redesigning our website at Nesta and we’re trying our hardest to give the Outsiders a fighting chance. Our Insiders are quite a formidable bunch, and it’s taking a lot of persuasion and numerous nudge tactics to reframe Nesta’s information as something that is useful to Outsiders, not something that is convenient to Insiders.
We had a brilliant meeting with our Outsiders, which has produced an interview that’s like a scourge for our backs. Painful as it is, we need to listen, learn and build for them – and resist the impulse to build for us.
Make it for your Outsiders
There’s a really simple principle at work here, and it’s this: outsiders know best because they’re the ones who you’re making it for. At Nesta we talk a lot about people-powered services and use newfangled concepts that even Google hasn’t heard of like Coproduction – but they all have the same searingly simple motor driving them: design things WITH your users not AT them.
The Government Digital Service rocks
There’s a great example of this principle being put into huge and resounding practice. The web dudes at the Government Digital Service have been dismantling and remantling the entire crazy stock of insider websites that built up like so many barnacles on a galleon and they’ve rebuilt them into a one-stop-shop for outsiders only, namely Gov.uk
For a behind the scenes glimpse at what they’ve achieved in just a short space of time, check out this great slideshare from Neil Williams – On her majestys digital service.
A pattern emerges
Posted: October 25, 2012 Filed under: alchemy, card sorting, Content, information architecture, UX | Tags: digital, redesign, web project Leave a commentWe’ve been doing some brisk soul-searching at Nesta to really figure out what it is we can offer people.
At an away day last week all Nesta staff were asked to bring a picture which for them summed up what Nesta does. Here’s an example of one of the slightly chaotic posters we created:
A turbulent Nesta mindmap
(Ruth had the best explanation with her Transformers picture: “We may look a bit boring at first glance, but we can transform into something cool – honestly”).
All this fed neatly into my website discovery process, as I could start to map what Nesta thought of itself with what our brilliant non-Nesta card sorters thought of what we actually produced.
Over the past week we’ve had some really helpful and creative people who have given up their lunch hour to help me and Sara (my trusty deputy) figure out the Nesta information puzzle.
Card sorters gallery of fame
Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck and their team from Entrepreneur First were brilliant, and slightly ruthless, in sorting out the Nesta brain. Alice at one point shouted out: “You guys do a lot of really random stuff!”. Exactly.
James Lush from Biochemistry Society, Alice Clay from City of London Festival and Peter Feltham from Ethos Valuable Outcomes were great at piecing things together, and coming up with creative solutions for the IA – especially the idea of a random button that summons up a random article from the archive.
And finally design researcher Svenja Bickert, artist Carys Davies and creative professional Dina Gitziou found some interesting patterns in what we did and grouped things by looking at what outputs and take aways we produce.
The card sort, correlated
I promised you I’d share everything with you as I went in this project, so here is the final correlated Excel spreadsheet showing how all the cards got sorted into standardised categories. (WARNING: I found standardising is the hardest part of a card sort – don’t oversimplify your categories if you can help it).
Let me know what patterns you see:
| Card name | Projects | About Us | Advice | News and Features | Resources | Events | Reports | Apply |
| Things we are currently funding | 29% | 57% | 14% | |||||
| Skills Review | 14% | 57% | 29% | |||||
| Mentoring programme for creative businesses | 43% | 29% | 14% | 14% | ||||
| Destination Local | 86% | 14% | ||||||
| Your ideas | 57% | 43% | ||||||
| Impact Investment Fund – ageing | 43% | 29% | 29% | |||||
| Ways to get assistance | 43% | 43% | 14% | |||||
| Find out what we do | 100% | |||||||
| People-Powered Health | 86% | 14% | ||||||
| Creative Councils | 71% | 29% | ||||||
| Press Office | 71% | 29% | ||||||
| Gallery of top 50 social innovators | 14% | 14% | 57% | |||||
| Predictions for the future | 14% | 57% | 14% | |||||
| Cycling challenge | 86% | 14% | ||||||
| Plan I | 43% | 29% | ||||||
| High growth firms | 43% | 43% | ||||||
| Collaborative Consumption | 14% | 71% | ||||||
| People in our organisation | 100% | |||||||
| Information about us | 100% | |||||||
| Innovation in Giving Fund | 86% | 14% | ||||||
| Digital Education | 100% | |||||||
| Innovation news | 71% | 14% | ||||||
| Do-it-yourself guide to innovation | 14% | 71% | ||||||
| Opportunities to work with us | 57% | 29% | 14% | |||||
| Opportunities to work for us | 71% | 29% | ||||||
| Areas of expertise | 100% | |||||||
| Current projects | 71% | 29% | ||||||
| Past projects | 43% | 29% | 14% | |||||
| Registration for Superhuman event | 14% | 71% | ||||||
| Venue hire | 86% | 14% | ||||||
| Newsletter | 71% | 29% | ||||||
| Join us | 71% | 29% | ||||||
| Find us | 100% | |||||||
| Feedback | 57% | 29% | 14% | |||||
| John Whatmore’s blog | 14% | 57% | 14% | |||||
| Partner organisations | 86% | 14% | ||||||
| Innovation report | 14% | 29% | 29% | |||||
| India’s innovation system | 14% | 14% | 14% | 43% | ||||
| Our mission | 100% | |||||||
| News about innovation | 71% | 14% | ||||||
| Success stories | 29% | 29% | 14% | 29% | ||||
| In converstaion with Mike Lynch | 17% | 33% | 17% | |||||
| Advanced prosthetics event | 14% | 14% | 57% | |||||
| Innovation in Labour market programmes | 57% | 14% | 14% | 14% | ||||
| Big Green Challenge project blog | 86% | 14% | ||||||
| Expert’s view | 71% | 14% | ||||||
| Creative Enterprise Toolkit | 29% | 71% | ||||||
| Fashion Toolkit | 29% | 71% | ||||||
| Radical Efficiency booklet | 14% | 86% | ||||||
| Trustee biography | 100% | |||||||
| CEO biography | 100% | |||||||
| Impact Investment Fund – young people | 67% | 17% | 17% | |||||
| Nesta in Manchester | 29% | 71% | ||||||
| Hot Topics | 83% | |||||||
| In conversation with Stephen Emmott | 14% | 43% | 14% | |||||
| Working papers | 14% | 43% | 43% | |||||
| Co-production catalogue | 57% | 29% | 14% | |||||
| Neighbourhood Challenge summary report | 43% | 43% | 14% | |||||
| Infratechnologies report | 14% | 14% | 29% | 43% |
Crazy card sort
Posted: October 11, 2012 Filed under: card sorting, design, information architecture, UX, web design | Tags: digital marketing, Digital platforms, interaction design, redesign, ux, web project 1 CommentCard sorting is a great way to get a different angle on your site. All you need is some willing users, 30 minutes over lunch, and a bunch of index cards and post-its (oh, and I recommend recording it too on your phone -some of the juiciest insights come through people’s reactions while they’re discussing the sort)
For our first card sort I tested it out on some internal Nesta peeps to make sure the cards were easily sortable. But then I branched out and started sorting with our real users .
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- Alice, Louise and Stian rebuilding Nesta’s brain
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- Steph, Tom and Claire grapple with Nesta
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- It looks quite neat from a distance
The results were really interesting. We know we’ve got a design problem with our site – it’s difficult to navigate because it’s been set up without users in min. But the scale of the problem is only coming to light now that card sorting is underway – we’ve had 5 sorts so far, and each one is throwing up really interesting and different.
As soon as the final data is in, I’ll share it with you.
But for now, here are some great off-the-cuff responses from our sorters to the problem they were trying to solve:
“It’s like a big soup!”
“People don’t care who’s in which team – they just want to know what’s happening”
“Nesta needs to talk more around a programme, rather than just after it”
“It’s all very jargony” (that was from a new Nesta staffer staring at the cards in front of her)
Useful tip:
I recommend reading Card Sorting by Donna Spencer (kindle edition is cheaper) – really practical instructions on how to run a sort. She’s also got a great spreadsheet for analysing the data afterwards. There’s nothing like hard evidence for persuading people they need to change what they do.
Digital soup 