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.
Help me redesign Nesta’s website
Posted: September 19, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: nesta, project management, redesign, web project, website Leave a commentI’m starting a redesign project of the Nesta website, and because the main aim is to create an OPEN, SOCIAL site which all Nesta staff can contribute to, I’m going to practice what I preach and blog updates on how it’s going, pitfalls and all.
Here’s what the site looks like now –
It’s lovely to look at, kudos to KentLyons, but its IA is based on Nesta’s v confusing internal structure (urgh), social media’s been bolted on, and user testing has shown that people find it tricky to know what we do and how we can be useful.
My main aim is to be totally transparent about this whole process and ensure that all the people who use the site, and want to improve it, are given a chance to get their voice heard. Nesta’s been way too corporate for too long – this is a chance for the real users like you to change how we do things.
Hopefully along the way you’ll also discover some useful stuff, like what to avoid and what works best. I’ll do my best to share it all.
P.S. If you haven’t already (and if you use the Nesta website) I’d be really grateful if you could take this quick designer survey – putting you in the designer’s seat so I get a feel for what real users think of us.
Digital soup 